Harry Springer gripped the wheel, his mood swaying between righteous anger and self-abasement. Was it so much he asked? She was his wife, dammit! What was he asking? To touch her, to hold her, get rid of the emptiness inside that seemed to stretch across a distance greater than the Argentine pampas. Not that he knew a hell of a lot about the pampas, but it was the one thing he remembered from geography; ever since the fifth grade it was the image he had used for vast. Who was she, the goddamn Supreme Court? He thought, abruptly, of how good it would be to drive out to Barneys, see some of the guys, have a beer. One beer, what the hell could it do?
I am an alcoholic. I will always be an alcoholic.
How many times had he said that in the AA meetings? He fought against the words, at first. No, he wasn’t really a drunk, not really. Just a young guy who got mixed up, lost his job. Only one beer.
I am an alcoholic.
One beer would mean two, and he’d be on the floor by midnight. It had been “one beer” the night he’d gotten so tanked up that he ended in the city lockup and lost even the crummy job in the grocery store bagging produce. One more episode like that and it was finis, all she wrote, babe. All that agony, the hard slogging of the past eight months, just to wind up on the floor at Barneys? Fuck that.
She was right, he hadn’t proved himself yet. Anybody could climb on the wagon for a few months. Four more months — it stretched ahead of him, like the pampas. No, think of it one day at a time, that way it wouldn’t seem so long.
He laughed ruefully to himself. He was waiting. Hot damn, that was something new. He had always wanted everything right away, thought he deserved it. Marge, the old broad in the AA group, called his drinking one little boy’s massive temper tantrum. Foulmouthed old broad, but she had something.
Jesus, growing up was hard, especially at twenty-five. Why didn’t anyone ever tell him how hard it was? It was one of those secrets they kept from you, like sex. You had to learn it by doing, so of course you got it wrong.
But he was doing it. He would show her he could do it. Her approval was a beam of light ahead, towards which he was moving. Sometimes he thought it was the only thing that kept him going, a fucking star in the East. Why was it so important? He didn’t know. He only knew it was, and that was it.
I am an alcoholic.
He thought about Klein, the skinny hebe pitcher. He wondered what ever happened to Klein. He never made it to the bigs. Had he ever tried? Did Klein know what it was like to be crawling in his own vomit on the floor of a drunk tank? He thought about Klein a lot, the kid who had one hell of a curveball and threw it right through Harry Springer’s life.
Harry had gone off to the All-State game in his senior year certain that the big league scouts in the stands would be looking for him. That was what all the smart guys in town were saying, nobody like him in the league for twenty years. Harry Springer, bonus baby — it sounded good to the ears. He’d have to fight the broads off.
The first time he came to bat in the game, Klein threw him a curveball he couldn’t even see, much less hit. He missed the ball by two inches. He’d never seen a curveball like that. How could that skinny hebe throw so good? And even he wasn’t good enough for the big leagues. With each pitch, the bigs grew dimmer and dimmer. In the small regional league the Belvedere Blades played in, Harry Springer was a standout. But he’d never seen kids who could play like this.
“You wanted to be DiMaggio,” Marge, the old broad said. “I wanted to be Jean Harlow. We ain’t none of us stars, kids, we’re drunks. Maybe because we wanted things we couldn’t have. You got to take it one day at a time, and get the fucking stars out of your eyes.”
“They’re gone, Marge.” The last one went out the night he hit bottom, crawling around on the cement floor, crying and heaving while an old drunk kept hitting him on the back. They all thought he was finished when that happened, even his parents. They wrote him off: boy drunk. They were wrong. He wasn’t ready to pack it in yet. Fuck it, he’d show them all.
He turned the wheel in the direction of his parents’ house.
Mary walked into the city room and saw Jay at the desk cropping a set of pictures. She walked over, sat on the edge of his desk and clutched her raincoat close to her body.
“Dick, guess what I have on under my good Republican cloth coat.”
He looked up. “What, Pat!”
“Black panties and a peekaboo bra.”
“For Chrissake, Pat, you want people to think we’re Democrats or something!”
“Look, Dick, I’m so horny I’m going to do it with Checkers. ”
“Checkers is dead.”
“He’s in the freezer. And he’s a hell of a lot livelier than you.”
They both cracked up. Dick and Pat had become their own private little joke. Sam Bernstein looked at them and shook his head.
“Too bad Nixon didn’t win. You could have taken that act on the road.”
“Yeah,” Jay said. “Too bad. Dick Nixon is one guy we’ll never hear from again.”
“That’s a shame,” Sam said. “I liked the way Herblock did his five o’clock shadow. ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’”
“Anybody thirsty?” Jay asked. “How about we hit the Sahara Room?”
“I got to finish an overnight,” Sam said. “You guys go on. I’ll catch you later.”
Jay and Mary walked across the street and slid into a booth.
“We’re getting a hell of a reaction on the urban renewal story,” Jay told her. “Charlie’s been on the phone all day.”
I wonder if Charlie knows what he’s stirred up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Things are coming out of the woodwork. My mother is getting it from a lot of people because they saw my byline.”
“What kind of things?”
“How come your daughter is helping that Jew bring a lot more Niggers into town?”
“That Jew? Charlie? He’s a Unitarian.”
“I know, but people see bylines like Bernstein, Speigel, Rosenberg, and they get ideas. Some people say the Blade is a Jewspaper.”
“What’s the local viewpoint on Irish Catholics?”
“You didn’t see this place go for Kennedy. Irish Catholics are drunks who want to sell the country to the Vatican.”
“Jeez, this is a bigoted place.”
“Like most, I guess. But I think that we’ve really picked up a rock and a lot of things are going to crawl out. Especially if the Negroes organize to fight the plan like they’re talking about doing.”
“Do you think they have a prayer?”
“With the paper against the plan? Maybe. But there’s going to be a fight.”
“I wouldn’t mind a little action. You know, if I thought I could keep body and soul together, I’d go down South and get some shots of the civil rights marchers.”
“Could you make it, freelancing?”
“It’s hard. Especially when you haven’t got a name. This is my first real job as a photographer, not counting the Army. I think I’ve got to get more experience before I go out on my own. Or maybe I’m just chicken.”
“What’s your dream job?”
“That’s easy. Life. I want to be another Capa. Mydans, Eisenstaedt. I want to be really, really good. But I’ll be thirty in a couple of years, and those guys were already famous by then. In this job, you have to make it young, you have to hustle. I got started late. I may never catch up.”
“I know that feeling.”
“I don’t want to end up like Pete Franklin, hanging around a small paper, shooting crap, doing weddings on the side. I think most people end up never getting to do what they want. Who was the guy who said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation? Boy, was that sucker right.”
“Do you think that’s really true?”
“You bet your ass I do. In my family, we had a fucking monopoly on quiet desperation. My father drove a cab and died at forty-eight from bad kidneys. He was a smart man too; he said if he’d gone to college maybe he could have been a professor, or a lawyer. He just lived and died and nothing ever happened to him.”
“But you’re so good, Jay. Everybody says so.”
“You think life’s like Sunday school? You’re good and you get a gold star on your forehead? There’s a thousand photographers who are good, and they all have a head start on me.”
“So you think life’s a jungle?”
“You bet it is. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”
“To me it’s like fourth grade. I keep thinking I have to put my hand up and ask for things. This job, it’s like a present that I think somebody’s going to come and take back. I don’t feel like I’m … entitled to it. Some days, anyway. Other days, I feel like I’m hot shit.”
He laughed. “Keep thinking that. Have it tattooed on your chest: ’I Am Hot Shit.’”
“You know what, we ought to have a secret club, like we used to do when we were kids. The Hot Shit Society. And we’ll keep on telling each other how great we are.”
“Good idea. Give me your hand.”
She extended her hand, palm up.
“I should spit on it. That’s what we used to do to seal a bargain.”
“Yuck. Isn’t there some other way?”
“Yeah.” He raised her palm to his lips and kissed it. “You are now a Hot Shit, for the rest of your life.”
She picked up his hand, turned it over and kissed his palm. “I dub thee Hot Shit.”
“Hey Pat, if you do it in the freezer with Checkers, can I watch?”
“You’re sick, Dick. Sick, sick, sick.”
“You’re screwing a dead cocker spaniel, and I’m the one who’s sick?”
“OK, you can watch, but only if you don’t wear your suit.”
“You’re a hard woman, Pat.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“OK, OK, but I’m keeping my shoes on.”