Streets of Night

by John Dos Passos

After the velvety blur of the snow the bar room assailed him with needles and facets of glitter on brass and crystal that shivered in the mirrors into sharp angular grottoes. He shook the snow off his coat and let himself fall heavily into a chair. The hard shape in his back pocket rapped against his hip. His spine went cold at the touch of it.

"A Martini cocktail, please," he said to the thin, large-eyed man with a scrawny neck who came for his order.

The little mirrors in the ceiling and the glinty knobs and bottle ends of the partitions all radiated endlessly in dusty looking-glasses on the walls, so that Wenny felt himself drunkenly spinning through air heavy with beersmells and whisky and old tobacco smoke in the middle of a crazy merrygoround. The men at tables round him were tiny and gesticulating. The cocktail stung his mouth, sent writhing gold haze all through him. The glass was the center of a vortex into which were sucked the cutting edges of light, flickering cones of green and red brightness, the voices and the throbbing rubber faces of the men in the bar. In his mind Fanshaw's voice and his father's voice droning like antiphonal choirs: Leanfaced people of the Renaissance carried away helpless in their vermilion barge through snarling streets shaken with the roar of engines: Stand therefore having your loins girt about with the breastplate of righteousness ... Of course that's what it reminds me of here, looking through the globes in the drugstore window where I used to go to get aspirin for Auntie.

"Waiter, another cocktail, please."

This cocktail, smooth, smooth, hot tropic beaches, and the leanfaced men in their great barge deepchanting sliding through lagoons of islands of the South Seas (first love, first South Sea island, the great things of life); brown girls girdled with red hybiscus pulling nets full of writhing silver through parrotgreen water.... God! I must pull myself together. I must think, not dream... In the beginning was the word,... And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth... Poor little me, with holes in my stockings, sitting in my bedroom that had the cracked looking glass learning Genesis for Dad: The earth also was corrupt before God, the earth was filled with violence ... And God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt ... corrupt... I must think, not dream putrid dreams. Dreams, the corruption of misery, soggy, thwarted. If I had a clean, sharp knife to cut away dreams. Herb's little gun will do as well.

"Hey, another Martini, please."

He had no sense of being drunk any more. Things were still, icehard, iceclear all about him. The little neatly painted world of his childhood had been like that, breaks of lollipop-colored sunlight, little redroofed houses back among lawns of green baize, set about with toy evergreens, at doors varnished farmers' wives in Dutch caps shepherding Noah's animals out of a cardboard ark, all cute and tiny, like through the wrong end of a telescope; and the smell of the enamel scaling off toys, the grain of wood grimed by the fingers, the dark gleam on the floor under the bay window.

"Another Martini, please."

He drank it slowly in little sips, watching himself in the looking-glass beside him. His hair was very curly with sweat, his dark eyebrows jauntily arched, his lips moist and red. He drank and the man in the looking-glass drank. He stared into the black wells of his dilated pupils. Panic terror swooped on him all of a sudden; it was not his face. The face was thinner, the upper lip tight over the teeth, the hair smooth and steel grey, the jowls pinkish, close-shaved, constricted by a collar round backwards. My face, my father's face, and Dad's voice: David, my boy, taking a job has pleased me more than I can say, sensible and manly course ... I am sure that earning your living you will find inspiring and helpful and regret callousness and restlessness ... I, myself, bitter moments in my youth inexpressibly painful for me to recall of profligacy and despair ... A thin voice shrieking, interrupting in his head: My God, I'm going mad, mad, mad. The pulpit voice boomed louder in his ears: It was like this, David, I was not content with my lot and told myself in my boyish pride that life was short and the world wide, and wanted to run away to sea. I was one of those filthy dreamers mentioned in the Gospels who defile the flesh, despise dominion and speak evil of dignities. And I fell so low that inexpressibly painful to recall I took up in a low dive with a scarlet woman and arranged with her that she should give herself to me for five dollars, and I followed her to her room and she divested herself of her clothes and I stood before her trembling with lust, and all at once a sword cleaving me, a light searing me, I felt my flesh corrupt before God, and I felt the mercy of God in a great white light about me, and I rushed out sobbing and calling upon God. And that is how, dearly beloved brethren, I was called to the ministry... Let us pray...

Rustle of Sunday dresses, a couple of coughs from the back, Wenny in short pants kneeling trembling in the full booming blast of his father's prayer, watching the patches of pink and purple and mustard yellow light cast on the pew ahead by the sun shining through the colored glass of the windows, then caught away in a dream of red Indians running through a birch wood, and roused by the long droning infections: To do good and communicate forget not for with such sacrifice God is well pleased. Women's voices shrilling high: