The human stain by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Unread, 110 best books: Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9780375726347
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2001-10-13T23:00:00+00:00

despite Walter's warning, to show himself to his mother. No. Absolutely

not. And instead he continued straight on home to his white

wife and his white child.

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

WHAT DO YOU D O . . . ?

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 empty tables: just as at the white

THE HUMAN STAIN

cathouse, nobody took him here for anything other than what

he was.

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