Free America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw

specialist’s job. Some of the men there had been on that beat for many years and I knew nothing about courts and didn’t learn easily. I wonder if I could ever be as kind to a young punk as those men in the reporters’ room at the Park Row Post Office were to me. They pretended that I knew what I was doing, and they did their best to teach me in a roundabout way. I learned to play bridge and where to look for suits and scandals. They informed me which judges were pushovers for publicity and several times they covered for me when I didn’t show up. You can’t repay that kind of thing. I never got to know them. Didn’t know where they lived, what they did, or how they lived when they left the room.
    I had a reason for that, and it was a girl again. I had known her slightly in California and she was most beautiful. I don’t think this was only my memory. For she got a job in the Greenwich Village Follies just walking around—and she got it with no trouble whatever. It was lucky because that’s about all she could do. She got a hundred dollars a week. I fell hopelessly in love with her.
    Now New York changed for me. My girl lived on Gramercy Park and naturally I moved there. The old Parkwood Hotel had some tiny rooms—six walk-up flights above the street—for seven dollars a week. I had nothing to do with New York. It was a stage set in which this golden romance was taking place. The girl was very kind. Since she made four times as much money as I did, she paid for many little dinners. Every night I waited for her outside the stage door.
    I can’t imagine why she went to the trouble of trying to reform me. We would sit in Italian restaurants—she paid—and drink red wine. I wanted to write fiction—novels. She approved of that in theory, but said I should go into advertising—first, that is. I refused. I was being the poor artist, shielding his integrity. I wonder now what would have happened if anyone had offered me a job in advertising. I was spared that choice.
    During all this time, I never once knew or saw one New Yorker as a person. They were all minor characters in this intense personal drama. Then everything happened at once. And I am glad it happened in the sequence it did. The girl had more sense than I thought. She married a banker from the Middle West and moved there. And she didn’t argue. She simply left a note, and two days later I was fired from the American.
    And now at last the city moved in on me and scared me to death. I looked for jobs—but good jobs, pleasant jobs. I didn’t get them. I wrote short stories and tried to sell them. I applied for work on other papers, which was ridiculous on the face of it. And the city crept in—cold and heartless, I thought. I began to fall behind in my room rent. I always had that one ace in the hole. I could go back to laboring. I had a friend who occasionally loaned me a little money. And, finally, I was shocked enough to go for a job as a laborer. But by that time short feeding had taken hold. I could hardly lift a pick. I had trouble climbing the six flights back to my room. My friend loaned me a dollar and I bought two loaves of rye bread and a bag of dried herrings and never left my room for a week. I was afraid to go out on the street—actually afraid of traffic—the noise. Afraid of the landlord and afraid of people. Afraid even of acquaintances.
    Then a man who had been in college with me got me a job as a workaway on a ship to San Francisco. And he didn’t have to urge me, either. The city had beaten the pants off me. Whatever it required to get ahead, I didn’t have. I didn’t leave the city in disgust—I left it with the respect plain unadulterated fear gives. And I went back to my little town, worked in the woods, wrote novels and stories and plays, and it was eleven years before I came back.
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    My second assault on New York was different but just as