The Nothing Man Read Free

"but I have youth on my side. Wondrous youth, with the whole great canvas of life stretching out before me."
    "You always drink like that?"
    "What's it to you?" I said, and I went back to the office.
    I was experiencing that peculiar two-way puil that had manifested itself with increasing frequency and intensity in recent months. It was a mixture of calm and disquiet, of resignation and frantically furious rejection. Simultaneously I wanted to lash out at everything and do nothing about anything. The logical result of the conflict should have been stalemate, yet somehow it was not working out that way. The positive emotions, the impulse to act, were outgrowing the others. The negative ones, the calm and resignation, were exercising their restraining force not directly but at a tangent. They were not so much restrictive as cautionary.
    They were pulling me off to one side, moving me down a course that was completely out of the world, yet of it.
    I wondered if I was drinking too much.
    I wondered how it would be-how I would manage to eat and sleep and talk and work: how to live-if I drank less.
    I decided that I wasn't drinking enough, and that henceforth I should be more careful in that regard.
    Dave Randall looked at me nervously as I sat down. Tom Judge jerked his head over his shoulder in a way that meant that Mr. Lovelace had arrived.
    "And, Brownie," he leaned forward, whispering, "you should've seen the babe he had with him!"
    "How, now," I said. "Much as it pains me, I shall have to report the matter to Mrs. Lovelace. The marriage vows are not to be trifled with."
    "Boy, for some of that you could report me to my wife!"
    "Let me catch you," I said, sternly, "and I shall."
    It was an average morning, newswise. I did a story on the Annual Flower Show and another on the County Dairymen's convention. I rewrote a couple of wire stories with a local twist and picked up a few items for my column. So it went. That was the sort of thing-and about the only sort of thing-that got into the Courier .
    Mr. Lovelace frowned on what he termed the "negative type" of story. He was fond of asserting that Pacific City was the "cleanest community in America," and he was very apt to suspect the credibility of reporters who produced evidence to the contrary. I could have done it and got away with it. For reasons that will become obvious, I held a preferred place in the "happy Courier family." But I was temporarily content with the _status quo_, and there was no one else. It had been years since any topflight reporter had applied for a job on the Pacific City _Courier_.
    With my last story out of the way, I began to feel those twinges of mental nausea that always herald the arrival of my muse. I felt the urge to add to my unfinished manuscript, _Puke and Other Poems_.
    I rolled paper into my typewriter. After some preliminary fumblings around, I began to write:

    _Lives of great men, lives en masse
    Seem a stench and cosmic ruse.
    Take my share, I'll take a glass
    (no demi-tasse-it has to knock me on my ass)
    Of booze_.

    Not good. Definitely not up to Omar, or, perhaps I should say, Fitzgerald. I tried another verse:

    _Sentience, my sober roomer,
    Steals my warming cloak of bunk
    (I'm sunk, sunk, sunk.)
    Leaves me an impotent assumer
    Of things that I can take when drunk_.

    Very bad. Far worse than the first stanza. Assumer- what kind of word was that? And when was I ever actually drunk? And the wretched, sniveling self-pity in that _sunk, sunk, sunk_…
    I ripped the paper out of the typewriter and threw it into the wastebasket.
    I didn't do it a bit too soon, either.
    Mr. Lovelace wasn't a dozen feet away. He was heading straight toward me, and the "babe" Tom Judge had mentioned was with him.
    I don't know. I never will know whether she was a little slow on the uptake, a little dumb, as, at first blush, I suspected her of being, or whether she was merely tactless, unusually straightforward, careless of what she said and did. I just don't