Empty Pockets

by Dale Herd

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  The first thing to do, he said, was never to get down on yourself, to always make things easy on yourself. If he became unhappy, he said, he always told himself to find out the cause, and then he changed it, no matter what the circumstances, it was always wrong to worry about the consequences.

  Working at IBM taught him this. Right after Korea he had gone to work for IBM as a management trainee. His wife said if you hate it so much why don’t you quit? He had been afraid to quit, but finally did, even though there wasn’t another job to go to. To make ends meet he took work as a laborer hanging drywall. It turned out he liked this better, and it even paid more money. That was the first step, he said, but he still wasn’t happy. Then he decided it wasn’t what kind of job, it was having a boss. He decided to work for himself. He kept on drywalling but banked half of each paycheck. When the money was there he bought a new pickup and the tools and bid his first job, a subcontract to drywall six tract houses in West Covina. He won the bid, quit his job, and started his own business.

  That was ten years ago.

  It had been a tremendous step.

  Right now his business was so good he was going into another business. The new business was so obvious a step it was hard to believe it hadn’t been done, but it hadn’t.

  Metal-studding, he said, mass-produced wall-studding made of metal compounds. No more hammer and nails, no more wooden two-by-fours, no more slivers and splinters and mashed thumbs. All that would be needed would be an electric stapling gun and the studs. Houses would spring up in two days’ time. First day, pour the foundation, slap in the studs. Second day, staple up the drywall and presto, instant house. Well, let the foundation cure first, so by second week, instant house. Two weeks tops.

  As far as he knew, he said, he and his partner, a Malibu Colony psychiatrist, were the only men in the country working on it. They already had the patents secured, were building the first production machine. They had a building in La Puente where they would begin manufacturing, production to commence in the fall.

  Right now they were testing different metals.

  The studs would be made in various sizes from an amazing number of different compounds.

  Their overall plan was franchise packaging.

  By 1977 there would be metal-stud plants everywhere across the nation.

  He wasn’t rich now but by ’77 he would be. By ’77 metal studs would revolutionize the entire building industry, all benefits accruing back to him, and to his partner, of course.

  And then it was on to Oregon.

  By ’77 he would be able to live anyplace he wanted and Oregon was the place. A man could live anywhere there and still go hunting and fishing. Or over in Idaho, the Snake River country, that was good country, live in a small town where everyone knew everybody.

  Because that’s what he wanted for his kids, he said, a nice small town. As a kid he had lived in a small town, which had made the difference. He hadn’t had an old man. His old man had run off. There hadn’t been any guidance and he got pretty wild. He would have gone to jail but his mother knew the judge and that got him off. He had a choice between the army or jail. Just having a choice made the difference.

  People in a small town pull together, he said, you can’t deny it.

  If my two boys ever need it, he said, I want them to get the same kind of break I got, although, he said, he was doing everything in his power to make them feel wanted, not feeling wanted being the cause of most of the trouble in the world.

  And that was the other advantage to living in a small town, because that was his other rule, that a man keep his own self-respect.

  A man had to do that, he said. If he didn’t, he was lost, and there wasn’t a faster way to lose it than to have some woman cut you down.

  Because I don’t care who she is, he said, a woman will cheat on you, especially a pretty woman, but not in a small town, if the town was small enough, he said, a man could take off hunting or fishing and not have to worry, he would always know where his kids were and he would always know where his wife was, and what’s more, his wife would know he knew and respect him for it, but L.A.?

  You can have L.A., he said, too many people . . .

  On Temple Street

  En route with him to hear Maria Muldaur in concert, she rehearsed this basic speech, trying it out in several ways, but all the time underneath it wondering where the money was going to come from and what she could really do for a living:

  “It’s too bad you have to be you and I have to be me. I mean, that we’ve got to stand up here like this at each other, but fuck it, that’s the way it is. I’m not taking any shit from you of any kind. But so what, right? Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t even think what the fuck I should do. Just worry about what you should do. You take care of you and I’ll take care of me, and if you don’t like it, shove it, either split or I’ll split, it doesn’t mean shit to me either way, though I don’t want this to be hard on either one of us . . .”

  Arts and Crafts

  “Oh no . . . No, No . . . You just tell him, I mean, my God! I’ve already got Liza here, that’s enough of a problem, isn’t it! I mean I’ve already gone through it with him, that’s just . . . Really! Like the water in the bathroom, he turns the water off in the bathroom, you go in to wash your hands and there’s no water, there’s no water in the toilet, he’s turned it off with that little knob under the sink, or he takes a drawing and tears it in half, saying, So what, what difference does it make, it doesn’t make any difference, all kinds of trips like that, some I can’t even mention! My God! No . . . No one wants him here! I mean, I don’t even know how to say this, a thing like this shouldn’t even be said, but he laid this big trip on me about me being gay . . . Yes! I mean, I’ve had that happen before and hold it right there! . . . Right! He actually got out of his clothes, for God’s sakes! And said, C’mon, do it to me. You’re gay, aren’t you? Sure you are! I had to practically demand that he stop! Don’t do this, I said, this could be a very embarrassing thing! Very embarrassing! He had his pants dropped down right there on the floor, begging me for it! Pleading with me! I told him, You put those right back on! I mean, my God! . . . Yes! That’s true! Really! I mean, it’s not for me that I feel embarrassed, it’s for him! I don’t ever want to see him. No! Not ever! Not even walking by on the street! . . . Really!”

  Bellflower Blvd.

  He bought the Coke before they went in but when they went to open it there was no opener, he had had to pry the cap off against an iron corner of the bed frame and warm Coke blew out over everything, soaking the cover and blanket and sheets. She said she didn’t mind, that she thought it was funny, but only wanted a sip, then went into the bathroom to clean herself. Standing there, looking at the mess they had made, he finished the rest by himself, then dressed, the Coke leaving a flat, dry, sticky taste in his mouth. Going out to the car, she was happy, then nervous, said she felt a little sick . . .

  Around the Corner

  She thought a revolution was going on and knew who was in it and how they were doing it. The first time we went to see her we couldn’t. The orderly there told us she was heavily sedated and didn’t want to see anyone. She thought she wasn’t a person, he said, and thought no one else was one either.

  A month later we still hadn’t seen her but she was better and could talk over the telephone. The first thing she said was that it was nice there, really nice, that everyone there was nice too, well, almost everyone, but too monotone, everything was too, too monotone, way too monotone, that was why she was talking in a monotone voice, could we tell she was talking in a monotone voice? Then she said but she was reading again, reading all kinds of books, that there were so many kinds and she was going through it all very slowly, very, very slowly, and that was right, wasn’t it, wasn’t that right?

  She called often after that, gradually becoming more vibrant, more excited about things, and on the first day after her release we all went for a drive and a wa
lk, going up Sunset near the Whiskey to show her the new shops and to see who was playing.

  We parked down Sunset from the Whiskey and walked up the street. She was very cheerful and bright, and I asked her if she wanted to go inside when we got there and get a drink, but she said no, she didn’t want to go inside, she liked it outside, but she didn’t like the smog.

  Lea and I looked at each other. There wasn’t any smog. The Santa Anas had been blowing all day and we both thought that’s it, she’s going out again, but we looked out across the city to see if we were wrong, and there was smog, a faint brownish haze barely visible behind the new skyscrapers over in Century City. We looked back to tell her she was right, but she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere on the sidewalk or over across the street.

  “Oh, Christ,” Lea said.

  We hustled up the street, going past the Scientology offices, there was a parking lot with some cars in it, then the corner, and then there she was, standing partway up the sidewalk that continued up the hill, facing down an alleyway, looking toward an older building of dirty white stucco.

  As we walked up to her, she shuddered. I looked at Lea. Lea didn’t know either. We looked where she was looking. Inside a window was a darkened apartment, a stand-up lamp dimly on next to an old TV on against a back wall. I didn’t know what she was seeing. Then back in the dark, sitting off to the side on a low couch, I saw two old women, both in housecoats, both very large, their legs out slack before them, facing the TV, its picture a dull, flickering blue.

  “Oh, God,” she said, “I know what they’re doing . . .”

  Pier Avenue

  Dave’s mother wasn’t exactly stupid. Twice she got a bottle off me by giving me the key to her room in the Hermosa Biltmore and telling me to come up later, but both times the door was chained shut from the inside and she wouldn’t answer. For obvious reasons I never told Dave about her and it became a source of amusement for me to watch her come to the door and give him the concerned mother routine of straightening his tie and pushing back his hair and then leave with a bottle of good Scotch that he would slip her. He claimed he kept track of the bottles she took but I never believed it. So much petty theft took place every day, with most of it happening during the day shift when Dave and I weren’t working, that I assumed he marked the bottle off as stolen. However he covered it though, it seemed to work as Arnie, the owner, never complained. And if Dave’s mother was using him to get free booze, I wasn’t any better.

  When I first went to work at the store I didn’t know anyone in Hermosa, and Dave and I got along all right. He was just breaking up with his wife, Jo, and when he learned I was quits with my old lady he started taking a bottle for us and we would keep it under the counter and get tight together while we worked, which suited me just fine.

  We started spending some free time together and several times spent the early part of the day shooting clay pigeons over in Palos Verdes. Dave was a hell of a shot, and something I’ll never forget was the way he’d look over at me after he’d made a hard shot and say, “Christ, I’d like to have met Hemingway.”

  He wasn’t kidding. As I got to know him better nearly all of our conversations would remind him of Hemingway. Dave had all the paperbacks by and on Hemingway and everything mentioned would be related to shooting and fishing or of going to the six-day bicycle races or boxing or bullfighting or Spain and Paris and Northern Michigan. Arnie said that one of the things that caused Jo to break with Dave was his obsession with Hemingway.

  I could understand that. After a time the Hemingway talk started getting to me. I had already decided to quit the job as nothing in Hermosa was happening for me by then, and as I was making this decision I spent less and less time with Dave and finally stopped drinking at work with him. He didn’t like it and stopped talking to me.

  The last night I worked in the store, though, Dave opened a fifth of Black Label in a farewell gesture and said that one time some famous critic had gone to visit Hemingway and Hemingway had slammed a bottle down on the table and said, Goddamn it, if you’re going to talk to me you’re going to have a drink with me.

  “Sure, Dave.” I had to laugh. “I’ll drink with you.”

  “Of course you will,” he said.

  And I took a drink.

  I gave the bottle back to him, wiping the lip with the back of my hand, and he asked me where I was going to go. I said I didn’t know right now but I didn’t care so long as it was somewhere new.

  He said he could understand that, he’d really like to do that too, but what he would really like to do would be to go to Africa.

  “Well, why don’t you?” I said.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Sure you can.”

  “No,” he said, “I can’t.”

  “If it’s money why don’t you quit and get a better job, then take off?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Is it because of Jo?”

  “No, it’s simply convenient to work here.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, “you’re here because any minute you keep hoping Jo will sail in here and sit down on the magazine racks like she used to do.”

  “No, that’s not true. It’s my mother. I’m here because of my mother.”

  But he looked away as he said it and put the bottle down, and the next thing he did was grab his jacket and walk out the door.

  That was the last time I saw him. We weren’t very good friends to start with so I didn’t mind that much, but he had been nice to me at a time when not many other people were and I was sorry I had opened my mouth.

  Then last week by chance I was at a party in Palos Verdes Estates and looking down on the long sweep of South Bay I could see the Redondo and then the Hermosa Beach Pier. So in the morning I drove up the coast through Hermosa and stopped at the store.

  Arnie was there and after a welcome he gave me Dave’s new telephone number and told me to call him.

  “I don’t know about him,” Arnie said. “He’s still doing a good job here but he’s into a new thing. You remember that Hemingway stuff?”

  “For sure,” I said.

  “Well, it’s space stuff now. He’s saving his money to try to get into one of those space programs.”

  “That’s something,” I said.

  “I don’t know. You remember his apartment? All that skeet-shooting and deep-sea fishing gear? All that’s gone now. He’s got the whole thing fixed up like a spaceship. He’s got this armchair he sits in, a big red job, with some kind of control panels built into the arms that control everything—windows, doors, the heat, lights, TV, the phone.”

  “Sounds like he’s changed quite a bit,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Arnie said. “I was talking to him the other day and he said what he likes about outer space is that it’ll be a completely different place where a man has perfect control. He said if you land on a planet you don’t like you simply get back in the ship and blast off. You think that sounds any different?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “No different than crawling inside a bottle,” Arnie said, “like a couple of characters I used to know.”

  “Sure, Arnie,” I laughed, “but I’ll never confess.”

  “Who was asking?” Arnie said.

  I laughed again and went over to the phone. I dialed Dave’s number and waited. The phone rang twice and then Dave’s voice came on.

  “Computer Center, Computer Control speaking.”

  “Dave,” I said, “this is Dick. How are you?”

  “Repeat, please.”

  “Norris,” I said, “Dick Norris.”

  “Norris,” Dave’s voice said. “Norris, Dick. That does not compute.”

  “Hey, Dave . . .” I said.

  “Repeat,” the voice went on, “that does not compute.”

  The line went dead.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “He hung up on me.”

  “I told you.” Arnie laughed, looking at me. “But I don’t give a damn
, so long as he does the job and comes to work on time.”

  “You’re all heart, Arnie,” I said.

  “Isn’t everyone?” Arnie said.

  Blood

  “A year ago I was divorced. I divorced on the advice of my father who said, Well, shit, get a divorce if that’s the situation. We were sitting in a room in a hotel off L.A. International. We were on the seventh floor and I was bitterly complaining. My capacity for unhappiness was overwhelming. The misery of my complaints provoked my father. Divorce her, he repeated. I didn’t have the money and told him so. He said he would pay for it. I sat there nodding my head. I wanted to punish my wife and divorce and abandonment seemed just. No doubt my old man knew what to do. I knew I didn’t. He said to write him the amount I would need and he would wire it to me but under no circumstance was I to give my wife any of it. I agreed not to. Then he said a man was supposed to forgive the dead, wasn’t he, that in time my wife would become as if dead to me and he hoped I could forgive her, he hoped that for me more than anything. I said I hoped so too, and he said it again, that I should forgive her, that it was the most important thing of all. If I didn’t, he said, she would never go away, she wouldn’t, she wouldn’t. I looked up at him. There were tears in his eyes. Up here, he said. He was tapping the side of his head. I mean up here. Tears came to my eyes. Dad, I said. You have to, he said, you can’t let them get the best of you, you can’t let them do it . . .”