A Diet of Treacle Read Online Free Page B

back at you. You had stumbled around, freezing, mud up to your neck and bullets all over the damned place. And then you had had a year in college on the GI bill, the professors throwing things at you that had neither made sense nor mattered a hell of a lot, and there had been nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to be with.
    That’s what happened to you, Joe would decide. You had been a good kid and they had sent you to Korea to make the world safe for Syngman Rhee, who had been nothing but a fascist bastard to begin with and who was finished now anyway and the Koreans behind half-a-dozen eight balls. They had sent you over there and when they had brought you back there had been nothing stateside for you. Nothing had mattered any more, nothing had fit any more, and when you had gone home to Rochester there had been nobody to talk to. The same people had been there, the same guys—even if they had aged a year or two they had only gotten deader from the neck up. Your folks had been there but it hadn’t been the same with them, and the girls had been there and it hadn’t been the same with them, either, and all in all Rochester hadn’t been worth a damn and New York University had been worth less of a damn and the whole world had gotten dead set on driving you out of your alleged mind.
    Sure, Joe thought.
    Or, his mood alternating, he would accuse himself: You’re just a no-good bastard and you’ve screwed up everything you’ve ever touched. Yeah, you had been a happy enough guy in high school. You had never had a thought in your life and you had never done anything except swing bats at baseballs and bang silly little girls in back seats. So you had gone through basic training and had started shaking when they sent live ammo ten feet over your head. So you had shipped to Korea and had aimed your gun at the sky most of the time because you had been too scared to kill anybody. You hadn’t had enough guts to have been a conscientious objector or enough guts to have been a soldier—but you had had an anonymous enough body to have been stuck in the middle, a gun in your hand and a hole in your head.
    And you had found a woman in Japan, little Michiko, flat-faced Mickey, the sweetest and warmest woman in the world, Mickey of the saffron arms and legs and thighs and breasts and belly, a girl named Mickey who had loved you. And, you gutless no-good wop son of a bitch, you hadn’t had the guts to make a Sayonara scene. You had left her there.
    Joe Gutless. You had dropped out of NYU because you hadn’t been able to knuckle down and study. You had left Rochester because it had been too tough for you to adjust, and you hadn’t wanted to do anything unless it was real easy. No guts, no push, no drive, no interest in anything or anybody. You were a faceless wop named Joe Gutless Milani who deserved whatever you got.
    And now you did nothing. Now you were Hip or Beat or whatever word they were calling it this month. You had been spending years doing nothing at all. That was the hell of it.
    You didn’t work. Getting a gig as a messenger boy for a week at a clip wasn’t working. Bussing tables at the Automat for a day or two at a time wasn’t working. Bumming off Shank, bumming from the women you crawled into an occasional bed with, bumming off anybody who happened to have bread or food or an empty bed or a lonesome gland wasn’t working.
    You floated.
    For the time being you padded down with Shank, as lousy a guy as you were, who pushed pot in an extremely small-time way, who carried a knife and would one day or another stick somebody with it if he hadn’t already.
    You floated. You pushed pot and chewed peyote.
    You drifted. You were impotent with half the women you slept with and you didn’t muscle much of a kick out of the other half.
    You stank.
    Joe rolled off the bed and eased himself into the chair. Since the joint of marijuana was still in his pocket, he thought for a moment about smoking it, but then decided