Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

He wanted to burst into tears. It loomed over him: he was alone, unwanted, unsearched for, hounded by the police, useless, black. But even that didn’t matter; not the blackness. He wasn’t even black, just yellow. That didn’t matter; he could pat flour all over his face—he had done that once as a little kid—and they would still ignore him or laugh at him; it was him, not the blackness; him they didn’t want and let run away and did not care if he ended up in a strange jail and left to rot. With the dreadful clarity of self-pity he saw himself as he really was, a frightened little baby who hadn’t the guts to stand up to the accident of his birth, who hadn’t the character to make the world like him or eat it. Just another yellowbelly, just another fool who gave money away and hoped people would take pity on him.

He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare, and by the time they got to the top of the stairs and piled into the car, he was bubbling with humor, and when he got up on Jack Levitt’s lap—the only place he could sit—he said, “Now, every time we go over a bump, you owe me a dollar.”

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. Damn it! he thought.

Jack nodded and drank some of his beer. He did not add that he had also bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid furnished rooms, pretended the vacuum was freedom, wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream. 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.

How do you wake up? It was one thing to know that you had been asleep all your life, but something else to wake up from it, to find out you were really alive and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but your own. Of course that was the problem. All right. Everything is a dream. Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change. Your eyes see things and your ears hear, but nothing has any reason behind it. It would be easier to believe in God. Then you could wake

together on a plan of mercy and death, punishment for evil, joy for good, and if the game was crazy at least it had rules. But that didn’t make sense. It had never made any sense. The trouble was, now that he was not asleep and not awake, what he saw and heard didn’t make sense either. Mishmash, he thought. You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don’t know enough to know why. Sitting in another lousy hotel room waiting for a couple of girls you’ve never seen before to do a bunch of things you’ve done so many times it makes your skin crawl just to think about it. Things. To do. That you dreamed about when you couldn’t have them. When there was only one thing, really, that made you feel good, and now you’ve done that so many times it’s like masturbating. Except you never really made it, did you. Never really killed anybody. That’s what you’ve always wanted to do, smash the brains out of somebody’s head; break him apart until nothing is left but you. But you never made it.

Actually, the reform school was a model of life without artifice, without the gilding of purpose and reason to brighten the truth: that men were units to be taken care of and kept quiet—nothing else mattered except you weren’t supposed to kill them.

They did not feed him every day, and because of that he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. After a while time ceased to exist. Time stopped in a strange way. First, he was aware that there was no present, no such thing as a moment; there was only the movement of his thoughts from past to future, from what had happened to what would happen. Then what had happened ceased to be real, as if his mind had invented a past his body could not remember; his senses were betraying him into dreams and the dreams eventually lost all contact with the senses. At first, he could not see because there was no light in his cell; then that became a delusion, and he could not see because he could not see, and then even that lost its reality, and he could not see because there was nothing to see, and never had been—his mind had tricked him into believing that there were colors and shapes, and he knew that there were no such things. At times, all his senses deserted him, and he could not feel the coldness of the concrete or smell his excrement, and the small sounds he made and the sounds

that filtered in through the door gradually dimmed, and he was left alone inside his mind, without a past to envision, since his inner vision was gone, too, and without a future to dream, because there was nothing but this emptiness and himself. It was not uncomfortable, not comfortable. These things did not exist. It was colorless, senseless, mindless, and he sometimes just disappeared into it.

something else, something they didn’t have words for. He really did not understand people who worked for a living. But he did not really dislike them, only the ones who tried to push him around. And there weren’t very many of those.

thinking, magnifying, Sue’s response to their one night together, until at last his mind was making a distinction between what he was doing with Mona and what he wanted to do with Sue, as the difference between satisfying an itch and making a discovery. He had never thought about sex in quite that way, and it gave focus to an otherwise endlessly empty round of days, and kept him involved with Denny and the girls when otherwise he might have checked out of the hotel and left them, gone off and done the serious thinking he had come to San Francisco to do in the first place—or so he sometimes thought. To live intimately with any person, however, is to pursue understanding, and after two weeks Jack felt that he knew more about Mona than there was to her, and since he was not going to release any of the hidden parts of himself to her, there were not even the satisfactions of being understood. Mona was a crafty girl but she was not intelligent in any real way; she had a line of patter to cover almost any situation she could expect, but when

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.

Because the children of the orphanage were taught, all week long every week of their lives, that the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, was purely a question of feeling: if it felt good, it was bad, if it felt bad, it was good. The food at the orphanage did not taste very good, and the children were taught, told, that this food, this unappetizing oatmeal or dish of prunes or boiled-to-death vegetable, was nourishing and good for them and would make them strong and capable of much hard

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 would be like aiming your whole life at getting a sandwich, and then getting it, eating it, and having nothing left. It was just as stupid to spend your whole life avoiding pain, because you could see right away that this would logically mean locking yourself up in a room and

seemed so bleak. He swallowed a sip of the warmish whiskey and continued to stare out the window. The quality of the light had been changing and now everyone on the street seemed identical. He could see them out there, obsessed not with their destinies but by some simple problem of today: to do a piece of business, to finish shopping, to catch a bus, to bum a cigarette. Nothing important, except to themselves. The only difference is that I am in here, and they are out there. What do we want? He searched his mind very carefully, and could find

his corpse would be taken to the gas chamber and gassed, and then it would be taken out and buried; and through all this he would be floating above it, watching, listening, trying to understand what was happening to his meat and bones, to the body he used to inhabit; and the corpse would just sit there, dead, in its chair, rotting, beginning to stink, everyone else in the courtroom pretending that the corpse did not stink, and he even saw his eyes shrivel, and finally drop out of their dead sockets and roll down onto the floor, and saw an attendant come over and pick them up and put them into his pocket, and the eyeless corpse just sat there, getting smaller and yellower as the trial droned on, and finally, when they carted it off to the gas chamber, it was so small and so light that one man carried it under his arm like a doll, and how tiny it looked in that big chair, eyeless, toothless, the nose half eaten away with decay, as the tiny octagonal room filled with the mists of cyanide gas and the corpse got soggy with it and began to fall to pieces so that several men had to pull it away from the chair in fragments and dump the

the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.

Certainly, a few of them were getting rich off the inmates, but Jack could not think of any reason why they should not. If they didn’t, somebody else would. Everybody was just doing his job, making the machinery run smoothly. And so Jack could not hate anybody, or blame anybody, but himself. And in the end he could not even hate himself, because he had not willed

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.

was necessary for their self-esteem that they consider, no matter how comically, that they were in charge of their own destiny, and to break the rules a little demonstrated this. It also got stuff passed, which was probably even more important. 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.

“So there’s a lot of injustice. So what? What’s that got to do with you?” “Nothin. Only, I do hate it. Man, justice is based on the idea that we all got a right to live our lives any way we fuckin please, so long as we don’t fuck up anybody else. Okay, I did wrong. I’ll pay, I’ll do my time. But I hope you don’t think I’m doin this time cause I bopped that one little check. I hope you know I’d be home free or at worst out on probation if I had the money to buy a good lawyer.”

“Yeah. They sucked you in royally, tellin you that if you cooperate, everthin gets better an better. Man, don’t you know the machine don’t need your help? The only thing you can do to the machine is fuck it up. You can’t help it. But you can slow it down. Now,

Fuck it. I’ll do my time. But what grinds my ass is all the goddam people takin away my rights, stealin my money, makin it tough on my kids, an gettin away with it. I’m talkin about crime, not law. They don’t even have laws for some of the shit they pull.” “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin about,” Jack said. “You wouldn’t. You’re white.”

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. They played until four o’clock the next afternoon;

“Everythin in the whole fuckin world is connected, I think; and the connection turns you on, an the broken connections burn you out.

It’s like you get this tremendous urge to bust a window with your fist, dig, and if you went ahead and did it right then, wham, for about a half a second there you’d feel like the king of the world; but instead, you get to worryin about cuttin your hand and all that shit, so you hesitate and then get pissed off at yourself and bust the window anyway, only you’re self-conscious about it and don’t get any pleasure out of it at all.”

know how silly a lot of this sounds, dig, a philosophy of the poolhall; but shit, I looked around myself and I asked myself, what is my life, anyway, and the answer was quick and easy, my life is what I got, an if I don’t find anythin important in it, I’m dead. But, you know what it’s like when you get high sometimes and everything seems important? Well, it’s like that. If the way I feel about pool aint important, what the hell am I? So I sat down and tried to think up words for it, and the only one I could come up with was connect.”

So today it is closed, deserted, and remains a monument to man’s incredible stupidity on the one hand, and to his incredible courage and love of freedom on the other.

just as Jack would lie if somebody asked him about his private life. Maybe that was what they meant by “private.”

final edge, staring toward the open sea, breakers crashing beside his tiny figure, and she knew there were all sorts of romantic ideas pouring through his mind about life, the sea, nature, the size of the universe, man is a tiny creature, etc. etc. But she did not feel like sneering at him for it; she began to have images of this man, locked somewhere in a prison cell away from all possible thoughts of immensity, and she felt a great wave of pity for him, for the loss of his youth, for his naive, childlike expectation that the past was all over and he could just start from where he was and bury it all behind him and become a cultured person. It made her feel so bitter she wanted to cry.

“We’re lucky,” he said abruptly. “We have a sense of humor. That saves us. A lot of times.” “Saves us from what?” “Oh, you know. Arguing.” “I think argument is good for a marriage,” she said. “It cleans out the dirty little places; the stuff you might bury away.”

While both of them admitted that taste was a very personal matter, they argued as if each had the proper taste and the other had to be kidding or was being defensive.

“I’ve done a lot of that waiting jazz,” Jack said. “I know what it’s like.” “So have I,” Sally said. “What do you think I do all day?” And it was true. Sally was waiting for—she did not know what. Waiting day after day, perhaps for the nerve to walk out. It was not really the marriage she had hoped for, and she often wondered sickly if any marriage could be. She felt chained by the marriage, trapped, her freedom gone. It was so maddening. She would sometimes just sit around the house all day, anticipating Jack’s return, allowing most of the housework to go undone, and when Jack did arrive, she would experience a sharp sense of disappointment. She did not know why. Often she would awaken with a feeling of resolve—to give the apartment a thorough cleaning, or to get a job so that they would have enough money to do more things; but the dullness of the morning routine of breakfast, toilet, dishes, and daily newspaper would take the edge from her resolve, and she would just sit.

Jack was certain he was going back to San Quentin, and he retreated bitterly into his hard shell, hating himself for his pretended hardness. They offered him his one telephone call and he shook his head angrily; then, rising out of the stupid hardness, accepted, and called Sally. “I’m in jail,” he told her. “Oh my God, I’ll get you a lawyer,”

But the boy would know deep inside that it was done with love by a human being, not abstractly by a machine. Of course, that was what it amounted to; the boy would be loved. It was that simple. He would be loved, and he would know it, and that would give him the strength to face any kind of injustice. 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. From that moment (the moment, he thought with a pang, of Billy’s death) his life

how long he had managed to stay innocent, dramatizing his adversity the way a kid does, as if to prove that it exists. By then the past would lie half-buried in his imagination and the future would stand before him as implacable, faceless, and beyond his power to control as it always had—but with the calming difference that now he knew it and accepted it. 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. By then he would understand that fulfillment was only temporary, and desire the enemy of death. By then he

last long drop to eternity would have been only an act of revenge, hurting no one but himself. There were other alternatives, too, born out of a need to act, a need for drama. He could have become a professional thief, revenging himself on a society he no longer loved or hated. He could have gone for junk or alcohol as weapons against his pain; they worked for some men, but he knew they would not work

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. The earth became real, and at times he was capable of sensing the pleasure of existence. Other times were not so good.