Yeah, it’s the goddamn sack — so I’m taking off and I guess I’ll. . . ah. . .
Mr. Kemp, I wish I could say how much I sympathize, but you understand that if I go back with a story about a rubber sack they’re going to tell me it’s useless and probably fire me. Now I don’t want to press you, but I wonder if you could give me something more concrete; you know — is there not enough opportunity here for aggressive young men? Is St. Louis meeting her responsibilities to youth? Is our society not flexible enough for young people with ideas? You can talk to me, Mr. Kemp — what is it?
Well, fella, I wish I could help you. God knows I don’t want you to go back without a story and get fired. I know how it is — I’m a journalist myself, you know — but. . . well. . . I get The Fear. . . can you use that? St. Louis Gives Young Men The Fear — not a bad headline, eh?
Come on, Kemp, you know I can’t use that; Rubber Sacks, The Fear.
Goddamnit, man, I tell you it’s fear of the sack! Tell them that this man Kemp is fleeing St. Louis because he suspects the sack is full of something ugly and he doesn’t want to be put in with it. He senses this from afar. This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn’t give a good shit for St Louis or his friends or his family or anything else. . . he just wants to find some place where he can breathe. . . is that good enough for you?
Well, ah, Kemp, you sound a bit hysterical. I don’t know if I can get the story on you or not.
Well fuck you then. Get out of my way. They’re calling my flight — hear that voice? Hear it?
You’re deranged, Kemp! You’ll come to no good end! I knew people like you back in Tallahassee and they all ended up —
Yeah, they all ended up like Puerto Ricans. They fled and they couldn’t say why, but they damn well wanted out and they didn’t care if the newspapers understood or not. Somehow they got the idea that by getting the hell away from where they were they could find something better. They heard the word, the rotten devilish word that makes people incoherent with desire to move on — not everybody in the world lives in tin shacks with no toilets and no money at all and no food but rice and beans; not everybody cuts sugarcane for a dollar a day, or hauls a load of coconuts into town to sell for two cents each — the cheap, hot, hungry world of their fathers and their grandfathers and all their brothers and sisters was not the whole story, because if a man could muster the guts or even the desperation to move a few thousand miles there was a pretty good chance that he’d have money in his pocket and meat in his belly and one hell of a romping good time.
Yeamon had caught their mood perfectly. In twenty-six pages he had gone way beyond the story of why Puerto Ricans shove off for New York; in the end it was a story of why a man leaves home in the face of ugly odds, and when I finished it I felt small and silly for all the tripe I had written since I’d been in San Juan. Some of the conversations were amusing and others were pathetic — but through them all ran the main thread, the prime mover, the fact that these people thought they might have a chance in New York, and in Puerto Rico they had no chance at all.
When I finished reading it a second time I took it back to Lotterman and told him I thought he should run it as a five-part serial.
He slammed his baseball on the desk. Goddamnit, you’re as crazy as Yeamon! I can’t run a serial nobody’s going to read.