Robert B. Parker by Love, Glory Page A

dollars in my pocket. I got a haircut, bought a razor and a toothbrush and some salt-water soap. I hadn’t had a drink or a cigarette since I’d started with Tom.
    Tom closed Mondays, and I had my first day off. I took a bus downtown and bought myself a pair of chino pants and white shirt with a button-down collar. Then I went back to the shop and got my journal and sat on the beach to write in it. I hadn’t written in a while and I started to reread a little to pick up the thread. The journal was a mess. There were stains on it from ketchup and pickle juice and grease, and spilled beer or wine. The pages were soiled and creased and wrinkled, all of them were ripped, and some were nearly torn in two. Much of it was barely legible. As I looked at it my eyes filled until the pages were bleary in front of me. I wiped them clear.
Okay
, I said,
okay. I’ll start with this
. I got up and walked back to the shop and put the journal on a shelf above the sink. Then I went out and down the block to a dime store and bought a dozen spiral-bound notebooks and four ball-point pens. Then I went back to the shop and sat at the counter and began to rewrite the journal.
    Every morning I went down and bathed in the sea and as the weeks went by and I kept saving money, I added another pair of pants and another shirt and two T-shirts and a pair of sneakers to my wardrobe. Every afternoonafter the shop closed I sat at the counter for an hour and restored the journal, printing painstakingly because my handwriting was messy. It had been a month and a half since I’d had a drink or smoked a cigarette. I was going to sleep at nine o’clock at night and eating three meals a day and putting on weight. One morning before I bathed in the ocean I jogged a little ways along the beach until I got tired. It wasn’t very far. But the next morning I did it again, and the next morning I went a little farther. By December I was running three miles a morning and had dropped ten pounds.
    For Christmas Tom and his wife gave me a six-month membership in the Santa Monica YMCA. And Tom, who worked out there regularly, took me down and showed me how to lift weights. I could barely bench-press seventy-five pounds that first day, but Tom didn’t laugh at me, and I went with him every other afternoon after work, before I wrote in my journal.
    From the time I woke up until I finished writing my journal in the late afternoon I was fine. Running, working, lifting weights, re-creating the journal, occupied my mind. But by six o’clock I had finished the journal and eaten my supper and cleaned up the dishes and it would be three or four hours before I’d fall asleep. In that time it was hard not to drink and hard not to smoke.
    I went over to the branch library in Santa Monica and took out a card and brought home a copy of
The Great Gatsby
. I read it in two evenings, and reread it in two more. The quote I remembered hadn’t meant quite what I’d remembered it as meaning, but it was true in spirit to the book. I was startled at how good the book was. Grinding through it in sophomore English survey, Ihadn’t realized. Then I went back and got
Go Down, Moses
by Faulkner and read “The Bear” and found myself nearly breathless at some of the writing. As the evenings unfolded I read Hemingway and Steinbeck and Dos Passos. I read
Moby Dick
and
The Scarlet Letter
, and
Walden
and
The Ambassadors
and
Hamlet
and
King Lear
and
Othello
. I read
Othello
in one of those casebook editions for colleges and read the essays also. It led me to literary criticism and I read Richard Sewall on tragedy and Tillyard on the Elizabethan world picture and Lovejoy on the great chain of being. I read R.W.B. Lewis and Henry Nashe Smith and then I read
Walden
twice more. I read books on nutrition and I read
The New York Times
and
The Boston Globe
and the L.A. papers, the
Times
and the
Herald Examiner
.
    I was up to five miles along the curve of the beach every morning, and doing