Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

He had, besides these chance victims, an extensive clientry among the townsfolk. Swinging briskly and cheerily down the street, full of greetings and glib repartee, he would accost each of the grinning men by a new title, in a rich stammering tenor voice:

“Colonel, how are you! Major — here you are, a week’s reading hot off the press. Captain, how’s the boy?”

“How are you, son?”

“Couldn’t be better, General — slick as a puppy’s belly!”

And they would roar with wheezing, red-faced, Southern laughter:

“By God, he’s a good ’un. Here, son, give me one of the damn things. I don’t want it, but I’ll buy it just to hear you talk.”

He was full of pungent and racy vulgarity: he had, more than any of the family, a Rabelaisian earthiness that surged in him with limitless energy, charging his tongue with unpremeditated comparisons, Gargantuan metaphors. Finally, he wet the bed every night in spite of Eliza’s fretting complaints: it was the final touch of his stuttering, whistling, cheerful, vital, and comic personality — he was Luke, the unique, Luke, the incomparable: he was, in spite of his garrulous and fidgeting nervousness, an intensely likable person — and he really had in him a bottomless well of affection. He wanted bounteous praise for his acts, but he had a deep, genuine kindliness and tenderness.

Every week, on Thursday, in Gant’s dusty little office, he would gather the grinning cluster of small boys who bought The Post from him, and harangue them before he sent them out on their duties:

“Well, have you thought of what you’re going to tell them yet? You know you can’t sit around on your little tails and expect them to look you up. Have you got a spiel worked out yet? How do you approach ’em, eh?” he said, turning fiercely to a stricken small boy. “Speak up, speak up, G-G-G-God-damn it — don’t s-s-stand there looking at me. Haw!” he said, laughing with sudden wild idiocy, “look at that face, won’t you?”

Gant surveyed the proceedings from afar with Jannadeau, grinning.

“All right, Christopher Columbus,” continued Luke, good-humoredly. “What do you tell ’em, son?”

The boy cleared his throat timidly: “Mister, do you want to buy a copy of The Saturday Evening Post?”

“Oh, twah-twah,” said Luke, with mincing delicacy, as the boys sniggered, “sweet twah-twah! Do you expect them to buy with a spiel like that? My God, where are your brains? Sail into them. Tackle them, and don’t take no for an answer. Don’t ask them if they WANT to buy. Dive into them: ‘Here you are, sir — hot off the press.’ Jesus Christ,” he yelled, looking at the distant court-house clock with sudden fidget, “we should have been out an hour ago. Come on — don’t stand there: here are your papers. How many do you want, you little Kike?”— for he had several Jews in his employ: they worshipped him and he was very fond of them — he liked their warmth, richness, humor.

“Twenty.”

“Twenty!” he yelled. “You little loafer — you’ll t-t-take fifty. G-g-go on, you c-c-can sell ’em this afternoon. By G-G-God, papa,” he said, pointing to the Jews, as Gant entered the office, “it l-l-looks like the Last S-S-Supper, don’t it? All right!” he said, smacking across the buttocks a small boy who had bent for his quota. “Don’t stick it in my face.” They shrieked with laughter. “Dive in to them now. Don’t let ’em get away from you.” And, laughing and excited, he would send them out into the streets.

To this land of employment and this method of exploitation Eugene was now initiated. He loathed the work with a deadly, an inexplicable loathing. But something in him festered deeply at the idea of disposing of his wares by the process of making such a wretched little nuisance of himself that riddance was purchased only at the price of the magazine. He writhed with shame and humiliation, but he stuck desperately to his task, a queer curly-headed passionate little creature, who raced along by the side of an astonished captive, pouring out of his dark eager face a hurricane of language. And men, fascinated somehow by this strange eloquence from a little boy, bought.

Sometimes the heavy paunch-bellied Federal judge, sometimes an attorney, a banker would take him home, bidding him to perform for their wives, the members of their families, giving him twenty-five cents when he was done, and dismissing him. “What do you think of that!” they said.

His first and nearest sales made, in the town, he would make the long circle on the hills and in the woods along the outskirts, visiting the tubercular sanitariums, selling the magazines easily and quickly —“like hot cakes” as Luke had it — to doctors and nurses, to white unshaven, sensitive-faced Jews, to the wisp of a rake, spitting his rotten lungs into a cup, to good-looking young women who coughed slightly from time to time, but who smiled at him from their chairs, and let their warm soft hands touch his slightly as they paid him.

Once, at a hillside sanitarium, two young New York Jews had taken him to the room of one of them, closed the door behind him, and assaulted him, tumbling him on the bed, while one drew forth a pocket knife and informed him he was going to perform a caponizing operation on him. They were two young men bored with the hills, the town, the deadly regime of their treatment, and it occurred to him years later that they had concocted the business, days ahead, in their dull lives, living for the excitement and terror they would arouse in him. His response was more violent than they had bargained for: he went mad with fear, screamed, and fought insanely. They were weak as cats, he squirmed out of their grasp and off the bed cuffing and clawing tigerishly, striking and kicking them with blind and mounting rage. He was released by a nurse who unlocked the door and led him out into the sunlight, the two young consumptives, exhausted and frightened, remaining in their room. He was nauseated by fear and by the impacts of his fists on their leprous bodies.

But the little mound of nickels and dimes and quarters chinked pleasantly in his pockets: leg-weary and exhausted he would stand before a gleaming fountain burying his hot face in an iced drink. Sometimes conscience-tortured, he would steal an hour away from the weary streets and go into the library for a period of enchantment and oblivion: he was often discovered by his watchful and bustling brother, who drove him out to his labor again, taunting and spurring him into activity.

“Wake up! You’re not in Fairyland. Go after them.”

Eugene’s face was of no use to him as a mask: it was a dark pool in which every pebble of thought and feeling left its circle — his shame, his distaste for his employment was obvious, although he tried to conceal it: he was accused of false pride, told that he was “afraid of a little honest work,” and reminded of the rich benefits he had received from his big-hearted parents.

He turned desperately to Ben. Sometimes Ben, loping along the streets of the town, met him, hot, tired, dirty, wearing his loaded canvas bag, scowled fiercely at him, upbraided him for his unkempt appearance, and took him into a lunch-room for something to eat — rich foaming milk, fat steaming kidney-beans, thick apple-pie.

Both Ben and Eugene were by nature aristocrats. Eugene had just begun to feel his social status — or rather his lack of one; Ben had felt it for years. The feeling at bottom might have resolved itself simply into a desire for the companionship of elegant and lovely women: neither was able, nor would have dared, to confess this, and Eugene was unable to confess that he was susceptible to the social snub, or the pain of caste inferiority: any suggestion that the companionship of elegant people was preferable to the fellowship of a world of Tarkintons, and its blousy daughters, would have been hailed with heavy ridicule by the family, as another indication of false and undemocratic pride. He would have been called “Mr. Vanderbilt” or “the Prince of Wales.”