34
PARTISAN REVIEW
Annex near' South Street. "I'd go down myself if I could bum a nickel.
Don't let no cop catch you asking for a ride. There's regulations out."
I did not want to do any more walking either ' so I got on back of a
Broadway Street car. The six o'clock jam was on and the trolley stopped
too often. I had not ridden the back fender of a taxi for about seven
years and the bundle hampered me. I would have nabbed a taxI anyway
but the trolley's clattering dissipated the strange feeling in my head some–
how. All the little tricks came back, when to drop off, when to step on,
how to disregard the cops' perfunctory "Hey you."
A cop did bounce me near City Hall. I knew they had a free em–
ployees' bus operating between the foot of Brooklyn Bridge and the Hearst
Publications Building on South Street. I looked carefully to see if Tommy
wasn't visiting one of his rye and scotch buddies but I remembered his
hours. In the bus I tried to tell who were copy boys, sports writers, leg
men. I was sure only of a fat but dry rewrite man.
The breadline coiled snugly around the former warehouse. The doors
had not yet been opened and the men stood four abreast. I fell in. No–
body so much as looked at me. A pulpy and inexorable lava of hunger
fldwed in my marrows.
"What do they give you here?" I said to the man beside me.
"Coffee and sandwiches."
"How long do you have to wait?"
"No telling," he said without turning around. But some others
looked at me because I had broken the silence.
"You eat when them four sons of bitches get good and through with
their poker," a young one said.
It was another five minutes before somebody spoke, the young one
again. "I see where the mayor of Los Angeles is sending out a call for
a thousand men with shovels."
There was an immediate effect.
"Yes, sir, he wants them to shovel snow next time they get snow
falling in Los Angeles:"
Nobody laughed. Some snorted or cackled. "\Vhere's the funeral?"
the youth said.
A fleet of garbage barges was being towed by on the East River and
there were gales of retching smell. I reproached myself for being over–
sensitized but a few others noticed it.
"A sniff of your horse doiver," the youth commented. That was the
last thing said until the doors were opened.
The line moved up briskly, hugging the warehouse. The official
