Free The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson Page B

Birnam, I wouldn’t recommend you to sweep a sidewalk!”—and these same words, syllable for syllable, were spoken at him in clipped impeccable speech twenty years later by the editor of a broadcasting company, a superior Britisher who obviously never had a moment of qualm or self-doubt in his life. Both pronouncements had been received almost with satisfaction; they relieved him of further effort in either field. It was as though he could say to himself, or to the world: “You see?” and shrug.
    He could never get used to the fact that he was grown up, in years at least, living in an adult world. When the barber said, “Razor all right, Sir?” he had to think for a minute. What was it men said when asked about the razor? And when he said it (“Razor’s fine, fine” or whatever it was) he felt a fraud. Out of the corner of his eye, over the vast bib, he looked at the man in the next chair. Did
he
feel foolish at being accorded these formalities,these symbols of respect? Was he ill at ease in the role of solid and substantial man, obliged to run true to form, behave like all the others, reply in kind, no matter how much his mind wandered on private or past excursions? But that mind certainly didn’t wander; there sat no perennial eavesdropper and wanderer and wonderer; the calm eyes looked neither to right nor to left; the man was as incurious and uninquisitive about Don as he was about himself.
    If he had put childhood behind him at all, it had been with a lingering glance backward, and regret. He had never looked forward to the long-pants, like other boys. He remembered his mortal embarrassment, almost shame (as if he had suddenly been exposed naked), when his mother announced, “Don’s shaving now.” It was a joke to everyone; they laughed. Other boys were only too proud of the first shave and boasted of the razor before they ever used one; but he—he was reminded that the razor meant he was growing body-hair elsewhere than on his lip, and he bitterly, privately, resented this evidence that childhood was slipping by.
    Where, along the way, had he missed the great chance to take the difficult but rewarding step from boyhood into manhood, the natural hazard that others took as a matter of course, without even knowing; and would he ever have such an opportunity again? Yes, he believed he would; but perhaps it meant going down to the bottom first, the very bottom; and then again, perhaps he might not recognize the opportunity if it should return. But somewhere he had missed the boat (was his own realization of this any good, any help?). Somewhere along the line had come a moment when he had looked the other way, willfully and on purpose, reluctant to part from the pleasant ways of childhood. When, at what time, had he deliberately ignored the responsibility and opportunity that beckoned him? Oh, he could put his finger on a dozen such moments, but no one of them was big enough in itself to have colored and crippled his whole life from that time forward.
    Some were more revealing than others; one he would never forget. A note had been passed across several aisles, a note from his friend Melvin. He knew what it said without unfolding it, these came every afternoon, from him or from Mel, worded the same; but he unfolded it as always and wrote “Okay” under the message: “How about going over to the church-sheds this afternoon after school and having fun?” The
having fun
was supposed to veil (and did, since no one intercepted the notes) what went on between them in the carriage-sheds back of the Presbyterian Church, several afternoons a week, in the backseat of an abandoned carriage that hadn’t been used for years—used for anything but this. The phrase was their phrase to describe, for their own private use, what they had lately found to be the most exciting thing in life. And later, amid the dry acrid semen-like smell of the sheds, the two of them shivering and groaning in the dark backseat of the dust-foul