Pick-Up Read online

  I finished my drink quickly and left the bar. I didn’t feel like drinking any more. I crossed the street and waited for my cable car. In a few minutes it dragged up the hill, slowed down at the corner, and I jumped on. I gave the conductor my fare and went inside where it was warmer. Usually, I sat in the outside section where I could smoke, but I was cold that night, my entire body was chilled.

  On the long ride home I decided it would be best to steer clear of a woman like Helen.

  TWO

  Finder’s Keepers

  I GOT OUT of bed the next morning at ten, and still half-asleep, put the coffee pot on the two-ring gas burner. I padded next door to the bathroom, stood under the hot water of the shower for fifteen minutes, shaved, and returned to my room. It was the last one on the left, downstairs in Mrs. Frances McQuade’s roominghouse. The house was on a fairly quiet street and my room was well separated from the other rooms and roomers. This enabled me to drink in my room without bothering anybody, and nobody could bother me.

  I sat down at the table, poured a cup of black coffee, and let my mind think about Helen. I tried to define what there was about her that attracted me. Class. That was it. I didn’t intend to do anything about the way I felt, but it was pleasant to let my mind explore the possibilities. I finished my coffee and looked around the room. Not only was it an ugly room; it was a filthy room. The walls were covered with a dull gray paper spotted with small crimson flowers. There was a sink in one corner, and next to it the gas burner in a small alcove. My bed was a double, and the head and footboard were made of brass rods, ornately twisted and tortured into circular designs. The dresser was metal, painted to look like maple or walnut, some kind of wood, and each leg rested in a small can of water. I kept my food in the bottom drawer and the cans of water kept the ants away. There were no pictures on the walls and no rug upon the floor, just a square piece of tangerine linoleum under the sink.

  The room was in foul shape. Dirty shirts and dirty socks were scattered around, the dresser was messy with newspapers, book matches, my set of oil paints; and the floor was covered with gently moving dust motes. Lined up beneath the sink were seven empty gin bottles and an overflowing paper sack full of empty beer cans. The window was dirty and the sleazy cotton curtains were dusty. Dust was on everything . . .

  Suppose, by some chance, I had brought Helen home with me the night before? I sadly shook my head. Here was a project for me; I’d clean my room. A momentous decision.

  I slipped into my shoes and blue gabardine slacks and walked down the hall to Mrs. McQuade’s room.

  “Good morning,” I said, when she opened the door. “I want to borrow your broom and mop.”

  “The broom and mop are in the closet,” she said, and closed the door again.

  Mrs. McQuade had a few eccentricities, but she was a kind, motherly type of woman. Her hair was always freshly blued and whenever I thought about it I would comment on how nice it looked. Why women with beautiful white hair doctor it with bluing has always been a mystery to me.

  I found the broom and a rag mop and returned to my room.

  I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the room, even going so far as to wash my window inside and out. The curtains needed washing, but I shook the dust out of them and hung them back on the rod. Dusted and cleaned, the room looked fairly presentable, even with its ancient, battered furniture. I was dirty again so I took another shower before I dressed. I put my bundle of laundry under my arm, dragged the mop and broom behind me, and leaned them up against Mrs. McQuade’s door.

  I left the house and dumped my dirty laundry off at the Spotless Cleaner on my way to the corner and Big Mike’s Bar and Grill. This was my real home, Big Mike’s, and I spent more time in his bar than anywhere else. It was a friendly place, old-fashioned, with sawdust on the floor, and the walls paneled in dark oak. The bar was long and narrow, extending the length of the room, and it had a section with cushioned stools and another section with a rail for those who preferred to stand. There were a few booths along the wall, but there was also a dining-room next door that could be entered either from the street outside or from the barroom. The food was good, reasonable, and there was plenty of it. I seldom ate anything at Mike’s. Food costs money and money spent for food is money wasted. When I got hungry, which was seldom, I ate at Benny’s.

  I took my regular seat at the end of the bar and ordered a draught beer. It was lunch hour and very busy, but both of the bartenders knew me well and when my stein was emptied one of them would quickly fill it again. After one-thirty, the bar was clear of the lunch crowd and Big Mike joined me in a beer.

  “You’re a little late today, Harry,” Mike said jokingly. He had a deep pleasant voice.

  “Couldn’t be helped.”

  Mike was an enormous man; everything about him was large, especially his head and hands. The habitual white shirt and full-sized apron he wore added to his look of massiveness. His face was badly scarred, but it didn’t make him look hard or tough; it gave him a kindly, mellowed expression. He could be tough when it was necessary, however, and he was his own bouncer. The bar and grill belonged to him alone, and it had been purchased by his savings after ten years of professional football—all of it on the line, as a right tackle.

  “How does my tab stand these days, Mike?” I asked him.

  “I’ll check.” He looked in the credit book hanging by a string next to the cash register. “Not too bad,” he smiled. “Twelve twenty-five. Worried about it?”

  “When it gets to fifteen, cut me off, will you, Mike?”

  “If I do you’ll give me an argument.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to me. Cut me off just the same.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “We’ve gone through this before, we might as well go through it again.” “I’m not that bad, Mike.”

  “I honestly believe you don’t know how bad you really are when you’re loaded.” He laughed to show he was joking, finished his beer, and lumbered back to the kitchen. I drank several beers, nursing them along, and at two-thirty I left the bar to go to work.

  We picked up a little business from the theatre crowd when the afternoon show at the Bijou got out at three-thirty, and after that the cafe was fairly quiet until five. When things were busy, there was too much work for only one counterman, and I met myself coming and going. Benny was of no help at all. He never stirred all day from his seat behind the register. I don’t know how he had the patience to sit like that from seven in the morning until eleven at night. His only enjoyment in life was obtained by eating orange gum-drops and counting his money at night. Once that day, during a lull, when no one was in the cafe, he tried to kid me about Helen. I didn’t like it.

  “Come on, Harry, where’d you take her last night?”

  “Just forget about it, Benny. There’s nothing to tell.” I went into the kitchen to get away from him. I don’t like that kind of talk. It’s dirty. All of a sudden, all ten seats at the counter were filled, and I was too busy to think of anything except what I was doing. In addition to taking the orders, I had to prepare the food and serve it myself. It was quite a job to handle alone, even though Benny didn’t run a regular lunch or dinner menu. Just when things are running well and the orders are simple things like sandwiches, bowls of chile, and coffee, a damned aesthete will come in and order soft-boiled eggs, wanting them two-and-one-half minutes in the water or something like that. But I like to work and the busier I am the better I like it. When I’m busy I don’t have time to think about when I’ll get my next drink.

  Ten o’clock rolled around at last, the hour I liked the best of all. The traffic was always thin about this time and I only had another hour to go before I could have a drink. I felt a little hungry—I hadn’t eaten anything all day—and I made myself a bacon and tomato sandwich. I walked around the counter and sat down to eat it. Benny eyed my sandwich hungrily.

  “How about fixing me one of those, Harry?” he asked.

  “Sure. Soo
n as I finish.”

  “Fix me one too,” a feminine voice said lightly. I glanced to the left and there was Helen, standing in the doorway.

  “You came back.” My voice sounded flat and strained. No longer interested in food, I pushed my sandwich away from me.

  “I told you I would. I owe you a drink. Remember?” She had a black patent leather purse in her hand. “See?” She shook the purse in the air. “I found it.”

  “Do you really want a sandwich?” I asked her, getting to my feet.

  “No.” She shook her head. “I was just talking.”

  “Wait right there,” I said firmly, pointing my finger at Helen. “I’ll be back in one second.”

  I went into the back room, and feverishly removed the dirty white jacket and leather tie. I changed into my own tie and sport jacket. Benny was ringing up thirty-one cents on the register when I came back. Helen had paid him for the coffee she had drunk the night before. Trust Benny to get his money.

  I took Helen’s arm, and Benny looked at us both with some surprise.

  “Now just where in the hell do you think you’re going?” he asked acidly.

  “I quit. Come on, Helen.” We walked through the open door.

  “Hey!” he shouted after us, and I know that he said something else, but by that time we were walking down the street and well out of range.

  THREE

  First Night

  “DID YOU really quit just like that?” Helen asked me as we wared down the street. Her voice was more amused than incredulous.

  “Sure. You said you were going to buy me a drink. That’s much more important than working.”

  “Here we are then.” Helen pointed to the entrance door of the bar where we’d had our drinks the night before. “Is this all right?”

  I smiled. “It’s the nearest.” We went inside and sat down at the bar. The bartender recognized Helen right away. He nodded pleasantly to me and then asked Helen: “Find your purse all right?”

  “Sure did,” Helen said happily.

  “Now I’m glad to hear that,” the bartender said. “I was afraid somebody might have picked it up and gone south with it. You know how these things happen sometimes. What’ll you have?”

  “Double gin and tonic for me,” I said.

  “Don’t change it,” Helen ordered, stringing along.

  As soon as the bartender left to fix our drinks I took a sideways look at Helen. She wasn’t tight, not even mellow, but barely under the influence; just enough under to give her a warm, rosy-cheeked color.

  “Where did you find your purse, by the way?” I asked Helen.

  “It was easy,” she laughed merrily. “But I didn’t think so this morning.” She opened her purse, put enough change down on the bar to pay for the check and handed me a five dollar bill. “Now we’re even, Harry.”

  “Thanks,” I said, folding the bill and shoving it into my watch pocket, “I can use it.”

  “This morning,” she began slowly, “I woke up in that miserable little hotel room with a hangover to end them all. God, I felt rotten! I could remember everything pretty well—you going down to the bus station with me, getting the room and so on, but the rest of the day was nothing. Did you ever get like that?”

  “I recall a similar experience,” I admitted.

  “All I had was two dollars, as you know, so after I showered and dressed I checked out of the hotel, leaving my bag at the desk. I was hungry, so I ate breakfast and had four cups of coffee, black, and tried to figure out what to do next.

  “Without money, I was in a bad way—” She quickly finished her drink and shook the ice in her glass at the bartender for another. I downed mine fast in order to join her for the next round.

  “So I returned to the bus station after breakfast and started from there.” She smiled slyly and sipped her drink. “Now where would you have looked for the purse, Harry?”

  I thought the question over for a moment. “The nearest bar?”

  “Correct!” She laughed appreciatively. “That’s where I found it. The first bar to the left of the station. There was a different bartender on duty—about eleven this morning—and he didn’t know me, of course, but I described my bag and it was there, under the shelf by the cash register. At first he wouldn’t give it to me because there wasn’t any identification inside. Like a driver’s license, something like that, but my traveler’s checks were in the bag and after I wrote my name on a piece of paper and he compared the signatures on the checks he gave it to me. The first thing I did was cash a check and buy him a drink, joining him, of course.”

  “No money at all?”

  “Just the traveler’s checks. I’m satisfied. Two hundred dollars in traveler’s checks is better than money.”

  “Cash a couple then and let’s get out of here,” I said happily. “This isn’t the only bar in San Francisco.”

  We went to several places that night and knowing where to go is a mighty tricky business. Having lived in San Francisco for more than a year I could just about tell and I was very careful about the places I took her to. I didn’t want to embarrass Helen any—not that she would have given a damn—but I wanted to have a good time, and I wanted her to have a good time too.

  The last night club we were in was The Dolphin. I had been there once before, when I was in the chips, and I knew Helen would like it. It’s a club you have to know about or you can’t find it. It’s down an alley off Divisadero Street and I had to explain to the taxicab driver how to get there. There isn’t any lettered sign over the door; just a large, blue neon fish blinking intermittently, and the fish itself doesn’t look like a dolphin. But once inside you know you’re in The Dolphin, because the name is in blue letters on the menu, and the prices won’t let you forget where you are. We entered and luckily found a booth well away from the bar. The club is designed with a South Seas effect, and the drinks are served in tall, thick glasses, the size and shape of a vase. The booth we sat in was very soft, padded thickly with foam rubber, and both of us had had enough to drink to appreciate the atmosphere and the deep, gloomy lighting that made it almost impossible to see across the room. The waiter appeared at our table out of the darkness and handed each of us a menu. He was a Mexican, naked except for a grass skirt, and made up to look like an islander of some sort: there were blue and yellow streaks of Paint on his brown face, and he wore a shark’s-teeth necklace.

  “Do you still have the Dolphin Special?” I asked him.

  “Certainly,” he said politely. “And something to eat? Poi, dried squid, bird’s-nest soup, breadfruit au gratin, sago palm salad—”

  Helen’s laugh startled the waiter. “No thanks,” she said. “I guess I’m not hungry.”

  “Just bring us two of the Dolphin Specials,” I told him. He nodded solemnly and left for the bar. The Special is a good drink; it contains five varieties of rum, mint, plenty of snow-ice, and it’s decorated with orange slices, pineapple slices and cherries with a sprinkling of sugar cane gratings floating on top. I needed at least two of them. I had to build up my nerve.

  After the waiter brought our drinks I lighted cigarettes and we smoked silently, dumping the ashes into the large abalone shell on the table that served as an ash-tray. The trio hummed into action and the music floating our way gave me a wistful feeling of nostalgia. The trio consisted of chimes, theremin acid electric guitar and the unusual quality of the theremin prevented me from recognizing the melody of the song although I was certain I knew what it was.

  With sudden impulsive boldness I put my hand on Helen’s knee. Her knee jumped under the touch of my hand, quivered and was still again. She didn’t knock my hand away. I drank my drink, outwardly calm, bringing my glass up to my lips with my free hand, and wondering vaguely what to do next.

  “Helen,” I said, my voice a little hoarse, “I’ve been hoping and dreading to see you all day. I didn’t really expect to see you, and yet, when I thought I wouldn’t, my heart would sort of knot up.”

  “Why, Ha
rry, you’re a poet!”

  “No, I’m serious. I’m trying to tell you how I feel about you.”

  “I didn’t mean to be rude or flippant, Harry. I feel very close to you, and trying to talk about it isn’t any good.”

  “I’ve had terrible luck with women, Helen,” I said, “and for the last two years I’ve kept away from them. I didn’t want to go through it all again—you know, the bickering, the jealousy, nagging, that sort of thing. Am I scaring you off?”

  “You couldn’t if you tried, Harry. You’re my kind of man and it isn’t hard to say so. What I mean is—you’re somebody, underneath, a person, and not just another man. See?” She shook her head impatiently. “I told you I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “One thing I want to get straight is this,” I said. “I’ll never tell you that I love you.”

  “That word doesn’t mean anything anyway.”

  “I never thought I’d hear a woman say that. But it’s the truth. Love is in what you do, not in what you say. Couples work themselves into a hypnotic state daily by repeating to each other over and over again that they love each other. And they don’t know the meaning of the word. They also say they love a certain brand of toothpaste and a certain brand of cereal in the same tone of voice.”

  Cautiously, I gathered the material of her skirt with my fingers until the hem was above her knee. My hand squeezed the warm flesh above her stocking. It was soft as only a woman’s thigh is soft. She spread her legs at the touch of my hand and calmly sipped her drink. I tried to go a little higher and she clamped her legs on my hand.

  “After all, Harry,” she chided me, “we’re not alone, you know.”

  I took my hand away from the softness of her thigh and she pulled her skirt down, smiling at me sympathetically. With trembling hands I lighted a cigarette. I didn’t know what to do or what to say next. I felt as immature and inept as a teenager on his first date. And Helen wasn’t helping me at all. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking about my crude and foolish passes.