Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

he at least had a vision of the future which included a wildness in itself, a succession of graduated pleasures and loves and joys, and if it was going to be a struggle, that was all right, too; he knew how to fight for what he wanted. In fact, that was almost all he did know. There were buried terrors, too; but he hoped that part of his life was finished. In this sense, he was that odd combination, a cynical optimist. His hopes were vague and even childish, but they were at least hopes, and their vagueness was a blessing; for many of the others, the future was all too clear.

Maybe they started out by tolerating him, but they ended up respecting him, because the only thing that counts in a poolhall is how well you shoot.

No, he wished he had some talent, like Billy’s for pool, that would make him as busy with himself as Billy seemed to be.

He had always been told that niggers were bad people, but no one had ever said why.

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.

“In the Marines, sure, you got to toe the line, but man, they’re tough ; you got to be good to make it. That’s worth doin.”

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.

the guards and everybody else on earth were prisoners in dark cells like themselves and just did not know it, and in fact they were in a worse prison than Jack was, because they were imprisoned by their own limits, and he was only imprisoned by them.

Everything seemed quite clear except the first step. He did not know what to do first.

he just tried to live his life his own way and that ran against the grain and he ended up, almost accidentally, in jail. And he could not hate accident. That was crazy.

You know, the worse thing in the whole fuckin world is to wake up in the middle of the night, when you’re helpless, man, an think to yourself, Billy, you’re a phony. You went to college because your heart ached,

It 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.

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.

From the moment they understood that word they would proceed through life half-murdered of their ability to love; the moment their eyes became wary they would cease to be children, and Billy was certain that he himself would not love them so much.

Black

They are alive, he thought; they have to put up with misery, like every living human. That’s the only way you ever learn anything.

So what was his life? Look out there at all the ten million things life can be, and tell yourself which are yours, and which you will never do. And there was the agony of it; so much he wanted to do, and so little he could do.

Yet he knew too much about the other world to try to pretend to join it. So he was not a member of anybody’s club, and he was lonely. Just a tourist, he thought; never a resident. Blah.

“Oh, yeah?” Billy could not help saying. “When does all this happen?” “Take it easy, Billy. Maybe not for a while, maybe not in our lives;

But I don’t want to be a Negro; I don’t want to be a white man; I don’t want to be a married man; I don’t want to be a businessman; I don’t want to be lonely.

I am a child, he thought. When am I going to grow up?

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

“You and me, now,” he said. “We’re connected. That’s good. And when the connection breaks, it’s over, that’s too bad, but it’s finished and a man would be a fool to try to make it go on when it’s all over. You dig? We got it, you don’t even have to admit it, but when we think of each other, we feel good, and that’s it. But when it busts, it’s busted, and that’s the end. Nothin happens twice.”

Jack wept that night, bitterly. He could find no thought to comfort himself. He could not even be enraged, only desolated, and more lonely than he had ever been in his life. There was nothing for him to do but weep, and he wept.

first there was one life and you just got used to it and pretended that there was nothing else, and then suddenly you remembered all the other things that could be done, and the urgency became frantic, everything else blurred away.

“What is your problem, then?” “I just told you. I want everything sometimes. And I’m not going to get everything. Ever.”

when you start with peanuts all you can lose is peanuts.

She blamed Jack for the whole thing. “I always win at the slots,” she said. She had never been more feminine, and Jack loved her for it.

They did not know he had talent as an actor, because they did not know what talent was.

Sally could tell at the end, when the cast lined up for their curtain call, that she had been almost the only one in the house to recognize his beauty, and it made her bitterly angry; she rushed out of the building with tears in her eyes and ended up wandering alone through the eucalyptus groves, full of hate for the people who could not, would not, recognize his talent, and full of love for him and for herself.

“The idea of prison is to reform people, they haven’t any right...“ “Now, where did you get that idea? The idea of prison is punishment, an any reforming done is strictly incidental.

But he did not want to analyze the emotion—it was too good to speculate about or attempt to define; it ought to be left alone and just felt.

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.

he had been avoiding the idea of change, putting off the necessary hard thought he would have to work his way through to discover what his life’s occupation was going to be.

He wondered how many people stayed married out of spite or from fear of being alone.

Look, all I’m good for is fighting.