On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg Read Free Book Online Page A

he lived. His life would have been unbearable without these signs of attention, if not affection, from passers-by.
    “A dime—a dime for a cupa coffee?”
    “Don’t give me that coffee, you juice-head.”
    Angered by Mutt’s refusal to go, and nervous about what was going to happen to Joey up there on the roof, Terry leaned over and spat savagely into Mutt’s upraised hand. Mutt drew his hand back indignantly and wiped the spittle on the sleeve of his stump. The violence of the gesture seemed to bring the sturdy, swaggering figure of the young man into focus for Mutt.
    “Terry. I shoulda known.” He straightened up a little and wiped his hand against his filthy slept-in denim pants. “Thanks fer nuthin’, ya bum.”
    “Get lost,” Terry mumbled as he watched the one-armed bottle-baby drift off into the evening mist.
    “Tippi tippi tin. …” the wanderer went back to his hoarse and mirthless chant, some ritual of his own, as if in a stroke of revelation, he had found an anthem for his emptiness.
    Terry took a last, wondering look at the rooftop where Joey must be already involved in critical conversation with Sonny and Specs. Then he brushed his fingers against his nose, boxer style again, and started walking in his rolling, light-footed, shoulder-shifting way toward the Friendly Bar and Grill over on the corner of River and Pulaski.

Three
    B Y THE TIME TERRY Malloy reached the end of the alley, giving on River Street, he had pretty well succeeded in putting Joey Doyle and the pigeon out of his mind; maybe, without his being aware of it, it was merely pushed back and buried in the dense undergrowth of forgotten or half-understood impressions that lay entangled in Terry’s mind. The luxury of anticipation and the pain of contrition and afterthought were unknown to Terry. Sometimes the corner cowboys tapped their heads and laughed, meaning Terry was punchy. But Terry’s inability to look into himself or to experience anything other than immediate pleasure or pain was nothing but sloth.
    You ate, you slept, you drank, you copulated, you took in a movie or shot a little pool and you worked when you had to, at the softest job you could find, to keep a few dollars in your pocket. That was the day-to-day existence of Terry Malloy. Johnny Friendly called you by your first name. You usually had enough cabbage or credit to get your load on Saturday nights. There was always a tramp somewhere to come up to your room and help you get the hot water off your stomach. What more could you want? What more could you want? What more could you possibly want?
    Feeling like that, full of life in a deadened sort of way, on his own, on the prowl, ready to run or bite or snatch off something good, ready for the minute but with no sense of time or urgency, Terry walked tough along the bars of River Street.
    There were at least half a dozen to every block, and each one doing business in fifteen-cent beers and thirty-five-cent shots; here and there a juke box blared, the Honeydreamers and the Four Aces, “I feel so lonely when I’m … here without you …” And bars where the old aimless conversations were displaced by television sets, drawing the row of customers’ faces in one direction and fixing them so rigidly as they nursed their beers that they seemed a depersonalized line of wax dummies.
    Except for this singular invention, the saloons were unchanged for generations, many of them a century old, with time-polished mahogany bars, elegant brass spittoons and brass rails that had supported the heavy feet of the great-grandfathers of the present company. The men among whom Terry walked along River Street had not changed their style either. There was something about this waterfront that stubbornly avoided progress, or even change. As in the days of the sailing ships, the street along the river was peopled with barrel-shaped men with faces weathered by sea air and drink, burly in their windbreakers, with heavy-toed shoes and caps