Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

If they seemed too noisy, too wild, too defiant, perhaps it was a little out of desperation, because lying before them were endless years of dull existence, shabby jobs, unattractive mates, and brats with no more future than themselves.

if he did get away (assuming the cops showed up at all), he would still be right back where he started: broke, locked out, etc. He felt a stirring of anger, not at society for failing to have provided him with money; not at himself for his refusal to work; but at the situation itself, for existing.

He just sat and smiled at Denny and saw what time had done to him and wondered, now comfortably, why he was so bothered by time. It happens to everybody this way, he thought, we sit here and get older and die and nothing happens.

When he was first thrown into the hole what bothered him most was not the lack of a blanket, the cramped space, or the early terrors of the dark; it was the fact that he was naked, that he had been stripped of his dignity. It did not matter that there was no one to see him; what mattered in increasing dimensions of hatred was the humiliation of his nakedness, which seemed to deprive him of any kind of pride, took away his self-esteem, his humanity, his right to think of himself as a man.

But it did not take much thinking on their part to see that if Jesus Christ and God approved of the administration of the orphanage, in fact preferred it to home and parents, then they were the enemies of the orphanage children because if that hollow cavity in their souls was the love of God then God was the ultimate murderer of love.

They acted as if they believed only one thing: that force and force alone governed. And this the children believed too, in their hearts, and most of them dreamed of the time when the power of force would be in their hands.

But, and this is what puzzled Jack now, once you grow out of this, once you learn that it is all nonsense, that what you thought as a child was nothing more than the excuses of selfpity, what did you replace it with? You had a life, and you were not content with it; where did you aim it?

The whole idea of a good life was silly. Because there was no such thing as good and bad, or good and evil. Not the orphanage way, with good equaling the dull and painful and stupid, and evil the bright and delicious and explosive; and certainly not the simple reverse of this—it would be all very well to live purely to have fun, but what did you do after you had had all the fun you wanted?

It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.

He was still trying to absorb the sights and sounds of the prison; it was his new home, and he expected it to be, almost wanted it to be, his home for the rest of his life. Because to think any other way was to hope, and he hoped he had given up hope.

“It wasn’t money, I found that out in a hurry. Money, man, I could get money. I had money. That’s how goddam dumb I was then. I thought me an my brains and my good right arm could get me all the money I wanted. You know? The big problem was I guess I was just empty most of the time.

The perfect convict, the man who lived entirely by the rules set down for him, was not a man but a vegetable. And the constant troublemaker, no matter how sick he was inside, was actually doing just what the State expected of him, therefore justifying the existence of the prison. So it was a matter of delicate balance between defiance and obedience.

His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten.

Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth, or understanding.

Money could make the difference; he had always believed it. He hadn’t really known what money was for until he had children. It is for them.

When she was drunk or naked, Billy decided, she was a ball; but sober and dressed she was nothing at all.

They eyed each other steadily, and Billy knew the fat man was right; he would not quit, neither of them would, until the other was broke. That was it; that was the center of it all, the nugget of truth he had been searching for all his life: to do something that was endless, to risk it all on himself.

In Hollywood she had been a nothing, the wife of an actor, someone to whom you made a point of saying hello; in San Francisco, on the other hand, she was a celebrity in her own right, someone who had given up all that to return to the only really cultured and exciting city in the Western Hemisphere. Sally knew what a damned lie it was; she knew she had run away from all that excitement, all that bubbling creativity, because down there she had been only a bystander; she knew she had come back to San Francisco to find some thing, some place, where she could again be central. And so she married Jack Levitt.

But of course there were other things to occupy him; the Sex Problem was enormous, but not all that enormous. There was also culture, the matter of what did he want to do with his life, how was he to improve himself in order to enjoy life to the fullest, to be able to draw pleasure from as many possible sources and to understand the natural pains of existence so they wouldn’t trouble him too much. He wanted a full life, which would have in it love, a kind of work he could love, sports, art, books, the theater, hobbies, friends, and most of all—most important, the pinnacle—children.

Jack had not been loved as a child; he had not even been liked. And it had almost destroyed him. He had been nothing until he had been loved.

By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive.

Gradually, through his books, his records, his long walks alone, the mere passage of time, he would begin to come to terms with his life as it was. He became an observer. He began to taste his food and to smell the air. He saw things and felt them.