Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [424]
He entered a building on North Wabash Avenue, read the bulletin board. Emmett Jewelry Company. He took the elevator, hoping again. A girl by a telephone board in an outer office looked at him impersonally.
“I want to see the man in charge.”
“For what purpose?”
“I’d like to interview him about a position.”
“I’m sorry, but we have no openings.”
“Well, couldn’t I just see him?”
“He isn’t in.”
“Is his assistant or secretary in?”
“She’s busy.”
He turned away, slammed the door behind him. Another defeat. He told himself that he didn’t give a good goddamn. Let himself get sick. Let anything happen. He’d already had so much tough luck that what the hell difference did it make. He stepped carelessly into the rain, faintly aware of streets and people.
He had a picture in his mind of Studs Lonigan courageously telling life and the world to shove itself up its old tomato, and let it stick there. He saw himself walking in the rain, wet and tired, with things crashing down on his head, being screwed at every turn, forced to do something. He saw himself walking south along State Street in the sloshing rain, past department stores, past attractive windows full of suits and ties and shirts and dresses and furniture and baseball bats and football suits and feminine lingerie and refrigerators. Walking past tall buildings full of people at work who didn’t have the troubles Studs Lonigan had. He looked at people on the street, their faces indistinct, and an unquenchable hate rose up in him, and he wanted to punch and maim and claw them. He caught a close-up view of a fat male face, a sleeping contentment in the features. There went another sonofabitch, another sonofabitch who had a job and did not have to marry a girl he’d knocked up when he was sick and didn’t have any dough, a sonofabitch who wasn’t afraid of dying of heart failure. And there was a high-hat black-haired broad who probably thought that hers was gold, a broad who ought to be raped until she was exhausted and couldn’t take another goddamn thing.
The sneer from the old days, the old Studs Lonigan sneer of confidence and a superior feeling came on his face, and he threw back his aching shoulders. He wanted to be noticed by these passing strangers, wanted them to see his surly expression telling them, he hoped, that here was a guy who did not give a good whooping goddamn and just walked along, taking his time and did not run to get out of the rain and hide from it in doorways, worried and afraid. A guy who had a perfect right to worry about plenty of things, plenty, and still did not worry. He stopped in a building entrance-way and drew out his package of cigarettes. Shouldn’t smoke. Phrigg you Doctor O’Donnell! Phrigg you Catherine! Phrigg everybody! He made the act of lighting a cigarette into a gesture of defiance. He stood watching a street car crawl northward, its roof blackened by rain. Automobiles swished past it. Its gong clanged. A second surface car crawled behind it.
“Look at the rain, just like a silver stream from the heavens, Martha,” a sallow fellow with a ruined panama hat said to a girl.
Studs glanced at them, sneered. But she was nice.
“It just looks wet to me,” she said.
“But you don’t see it with the poet’s lyric eye.”
Poet. He better watch himself before somebody slapped his wrist and kidnapped him.
“Now, as a poet, what does it mean, this silver rain, these puny crawling little packages of wet mortality?”
“Oh, Alvin, please.”
Studs sneered at the nut, walked out of the entrance-way laughing to himself.