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Show 112 there in that theatre vaudeville was still living and all the big bands played, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw, Jack Teagarden, Duke Ellington, Bennie Goodman; people like Donald O'Connor and Frank Sinatra just beginning to make it, and one day Tarzan walked past me on the street outside the theatre, one of my childhood dreams in a suit, Johnny Weissmuller, only a man. After Pearl Harbor we went to ship fitters' school and that spring worked in Richmond on the swing shift in Henry Kaiser's shipyards building Liberty Ships, wore a hard hat and steel-toed shoes and carried a miter square. Since our apartment was only one room with a Murphey bed, we moved to a small hotel on Taylor to give Ross more privacy, two little rooms with a bath between On his side Ross was making out with waitresses, usherettes, secretaries, now and then a girl from the chorus line at the Golden Gate, a whole damn string of girls coming up to the place, more girls than a ranch has horses. He had advice too, which never worked for me. Finally he said all right, we'll get you the easiest pickup there is, the surest deal, we'll go to church Sunday morning and find her. We found Bess and Lily. Both lived on the other side of Twin Peaks and were going their first year to San Francisco State, the old San Francisco State; Lily's father was a doctor and Bess's a CPA, and they were clean and nice smelling, they were pretty, they knew how to look chic in basic black, with gloves in dressy San Francisco, and what saved them was their coarseness. We'd go to a movie at the Golden Gate or the Fox and sit in the smoking loge and sprawl out and light up, and the girls would laugh loudly and say shit as often as possible. They used the word in place of heck and darn and hell, in place of swell and lousy, in place of alas and hallelujah, in place of any word they could re- Place. They used it as noun and pronoun, as verb, verbal and adverb, as |
