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“You’ve got to realize I’m not like you. I’m too warped and tangled by too many yesterdays to be like you. This doesn’t mean I’m fated to be a menace to society. If I believed my future had to be like my past, I’d kill myself. I’m tired. I can bend enough to stay within the law, but I’m never going to be the guy who goes home to San Fernando Valley to a wife and kids. I wish I was that guy, but I’m not. And your threats aren’t going to hold me. Threats instill fury, not fear.”
Pain without purpose is the most unendurable kind.
It was a fury beyond hatred. It embraced God and man. It grew from the corpse of my last hope to belong to mankind and what mankind professed as good.
Remorse swelled through me—not exactly remorse but a hope that he was insured.
I was enjoying life too much, was making things too precious, especially when it had to end. Had I lawfully reached my situation, a nice automobile (but not new), a decent wardrobe (but not a closet of silk suits and alligator shoes), a comfortable dwelling (but not a penthouse), and a woman whom I liked, nothing in the world could have induced me to risk losing it by committing a crime. I would have worked my ass off.
Memory of Chicago is more an impressionist watercolor, all blurred detail and color, than the clear image of a photograph. The city’s tangle of red, green, and silver neon on wet streets was brilliance daubed on bleakness.
