Read Online The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams - Free Book Online

cotton, the pills, the pain, the morphine, Dr. Woodson, were a hideous comedy of errors. Even now, he thought, some obscure lab technician might be on the phone talking to the doctor, saying there had been a mistake. Max shook himself out of the daydream and started the car. Take what you get, man. It’s nice, enjoy it. You knew as soon as you could know things that you weren’t going to live forever. You got twenty extra years. Remember the war. The tanks. Cinquale Canal. Viareggio. The mountains. The Ghoums. The donkeys. He drove slowly through the streets. They did not look familiar. That is, they did not look unfamiliar; they looked, each one, just like one he had passed. He felt his way and was pleased when he arrived at the road south, Europa 10.
    A fine silver mist hung low over the level, neat green fields. You could say that for the Netherlands; their neatness was blatant, as blatant as New York’s high risers. Going back toward the city were two highway policemen with their helmets and sunglasses and white shoulder belts. They roared along in a Porsche. Max settled back in the seat. It was a nice day. Why was he messing it up with Harry Ames, now dead and gone, sprinkled somewhere over the Seine? Once he and Harry had planned to drive through Holland, but like so many things they’d talked about doing, it hadn’t come off. But there had been other things, a hundred thousand other things, he thought, driving along at a steady clip under a rapidly warming sun …

5
    NEW YORK
    â€¦ and he started to feel a little too warm. He rolled down the windows of the beetle-backed Ford he had borrowed. He felt good. A part of things. Bigger than the things he was a part of. It was about time. He bounced over the Long Island roads that F. Scott Fitzgerald had made famous, and thought of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, of Gatsby. Hell, he was going to write Fitzgerald out of existence. Most of the reviews of his first book, published only two weeks ago, made him think so, although not one failed to compare him with Harry Ames. He was not going to let that bother him just yet. He would meet Ames that day, at Wading River, at the summer home of Bernard Zutkin, the literary critic. Of course, Max had read Ames, had liked the very hell out of his big book, the one that had made him. He wondered what kind of man Ames was. There were always stories around the newspaper, the Harlem Democrat , which, after the acceptance of his novel for publication, had finally moved him from hustling ads from the owners of bars and barbecue joints to editorial. Now Max wrote about shootings and stabbings and cases of discrimination. And the scandals. Especially the ones involving chicken-eating ministers caught with someone else’s wife in a fleabag hotel. Ames got a lot of attention in the paper, along with Bolton Warren. So there were always stories. Max knew that Ames was thirty, six years older than he; that Ames had been born in Mississippi, but had traveled around the country, to Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington. Max knew Chicago, had been born there, and he had lived in Cleveland for a while before coming to New York to settle down. New York, the Big Apple.
    Max looked forward to the weekend. Perhaps the people at Zutkin’s would be groovy. Going in for the beach scenes and all, lots of whiskey and dancing. He wondered if Ames could swim. Yes, it would be an absolute groove, if Harry Ames hadn’t sewed it up already. He pictured Ames (on the basis of the love scenes Ames had written) as being pretty great with the chicks. He’d see.
    And he’d have to feel his way with Zutkin who’d already asked him to write articles for his magazine. Zutkin, a loner, so the talk went, was a highly regarded critic. His criticism seemed to have roots in the struggles taking place within the society. In Harlem, where no one cared, it was said that Zutkin once had been a big man in the Party. No one knew