Robert B. Parker by Love, Glory Page B

two-hundred-pound bench presses and working on the last ten pages of my journal restoration when Tom told me he was closing the shop.
    “They’re going to buy the whole business block and tear it up and rebuild the fucker,” he told me while we were at the Y. “I got a job cooking at a place in Torrance.”
    I nodded. “That’s tough, Tom, to have the thing sold out from under you.”
    He shrugged. “Don’t matter. I’ll probably make more cooking for somebody else. What about you?”
    “I got five hundred bucks put away,” I said. “It’ll hold me till I find something.”
    That night I finished rewriting my journal and packed the six neatly filled-in spiral notebooks in the bottom of my gym bag. I put my extra pants and shirt in ontop of them, and my shaving stuff and toothbrush wrapped in aluminum foil. Then I read
The Big Sleep
until bedtime.
    In the morning I said good-bye to Tom and his wife. The wife, who hadn’t said twenty words to me in seven months, cried and hugged me and kissed me on the mouth.
    I said to Tom, “I think I might have died if I hadn’t seen you last fall washing off the sidewalk.”
    Tom nodded. “You’ve come a way,” he said. We shook hands, and I left them closing up the shop and headed for Colorado Street. On the corner I stopped and looked at myself in the black glass facade of a drugstore. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I was tanned from my morning runs and my stomach was flat. I weighed 170 pounds and my biceps stretched the sleeves of the T-shirt. Tom was right. I’d come a way. But I had a way left.
    I walked up to Wilshire and caught a bus downtown.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
    I got a one-room furnished apartment with kitchenette and bath in a building in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue near Kenmore. The day I moved in I went to Ralph’s market on Sunset and bought groceries and made myself steak and salad with French bread. I bought a bottle of red wine to go with the meal. It had been eight months since I had had a drink. It was time to find out. I drank two glasses of the wine with my meal, and sipped the rest of the bottle afterward while I read the
Times
and the
Herald Examiner
classified pages, looking for a job. There were three openings for a carpenter’s helper and I marked them for the morning. Then I washed up the dishes and went to bed with a mild buzz and a full stomach.
    I could still taste wine in my mouth the next morning and my head ached enough to take aspirin with my orange juice. But I didn’t feel bad, and I didn’t feel like I needed a drink. Maybe next week I could try a couple of beers. I did a careful journal entry after breakfast, andthen took a bus downtown to a temporary office in a storefront on the corner of Seventh and Hope to interview for the carpentry job. The job was with a big construction firm that was putting up houses in the Toluca Lake area in North Hollywood. They hired two of us, probably because we were sober, me, and a muscular black man named Roy Washington. A half-hour later we were in the front seat of a pickup truck with a carpenter named Henry Reagan heading for the job.
    Henry was a thin, drawn, old man, over sixty, with skin that had weathered to a permanent reddish tone. He wore glasses with gold rims and a sweat-stained baseball cap.
    “You know anything about carpentry?”
    I said, “No.” Washington shook his head.
    “You own any tools?”
    “No.”
    “Jesus,” Henry said. “How am I supposed to teach you anything if you don’t have any motherfucking tools?”
    Washington and I looked at each other.
    “I’ll lend you some, but as soon as you get paid, you sure better buy your own,” Henry said. “What’d you boys do before?”
    “Boxer,” Washington said.
    “How come you’re not boxing now?” Henry said.
    “Can’t get no fights,” Washington said. “People ducking me. My manager’s working on it. But in the meantime I gotta eat.”
    Henry glanced at me, sitting in the middle between him and