ENOCH AND THE GORILLA ENOCH EMERY / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM ENOCH AND THE GORILLA ENOCH EMERY / TUTORIALOUTLET | Page 9

indicating the customer reading the newspaper. He slid over the stools
and began reading the outside
sheet of the man’s paper.
The man lowered the paper and looked at him. Enoch smiled. The
man raised the paper again. “Could I
borrow some part of your paper that you ain’t studying?” Enoch
asked. The man lowered it again and
stared at him; he had muddy unflinching eyes. He leafed deliberately
through the paper and shook out
the sheet with the comic strips and handed it to Enoch. It was Enoch’s
favorite part. He read it every
evening like an office. While he ate the cake that the waitress had
torpedoed down the counter at him,
he read and felt himself surge with kindness and courage and strength.
When he finished one side, he turned the sheet over and began to scan
the advertisements for movies
that filled the other side. His eye went over three columns without
stopping; then it came to a box that
advertised Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch, and listed the theaters he
would visit on his tour and the hours
he would be at each one. In thirty minutes he would arrive at the
Victory on 57th Street and that would
be his last appearance in the city.
If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a certain
transformation in his
countenance. It still shone with the inspiration he had absorbed from
the comic strips, but something