But the phone, once it is connected, still doesn't ring. The days go by empty. The Golds next door are back in Framingham. Bernie and Fern Drechsel are up north bouncing between their two daughters' houses, one in Westchester County and the other still in Queens, and their son's lovely home in Princeton and a cot-tage he has in Manahawkin. The Silbersteins have a place in North Carolina they go to from April to November. Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?" The Valhalla dining room is spooky ? empty tables and an echoing click of silver on china and Bingo only once a week. The golf course has noisy foursomes on it early in the morning, waking Harry up with the moon still bright in the sky ? younger men, local Deleon business types who buy cut?rate off?season memberships ? and then the fairways from ten to about four bake in the mid?nineties heat, deserted but for the stray dog cutting diagonally across or the cats scratching in the sand traps. When Harry one morning gets up his nerve for a round by himself, planning to take a cart, he discovers the pro shop has lost his golf shoes. The kid at the counter ? the pro and assistant pro are both still up north at country clubs that don't close down until late October says he's sure they're somewhere, it's just that this time of year there's a different system.
The only other person in the fourth?floor corridor who seems to be here is the crazy woman in 402, Mrs. Zabritski, a widow with wild white hair, pinned up by two old tortoise?shell combs that just add to the confusion. The Golds have told him she survived one of the concentration camps when a girl. She looks at Harry as if he's crazy too, to be here.
He explains to her one day, since they meet at the elevator and she looks at him funny, "I had this sudden impulse to come down early this year. My wife's just starting up in the real?estate business and I got bored hanging around the house."
Mrs. Zabritski's little neckless head is screwed around at an angle on her shoulder, as if she's bracing an invisible telephone against her ear. She stares up at him furiously, her lips baring her long false teeth in a taut oval that reminds him of that Batman logo you saw everywhere this summer. Her eyes have veiny reds to them, stuck hot and round in their skeletal sockets, that wasting?away look Lyle had. "It's hell," the tiny old lady seems to pronounce, her lips moving stiffly, trying to keep her teeth in.
"It's what? What is?"
"This weather," she says. "Your wife -" She halts, her lips working.
"My wife what?" Rabbit tries to curb his tendency to shout, since hearing doesn't seem to be one of her problems, regardless of that pained way her head is cocked.
"Is a cute little thing," she finishes, but looks angry saying it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and abandoned.
"She'll be down soon," he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness. This is the kind of woman he's ended up with, after Mary Ann and then Janice and Ruth's silky?sack heaviness and Peggy Fosnacht's splayed eyes and Jill's adolescent breasts and stoned compliance and Thelma with her black casket and Pru glowing dimly in the dark like a tough street in blossom, not to mention that tired whore in Texas with the gritty sugar in her voice and that other paid lay in his life, a girl he once in a great while remembers, at a Verity Press outing in the Brewer Polish?American Club, she was skinny and had a cold and kept her bra and sweater on, there in this room off to the side, where she was waiting on a mattress like a kind of prisoner, young, her belly and thighs sweaty from the cold she had but pure and pale, a few baby?blue veins where the skin molded around the pelvic bones, her pussy an oldfashioned natural dark ferny triangle, flourishing, not shaved at the sides to suit a bathing suit the way you see in the skin magazines. You paid the guy who stood outside the door, ten dollars for ten minutes, he hadn't shaved very recently, Rabbit assumed he was her brother, or maybe her father. He assumed the girl was Polish because of the name of the club, she might have been eighteen, Mrs. Zabritski would have been that age after getting out of the concentration camp, smooth?skinned, lithe, a young survivor. What time does to people; her face is broken into furrows that crisscross each other like a checkerboard of skin.
"She should wait," Mrs. Zabritski says.
"I'll tell her you said so," he says loudly, fighting the magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors apart in this corridor like a long peach?colored chute glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty?two. Not so bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.
He tries to watch TV but it makes him restless. The last of the summer reruns are mixed in with previews of new shows that don't look that much different: families, laugh tracks, zany dropins, those three?sided living?room sets with the stairs coming down in the background like in Cosby, and front doors on the right through which the comical good?natured grandparents appear, bearing presents and presenting problems. The door is on the right in Cosby and on the left in Roseanne. That fat husband's going to have his cardiovascular problems too. TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except yours isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.
At first he thinks Janice has tried so hard to reach him those four days before the phone got connected on Thursday that she's lost faith in their old number. Then he begins to accept her silence as a definite statement. I'll never forgive you. O.K., he'll be damned if he'll call her. Dumb mutt. Rich bitch. Working girl yet. Thinks she's so fucking hot running everybody's lives with those accountants and lawyers Charlie put her on to, he's known her so drunk she couldn't get herself to the bathroom to pee. The few times Harry has weakened, impulsively, usually around four or five when he can't stand the sound of the golf games beginning up again and it's still hours to dinner, the telephone in the little limestone house in Penn Park rings and rings without an answer. He hangs up in a way relieved. Nothingness has a purity. Like running. He showed her he still had some kick in his legs and now she's showing him she can still be stubborn. Her silence frightens him. He fights off images of some accident she might have, slipping in the bathtub or driving the Camry off the road, having had too much to drink over at Nelson's or at some Vietnamese restaurant with Charlie, without him knowing. Police frogmen finding her drowned in the back seat like that girl from Wilkes?Barre twenty years ago. But no, he'd be notified, if anything were to happen, somebody would call him, Nelson or Charlie or Benny at the lot, if there still is a lot. Each day down here, events in Pennsylvania seem more remote. His whole life seems, as he rotates through the empty condo rooms, each with its view across the parallel fairways to a wilderness of Spanish?tile roofs, to have been unreal, or no realer than the lives on TV shows, and now it's too late to make it real, to be serious, to reach down into the earth's iron core and fetch up a real life for himself.
The local air down here this time of year is full of violence, as if the natives are on good behavior during the winter season. Hurricane alarms (Gabrielle packs punch), head?on car crashes, masked holdups at Publix. The day after Labor Day, lightning kills a young football player leaving the field after practice; the story says Florida has more deaths by lightning than any other state. In Cape Coral, a Hispanic police officer is charged with beating his cocker spaniel to death with a crowbar. Sea turtles are dying by the thousands in shrimp nets. A killer called Petit whose own mother says he looks like Charles Manson is pronounced mentally fit to stand trial. That Deion Sanders is still making the front page of the Fort Myers News?Press: one day he knocks in four runs and a homer playing baseball for the Yankees, the next he signs for millions to play football for the Atlanta Falcons, and the very next he's being sued by the auxiliary cop he hit last Christmas at that shopping mall, and on Sunday he bobbles a punt return for the Falcons but runs it back for a touchdown anyway, the only man in human history to hit a home run and score a touchdown in pro ball the same week.
Deion has
right stuff
Enjoy it while he can. He calls himself Prime Time and is always on the TV news wearing sunglasses and gold chains. Rabbit watches that big kid Becker beat Lendl in the U.S. Tennis Open final and gets depressed, Lendl seemed old and tired and stringy, though he's only twenty?eight.
He talks to nobody, except for Mrs. Zabritski when she catches him in the hall, and the teenage Florida?cracker salesclerks when he buys his food and razor blades and toilet paper, and the people who feel obliged to make chitchat, the other retirees, in the Valhalla dining room; they always ask about Janice so it gets to be embarrassing and he more and more just heats up something frozen and stays in the condo, ransacking the cable channels for something worthy to kill time with. In his solitude, his heart becomes his companion. He listens to it, tries to decipher its messages. It has different rhythms at different times of the day, a thorrumph thorrumph sluggish slightly underwater beat in the morning, and toward evening, when the organism gets tired and excited at once, a more skittish thudding, with the accent on the first beat and grace notes added, little trips and pauses now and then. It twinges when he gets up out of bed and then again when he lies down and whenever he thinks too hard about his situation, having set himself adrift like this. He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face? So he and Pru did fuck, once. What are we put here in the first place for? These women complain about men seeing nothing but tits and ass when they look at them but what are we supposed to see? We've been programmed to tits and ass. Except guys like Slim and Lyle, the tits got left out of their program. One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking, even that sniffly girl in the PolishAmerican Club, she hardly said two words, and wiped her nose with a handkerchief while he was on top of her, but nevertheless she showed him something, a flourishing bush, and took him in, where it mattered. A lot of this other stuff you're supposed to be grateful for isn't where it matters. When he gets up from the deep wicker chair indignantly ? he can't stand Cheers now that Shelley Long is gone, that guy with the Cro?Magnon brow he never did like ? and goes into the kitchen to refill his bowl of Keystone Corn Chips, which not all of the stores down here carry but you can get over at the Winn Dixie on Pindo Palm Boulevard, Harry's heart confides to him a dainty little gallop, the kind of lacy riff the old swing drummers used to do, hitting the rims as well as the skins and ending with a tingling pop off the high hat, the music of his life. When this happens he gets an excited, hurried, full feeling in his chest. It doesn't hurt, it's just there, muffled inside that mess inside himself he doesn't like to think about, just like he never cared for rare roast beef, as it used to come on the take?out subs from the Chuck Wagon across Route 111 before it became the Pizza Hut. Any sudden motion now, he feels a surge of circulation, a tilt of surprise in the head that makes one leg feel shorter than the other for a second. And the pains, maybe he imagines it, but the contractions of the bands across his ribs, the feeling of something having been sewn there from the inside, seems to cut deeper, more burningly, as though the thread the patch was sewn with is growing thicker, and red hot. When he turns off the light at night, he doesn't like feeling his head sink back onto a single pillow, his head seems sunk in a hole then, it's not that he can't breathe exactly, he just feels more comfortable, less full, if he has his head up on the two pillows and lies facing the ceiling. He can turn on his side but his old way of sleeping, flat on his stomach with his feet pointing down over the edge, has become impossible; there is a nest of purple slithering half?dead thoughts he cannot bear to put his face in. There is a whole host of goblins, it turns out, that Janice's warm little tightly knit body, even snoring and farting as it sometimes did, protected him from. In her absence he sleeps with his heart, listening to it race and skip when his rest is disturbed, when kids who have climbed the fence yell on the empty moonlit golf course, when a siren bleats somewhere in downtown Deleon, when a big jet from the north heads in especially low to the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, churning the air. He awakes in lavender light and then lets his heart's slowing beat drag him back under.
His dreams are delicious, like forbidden candy ? intensely colored overpopulated rearrangements of old situations stored in his brain cells, rooms like the little living room at 26 Vista Crescent, with the fireplace they never used and the lamp with the driftwood base, or the old kitchen at 303 Jackson, with the wooden ice box and the gas stove with its nipples of blue flame and the porcelain table with the worn spots, skewed and new and crowded with people at the wrong ages, Mim with lots of green eye makeup at the age Mom was when they were kids, or Nelson as a tiny child sliding out from under a car in the greasy service section of Springer Motors, looking woebegone and sickly with his smudged face, or Marty Tothero and Ruth and even that nitwit Margaret Kosko, he hasn't thought of her name for thirty years, but there she was in his brain cells, just as clear with her underfed city pallor as she was that night in the booth of the Chinese restaurant, Ruth next to him and Margaret next to Mr. Tothero whose head looks lopsided and gray like that of a dying rhinoceros, the four of them eating now in the Valhalla dining room with its garbled bas?relief of Vikings and sumptuous salad bar where the dishes underneath the plastic sneeze guard are bright and various as jewels, arranged in rainbow order like the crayons in the Crayola boxes that were always among his birthday presents in February, a little stadium of waxy?smelling pointed heads there in the bright February window?light, filtered through icicles and the stunned sense of being a year older. Harry wakes from these dreams reluctantly, as if their miniaturized visions are a substance essential to his nutrition, or a whirring finely fitted machine he needs to reinsert himself into, like poor Thelma and her dialysis machine. He awakes always on his stomach, and only as his head clears and re?creates present time, establishing the felt?gray parallel lines he sees as the dawn behind the curved slats of Venetian blinds and the insistent pressure on his face as the cool Gulf breeze coming in where he left the sliding door ajar, does his solitude begin to gnaw again, and his heart to talk to him. At times it seems a tiny creature, a baby, pleading inside him for attention, for rescue, and at others a sinister intruder, a traitor muttering in code, an alien parasite nothing will expel. The pains, when they come, seem hostile and deliberate, the knives of a strengthening enemy.
He makes an appointment with Dr. Morris. He is able to get one surprisingly soon, the day after next. These doctors are scrambling down here, a glut of them, too many miners at the gold rush, the geriatric immigrants still hanging up north this time of year. The office is in one of those low stucco clinics along Route 41. Soothing music plays constantly in the waiting room, entwining with the surf?sound of traffic outside. The doctor has aged since the last appointment. He is bent?over and shufliy, with arthritic knuckles. His shrivelled jaw looks not quite clean?shaven; his nostrils are packed with black hair. His son, young Tom, pink and sleek in his mid?forties, gives Harry a freckled fat hand in the hall, and is wearing his white clinical smock over kelly?green golf slacks. He is established in an adjacent office, primed to take over the full practice. But for now the old doctor clings to his own patients. Harry tries to describe his complex sensations. Dr. Morris, with an impatient jerk of his arthritic hand, waves him toward the examination room. He has him strip to his jockey undershorts, weighs him, tut?tuts. He seats him on the examination table and listens to his chest through his stethoscope, and taps his naked back with a soothing, knobby touch, and solemnly, silently takes Harry's hands in his. He studies the fingernails, turns them over, studies the palms, grunts. Close up, he gives off an old man's sad leathery, moldy smell.
"Well," Harry asks, "what do you think?"
"How much do you exercise?"
"Not much. Not since I got down here. I do a little gardening up north. Golf-but I've kind of run out of partners."
Dr. Morris ponders him through rimless glasses. His eyes, once a sharp blue, have that colorless sucked look to the irises. His eyebrows are messy tangled tufts of white and reddish?brown, his forehead and cheeks are flecked with small blotches and bumps. His projecting eyebrows lift, like turrets taking aim. "You should walk."
"Walk?"
"Briskly. Several miles a day. What sorts of food are you eating?"
"Oh ? stuff you can heat up. TV?dinner kind of thing. My wife is still up north but she doesn't cook that much even when she's here. Now, my daughter?in?law -"
"You ever eat any of this salty junk that comes in bags?"
"Well ? once in a great while."
"You should watch your sodium intake. Snack on fresh vegetables if you want to snack. Read the labels. Stay away from salt and animal fats. I think we've been through all this, when you were in the hospital" ? he lifts his forearm and checks his record ? "nine months ago."
"Yeah, I did for a while, I still do, it's just that day to day, it's easier -"
"To poison yourself. Don't. Don't be lazy about it. And you should lose forty pounds. Without the salt in your diet you'd lose ten in retained water in two weeks. I'll give you a diet list, if you've lost the one I gave you before. You may get dressed."
The doctor has grown smaller, or his desk has grown bigger, since Harry's last visit here. He sits down, dressed, at the desk and begins, "The pains -"
"The pains will moderate with better conditioning. Your heart doesn't like what you're feeding it. Have you been under any special stress lately?"
"Not really. Just the normal flack. A couple family problems, but they seem to be clearing up."
The doctor is writing on his prescription pad. "I want you to have blood tests and an EKG at the Community General. Then I want to consult with Dr. Olman. Depending on how the results look, it may be time for another catheterization."
"Oh Jesus. Not that again."
The messy eyebrows go up again, the prim dry lips pinch in. Not a clever generous Jewish mouth. A crabby Scots economy in the way he thinks and talks, on the verge of impatience, having seen so many hopelessly deteriorating patients in his life. "What didn't you like? Were the hot flashes painful?"
"It just felt funny," Harry tells him, "having that damn thing inside me. It's the idea of it."
"Well, do you prefer the idea of a life?threatening restenosis of your coronary artery? It's been, let's see, nearly six months since you had the angioplasty at" ?he reads his records, with difficulty ? "St. Joseph's Hospital in Brewer, Pennsylvania."
"They made me watch," Harry tells him. "I could see my own damn heart on TV, full of like Rice Krispies."
A tiny Scots smile, dry as a thistle. "Was that so bad?"
"It was" ? he searches for the word ? "insulting." In fact when you think about it his whole life from here on in is apt to be insulting. Pacemakers, crutches, wheelchairs. Impotence. Once in the Valhalla locker room a very old tall guy ? somebody's guest, he never saw him again ? came out of the shower and his muscles were so shrivelled his thighs from the back blended right up into his buttocks so his asshole seemed to flow down into the entire long space between his legs. His ass had lost its cheeks and Harry couldn't stop staring at the fleshly chasm.
Dr. Morris is making, in a deliberate, tremulous hand, notes to add to his folder. Without looking up, he says, "There are a number of investigative instruments now that don't involve a catheter. Scans using IV technetium 99 can identify acutely damaged heart muscle. Then there is echocardiography. We won't rush into anything. Let's see what you can do on your own, with a healthier regimen."
"Great."
"I want to see you in four weeks. Here are slips for the blood tests and EKG, and prescriptions for a diuretic and a relaxant for you at night. Don't forget the diet lists. Walk. Not violently, but vigorously, two or three miles a day."
"O.K.," Rabbit says, beginning to rise from his chair, feeling as light as a boy called into the principal's office and dismissed with a light reprimand.
But Dr. Morris fixes him with those sucked?out old blue eyes and says, "Do you have any sort of a job? According to my last information here, you were in charge of a car agency."
"That's gone. My son's taken over and my wife wants me to stay out of the kid's way. The agency was founded by her father. They'll probably wind up having to sell it off."
"Any hobbies?"
"Well, I read a lot of history. I'm a kind of a buff, you could say."
"You need more than that. A man needs an occupation. He needs something to do. The best thing for a body is a healthy interest in life. Get interested in something outside yourself, and your heart will stop talking to you."
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way. He resumes rising from the chair and takes Dr. Morris' many slips of paper out into the towering heat. The few other people out on the parking lot seem tinted smoke rising from their shadows, barely cxisting. The radio in the Celica is full of voices yammering about Deion Sanders, about Koch losing the New York Democratic primary to a black, about the SAT scores dropping in Lee County, about President Bush's televised appeal to America's schoolchildren yesterday. "The man's not doing anything!" one caller howls.
Well, Rabbit thinks, doing nothing works for Bush, why not for him? On the car seat next to him Dr. Morris' prescriptions and medical slips and Xeroxed diet sheets lift and scatter in the breeze from the car air?conditioning. On another station he hears that the Phillies beat the Mets last night, two to one. Dickie Thon homered with one out in the ninth, dropping the pre?season pennant favorites five and a half games behind the once?lowly Chicago Cubs. Harry tries to care but has trouble. Ever since Schmidt retired. Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
But he does begin to walk. He even drives to the Palmetto Palm Mall and buys a pair of walking Nikes, with a bubble of special hi?tech air to cushion each heel. He sets out between nine and ten in the morning, after eating breakfast and digesting the News?Press, and then again between four and five, returning to a nap and then dinner and then television and a page or two of his book and a sound sleep, thanks to the walking. He explores Deleon. First, he walks the curving streets of low stucco houses within a mile of Valhalla Village, with unfenced front yards of tallish tough grass half?hiding bits of dried palm frond, a Florida texture in that, a cozy sere Florida scent. Encountering a UPS man delivering or a barking small dog ? a flat?faced Pekinese with its silky long hair done up in ribbons ? is like finding life on Mars. Then, growing ever fonder of his Nikes (that bubble in the heel, he thought at first it was just a gimmick but maybe it does add bounce), he makes his way to the downtown and the river, where the town first began, as a fort in the Seminole wars and a shipping point for cattle and cotton.
He discovers, some blocks back from the beachfront and the green glass hotels, old neighborhoods where shadowy big spicy gentle trees, live oaks and gums and an occasional banyan widening out on its crutches, overhang wooden houses once painted white but flaking down to gray bareness, with louvered windows and roofs of corrugated tin. Music rises from within these houses, scratchy radio music, and voices raised in argument or jabbery jubilation, bright fragments of overheard life. The sidewalks are unpaved, small paths such as cats make have been worn diagonally between the trees, in and out of private property, the parched grass growing in patches, packed dirt littered with pods and nuts. It reminds Harry of those neighborhoods he blundered into trying to get out of Savannah, but also of the town of his childhood, Mt. Judge in the days of Depression and distant war, when people still sat on their front porches, and there were vacant lots and oddshaped cornfields, and men back from work in the factories would water their lawns in the evenings, and people not long off the farm kept chickens in back?yard pens, and peddled the eggs for odd pennies. Chickens clucking and pecking and suddenly squawking: he hasn't heard that sound for forty years, and hasn't until now realized what he's been missing. For chicken coops tucked here and there dot this sleepy neighborhood he has discovered.
In the daytime here, under the heavy late?summer sun, there are few people moving, just women getting in and out of cars with pre?school children. The slams of their car doors carry a long way down the dusty straight streets, under the live oaks. At some corners there are grocery stores that also sell beer and wine in the permissive Southern way, and pastel?painted bars with the door open on a dark interior, and video rental places with horror and kung?fu tapes displayed in the window, the boxes' colors being bleached by the sun. One day he passes an old?fashioned variety store, in a clapboarded one?story building, displaying all sorts of innocent things ? erector sets, model airplane kits, Chinese?checker boards and marbles ? that he hadn't known were still being sold. He almost goes in but doesn't dare. He is too white.
Toward late afternoon, when he takes his second walk of the day, the neighborhood begins to breathe, a quickness takes hold, men and boys return to it, and Rabbit walks more briskly, proclaiming with his stride that he is out for the exercise, just passing through, not spying. These blocks are black, and there are miles of them, a vast stagnant economic marsh left over from Deleon's Southern past, supplying the hotels and condos with labor, with waiters and security guards and chambermaids. To Harry, whose Deleon has been a glitzy community of elderly refugees, these blocks feel like a vast secret, and as the shadows lengthen under the trees, and the chickens cease their day?long clucking, his senses widen to grasp the secret better, as when in whispering knickers he would move through Mt. Judge unseen, no taller than a privet hedge, trying to grasp the unspeakable adult meaning of the lit windows, of the kitchen noises filtering across the yards mysterious and damp as jungles. An unseen child would cry, a dog would bark, and he would tingle with the excitement of simply being himself, at this point of time and space, with worlds to know and forever to live, Harold C. Angstrom, called Hassy in those lost days never to be relived. He prolongs his walks, feeling stronger, more comfortable in this strange city where he is at last beginning to exist as more than a visitor; but as darkness approaches, and the music from the glowing slatted windows intensifies, he begins to feel conspicuous, his whiteness begins to glimmer, and he heads back to the car, which he has taken to parking in a lot or at a meter downtown, as base for his widening explorations.
Coming back one day around six?thirty, just in time for a shower and a look at the news while his TV dinner heats in the oven, he is startled by the telephone's ringing. He has ceased to listen for it as intensely as in that first lonely week. When it does ring, it has been one of those recordings ("Hello there, this is Sandra") selling health insurance or a no?frills burial plan or reduced?fee investment services, going through all the numbers by computer, you wonder how it pays, Harry always hangs up and can't imagine who would listen and sign up for this stuff. But this time the caller is Nelson, his son.
"Dad?"
"Yes," he says, gathering up his disused voice, trying to imagine what you can say to a son whose wife you've boffed. "Nellie," he says, "how the hell is everybody?"
The distant voice is gingerly, shy, also not sure what is appropriate. "We're fine, pretty much."
"You're staying clean?" He didn't mean to take the offensive so sharply; the other voice, fragile in its distance, is stunned into silence for a moment.
"You mean the drugs. Sure. I don't even think about coke, except at NA meetings. Like they say, you give your life over to a higher power. You ought to try it, Dad."
"I'm working on it. Listen, no kidding, I am. I'm proud ofyou, Nelson. Keep taking it a day at a time, that's all anybody can do."
Again, the boy seems momentarily stuck. Maybe this came over as too preachy. Who is he to preach? Shit, he was just trying to share, like you're supposed to. Harry holds his tongue.
"There's been so much going on around here," Nelson tells him, "I really haven't thought about myself that much. A lot of my problem, I think, was idleness. Hanging around the lot all day waiting for some action, for the customers to sh............