Decker, the student-proprietor of the restaurant where I ate every day, was more astute.
"Now look here, Gregory, you just can't run your bill up any higher."
I already owed him fifteen dollars.
I compounded with him by handing him over my Illustrated History of English Literature. It was like tearing flesh from my side to part with these volumes.
And now I had no more credit at the Y.M.C.A.
And I went back to Frank Randall, to apply again for my old room over his shop. He was using it now to store old stoves in. But he moved them out.
With a sense of despair, compensated by a feeling of sacrifice for my poetry, I found myself once more back over the tinshop, the hammers sounding and crashing below.
Old Blore, the cancer doctor, lived in a room in the front. All day long he sat drinking rum and sugar ... and shipping out his cancer cure, a white mixture like powdered sugar. Whether it did any good or not, he believed in it himself....
I have not written about him before ... there are so many odd characters that I came in contact with that I have not written about ... for this book is about myself....
But old Blore ... he came waddling back to me, drunk, as usual, on his rum and sugar.