The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [169]
They dragged Hink back, and got him inside the poolroom. Studs walked off towards the park. Like a pig in a gutter. It was queer all right, the way people always drank. You were calm and sober, and wanted something to do, excitement, wanted to cut loose. So you warmed your belly up with a few drinks, and it made your head a little giddy. Everything seemed suddenly rosy or funny, you were happy, you forgot everything that was bothering you. People laughed at what you said, and you laughed at your own jokes too. Everybody looked at you. You were proud of yourself, proud because you couldn’t even walk straight. You weren’t afraid of any sonofabitch and his brother—sometimes, not even of Johnny Law. You didn’t care what you did, told everybody what you thought of him, kicked in windows, raised all holy hell. It was a glorious feeling, but you kept wanting more to drink, and kept wanting to talk more and tell the world who you were and what a great guy you were, make everybody just pay attention to you. And soon, the lights went out. Everything was black, and all you knew about was a kind of torment the same as when you went under gas to have a tooth pulled. You acted like a clown, became so helpless that you couldn’t walk, puked, sometimes got puke all over yourself, made a pig out of yourself. Pig Lonigan. A wave of self-disgust swept through him. It wasn’t worth it. The stuff was generally strong enough to corrode a cast-iron gut. It was canned heat, rot-gut, furniture-varnish, rat-poison. When you drank it, you took your life in your hands, and even if it didn’t kill you, it might make you blind, or put your heart, liver, guts or kidneys on the fritz for life. And after you went on a bat, you woke up the next morning with a hangover. You were so jumpy you couldn’t be satisfied with anything. You had sweats, a general feeling of tiredness and were ashamed of yourself for having been a fool. Your head throbbed with lines of pain running clean through it, and you had to put ice packs on it. Your guts were upset and heaving, and you couldn’t eat. You were so damn thirsty that you couldn’t drink enough water. You had to dope yourself with bromos, bicarbonate of soda, black coffee, aspirin, and cokes. It ruined your whole goddamn day, and you tasted bum gin and moonshine for three days.
He crossed over into Washington Park. It seemed funny to him now, how it was something to brag about, like copping a cherry, and how back in the sixth grade, he and most of the kids had thought drinking was a horrible disgrace. He didn’t know why he had drunk so much of the world’s liquor in his twenty-two and a half years. He had just started drinking because all the guys did. But he was on the wagon. Yes, and for good... maybe.
Suddenly, he sensed that spring was in the air. He could smell it. He breathed deeply, changed his slouchy walk into a brisk one, and looked about him at the dark shadows, the naked shrubbery and trees. He crossed the park drive, and walked around the patch of shrubbery on the right-hand side of the walk that curved to the boathouse. He could see the lagoon, steely, dark, glittering here and there with the moon and stars. The world, the night, the park, spring that was going to come, it was all new. He felt as if he were discovering them for the first time in his life, as if the sense of budding things, of leaves coming out on the branches, the gradual warming and laziness in the air, the grass bursting green through the cold, hard, wintry earth, as if all these were inside of him. He wished that it were spring already. He determined that it was going to be a different spring and summer for him. He was fed up with the old stuff, and he had let himself go far enough already.
He stood by the lagoon watching while trifling waves swished into the thin line of pebbled shore. He glanced up at the sky and was quickened with surprise and elation because it was so clear, with such clean clouds, and a moon which seemed like frothy ice or frozen snow. And he had never realized there were so many stars in the sky, some of