Read Online America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw
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through the falling snow. I crept ashoreâfrightened and cold and with a touch of panic in my stomach. This Dick Whittington didnât even have a cat.
I wasnât really bad off. I had a sister in New York and she had a good job. She had a husband and he had a good job. Now, in California, when a relative visited, there was always a good bedâmaybe under the eaves, but it was yours for as long as you wanted to stay. My sister had one of the really nice apartments. It consisted of one large room, a tiny bathroom and a screened alcove where the lightest of cooking could be done and wasnât. There wasnât any question of staying with her. One double studio couch that acted as a sitting place in the daytime was the total sleeping space. My brother-in-law loaned me thirty dollars and put me up at a hotel for the first night. The next day he got me a job as a laborer on a big construction job and I found a room three flights up in Fort Greene Place in Brooklyn. That is about as alone as you can get. The job was on Madison Square Garden, which was being finished in a hurry. There was time and a half and there was double time. I was big and strong. My job was wheeling cementâone of a long lineâone barrow behind another, hour after hour. I wasnât that big and strong. It nearly killed me and it probably saved my life. I was too tired to see what went on around me.
Most of the men in the line were Negroesâstringy men who didnât look big and strong at all, but they dollied those 150-pound barrows along as though they were fluff. They talked as they went and they sang as they went. They never seemed to get tired. It was ten, fifteen, and sometimes eighteen hours a day. There were no Sundays. That was double time, golden time, two dollars an hour. If anybody slipped out of the line, there were fifty men waiting to take his place.
My knowledge of the city was blurredâaching, lights and the roar of the subway, climbing three flights to a room with dirty green walls, falling into bed half-washed, beef stew, coffee and sinkers in a coffeepot, a sidewalk that pitched a little as I walked, then the line of barrows again. Itâs all mixed up like a fever dream. There would be big salamanders of glowing coke to warm our hands and I would warm mine just for the rest, long after I couldnât feel my hands at all. I do remember a man falling from a scaffold up near the ceiling about ninety feet and landing about four feet from me. He was red when he hit and then the blood in his face drew away like a curtain and he was blue and white under the working lights.
I donât even remember how long the job went on. It seems interminable and was maybe a month or six weeks. Anyway, the Garden got finished for the six-day bicycle races and Tex Rickard congratulated us all, without respect to race or color. I still get a shiver from the place sometimes.
About that time, my rich and successful uncle came to town from Chicago. He was an advertising man with connections everywhere. He was fabulous. He stayed in a suite at the Commodore, ordered drinks or coffee and sandwiches sent up any time he wanted, sent telegrams even if they werenât important. This last still strikes me as Lucullan. My uncle got me a job on a newspaperâthe New York American down on William Street. I didnât know the first thing about being a reporter. I think now that the twenty-five dollars a week that they paid me was a total loss. They gave me stories to cover in Queens and Brooklyn and I would get lost and spend hours trying to find my way back. I couldnât learn to steal a picture from a desk when a family refused to be photographed and I invariably got emotionally involved and tried to kill the whole story to save the subject.
But for my uncle, I think they would have fired me the first week. Instead, they gave me Federal courts in the old Park Row Post Office. Why, I will never know. It was a
I wasnât really bad off. I had a sister in New York and she had a good job. She had a husband and he had a good job. Now, in California, when a relative visited, there was always a good bedâmaybe under the eaves, but it was yours for as long as you wanted to stay. My sister had one of the really nice apartments. It consisted of one large room, a tiny bathroom and a screened alcove where the lightest of cooking could be done and wasnât. There wasnât any question of staying with her. One double studio couch that acted as a sitting place in the daytime was the total sleeping space. My brother-in-law loaned me thirty dollars and put me up at a hotel for the first night. The next day he got me a job as a laborer on a big construction job and I found a room three flights up in Fort Greene Place in Brooklyn. That is about as alone as you can get. The job was on Madison Square Garden, which was being finished in a hurry. There was time and a half and there was double time. I was big and strong. My job was wheeling cementâone of a long lineâone barrow behind another, hour after hour. I wasnât that big and strong. It nearly killed me and it probably saved my life. I was too tired to see what went on around me.
Most of the men in the line were Negroesâstringy men who didnât look big and strong at all, but they dollied those 150-pound barrows along as though they were fluff. They talked as they went and they sang as they went. They never seemed to get tired. It was ten, fifteen, and sometimes eighteen hours a day. There were no Sundays. That was double time, golden time, two dollars an hour. If anybody slipped out of the line, there were fifty men waiting to take his place.
My knowledge of the city was blurredâaching, lights and the roar of the subway, climbing three flights to a room with dirty green walls, falling into bed half-washed, beef stew, coffee and sinkers in a coffeepot, a sidewalk that pitched a little as I walked, then the line of barrows again. Itâs all mixed up like a fever dream. There would be big salamanders of glowing coke to warm our hands and I would warm mine just for the rest, long after I couldnât feel my hands at all. I do remember a man falling from a scaffold up near the ceiling about ninety feet and landing about four feet from me. He was red when he hit and then the blood in his face drew away like a curtain and he was blue and white under the working lights.
I donât even remember how long the job went on. It seems interminable and was maybe a month or six weeks. Anyway, the Garden got finished for the six-day bicycle races and Tex Rickard congratulated us all, without respect to race or color. I still get a shiver from the place sometimes.
About that time, my rich and successful uncle came to town from Chicago. He was an advertising man with connections everywhere. He was fabulous. He stayed in a suite at the Commodore, ordered drinks or coffee and sandwiches sent up any time he wanted, sent telegrams even if they werenât important. This last still strikes me as Lucullan. My uncle got me a job on a newspaperâthe New York American down on William Street. I didnât know the first thing about being a reporter. I think now that the twenty-five dollars a week that they paid me was a total loss. They gave me stories to cover in Queens and Brooklyn and I would get lost and spend hours trying to find my way back. I couldnât learn to steal a picture from a desk when a family refused to be photographed and I invariably got emotionally involved and tried to kill the whole story to save the subject.
But for my uncle, I think they would have fired me the first week. Instead, they gave me Federal courts in the old Park Row Post Office. Why, I will never know. It was a