Free 1919 by John Dos Passos Page A

looking for a boarding house.
    After he’d been a couple of days reading want ads and going around Brooklyn looking for a job he got sick. He went to a sawbones an oldtimer at the boarding house told him about. The doc who was a little kike with a goatee told him it was the gonawria and he’d have to come every afternoon for treatment. He said he’d guarantee to cure him up for fifty dollars, half payable in advance, and that he’d advise
him to have a bloodtest taken to see if he had syphilis too and that would cost him fifteen dollars. Joe paid down the twentyfive but said he’d think about the test. He had a treatment and went out onto the street. The doc had told him to be sure to walk as little as possible, but he couldn’t seem to go home to the stinking boardinghouse and wandered aimlessly round the clattering Brooklyn streets. It was a hot afternoon. The sweat was pouring off him as he walked. If you catch it right the first day or two it ain’t so bad, he kept saying to himself. He came out on a bridge under the elevated; must be Brooklyn Bridge.
    It was cooler walking across the bridge. Through the spider-webbing of cables, the shipping and the pack of tall buildings were black against the sparkle of the harbor. Joe sat down on a bench at the first pier and stretched his legs out in front of him. Here he’d gone to work and caught a dose. He felt terrible and how was he going to write Del now; and his board to pay, and a job to get and these damn treatments to take. Jesus, he felt lousy.
    A kid came by with an evening paper. He bought a
Journal
and sat with the paper on his lap looking at the headlines: RUSH MORE TROOPS TO MEX BORDER . What the hell could he do? He couldn’t even join the national guard and go to Mexico; they wouldn’t take you if you were sick and even if they did it would be the goddam navy all over again. He sat reading the want ads, the ads about adding to your income with two hours’ agreeable work at home evenings, the ads of Pelmanism and correspondence courses. What the hell could he do? He sat there until it was dark. Then he took a car to Atlantic Avenue and went up four flights to the room where he had a cot under the window and turned in.
    That night a big thundersquall came up. There was a lot of thunder and lightning damned close. Joe lay flat on his back watching the lightning so bright it dimmed the streetlights flicker on the ceiling. The springs rattled every time the guy in the other cot turned in his sleep. It began to rain in, but Joe felt so weak and sick it was a long time before he had the gumption to sit up and pull down the window.
    In the morning the landlady, who was a big raw-boned Swedish woman with wisps of flaxen hair down over her bony face, started bawling him out about the bed’s being wet. “I can’t help it if it rains, can I?” he grumbled, looking at her big feet. When he caught her eye, it came over him that she was kidding him and they both laughed.
    She was a swell woman, her name was Mrs. Olsen and she’d raised
six children, three boys who’d grown up and gone to sea, a girl who was a school teacher in St. Paul and a pair of girl twins about seven or eight who were always getting into mischief. “Yust one year more and I send them to Olga in Milwaukee. I know sailormen.” Pop Olsen had been on the beach somewhere in the South Seas for years. “Yust as well he stay there. In Brooklyn he been always in de lockup. Every week cost me money to get him outa yail.”
    Joe got to helping her round the house with the cleaning and did odd painting and carpentering jobs for her. After his money ran out she let him stay on and even lent him twentyfive bucks to pay the doctor when he told her about being sick. She slapped him on the back when he thanked her; “Every boy I ever lend money to, he turn out yust one big bum,” she said and laughed. She was a swell woman.
    It was