Andrew Shaw: $20 Lust

I went to sleep and dreamed bad dreams.

After a few days in the hotel I got a room and a job in that order. Neither was much to write home about, but for that matter there was nobody at home to write to. The room guaranteed that I wouldn’t die of exposure; the job guaranteed that I wouldn’t die of starvation. What more can anybody ask?

The room was in an old brownstone on West 73rd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. It was a fourth-floor walkup, a little room with a single bed, a scarred dresser and a chair that might have qualified as an antique if it hadn’t been so ugly and broken down. There was a bathroom down the hall where the cockroaches could lead me every morning. The room cost ten dollars a week, which was reasonable, and the landlady was a sad-looking old baby who let me know that I could drink as much as I wanted as long as I didn’t puke, and screw as much as I wanted as long as I didn’t break the bed. It seemed decent enough.

The job came after the room, because I wanted to find something I could walk to rather than fight the IRT every morning and evening. I passed up the HELP WANTED: MALE section of the Times and wandered around the area looking for a job that didn’t require much in the way of talent.

It was an interesting neighborhood to wander around. There were a large number of faggots and dykes, the more subdued ones who thought it was gauche to live in the Village, a batch of Irish who drank in the wonderful bars on Columbus Avenue, a scattering of Puerto Ricans, and throughout a sprinkling of various Manhattan types. The neighborhood was small stores and bars and shops on Columbus and Amsterdam, bigger stores and restaurants on 72nd Street, and mostly brownstones with an occasional brick building on the side streets. Here and there you could find a tree, if you cared about it. I didn’t.

Central Park was just a block and a half away, which was nice if you cared about birds and grass and flowers and fresh air. Again, I didn’t.

There was a Help Wanted card in a window on Columbus and I took a long look at the place that wanted help. It looked as though they could use it. A big weather-beaten sign said the place was Grace’s Lunch and advised the world to drink Coca-Cola. The window needed a scrubbing and so, by the looks of things, did the people who ate there.

I went inside. There were half a dozen tables with chairs around them and maybe twice as many stools at the counter. A battered dame in her thirties with frizzy black hair was dividing her time between the counter and the cash register. There seemed to be somebody in the back cooking up the slop for her to serve. About eight or ten customers were shoveling it down.

I pulled up a stool and the dame with the hair came over and shoved a menu at me. It was dog-eared around the edges and contained a lot of food. Somebody’s fried eggs were stuck to it in one spot; the rest I couldn’t identify.

I gave the menu back to her. “I ate a little while ago,” I told her. “I’m looking for a job.”

“Ever sling hash before?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“Nothing much to it, actually. No cooking — Carl takes care of that end. Just take the orders, pour the coffee and like that. We don’t get much of a rush here. Just neighborhood people who know the place, regulars that come in all the time. You look at this place from the front and it doesn’t make much of a show. The grub’s good and the regulars know it. They don’t care how fancy it is.”

I filled in with a nod.

“My name’s Grace,” she told me. “I own the place. I need somebody nights from midnight to eight. Horrible hours for most people. It gets tough to keep help those hours. A guy’ll take the job, then quit me cold in a week or two as soon as his belly’s full. If you’re going to pull that bit I don’t need you. If you want to be steady the work’s here for you. The job pays forty a week and meals. You get to stuff yourself as much as you want while you work only don’t eat up all the profits or I’ll fire you. Try to cheat me and I’ll catch you. Sound fair enough to you?”

“Fair enough. I’m just looking for steady work.”

“That’s what it is. You don’t mind the hours?”

I was used to them. I told her I didn’t mind at all. And the job turned out to be simple enough. Grace couldn’t have gotten rich on the midnight-to-eight shift; the bulk of the trade was coffee-an’ with an occasional ham and eggs thrown in. Most of the time the place was half empty; sometimes Carl and I would talk to each other without seeing a single customer for twenty minutes at a clip.

But the food was good and the pay was enough to live on. I spent April and May settling down into a strange sort of routine, the general type of life that Dr. Strom had said would do me the most good. Up at four or five in the afternoon, coffee on a hot plate in my room, a magazine in my room or a movie around the corner on Broadway. A walk, a nap or something until it was time to go to work.

Then eight hours of work, broken up with a meal or two and a few rounds of the harmless and generally useless conversation a counterman has with a customer. I got to know the regulars — a couple of cabbies who made a stop at Grace’s once or twice a night for coffee, a bartender from Maloney’s who’d stop in for a bite as soon as his place was closed for the night, a waitress who ended her shift at four and a batch of guys and dolls whom I knew only by their faces.

It was supposed to be therapy. I was completely alone, as alone as a person could be who still talked to people, still breathed city air and still walked in city streets. No one knew more about me than my name. No one asked where I was from, what I was doing, where I was headed. Come to think of it, Grace was the only person in New York outside of my landlady who knew my last name. To everybody else I was Ted, or Hey, You.

I think I understand what Strom had in mind. Bit by bit every shred of the identity of Ted Lindsay, Reporter, was evaporating. At first I would glance through the New York papers with the eye of a pro, but now all I read were the stories themselves. Fine points flew by me; I was too immersed in other things to bother with them. They didn’t matter at all anymore.

And, as Ted Lindsay disappeared, Mona Lindsay gradually faded into the background. As I lost consciousness of myself the woman who was lost forever gradually ebbed into oblivion, or Limbo, or whatever is the abode of lost and forgotten souls. This isn’t to say that I forgot her, because forgetting Mona would have been like forgetting a white cow. You know the bit? Try not to think of a white cow. See what I mean?

But I would test myself now and then, trying to think of her without caring, trying to remember her without getting a hard painful spot in my chest about where your heart is supposed to be. It got progressively easier. Away from Louisville, away from the Times Building, away from our home and our friends and all the places where we had been together, the memories of her were far less compelling, far less vivid and real.

It should have been ideal. By all rules it should have been ideal, just an inch or two short of Nirvana. It wasn’t, and this was a constant source of irritation to me. It didn’t send me screaming, didn’t drive me to drink in the cool green Irish bars on Columbus Avenue, for the elementary reason that there was nothing to scream about, nothing to drink over.

There was no pain.

But pleasure is more than the absence of pain. And, all in all, the life I was leading was totally devoid of pleasure. One day followed the next with mechanical precision. Eight hours of nothing was followed by eight hours of work which in turn was followed by eight hours of sleep. Life was three shifts of eight hours each, seven of these groups of three making a week. The worst day in each week was Sunday — then I had to find something to do to fill in the eight hours when I would otherwise have been working.