I WAS TOO TIRED to care. Like all the rooms in that old house, my mother’s bedroom was small. The bed was still warm from the heat of the day as I slipped naked beneath a sheet and down into a cradle in the mattress that measured the contours of my mother’s body. It was very black down there when I snapped off the bedside lamp. In the pillow my nostrils drew the sweet, earthy odor of my mother’s hair, pulling me back to other times, when I was not yet twenty and sought to run away.
Yes, I got away. I made it when I was not yet twenty. The writers drew me away. London, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Silone, Hamsun, Steinbeck. Trapped and barricaded against the darkness and the loneliness of the valley, I used to sit with library books piled on the kitchen table, desolate, listening to the call of the voices in the books, hungering for other towns.
I had come to the limits of shooting pool, playing poker and bullshitting over beers, of driving off with other guys and broads into lonely orchards, clawing clumsily at skirts and panties, clawing in vain. Women were fine but demanding, you hurt easily at nineteen; you thought women were sweet and submissive but find them alley cats; you find comfort in whores who are less deceitful, and if you are lucky you learn to read.
My old man, the son of a bitch, lurching home with a snoutful of vino, yelling turn off the lights, get to bed, what the hell’s come over you, for books were a drug and my addiction was alarming, and I was hardly his son at all anymore. Get a job, he demanded, do something with your life. He was right. He must have been. Everybody agreed with him. Even the guys at the poolhall noticed the change. We couldn’t talk to one another the old way.
I got a job. I picked almonds. I picked grapes. I worked the hop fields. The rains came, the fields wet and unworkable, thank God, and I was back in the kitchen, reading the sweet books. They thought I was ill—my eyes red and staring, my mother feeling my forehead: You all right, Henry? Maybe you got the flu.
He should see a doctor, my father said. Find out what’s wrong. Where you going with your life? Who’s gonna take care of your mother when I’m gone? They don’t pay wages for reading books. Get out of here! There’s a war on. Get in the army. Go to San Francisco. Get on a boat. Support yourself. Be a man. You know what a man is? A man works. He sweats. He digs. He pounds. He builds. He gets a few dollars and puts them away. Listen to who’s talking! I sneered.
There was no answer for that street-corner Dago, that low-born Abruzzian wop, the yahoo peasant ginzo, that shit-kicker, that curb crawler. What did he know? What had he read?
For I was okay. I was on to something. A new feeling of the world beyond San Elmo and television, thrilling, shocking, pumping my adrenalin. Why had I not come upon it before? Where had I been all those years? Trying to carry a hod, mixing mortar? Who was it that had stunted my brain, kept books out of my range, ignored them, despised them? My old man. His ignorance, the frenzy of living under his roof, his rantings, his threats, his greed, his bullying, his gambling. Christmas without money. Graduation a suit of clothes. Debts, debts. We stopped speaking. One day we passed one another crossing the railroad tracks. He went on a few steps, stopped, and began to laugh. I turned. He pointed at me and began to laugh. He pretended to read a book and laughed. It was not amusement. It was rage and disappointment and contempt.
Then it happened. One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life. I held his book in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same. His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, and of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence. Dostoyevsky changed me. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler. He turned me inside out. I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons. The hatred for my father melted. I loved my father, poor, suffering, haunted wretch. I loved my mother too, and all my family. It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world. I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky. I wanted to write.
The week before I left town the draft board summoned me to Sacramento for my physical. I was glad to go. Someone other than myself could make my decisions. The army turned me down. I had asthma. Inflammation of the bronchial tubes.
“That’s nothing. I’ve always had it.”
“See your doctor.”
I got the needed information from a medical book at the public library. Was asthma fatal? It could be. And so be it. Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, I had asthma. To write well a man must have a fatal ailment. It was the only way to deal with the presence of death.