The Human Stain by Roth Philip

Author:Roth, Philip [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780375726347
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2001-10-13T23:00:00+00:00

And, some four decades later, all the while he was driving home from the college, besieged by recrimination, remembering some of the best moments of his life—the birth of his children, the exhilaration, the all-too-innocent excitement, the wild wavering of his resolve, the relief so great that it nearly undid his resolve—he was remembering also the worst night of his life, remembering back to his navy stint and the night he was thrown out of that Norfolk whorehouse, the famous white whorehouse called Oris's. "You're a black nigger, ain't you, boy?" and seconds later the bouncers had hurled him from the open front door, over the stairs to the sidewalk and into the street. The place he was looking for was Lulu's, over on Warwick Avenue—Lulu's, they shouted after him, was where his black ass belonged. His forehead struck the pavement, and yet he got himself up, ran until he saw an alleyway, and there cut away from the street and the Shore Patrol, who were all over the place on a Saturday, swinging their billy clubs. He wound up in the toilet of the only bar he dared to enter looking as battered as he did—a colored bar just a few hundred feet from Hampton Roads and the Newport News ferry (the ferry conveying the sailors to Lulu's) and some ten blocks from Oris's. It was his first colored bar since he was an East Orange schoolkid, back when he and a friend used to run the football pools out of Billy's Twilight Club down on the Newark line. During his first two years of high school, on top of the surreptitious boxing, he would be in and out of Billy's Twilight all through the fall, and it was there that he'd garnered the barroom lore he claimed to have learned—as an East Orange white kid—in a tavern owned by his Jewish old man.

He was remembering how he'd struggled to stanch his cut face and how he'd swabbed vainly away at his white jumper but how the blood dripped steadily down to spatter everything. The seatless bowl was coated with shit, the soggy plank floor awash with piss, the sink, if that thing was a sink, a swillish trough of sputum and puke—so that when the retching began because of the pain in his wrist, he threw up onto the wall he was facing rather than lower his face into all that filth.

It was a hideous, raucous dive, the worst, like no place he had ever seen, the most abominable he could have imagined, but he had to hide somewhere, and so, on a bench as far as he could get from the human wreckage swarming the bar, and in the clutches of all his fears, he tried to sip at a beer, to steady himself and dim the pain and to avoid drawing attention. Not that anyone at the bar had bothered looking his way after he'd bought the beer and disappeared against the wall back of the

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