He shook his head. “It’s not a loan. Since you put it as you did, I canceled it against your unused time.”
“Huh? Now, see here, Mr. Doughty, I didn’t intend to twist your arm. Of course, I’m going to-”
“Please. I told my assistant to enter the charge when I directed it to pay you. Do you want to give our auditors headaches all for a fiddling four hundred dollars? I was prepared to loan you much more than that.”
“Well-I can’t argue it now. Say, Mr. Doughty, how much money is this? How are price levels now?”
“Mmmm . . . that is a complex question.”
“Just give me an idea? What does it cost to eat?”
“Food is quite reasonable. For ten dollars you can get a very satisfactory dinner . . . if you are careful to select moderately priced restaurants.”
I thanked him and left with a really warm feeling. Mr. Doughty reminded me of a paymaster I used to have in the Army. Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can’t have what you’ve got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don’t rate it.
Doughty was the second sort.
The sanctuary faced on the Wilshire Ways. There were benches in front of it and bushes and flowers. I sat down on a bench to take stock and to decide whether to go east or west. I had kept a stiff lip with Mr. Doughty but, honestly, I was badly shaken, even though I had the price of a week’s meals in my jeans.
But the sun was warm and the drone of the Ways was pleasant and I was young (biologically at least) and I had two hands and my brain. Whistling “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” I opened the Times to the “Help Wanted” columns.
I resisted the impulse to look through “Professional Engineers” and turned at once to “Unskilled.”
That classification was darned short. I almost couldn’t find it.
I got a job the second day, Friday, the fifteenth of December. I also had a mild run-in with the law and had repeated tangles with new ways of doing things, saying things, feeling about things. I discovered that “reorientation” by reading about it is like reading about sex-not the same thing.
I suppose I would have had less trouble if I had been set down in Omsk, or Santiago, or Djakarta. In going to a strange city in a strange land you know that the customs are going to be different, but in Great Los Angeles I subconsciously expected things to be unchanged even though I could see that they were changed. Of course thirty years is nothing; anybody takes that much change and more in a lifetime. But it makes a difference to take it in one bite.
Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper-which I hastily explained-kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won’t use the word here-oh yes, I will; why shouldn’t I? I’m using it to explain something. Don’t take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.
The word was “kink.”
There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. “Host” for example-“host” used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.
But I got along. The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns-all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive `em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! Crash!-scrap iron for blast furnaces.
It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn’t own so much as a gravJumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my job . . . until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn’t understand.