When Lawrence and I got back from Indiana we found that Proctor had moved out of the dorm. Lundgren had helped him move over to Hogan’s Alley, a collection of shacks where the seniors used to live. Some of the upperclass boys had complained about the noise of his typewriter. Over on Hogan’s Alley he could type all night if he wanted to. And he wanted to. He also liked the idea, he said, of being alone.
That left the three of us in the swanky suite of rooms, but we were hardly ever in it together. If we were, Lundgren usually had his door closed. He couldn’t stand to hear Lawrence play his phonograph records any more. I didn’t mind the records, but I got awfully tired of the showers Lundgren liked to take, sitting on the shower floor and letting the water drum on his back. He took a cold one in the morning and an hour-long hot one every night. Everything in the bathroom was wet with steam and smelled of the olive oil he rubbed down with. After his shower he took about another hour drying off.
As that began to get on my nerves, I did most of my work in the library basement or in the booth behind the radio at the Sugar Bowl. The noise coming out the rear didn’t bother me so much.
Both January and February were so foggy that Lawrence and I didn’t do much night driving. We would take a little spin in the afternoon, then call it quits. On the weekends we usually drove down to Long Beach, if we were sure Lundgren wouldn’t be there, and take in the dance halls along the coast. Neither of us danced, but we liked to sit at the back and watch. The Santa Monica kids had a different style from what you saw at Balboa, or along the strip that Lundgren called the cemetery with lights. That was how Long Beach looked from the foothills, if you felt about it the way he did, and saw the lights through the oilfield derricks like windmills with their heads blown off.
Once a week I’d go by and see how Proctor was making out. A magazine in the East had paid him thirty-five dollars for a story about a pole vaulter, Lindquist by name, who was always running into the pole. But they had cut the story about half, so the reading time was twelve minutes; the magazine featured a twelve-minute story every month. He showed me the check, but he wouldn’t let me see what the magazine was.
In February he had a letter from an editor who had read and liked the story and wondered if he might be thinking of something with a little more length. Proctor had about a hundred pages of his novel, but he decided to send the editor just fifty, since he wasn’t too sure about the second fifty himself. He thought a great editor might point out something he had overlooked. The editor sent it back with a letter saying that he liked the start of the book very much, especially the fresh quality of the writing, and asked if what Proctor needed was a little ready cash to get on with it. They could let him have a couple hundred dollars if he could indicate, to their satisfaction, just what it was the book was about, and how it would end. But that happened to be what Proctor wanted to know himself. First, just what it was about. Second, just how the hell it should end.
While he was trying to decide we discussed the matter quite a bit. I said I thought he should take the two hundred bucks, naturally. My idea was that he should take the two hundred bucks and go to some place like Santa Fe, or Taos, where he would meet other writers and find a more creative atmosphere. In a place like that he might figure out how to finish the book. But he didn’t seem to think so. He seemed to think that Taos was phony as hell.
Every time I saw him we worked over the same old ground. The real trouble was, in his opinion, that two hundred bucks was not a lot of money when you put it up against something like the barbed-wire empire. It just so happened, naturally, that there was a mention of an Indiana family, and certain Indiana families might mistakenly think they were the family he meant. And there was also the mention, at considerable length, of a small, swanky college in southern California, but not in just the terms that might please somebody like the dean of men. The dean was not the type, to put it mildly, to understand the processes of creative fiction, and he might be led to think that he was one of the characters in the book. Put up against the sort of squawk that such people might make, two hundred measly bucks was not much dough. Once he got out in the world, on his own, two hundred bucks would not be so much.
In March I didn’t see him for a while, because we had our exams. Then we had a big rain, with a foot or so of very fast water in the gutters, and Hogan’s Alley was a solid stream of water about ten yards wide. A stream of it lapped under Proctor’s shack all night long. He would come to class barefoot, his pants rolled up, the scar showing blue where he had shot himself, and sit in the back of the class, smelling wet and sucking oranges. It was still raining a little the night he came over to see me. He didn’t want Lundgren snooping around, so we walked through the rain to the Sugar Bowl, where he said that they had upped their offer to a clean five hundred bucks. What he wanted to know was, where he ought to go to live on it. Where he could write a book and live the longest, that is, on five hundred bucks.
I hadn’t given that particular problem much thought. I gave it some, then said that he might try one of the Great Blasket Islands—if what he wanted to be was alone. If being alone wasn’t so important he might try Majorca, or Paris, if what he wanted was a more congenial atmosphere. Some writers did. While living in Paris they had written some pretty good books. Proctor said he was delighted to hear me say so, because in his own mind he had thought of Paris, but everybody thought of Paris, and he would hate to end up where everybody was. Then we talked about Capri and Rapallo, where he might run into Ezra Pound, and about St. Cloud, where he just might run into Lawrence. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to run into Lawrence, since the book did have a tennis player in it, one from St. Cloud and Indiana, and some people might be led to think it was Lawrence.
We went on in this vein till after midnight, when the Sugar Bowl closed up, then we walked up Hogan’s Alley and listened to the radio in his shack. We went through the Guy Lombardo records that he wanted to save, and asked me to keep for him, and a little after four in the morning I got back to the dorm. I came in through the back, under the lemon trees, where Lawrence liked to keep his Bugatti, but the car was gone, and so was the tarpaulin. He was never off by himself at that time of night. I lay awake for an hour or more, waiting for him, then I slept through till late afternoon, when I heard someone fooling around in his room. I thought it must be Lawrence and called to ask him where the hell he’d been. He didn’t answer, so I opened the door and saw a uniformed van man, out from L.A., packing everything in his room into shipping crates. The van man cleaned his room out, roped up the crates, then left them there for further instructions; the shipping labels turned up on my desk.
According to Proctor, the trouble was Lundgren; he knew Lawrence couldn’t stand him, the mercurochrome between his toes especially. According to Lundgren, Lawrence had been pretty smart. He had decided to leave before the college threw him out.
There was a little of both, in my opinion. Lawrence had not troubled to take his exams, and nobody else had troubled to turn in a set for him. There was that, there was Lundgren, and there was also the fact that he had gone for a ride, and, being alone, it hadn’t been necessary for him to come back. He had probably got over as far as Needles, saw Arizona beckoning across the river, and just kept his eye on the white line, following it east. Over in Flagstaff, having his breakfast, he had probably remembered about his classes, and the Fanny Brice record he had left on his phonograph. He probably worried about that, knowing Lundgren, and called the van man to come out and pack up.
During spring vacation Proctor got a ride as far as El Paso with a Texas junior, and Lundgren decided to put in the time at Jackson Hole. His uncle from Long Beach, the Army colonel, drove him north to Salt Lake City, from where he sent me a postcard with a little bag of salt.
The first three or four days of vacation I spent in bed. I’d get up in the morning and go for the mail, as if I expected something, then come back to bed and read The Bridge of San Luis Rey. One morning I had a card from Proctor, who said he was sailing from New Orleans, and near the end of vacation I had a card from Lawrence. It showed a bullfighter, named Belmonte, down on one knee in the bullring, staring at the bull. It had been mailed from Spain, was signed Lawrence, and on the back it said:
This is no bullshit, old man.
Over the following weekend I packed my books in cartons, which I left in the basement of the dorm, and got off a letter to Mr. Conklin, the Lindbergh man. I said that I was now prepared to take the hop to Paris, or anywhere else. I also wrote a letter to the dean of men, which I planned to mail when I got to Paris, and three days later I heard from Mr. Conklin, Special Delivery. He enclosed a cashier’s check for five hundred dollars and said he would like to see me later, if I made it.
I put the five hundred into traveler’s checks, applied for a passport, which I arranged to have sent to me in New York, and to put in the time as well as save a little money I bought a bus-trip ticket that would take me through New Orleans on the way.
In New Orleans I wrote a letter to my mother, enclosing a postcard for Arlene Miller, that I mailed in Times Square the night before I sailed. I told them both that I would send them a good assortment of foreign stamps.