Hard Rain Falling (New York Review Books Classics)

by Don Carpenter

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.