Chester Himes by James Sallis Read Free Book Online Page B

swinging wildly from emotion to emotion, and quite likely both Chesters existed at different times. For that matter, both Chesters, the socially adept and the reclusive brooder, coexisted in the adult as well.
    Chester’s uncle Andrew helped him find work as a busboy in chic Wade Park Manor Hotel in east Cleveland, where at his first job Chester felt simultaneously superior and hopelessly intimidated.
    He felt like an intruder, a tourist who has wandered upon the ceremonial rites of a primitive tribe. He didn’t know it was his manner that set him apart. At one glance they knew he was not of them. He had none of the extroversion the occupation requires. Inside he was taut with timidity. Outwardly he strove to show a hard indifference. 45
    His job was to retrieve room service trays and roll them two or three at a time into the service elevator for return to the kitchen. Two young women sat in a glass booth facing the elevators to check the trays before waiters took them upstairs. These women were white and good-looking, and immediately took to Chester. In
The Third Generation’s
account, a supervisor jokes with Charles:
    â€œThese young ladies cause more havoc on my station than a four-alarm fire,” Mr. Jackson warned. “You must inure yourself against their charms, son. You won’t be able to find the elevators.” 46
    In fact the women got Chester so worked up that he sallied off to the ghetto slums on Scoville Avenue and lost his virginity to “an old fat ugly whore sitting on a stool outside her hovel.” 47 Himes’s description of Scoville Avenue, with its poverty, its aimless men living off whores, drinking raw alcohol and cutting one another up, reads like a sketch for the Harlem of his detective novels.
    One morning two weeks after he started the job, feeling less at odds, Chester stopped by the girls in their booth planning to ask for a date. Sensing this, the checkers quickly steered the conversation elsewhere. Chester, crestfallen, pulled open the elevator doors, stepped in—and fell forty feet.
    I remember the sensation of falling through space and landing on a solid platform with the feeling of my body spattering open like a ripe watermelon.
    I remember calling for help in a tiny voice. My mouth felt as though it were filled with gravel. Later I discovered that it was only my teeth.
    My chin had hit something that cut the flesh to the bone, broke my lower jaw, and shattered all my teeth. My left arm hit something and both bones broke just above the wrist so that they came out through the skin, dead white with drops of blood in the bone fractures. My spine hit something and the last three vertebrae were fractured. 48
    Finding the hotel responsible for the accident—it should not have been possible to open the outer doors when the elevator was on another floor—the Ohio State Industrial Commission paid all hospital bills and awarded Chester a disability payment of $75 a month. The hotel offered to continue his salary of $50 a month. This led to further bitterness between his parents. Joseph had urged Chester to sign waivers to all rights for additional claims; Estelle believed that he should have rejected pension and waivers alike and sued Wade Manor. She went so far as to confront the hotel’s management, accusing them of taking advantage of her son. The hotel responded by withdrawing its offer to maintain Chester on salary. Joseph and Estelle quarreled horribly, he insisting that she was only making a fool of herself and antagonizing everyone who might help them, she accusing him of inertia and Uncle Tomism.
    At this point in
The Third Generation
there’s a moment of great feeling for both parents.
    Mrs. Taylor’s long and bitter fight was to save herself as much as anything. She didn’t realize this. She thought of herself as doing what a mother should. And yet, in the end, she lost herself. Both lost themselves. She became mean and petty. And