LITMIR.BIZ

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like banana?’ Sure, so he gave me a couple of bananas. A pleasant innovation, orange juice and bananas. ‘You like apple?’ Sure, so he gave me some apples. Here was something new: oranges and apples. ‘You like peaches?’ Indeed, and I carried the brown sack back to my room. An interesting innovation, peaches and oranges. My teeth tore them to pulp, the juices skewering and whimpering at the bottom of my stomach. It was so sad down there in my stomach. There was much weeping, and little gloomy clouds of gas pinched my heart.

      My plight drove me to the typewriter. I sat before it, overwhelmed with grief for Arturo Bandini. Sometimes an idea floated harmlessly through the room. It was like a small white bird. It meant no ill-will. It only wanted to help me, dear little bird. But I would strike at it, hammer it out across the keyboard, and it would die on my hands.

      What could be the matter with me? When I was a boy I had prayed to St Teresa for a new fountain pen. My prayer was answered. Anyway, I did get a new fountain pen. Now I prayed to St Teresa again. Please, sweet and lovely saint, gimme an idea. But she has deserted me, all the gods have deserted me, and like Huysmans I stand alone, my fists clenched, tears in my eyes. If someone only loved me, even a bug, even a mouse, but that too belonged to the past; even Pedro had forsaken me now that the best I could offer him was orange peel.

      I thought of home, of spaghetti swimming in rich tomato sauce, smothered in Parmesan cheese, of Mamma’s lemon pies, of lamb roasts and hot bread, and I was so miserable that I deliberately sank my fingernails into the flesh of my arm until a spot of blood appeared. It gave me great satisfaction. I was God’s most miserable creature, forced even to torturing myself. Surely upon this earth no grief was greater than mine.

      Hackmuth must hear of this, mighty Hackmuth, who fostered genius in the pages of his magazine. Dear Mr Hackmuth, I wrote, describing the glorious past, dear Hackmuth, page upon page, the sun a ball of fire in the West, slowly strangling in a fog bank rising off the coast.

      There was a knock on my door, but I remained quiet because it might be that woman after her lousy rent. Now the door opened and a bald, bony, bearded face appeared. It was Mr Hellfrick, who lived next door. Mr Hellfrick was an atheist, retired from the army, living on a meagre pension, scarcely enough to pay his liquor bills, even though he purchased the cheapest gin on the market. He lived perpetually in a grey bathrobe without a cord or button, and though he made a pretence at modesty he really didn’t care, so that his bathrobe was always open and you saw much hair and bones underneath. Mr Hellfrick had red eyes because every afternoon when the sun hit the west side of the hotel, he slept with his head out the window, his body and legs inside. He had owed me fifteen cents since my first day at the hotel, but after many futile attempts to collect it, I had given up hope of ever possessing the money again. This had caused a breach between us, so I was surprised when his head appeared inside my door.

      He squinted secretively, pressed a finger to his lips, and shhhhhhhhhed me to be quiet, even though I hadn’t said a word. I wanted him to know my hostility, to remind him that I had no respect for a man who failed to meet his obligations. Now he closed the door quietly and tiptoed across the room on his bony toes, his bathrobe wide open.

      ‘Do you like milk?’ he whispered.

      I certainly did, and I told him so. Then he revealed his plan. The man who drove the Alden milk route on Bunker Hill was a friend of his. Every morning at four this man parked his milk truck behind the hotel and came up the back stairs to Hellfrick’s room for a drink of gin. ‘And so,’ he said, ‘if you like milk, all you have to do is help yourself.’

      I shook my head.

      ‘That’s pretty contemptible, Hellfrick,’ and I wondered at the friendship between Hellfrick and the milkman. ‘If he’s your friend, who do you have to steal the milk? He drinks your gin. Why don’t you ask him for milk?’

      ‘But I don’t drink milk,’ Hellfrick said. ‘I’m doing this for you.’

      This looked like an attempt to squirm out of the debt he owed me. I shook my head. ‘No thanks, Hellfrick. I like to consider myself an honest man.’

      He shrugged, pulled the bathrobe around him.

      ‘Okay, kid. I was only trying to do you a favour.’

      I continued my letter to Hackmuth, but I began to taste milk almost immediately. After a while I could not bear it. I lay on the bed in the semi-darkness, allowing myself to be tempted. In a little while all resistance was gone, and I knocked on Hellfrick’s door. His room was madness, pulp western magazines over the floor, a bed with sheets blackened, clothes strewn everywhere, and clothes-hooks on the wall conspicuously naked, like broken teeth in a skull. There were dishes on the chairs, cigarette butts pressed out on the window sills. His room was like mine except that he had a small gas stove in one corner and shelves for pots and pans. He got a special rate from the landlady, so that he did his own cleaning and made his own bed, except that he did neither. Hellfrick sat in a rocking chair in his bathrobe, gin bottles around his feet. He was drinking from a bottle in his hand. He was always drinking, day and night, but he never got drunk

      ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I told him.

      He filled his mouth with gin, rolled the liquor around in his cheeks, and swallowed ecstatically. ‘It’s a cinch,’ he said. Then he got to his feet and crossed the room towards his pants, which lay sprawled out. For a moment I thought he was going to pay back the money he owed me, but he did no more than fumble mysteriously through the pockets, and then he returned empty handed to the chair. I stood there.

      ‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you could pay the money I loaned you.’

      ‘Haven’t got it,’ he said.

      ‘Could you pay me a portion of it – say ten cents?’

      He shook his head.

      ‘A nickel?’

      ‘I’m broke, kid.’

      Then he took another swig. It was a fresh bottle, almost full.

      ‘I can’t give you any hard cash, kid. But I’ll see that you get all the milk you need.’ Then he explained. The milkman would arrive around four. I was to stay awake and listen for his knock. Hellfrick would keep the milkman occupied for at least twenty minutes. It was a bribe, a means of escaping payment of the debt, but I was hungry.

      ‘But you ought to pay your debts, Hellfrick. You’d be in a bad spot if I was charging you interest.’

      ‘I’ll pay you, kid,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay every last penny, just as soon as I can.’

      I walked back to my room, slamming Hellfrick’s door angrily. I didn’t wish to seem cruel about the matter, but this was going too far. I knew the gin he drank cost him at least thirty cents a pint. Surely he could control his craving for alcohol long enough to pay his just debts.

      The night came reluctantly. I sat at the window, rolling some cigarettes with rough cut tobacco and squares of toilet paper. This tobacco had been a whim of mine in more prosperous times. I had bought a can of it, and the pipe for smoking it had been free, attached to the can by a rubber band. But I had lost the pipe. The tobacco was so coarse it made a poor smoke in regular cigarette papers, but wrapped twice in toilet tissue it was powerful and compact, sometimes bursting into flames.

      The night came slowly, first the cool odour of it, and then the darkness. Beyond my window spread the great city, the street lamps, the red and blue and green neon tubes bursting to life like bright night flowers. I was not hungry, there were plenty of oranges under the bed, and that mysterious chortling in the pit of my stomach was nothing more than great clouds of tobacco smoke marooned there, trying frantically to find a way out.

      So it had happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your flash-in-the-pan genius, your one-story-writer: a thief. I held my head in my hands and rocked back and forth. Mother of God. Headlines in the papers, promising writer caught stealing milk, famous protégé of J. C. Hackmuth hauled into court on petty thief charge, reporters swarming around me, flashlights popping, give us a statement, Bandini,

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