LITMIR.BIZ

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the other cooks look upon me with reproach (see envy), but watch me flip that omelet without a snag or an oath every time. Ferran grumbles, but he can’t argue with a first-rate, cake-high, daisy yellow omelet. I’m more proud of my ability to make fabulous omelets than any A I ever got on a psychology exam.

      Soon I’m transferred to dinner cook. Twenty-five cents more an hour and not so many omelets, but about as many tickets. The Tavern is the busiest of the five restaurants at the grand old Broadmoor. Our dining room (with the original Toulouse-Lautrecs hanging from the walls and Frank Fanelli and his Orchestra churning out the dance numbers live on stage) holds at least two hundred guests, and sometimes we turn the room over three times. Famous people come here too. A waiter will rush lisping into the kitchen, “Peggy Fleming is out there!” Not that I’m excited about celebrities, especially ice-skaters. As a matter of fact, I never leave the kitchen to look out over the glittering sea of wealthy diners. I don’t admire the rich, who merely subjugate others for their comfort and amusement. I hold them responsible for the plight of America and the wastrel example they set for the rest of us. America is a corrupt and dissolving civilization whose pride has always been reserved for the wealthy and the famous, the so-called winners. I prefer the culture of poverty, from which all good things—humility, honesty, the words of Christ and Lincoln, rock music, and French onion soup—have evolved.

      Dinner cook suits me. I can sleep late, stay up late, read books, lounge in front of the radio, make entries in my journal, sit in one of twenty pieces of furniture, and blow smoke rings at the ceiling. I’ve gotten into the habit of checking out three or four books a week from the library down the street. The gummy and lightweight ball of gossamer that passes for my brain has at long last, without the constant assault of recreational drugs, begun to awaken and reform. Late at night my noisy neighbors have all drifted off to sleep. When I was a friendless, asthmatic boy I used to sit in bed and read all night, my only pure satisfaction in life.

      The only bad part about cooking the afternoon shift is hitchhiking home in the dark. More than once I’ve had to walk. And coming to work I’ve been late a couple of times too. And now in December it’s getting cold. The winter snows have begun in earnest. I’ve tried to avoid it, but at last, reluctantly, I enter a car lot. I don’t like cars. They’re obscene contraptions, fossil-fuel furnaces. But I’m not going to hitchhike or walk anymore through the blizzards of midnight. I find a Fiat that I like. It’s only a thousand bucks. It’s a small car. It won’t pollute too much.

      The salesman is a ruddy man in a down jacket and green slacks who smells vigorously of cinnamon gum. He strolls over. “Nice car, huh?”

      “Can I drive it?”

      He positions his hands as if his thumbs are hooked into suspenders. “Key’s in the ignition,” he says.

      This is my kind of car, I think, whipping it around the block. I’ve always seen myself, if I had to see myself in a car, in a European sports car. They’re French, aren’t they, Fiats?

      In the salesman’s office he creaks back in his chair, thumbs now hooked in the invisible suspenders of his Arrow sports shirt, and begins to amiably shake his head. “Can’t sell you the Fiat,” he says.

      “Why not?”

      “You got no credit. You been working only two months.”

      “What am I going to do?” I say, feeling tears well. “ I need a car.”

      “Tell you what,” he says, crossing his feet up on the desk and cradling the back of his head in his hands. “I’ll sell you the Vega.”

      “The VEGA?” I look outside. A few flakes zigzag past the glass. I already saw the Vega. It’s a Kaamback, a station wagon, and outside of a crumpled fender and a cracked windshield it isn’t in bad shape, but I know that Vegas are terrible cars. The cocaine addicts who assemble them in Detroit put rocks in the wheel covers because they only make nine times an hour more than I do. “But I don’t want the Vega,” I say.

      “Sorry,” he says. “We’ll finance you for the Vega but not the Fiat.”

      “How much is the Vega?”

      “Thousand dollars.”

      “Same price as the Fiat,” I say. “I don’t get it.”

      “We’ll extend you the credit,” he says, “but you’ll have to take the Vega.”

      I decide to take the Vega. I know after working only ten weeks with a job that pays only fifty cents over minimum that I’ll be lucky to find anyone who will finance me. Anyway, I’m leaving soon. It won’t matter. I sign on the dotted line and drive my Vega off the lot. It isn’t so bad. Nice radio. Automatic transmission. Plaid vinyl seats. Two blocks out the driveway it dies. I stomp back to the lot. The flummoxed salesman has it towed back to the garage. “It’s a gas-sending unit,” he explains half an hour later, with a slap on my back. “You shouldn’t have any more trouble with it.”

      “Right,” I grumble, and I drive it away again, knowing I’ll be back, knowing I’ve been screwed. They sold me the Vega because I was the only fool on earth who would buy it. A man with any backbone would’ve fought for the Fiat.

      9.

      THIS IS THE STRANGE PART ABOUT COLORADO SPRINGS: I have made no friends yet. Usually I’m automatically social. I come from that generation that uses drugs or “the party” as a form of instant tribal cement. We are all brothers, pass that joint, what was your name again? But I’m hesitant now. I’m suspicious of my patterns, my lethargy, whimsy, and hypocrisy, my fear and refusal to mature. If I make friends it will be the Tooley boys all over again and I’ll be running away shortly with no money to a place I don’t really want to go. I’ll stop reading and thinking. I’ll lose sight of my goals, chief among them to master my consciousness. First I must read all the great books and acquaint myself with their ideas. Second I must accumulate practical experience. Third I must continue to travel and to pay attention to all that goes on around me. Fourth I must take risks and not be afraid of death, for consciousness, the very brain waves of the Creator, even if lost for a moment in the pursuit of its promotion, will only be restored to me again.

      No, it is better to be alone. No more drugs or excessive drink. I want to be an adult, intellectually complete, comfortable with myself, with reliable friends who’ll come to my birthday party. Whatever associations I make from now on will be based upon word and honor. It will take a while, I realize, to do all this: I have lost—no, wasted—so much time.

      More and more I think of my good friend, Mountain. My parents (who are without explanation not angry about my running away from school, because they apparently think this is some natural adventurous phase in the sequence that will somehow lead to success) reported that Mountain called looking for my whereabouts, and said they’d given him my address and work number. He has not written to me, however. I keep hoping to see him at my door. I’d write to him if I had his address, and if I wasn’t saving money, I’d get a phone, just so I could talk with him.

      When spring arrives I seem to have gathered little momentum to leave the country. I have over four hundred dollars in the bank, and my feelings about America haven’t changed, but I wonder if four hundred is enough. Also I’m learning a trade. I’ve learned how to sharpen knives and make a roux, how to broil lobster tails and flambé. I don’t know if I’ll ever enjoy cooking professionally, but at least it’s honest work. What does a lawyer do when he gets home, pull the wings off flies? When I get home I can cook anything I like. If I could pluck up the heart to ask a girl out on a date, I’d make her a nice meal. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. With my advance in sobriety, I seem to have retreated in confidence. Maybe I never had confidence. Maybe it was only the bogus bravado of alcohol.

      And now the tourist season has begun. Summer and immeasurably busy nights are upon us. Tonight I am standing over a giant iron skillet, grease popping and burning my wrists as I flick stiff, glassy-eyed trout back and forth, waiting for that last trace of pink to leave the spine. The tourists never tire of rainbow trout meuniére, which is not trout

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