Love and Glory

Chapter Twenty-One

I got a one-room furnished apartment with kitchenette and bath in a building in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue near Kenmore. The day I moved in I went to Ralph’s market on Sunset and bought groceries and made myself steak and salad with French bread. I bought a bottle of red wine to go with the meal. It had been eight months since I had had a drink. It was time to find out. I drank two glasses of the wine with my meal, and sipped the rest of the bottle afterward while I read the Times and the Herald Examiner classified pages, looking for a job. There were three openings for a carpenter’s helper and I marked them for the morning. Then I washed up the dishes and went to bed with a mild buzz and a full stomach.

I could still taste wine in my mouth the next morning and my head ached enough to take aspirin with my orange juice. But I didn’t feel bad, and I didn’t feel like I needed a drink. Maybe next week I could try a couple of beers. I did a careful journal entry after breakfast, and then took a bus downtown to a temporary office in a storefront on the corner of Seventh and Hope to interview for the carpentry job. The job was with a big construction firm that was putting up houses in the Toluca Lake area in North Hollywood. They hired two of us, probably because we were sober, me, and a muscular black man named Roy Washington. A half-hour later we were in the front seat of a pickup truck with a carpenter named Henry Reagan heading for the job.

Henry was a thin, drawn, old man, over sixty, with skin that had weathered to a permanent reddish tone. He wore glasses with gold rims and a sweat-stained baseball cap.

“You know anything about carpentry?”

I said, “No.” Washington shook his head.

“You own any tools?”

“No.”

“Jesus,” Henry said. “How am I supposed to teach you anything if you don’t have any motherfucking tools?”

Washington and I looked at each other.

“I’ll lend you some, but as soon as you get paid, you sure better buy your own,” Henry said. “What’d you boys do before?”

“Boxer,” Washington said.

“How come you’re not boxing now?” Henry said.

“Can’t get no fights,” Washington said. “People ducking me. My manager’s working on it. But in the meantime I gotta eat.”

Henry glanced at me, sitting in the middle between him and Washington.

“How about you? You fight too?”

“Not if I can run,” I said. “I was washing dishes in a place out in Santa Monica. Somebody bought the building and is gonna tear the place down.”

Henry nodded, still sidelonging me as he drove.

“You didn’t get the upper body rinsing dishes,” he said.

“I work out a little.”

“You’ll be working out a lot more by the time I get through teaching your asses,” Henry said.

Washington looked at Henry’s narrow arms and winked at me. Henry turned the truck into the dirt road of a construction site and parked in front of a row of newly poured concrete slabs.

“Okay, boys,” Henry said. “Time to start learning. I’m going to make first-class fucking framers out of you, and I’m in a hurry.”

He didn’t succeed by evening of the first day, but neither Washington nor I laughed at the thinness of his arms again. He gave us sixteen-ounce hammers and nailing aprons and we filled the aprons with handfuls of tenpenny nails from a fifty-pound keg that he had in the back of the truck.

“Okay,” Henry said. “We’re going to frame this house. I’m going to show you how and you’re going to do it. You can expect to fuck it up a few times until you get the feel of things. Don’t let it bother you. If you do it wrong, I’ll straighten it out. Let’s get the cocksucker going.”

And we did. We built sections of the frame on the floor of the slab, and then raised them into position and nailed them together. Henry could drive a ten-penny nail full in with two strokes of the hammer. Washington and I took ten or twelve bangs apiece to get one in. We bent half of them. Henry made us pull out any bent ones. He made us hold the hammer down at the butt end instead of choking up, and he showed us how to take a full-armed swing with it instead of small taps.

“Hit the cocksucker,” he said. “Two swings and it’s in. No sense tiring yourself out with ten bangs. Let the hammer do the work; let the weight of the head do it. You know how to let the head do the work, don’t you?”

He was inexhaustible. He drove nails steadily all afternoon, varying it only to cut the studs to size, driving the circular saw through the wood with a clean, sharp, single movement. When Washington and I did it the saw would bind and the smell of friction-seared wood was sharp.

By five o’clock, when we stopped, Washington and I were soaked with sweat and my arms were shaking tired. I had hit myself on the thumb four times. Henry looked exactly as he had, his thin, reddish body moving with the same tight alacrity it had when he’d picked us up in the morning.

“We start at eight,” Henry said. “Punch in at the field shed. If you’re late, the foreman will take a bite out of your fucking ass.”

We put the hammers and the aprons in the tool box in the back of Henry’s truck and got in. He drove us down to Hollywood Boulevard.

“I’m heading for West L.A.,” he said. “I’ll drop you boys here.”

Washington and I went into a bar on Hollywood near the corner of Wilton and had a beer. I was so drained and thirsty, I forgot for a moment that it was the first beer since last fall. It was cold and it filled me as I had always imagined it would.

“Where you staying?” I asked Washington.

He shrugged. “Around,” he said.

I looked at him in the mirror behind the bar. He had a wide mouth and a little mustache like Ray Robinson wore. I didn’t see any sign of damage on his face except a horizontal scar maybe two inches along the cheekbone under his right eye.

“You need a place to stay?” I said.

“Naw, man, I’m fine,” he said.

“Then how come you’re staying ‘around,’ ” I said.

“Don’t get too pushy, man,” Washington said.

“Why don’t you stay with me for a while,” I said. “I slept in too many parks to think it’s fun.”

“Where you staying?” Washington said.

“Up on Franklin Avenue,” I said. “Near Kenmore.”

His eyes were hazel, with a lot of white around the iris. “They let me in up there?”

“They let me in,” I said.

“I ain’t the same color as you,” Washington said.

“I noticed that,” I said. “Let’s integrate the fucker.”

Washington grinned. He raised his beer glass toward me. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” So we did.