"I tell you what, Levinsky," he once said to me. "You ought to learn some trade. It's plain you were not born to be a business man. The black dots [meaning the words in books] take up too much room in your head."
Finally I owed him so many quarters, and even half-dollars, that I had not the courage to ask him for more
Hunger was a frequent experience. I had been no stranger to the sensation at Antomir, at least after the death of my mother; but, for some reason, I was now less capable of bearing it. The pangs I underwent were at times so acute that I would pick up cigarette stubs in the street and smoke them, without being a smoker, for the purpose of having the pain supplanted by dizziness and nausea. Sometimes, too, I would burn my hand with a match or bite it as hard as I could. Any kind of suffering or excitement was welcome, provided it made me forget my hunger
When famished I would sometimes saunter through the streets on the lower East Side which disreputable creatures used as their market-place. It was mildly exciting to watch women hunt for men and men hunt for women: their furtive glances, winks, tacit understandings, bargainings, the little subterfuges by which they sought to veil their purpose from the other passers-by; the way a man would take stock of a passing woman to ascertain whether she was of the approachable class; the timidity of some of the men and the matter-of-fact ease of others; the mutual spying of two or three rivals aiming at the same quarry; the pretended abstraction of the policemen, and a hundred and one other details of the traffic. Many a time I joined in the chase without having a cent in my pocket, stop to discuss terms with a woman in front of some window display, or around a corner, only soon to turn away from her on the pretense that I had expected to be taken to her residence while she proposed going to some hotel. Thus, held by a dull, dogged fascination, I would tramp around, sometimes for hours, until, feeling on the verge of a fainting-spell with hunger and exhaustion, I would sit down on the front steps of some house
I often thought of Mr. Even, but nothing was further from my mind than to let him see me in my present plight. One morning I met him, face to face, on the Bowery, but he evidently failed to recognize me
One afternoon I called on Argentine Rachael. "Look here, Rachace," I said, in a studiously matter-of-fact voice, "I'm dead broke to-day. I'll pay you in a day or two." Her face fell. "I never trust. Never," she said, shaking her head mournfully. "It brings bad luck, anyhow."
I felt like sinking into the ground. "All right, I'll see you some other time," I said, with an air of bravado
She ran after me. "Wait a moment. What's your hurry?"
By way of warding off "bad luck," she offered to lend me three dollars in cash, out of which I could pay her. I declined her offer. She pleaded and expostulated. But I stood firm, and I came away in a state of the blackest wretchedness and self-disgust
I could never again bring myself to show my face at her house