Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

Whatever made him run away from Oakland to the Wild West seemed to have been taken care of, one way or another. Maybe what he wanted was freedom. Maybe he looked around and saw that everybody was imprisoned by Oakland, by their own small neighborhoods; everybody was breathing the same air, inheriting the same seats in school, taking the same stale jobs as their fathers and living in the same shabby stucco homes. Maybe it all looked to him like a prison or a trap, the way everybody expected him to do certain things because they had always been done a certain way, and they expected him to be good at doing these strange, meaningless, lonely things, and maybe he was afraid—of the buildings, the smoke, the stink of the bay, the gray look everybody had. Maybe he was afraid that he too would become one of these grown people whose faces were blank and lonely, and he too would have to satisfy himself with a house in the neighborhood and one of the girls from high school and a job at one or another factory and just sit there and die of it. So he ran for the only frontier he ever heard about and became a cowboy. But of course he brought it all with him when he ran, and it kept at him, jabbing, destroying, murdering, until he himself was all gone and nothing was left but a man’s body doing work. And finally that died too.

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. He took another drink of whiskey. There was nothing he could do about it now; so he might just as well get as drunk as he could, have fun, find a girl, and worry about later later.

It was not a significant moment for any of them, but later on, when Jack had plenty of time to think, the moment took on significance: it was the last time he was to see either of them for years. He thought about them, both of them, often, as he sat in darkness and dreamed away his past; thought of Denny’s friendliness, his openhearted kindness; blew it up all out of proportion, made Denny into a kind of saint in his memory; effectively destroyed the real Denny—thought about Billy and about his talent, his courage, exaggerated him as he did with Denny, so that both boys became almost symbolic of what he lacked, or what he dreamed, in darkness, that he lacked. Then he forgot about them as he forgot about almost everything. But that was later.

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 up and yawn and stretch and grin at a world that was put 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.

Everybody knew what was what, but nobody wanted to be straight about it. They would go on like this—bored, indifferent, edgy, too hip to live—until they got drunk, and then somebody would turn on the radio and they would dance in the tiny space between the beds, and somebody would push somebody down onto the bed, and in the darkness the four of them would be sorted out into fornicating couples almost at random, with the light coming in through the window shade, and later somebody would throw up, and some time after that somebody would suggest that they switch partners, and after an hour of dull bitching they might or might not, and everybody would fall asleep from alcohol and boredom, and the radio would keep playing through their fuzzy dreams, and eventually they would all have to wake up. So much waste, he thought. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of this overwhelming sense of waste. He had come to San Francisco to think, and he was not going to do it. He was always doing the easy thing, the thing that first came to hand.

She had gone through about ten emotions in ten seconds and now she was bawling. But that was just like a whore, wasn’t it? All of the whores Jack had known very well, no matter how cool and businesslike, turned hysterical in the end, went on shit or fell in love with other whores or sat around talking about suicide or pretending they were catching tuberculosis; and suddenly Jack knew that Sue and Mona were going to be just exactly what they were afraid of, and that so far no smart pimps had gotten hold of them and taken them over the bumps, or they’d have been turned out long before. It was just a matter of time, and Mona would learn about getting the money first, and Sue would forget about liking it; the life would soften them, and tears would come easier and love harder. It was depressing. A life of prostitution seemed so drab. But then he had to admit that the girls weren’t really cut out for any thing else, except maybe working behind a counter somewhere, going out with small-time sports and fading out into drab marriages and the bitterness of obscurity. Either way. What difference did it make? He felt a little sorry for them, for Sue, now silent and pretending sleep, and then he corrected himself angrily. To feel sorry for them was to pretend that he was any better, and worse, to pretend that he cared about them. Which was nonsense, both ways. He had whored a little himself, hadn’t he? What else could you call boxing? Of course, he had enjoyed boxing for a while, but ...

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 the unusual happened, she hid quickly behind a barrier of sarcasm, or a comically old-fashioned morality.

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 letting the authorities take over, bring your food, take away your excrement; even if the authorities provided entertainment for the senses, you would still be a prisoner....

You didn’t go to jail for what you did; you went because they caught hold of you and didn’t know what else to do, and so they put you in jail. They. Yes, they. The filing cabinets in the orphanage. The city hall. The parking meter. The hotel-room door. Batman. Never anybody real sending you to jail. The cops didn’t do it. The District Attorney didn’t do it. His chair is doing it. Sending my meat and bones to jail, and I got to go along. That’s all. Nothing personal.

As for the true crimes of his life, the crime of being born without parents, the crime of being physically strong and quick, the crime of not having a puritan conscience, the crime of existing in a society in which he and everybody else permitted crime without rising up in outrage: well, he was purely and perfectly guilty here, too, as was everybody else. So that didn’t matter, either. The trick was to keep from being “punished” for his “crimes.” He decided that to fight the authorities, to balk, would in a sense be admitting that they were right and he was wrong. But of course there wasn’t any right or wrong. So it was better to cooperate, to do anything that would lessen his punishment. Except that in his heart he felt deep personal rage at himself for cooperating. It made him grind his teeth together to keep from shouting out his self-hatred, from beating himself against the concrete wall of his cell; the thought kept ballooning up in his mind that they had no right to treat him like an animal, no matter what he had done or not done. All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. 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.

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.

Jack said. “They put us in here because it was easier than leaving us outside on the street. They had the power and they used it. I’m no victim of injustice. I’m not a victim of anything.”

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. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe.

“Night or day it’s all one in those damn 24-hour joints,” Billy said one slow evening a few days before he was killed. “That’s the hell of it, man; they’re air-conditioned, open all night, soft music playin, an you don’t know what day it is after a while, or if it’s winter or summer. Time dies in a place like that, you feel pulled loose from it, like dreaming, dig, you don’t even know if you’re hungry. Like comin out of a movie, dig, and it’s bright sunlight out and you’re blinkin away and people are walkin around on business and you wonder what the hell world you fell into.

When you lose you lose forever, an when you win it only lasts a second or two. That’s life. I aint lyin.

The whole function of Alcatraz was its hopelessness, and if the convicts started leaving any time they felt like it, well.... 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.

a few from all-night parties, drunk, sitting at the little tables eating their croissants and pouring brandy into their coffee, talking the brittle patter of people who don’t have anything to do with themselves. Saul

He was a rich and famous actor. You see him all the time, these days, having serious conversations with dogs and sadly killing Indians.

Maybe society didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe where you were born and who you were raised by didn’t affect things at all. Maybe some people were just naturally rotten and others just naturally good. But if that was the case, then what could he do to make sure Billy, his son, would turn out good? Nothing. It was an awful word. Nothing. It made him sick at heart. He refused to believe in it. He demanded that there be something he could do. He demanded that his love be worth something to his child. If it wasn’t, life was garbage. He had to rule out the idea that life was just a matter of accident, of percentages, because it was just too goddam much to stand for. Even if it was true, he was determined to live as if it were false. There had to be some way you could make yourself be felt.

Life promises them so much, and then it all comes to nothing. It has to, because the promises are false; they have to be false, because they are too promising.

Perhaps all marriages had some of this quality, and if there wasn’t a binding force stronger than love—or was it only passion?—something like a religion, a code, a blind facing-away from the messy inconclusiveness of life, a marriage was doomed from the moment the man and woman regained their sight. He did not know. He wondered how many people stayed married out of spite or from fear of being alone. He wondered how many children were raised in homes without love, where the counterfeit was accepted as the coin, where the words were warm and the eyes and heart cold.

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. There were evenings when he would drink too much and get to feeling sorry for himself, and at such times he was easy to provoke. Among the regulars of North Beach he became known as a likable but unpredictable character, and it amused him to see the wariness in their eyes. His life was temporary. He continued to park cars for a living, and he stayed in hotels and ate in restaurants, but for the time being, that was enough. Not that he planned to spend the rest of his life this way. He did not plan anything.