The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [71]
I said, violent and excited. "You don't have to tell me. I know you didn't. I only asked if you have the real impulses from the bottom, and I don't believe you do. Now, for God's sake, Augie, stay away from those thieves. I'd give you twenty bucks for your widowed mother if you asked me. Did you need it so badly?" "No." It was kindness itself of him to call Mama a widow when he knew she really wasn't. "Or were you looking for a thrill? Is this a time to be looking for a thrill, when everybody else is covering up? You could take it out on the roller coasters, the bobs, the chute-the-chutes. Go to Riverview park. But wait. All of a sudden I catch on to something about you. You've got opposition in you. You don't slide through everything. You just make it look so." This was the first time that anyone had told me anything like the truth about myself. I felt it powerfully. That, as he said, I did have opposition in me, and great desire to offer resistance and to say "No!" which was as clear as could be, as definite a feeling as a pang of hunger. The discoverer of this, who had taken pains to think of me--to think of me--I was full of love of him for it. But I was also wearing the discovered attribute, my opposition. I was clothed in it. So I couldn't make any sign of argument or indicate how I felt. "Don't be a sap, Augie, and fall into the first trap life digs for you. Young fellows brought up in bad luck, like you, are naturals to keep the jails filled--the reformatories, all the institutions. What the state orders bread and beans long in advance for. It knows there's an element that can be depended on to come behind bars to eat it. Or it knows how much broken rock for macadam it can expect, and whom it can count on to break it, and whom it can expect for chancre treatments at the Public Health Institute. From around here and similar parts of the city, and the same in other places throughout the country. It's practically determined. And if you're going to let it be determined for you too, you're a sucker. Just what's predicted. Those sad and tragic things are waiting to take you in--the clinks and clinics and soup lines know who's the natural to be beat up and squashed, made old, pooped, farted away, no-purposed away. If it should happen to you, who'd be surprised? You're a setup for it." Then he added, "But I think I'd be surprised." And also, "I don't ask you to take me for your model either," too well realizing the contradiction, that I knew about his multifarious swindles. Einhorn had his experts who tinkered with the gas meters; he got around the electric company by splicing into the main cables; he fixed tickets and taxes; and his cleverness was unlimited in these respects. His mind was continually full of schemes. "But I'm not a lowlife when I think, and really think," he said. "In the end you can't save your soul snd life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world." He continued, but my thoughts took their own direction. No, I didn't ^nt to be what he called determined. I never had accepted determinat^n and wouldn't become what other people wanted to make of me .1 had said "No" to Joe German too. To Grandma. To Jimmy. To lots of people. Einhorn had seen this in me. Because he too wanted to exert influence. To keep me out of trouble and also because he was accustomed to have a delegate, messenger, or trusted hand, he hired me again for less money. "Don't forget, old man, I've got my eye on you." Didn't he always have his eye on as many things and people as he could get in range? Conversely, however, I had my eye on him. I took closer interest in his swindles than when I had been not much more than houseboy and the Einhorn business was too vast for me to understand. One of the first things I helped with was a very dangerous piece of work--taking in a gangster, Nosey Mutchnik. A few years before, Nosey Mutchnik, nothing but a punk, had worked for the North Side gang, throwing acid on clothes in dry-cleaning shops that wouldn't buy protection and doing similar things. Now he had reached