I hadn't been able to find my car in the sepulcher parking yard.
Too lost, ingrown, ashamed to ask the attendant.
Too penniless to hire a cab.
I walked down that Golconda Golgotha, stopping to puke, with my fists in my pockets holding to wet handkerchiefs.
It was on the Boulevard, with the rich night traffic, the skimmed scarlet scum of the studios and the magnates from Pasadena with their cold, oiled working-model blondes.
The bells rang.
The iron hands came down.
Stop civilization. Go civilization.
Red lights green lights cracking my drunken brain.
The acrid flavor of tomorrow in my mouth.
Alarm.
Headsplitting daylight.
How about this?
She sees him get out of the ice wagon.
She throws a snowball at him.
Go sell it to the Eskimos, she says.
I've got it!
She throws the snowball. That's good. So okay—her mitten sticks to it and soaks him square in the puss and instead of spitting out the mitten—which he gets in his teeth—he makes like it's a mustache!
Hell! He's a football player, isn't he—not just an ice-man? Going to be a big-shot brain specialist someday, isn't he? Quick thinker. So okay. So he leaps and spears the mitten and the snowball like it's a long forward and he runs at her and tackles her and spills her—not real hard—but hard—and there's how they meet, the both of them lying down in the snow with her on her back and the guy on top. Is that good—or is it terrific?
And there, so help me Christ, after eleven days, and twenty-three thousand dollars, is how they do meet.