Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 2
Nickeling up meant going into a bakery with a nickel and a sad expression and asking for as much stale bread as could be spared for a nickel. Strangely enough, without a nickel you would get little or nothing, but with a nickel a baker would usually give you a loaf of stale bread and throw in a batch of stale donuts and a few sweet rolls as well. In America, it takes very little cash to establish legitimacy.
Altogether the kid had walked about 12 miles with holes in both shoes. There were blisters on his heels and on the soles of his feet.
“D’you think there’ll be any empties?”
“No,” I said, “not on the Pacific Fruit Express, although they sometimes put on an empty gondola. The last time I rode to Tucson I had to ride on top of a reefer. So you’d better take some water.”
“I don’t have no water.”
“Okay.” I shrugged, resolving not to ride on the same car with the kid and share my bottle of water with him, although I would have cheerfully given him my candy bar. “Maybe you can get some water when and if the train stops at Gila Bend.”
When we heard the engine highball in the yards we climbed down from the telephone poles and started walking down the well-defined gandy dancer’s trail alongside the tracks. As the engine passed me I started running. I managed to get up to train speed by the time the fourth boxcar came by, and I then caught the ladder rungs at the front of the fifth boxcar. The train was moving faster than 15 miles an hour, and I banged my left knee against the board walls of the car as I was swung against it by the momentum of the train.
I looked back and saw that the kid, instead of catching the front end of the sixth car, as a man is supposed to do, had tried for the back end of the same car I had caught, and he had tried to grab onto the rung with one hand while carrying his bag of bakery stuff in the other. He had, of course, been snatched off the ground by the momentum, but there had been nothing to stop him. As he lost his grip, he had been swung between the cars instead, and he fell. He must have pushed out some, however, as he fell, but he was on the ground, with his head toward the back of the moving train. His body wasn’t moving. I hesitated, but only for a second or so. I faced toward the engine and started running with my feet before I jumped off and hit the ground, but by this time the train was moving at least 25 miles an hour. When I hit I tumbled, and landed on my right shoulder. The bottle of water slipped out of my shirt and the neck broke off. I wasn't hurt, except for a few scratches on my cheek from the loose gravel in the trail beside the tracks. I had also twisted my right foot slightly, just enough to feel a twinge.
As I walked back up the tracks the caboose passed me before I got back to where the kid was sprawled out on the ground. He wasn’t moving, and his face was as pale as a peeled almond beneath the dirt. One arm was across his eyes, as if he were shielding them from the sun, and his other arm was limp. Blood gushed from his right knee. His right foot, still with the shoe on it, was in the center of the railroad tracks, about ten yards away from where he was lying. I knew I had to get some help for him quickly, but I wondered how to get it. If I went back to the Yuma railroad station, would they believe me if I told them there was a kid hurt down the tracks? And if they believed me, would they care? How could I make them see the seriousness of the kid’s injury? I knew what I had to do, but I still didn’t want to do it. But time was passing.
I picked up the severed foot, cradled it to my chest, and started running down the gandy dancer’s trail toward the station. I kept a steady jog, a rate that I knew I could maintain. When I reached the station I went inside and put the foot down on the ticket counter. Almost out of breath, and with a stitch in my side, I pointed down the tracks and told the man behind the window that there was a kid down there who was hurt. A uniformed brakeman took my arm and led me over to one of the waiting room benches. I sat down heavily, dizzy, put my head down between my knees, and passed out cold— just like that.
When I awoke, later on, still on the bench, someone had put a pillow beneath my head and covered me with a blanket. I was still a little dizzy as I sat up, but I rolled a cigarette. I had to use both hands to roll it, and my fingers trembled as I lit it. A middle-aged man wearing a gray suit, a gray rancher’s hat, and a gray tie with a hand-painted picture of a dog’s head on it, sat down beside me. His voice was like gravel.
“You okay, son?”
I nodded.
“Come with me.”
I followed him into a small office in the station, and sat in the chair he pointed to as he picked up some typed papers from the desk. I signed the papers, “Jake Lowey” (my grand-uncle’s name), on the lines that were marked with an X in red grease pencil. I didn’t read the papers.
“Where’re you headed, Jake?”
“El Paso. My daddy owns a clothing store there,” I lied. “He sent me to LA to buy some pants at a warehouse sale, but I was held up by robbers and they took all my money. That’s why I was trying to catch that freight—to get back home to El Paso.”
“Don’t overdo it, Jake. I’ll see that you get to El Paso. Stay here.” I waited in the cluttered little office. Later, the man in the gray suit brought me a warm XLNT tamale and a cup of black coffee. I ate the cooling tamale out of the cornhusk. When the eastbound Sunset Limited came through, he took me to the chair car, gave me a silver dollar, and called the conductor over to the seat.
“See that this young man,” he told the conductor, “gets safely to El Paso, and that he doesn’t get off the train until he does.”
“Yes, sir,” the conductor said.
I never found out what happened to the kid who lost his foot. The man in the gray suit was probably a railroad dick, but from the quiet authority he seemed to have, he might have been a lawyer or the president of the railroad. No ticket was issued for my trip, and the conductor kept a nervous eye on me for most of the way to El Paso.
When I arrived in El Paso I was met by a freezing, dusty wind from the north. I couldn’t very well go back to Arizona, not now, so that night I caught the Ma Ferguson, a fast freight named for the governor, for Brownsville, Texas. I had never been to Brownsville before, but the destination didn’t matter.
The purpose of running away is to keep running.
The Signs and the Times
(1950s)
Sparks, Nevada, the railroad division for Reno, is a small town today, but it was a lot smaller in 1932 when I was introduced to road signs. My hunger had drawn me to a tiny campfire in the Sparks jungle where three men hovered about a five-gallon Standard Oil can of mulligan. The mixture bubbled; the aroma was tantalizing. As I soon learned, the cook, that is, the man who stirred the mixture with a piece of broken lath, had furnished the stew meat and the pound of rice, whereas the other two men had contributed onions, carrots, and a few seed potatoes.
I had nothing to contribute, but I attempted to buy my way into the group with a sack of RJR and cigarette papers. I passed the tobacco and papers around; each man rolled a fat cigarette, which encouraged me. I was only fourteen, and I was accustomed to being run off when I attempted to join an adult group of bums on the road.
The cook, a cadaverous looking man, who sipped frequently from a tin cup of unleaded gasoline and condensed milk when he wasn’t stirring the mulligan, gave the stick a testing lick. He made a face. “Salt,” he said. “It needs salt.” He looked at me. The other two men looked at me, too, and I knew that I was the one they expected to furnish the salt. I also knew, if I contributed salt, I would get a share of the mulligan.
“I don't have any salt,” I said. “In fact, I hit about twelve houses in Sparks, and couldn’t get a damned thing. At the last house I dinged, the old lady sicced her dog on me—”
“We gotta have some salt,” the cook said, taking another sip of gas-and-milk. “So you’d better look for a good sign and get back as soon as you can.”
I didn’t know what he meant by “signs,” and he explained them to me.
There were three basic signs, all of them tailless arrows. These signs are left outside the houses by bums who have scored, or who have failed to score. The arrows are a record of their luck. If the arrow pointed down, it meant that your chances of getting a handout from this house were negligible to the point of being nonexistent. If the arrow was sideways, the possibility of a handout was greatly enhanced, but the homeowner also expected you to do some work for the food he passed out. The best sign, the upward arrow, meant that here was a good house indeed. If the occupant had anything to spare, he or she would share, and there was none of that nonsense about asking you to chop a load of firewood or wash the windows before the occupant would feed you, either.
I didn't have any trouble in getting a handful of salt in Sparks, nor did I discover any arrows on that excursion. The first house I hit (and I didn't see any sign on or near it) provided me with some salt; the woman was so glad that I didn't ask for anything more than salt she threw in a couple of cloves of garlic.
The garlic and the salt undoubtedly improved the mulligan.
Now that I knew about the signs, however, I began to look for them on the road, and I found them, too, usually in unlikely or hard-to-find locations: a tiny upward arrow scratched with a nail on a whitewashed rock in the driveway; a sideways arrow in pencil at the bottom of a wooden backyard gate; or a larger downward arrow on a red brick wall, scratched in angrily with a rock. The rejection signs were invariably larger than the “good” or acceptance signs. The recipient of a generous handout was a little conscience stricken about informing another ’bo about the favorable tidings, so good signs were always small and hard to find.
I also discovered some minor modifications of the signs, and I was able to decipher one of them easily: an upward arrow had a little circle at the end, and this meant that the woman was also good for a lunchbag full of sandwiches to take with me. Another sign had me completely baffled (I was only fourteen, as I said), because the crosswise arrow had a mysterious x in the middle: The widow who fed me made no overt overtures (I was only fourteen); and the Great Depression period was a good many years before movies were rated. Today, of course, the sign would be simple enough to decipher, together with the kind of work one would have to do to get a free meal.
I also found out, as time passed, that the signs were not particularly reliable. Every person has his own personal sales-pitch for food, and a highly verbal bum with a good line will often succeed where others will fail. I had quite a few failures on good signs simply because I could never make myself go around to the back door to ask for a handout. Many American housewives resent it when you knock on the front door to ask for a meal, and I invariably went to the front door. My sales-pitch didn't help me much, either.
“You don't have any work I can do for something to eat, do you?” My mumbled, negative query was accompanied by a flaming face; I never quite got over being embarrassed about asking for food, and I always stood sideways, poised and ready for a hasty rejection and departure. Even so, I often ate six or seven meals a day.
Signs or no signs, I learned a good deal about people. I could usually tell, without knowing why, whether I would be fed or not when the person opened the door. There were people who had who would never give, but there were more people who wanted to give who had nothing. And the latter were often infuriated that you asked because they were then forced into telling you that they didn't have anything. As a consequence, I listened to a good many hard luck stories with an empty rumbling stomach.
I was a road kid, I was on the road, and I looked for road signs; but I made no signs of my own. It didn't occur to me to do so, and when it did, following a very nasty and humiliating rejection, I was ashamed after scratching a huge downward arrow on the sidewalk in front of the house.
The fact that I had finally scratched out a sign, I realized, made me a full-fledged member of the hobo fraternity, providing me with an identity I did not covet. I realized, at that moment, that I would either have to leave the road soon or become a permanent member.
A few weeks later I discovered what many desperate men have learned before me. No matter how deep the Depression, a salesman who is willing to work for a straight commission will never be unemployed. I joined a magazine crew that was engaged in selling subscriptions in Oklahoma.
The crew leader, a rangy, red-faced, fast-talking Oklahoma City slicker, gathered the group of us together beneath a shade tree in Norman, and taught us all about sales-talks. He took a pointed stick, and drew three abstract designs in the dirt.
“There are three kinds of people in this world,” he said. “If you run into a person with a square face like this”—“forget it. He won’t buy anything from you, no matter what you say. So don’t waste your time. If the person who answers the door has a round moon face”—“you may get a sale, and you may not, but it’s worth going after. But if you’re lucky enough to get a person with a mug like this”—“never give up! Keep talking. The person with a triangle face is an idealist, you see, and he or she will eventually take out a subscription.”
“Jesus,” I said to myself, “I already know these people!”
Newsboy
(1979)
Poor David Halberstam. He may not know it yet, but he’s in trouble. Deep trouble. In his new book, The Powers That Be, he was injudicious enough to sharply criticize The Los Angeles Times.
In 1934, when I was 14 years old, I got a job as a newsboy for The Los Angeles Times. Then, as now, The L. A. Times had the greatest home circulation in the city, but street sales were dismal. In an effort to beef up street sales, team captains (with a car) recruited five or six young boys or old winos, and put us out on strategic corners to compete with the Los Angeles Examiner, a Hearst paper.
We (the team I was on) were picked up at nine P. M. at the corner of Vernon and Main Street, and then dropped off at various locations in the southwest area of L. A.—Slauson and Figeroa; Huntington Park, and other off-beat locations—so long as there was an Examiner newsboy on the scene as well.
We were each given ten newspapers. If we sold a paper, we could keep the nickel (that’s right, the Times sold for five cents in 1934); if we couldn’t sell any papers, we were to give them away free. Believe it or not, it was incredibly difficult to talk someone into taking a free L. A. Times. At midnight, we were picked up again in the car—squeezed in—and dropped off at Vernon and Main. I then had a ten-block walk to get home.
Inasmuch as I had another job selling the Daily News, for which I had to get up at 5 A. m., my school work suffered—but that’s another story.
On Friday night (we only did the three-hour street sale stint from Monday through Friday), each newsboy was given a bonus of fifty cents. On a good week, I could make a dollar.
Despite the late hours, I liked the job. On Friday night, our team captain, who owned the car, was paid for his efforts downtown at the L. A. Times when he picked up the papers for us. He always bought a pint of Old Indian Head bourbon, and he would have me ride around with him when he paid out the bonuses and made his checks to the newsboys because he was half-drunk and didn’t want to make any mistakes in his payments.
After three weeks on this job, I began to wonder why the L. A. Examiner, a newspaper approximately the same size as the L. A. Times, would sell 50 copies on the corner on Slauson and Figeruoa while I, hollering as loud as the Examiner newsboy, could sell only one or two papers, and have difficulty in giving them away free.
So one afternoon I analyzed the two newspapers. I went through them page by page and then wrote a letter to Harry Chandler, the publisher of the L. A. Times, explaining what he would have to do if he wanted to get the same volume of street sales the Examiner enjoyed.
The Times newer said anything about murder or sex crimes, but there was at least one story about murder or rape on the Examiner’s front page every single day. If there were no L. A. murders or rapes, the Examiner would report fully on rapes and murders elsewhere, in Detroit or Chicago. The Examiner also wrote about police corruption in L. A., and about the scandals in Hollywood (remember the Paul Bern story?). The Times’ Op-Ed page was a drab affair compared to the Examiner’s—the Examiner had at least two anti-vivisection editorials a week, but the Times never ran an anti-vivisection editorial. The letters in the Examiner were fascinating facets of peculiar minds; the Times’ letters to the editor were complaints about barking dogs.
Things like that. It was a long letter, because I had a few things to say about the ads, too.
Two nights later, when my team captain picked us up at the corner of Vernon and Main, he asked me if my last name was Willeford.
“Of course,” I said.
His face was ashen. “I didn’t know your last name,” he said, “but the publisher does.” He shook his head, and pulled a note out of his shirt pocket. The note said to discharge Charles Willeford and it had been signed by Harry Chandler.
Harry Chandler, you see, had received my letter, and sent down word to have me fired.
I don’t know whether I am the only newsboy to ever be fired by a publisher; in fact, there are probably many more— publishers, on the whole, being a rather strange breed of people. But I eventually learned the full effect of being fired by the L. A. Times, and Harry Chandler.
I grew up, I got married and divorced; I went to war and became a war hero; I have written a dozen books—and Los Angeles, California, is my hometown. But not once, ever, has my name been mentioned in The Los Angeles Times.
So as I said, in the beginning here, David Halberstam is in trouble. Deep trouble. Never criticize The Los Angeles Times.
Hat
(1976)
I’ve been looking at the hats in my closet. My favorite is the insouciant straw near-Homburg I picked up in a black superstud hat shop in Atlanta four years ago. I’ve only worn it twice in Miami, because people down here look at you funny when you wear hats that have any kind of formality about them.
