Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [410]
LEARN SCIENTIFIC SWEDISH MASSAGE
That would have been good work for Hink Weber.
THE IMPORTANT THING IN LEARNING BARBERING IS THE JOB AFTER YOU COMPLETE IT
Hollywell not only creates the unusual jobs but the unusual graduates by their distinctive individual short course.
He could see himself going to a barber college. Studs Lonigan the barber.
Help Wanted Female
More jobs for women than men. Not too promising. Hell, he didn’t even know where to go. Through the train window he saw the lake, gray, sullen, and he thought that, Christ, he did not see why he instead of someone else had to get a break like the one he had gotten. It hadn’t happened to Red Kelly, or Stan Simonsky. Stan at least had his health. But suppose his baby should be born crippled like Stan’s? It couldn’t. He couldn’t have one additional jolt of tough luck. The world wasn’t made that way. He turned back to the classified advertisements.
BE A TRAFFIC MANAGER Learn newest growing profession. Railroads, industries, motor freight carriers need men trained in modem methods. Big pay and free emp. Help to qualify. Class forming. Call 9 A. M. to 9 P. M. . . .
That was something it might be well to follow up. As soon as he and Catherine got really settled down, he’d take a course like this one, and see if he couldn’t get himself lined up with a job as a traffic manager. He saw himself a business man wearing a classy suit, getting up from a glass-topped desk, turning to a pretty stenographer and saying with an air of authority, Lucy, I’ll be back at two-thirty. And then, walking out of an office with WILLIAM LONIGAN painted large on the glass window. The train was crowded. Were all these people going to jobs? Was the dopey fellow beside him going to work or to look for it?
“Gee, kid, that association in our store is all a racket. I know it. They take a quarter out of our pay every week, and we don’t ever get anything out of it,” a girl in back of him was saying.
“Well, if you die, they’ll bury you.”
He wondered what the girls looked like, but he did not turn around to see. And damn it, he had to line up work right now. Suddenly, almost over night, his whole life had changed, and all this had come on him. So here he was with no future, nothing ahead of him, unless he could go out and get it for himself. The best thing, if it only could be done, would be to get into politics. Red Kelly had, but he’d run in luck, and was in now. How was he going to get in and get lined up? Yes, how? Oh, Christ, wouldn’t his luck ever change?
“But, kid, there must be some good in the association. Mr. Goldensteiner says it’s for us, and you know how much he thinks of all us girls who work for him.”
“Well, before I believe it’s not a racket to get something out of us, you got to show me.”
He slouched in his seat, wondering what would come next, feeling that his life was going to be short, and that he’d thrown it away for nothing. He felt cramped, too, in the seat, damp. And the day was so damn gloomy. He had no spirit. He couldn’t put his heart into trying to get a job today. And he had to. Now there was no let-up. All day and always now he would have to keep himself going, and all the boozing and things he had done in his life, they had sure backfired on him. And he had never really been happy. Always in the midst of forgetting or getting over one trouble, he had always walked into another. The image of Catherine seemed to flash into his mind. It was for her now that he had to face things and keep going on. Anyway, she would stick things out.
“But, Hazel, even if Mr. Browne is hard to work for, still, isn’t he handsome?”
The girls in back of him sounded like dumb clucks. But hell, in the old days, he never would have pictured Studs Lonigan having to have someone like Catherine, or anyone, stick by him. And he remembered that night when he had a scrap with the old man, and he’d left home with a gat in his pocket to become Lonewolf Lonigan. Swell Lonewolf now, he was, hemmed in on every side. And how was he going to get out?
He saw that the train was pulling into