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rat; and

I remember when the boxers were all Jewish and Irish

and never gave you a

bad fight; and when the biplanes flew so low you

could see the pi lot’s face and goggles;

and when one ice cream bar in ten had a free coupon inside;

and when for 3 cents you could buy enough candy

to make you sick

or last a whole

afternoon; and when the people in the neighborhood raised

chickens in their backyards; and when we’d stuff a 5-cent

toy auto full of

candle wax to make it last

forever; and when we built our own kites and scooters;

and I remember

when our parents fought

(you could hear them for blocks)

and they fought for hours, screaming blood-death curses

and the cops never

came.

places to hunt and places to hide,

they’re just not around

anymore. I remember when

each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord

only got his rent

when you had

it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was

full of promise.

the burning of the dream

the old L.A. Public Library burned

down

that library downtown

and with it went

a large part of my

youth.

I sat on one of those stone

benches there with my friend

Baldy when he

asked,

“you gonna join the

Abraham Lincoln

Brigade?”

“sure,” I told

him.

but realizing that I wasn’t

an intellectual or a political

idealist

I backed off on that

one

later.

I was a reader

then

going from room to

room: literature, philosophy,

religion, even medicine

and geology.

early on

I decided to be a writer,

I thought it might be the easy

way

out

and the big boy novelists didn’t look

too tough to

me.

I had more trouble with

Hegel and Kant.

the thing that bothered

me

about everybody

is that they took so long

to finally say

something lively and /

or

interesting.

I thought I had it

over everybody

then.

I was to discover two

things:

a) most publishers thought that anything

boring had something to do with things

profound.

b) that it would take de cades of

living and writing

before I would be able to

put down

a sentence that was

anywhere near

what I wanted it to

be.

meanwhile

while other young men chased the

ladies

I chased the old

books.

I was a bibliophile, albeit a

disenchanted

one

and this

and the world

shaped me.

I lived in a plywood hut

behind a rooming house

for $3.50 a

week

feeling like a

Chatterton

stuffed inside of some

Thomas

Wolfe.

my greatest problem was

stamps, envelopes, paper

and

wine,

with the world on the edge

of World War II.

I hadn’t yet been

confused by the

female, I was a virgin

and I wrote from 3 to

5 short stories a week

and they all came

back

from The New Yorker, Harper’s,

The Atlantic Monthly.

I had read where

Ford Madox Ford used to paper

his bathroom with his

rejection slips

but I didn’t have a

bathroom so I stuck them

into a drawer

and when it got so stuffed with them

I could barely

open it

I took all the rejects out

and threw them

away along with the

stories.

still

the old L.A. Public Library remained

my home

and the home of many other

bums.

we discreetly used the

restrooms

and the only ones of

us

to be evicted were those

who fell asleep at the

library

tables—nobody snores like a

bum

unless it’s somebody you’re married

to.

well, I wasn’t quite abum. I had a library card

and I checked books in and

out

large

stacks of them

always taking the

limit

allowed:

Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence,

e. e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, Fyodor

Dos, Dos Passos, Turgenev, Gorky,

H.D., Freddie Nietzsche, Art

Schopenhauer,

Steinbeck,

Hemingway,

and so

forth…

I always expected the librarian

to say, “you have good taste, young

man…”

but the old fried and wasted

bitch didn’t even know who she

was

let alone

me.

but those shelves held

tremendous grace: they allowed

me to discover

the early Chinese poets

like Tu Fu and Li

Po

who could say more in one

line than most could say in

thirty or

a hundred.

Sherwood Anderson must