We laughed. When he left Dido said, dreamily, “It was like a sweet delirium.”
The second week in January I received a letter from my mother telling me to be brave and cheerful and not to become despondent because I hadn’t received a Christmas pardon. The legislature hadn’t adjourned until Christmas week, she wrote, and the governor had been so busy with the budget he hadn’t had time to consider my case. “Reverend Bentley talked to Mr. Allison again and he seems to think you will get some action this coming summer,” she wrote.
“Are you sorry?” Dido asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but I had forgotten it until now.”
“Then I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m not sorry for our Christmas. I couldn’t be sorry for that.”
“I’m not, either,” I said.
When we wrote home that Sunday he said, “I told my mother about you last time, Jimmy. Do you want to say something to her?”
“Tell her that I think she is very swell people and that I think of her as my very own mother and that I love her very much.”
“I’ll tell her. She’ll like that.”
“I’m going to tell my mother about you,” I said.
He looked up, as startled as a deer. “I hope she doesn’t dislike me.”
“Oh, she’ll love you,” I said. I had my doubts.
He looked very queer when I said that but I didn’t think anything about it at the time.
“You never speak of your father,” I said.
“You don’t speak of yours, either.”
“Mine’s in Terre Haute,” I said.
“Mine’s in San Francisco.”
We looked at each other.
During the weeks following we became very literary and read O. Henry together. Once I said, “You’re a sweet child.”
His reaction was abrupt. “Oh, how lovely!” he exclaimed, his eyes turning smoky with wistfulness. “Call me that always.”
And then we ran across the name “Puggy Wuggy” and he said, “What a darling name and it just fits you.”
“Me!” I said. “What the hell?”
“You have a Puggy-Wuggy nose that quirks when you’re about to laugh—” he said, his husky voice teasing and his eyes alight with mischief.
“That’s no compliment.” I said.
“—and I love it and I’m going to call you Pussy Wuggy—”
“The hell you are!”
“—and you’re going to call me Sweet Child. Won’t that be nice?”
“No,” I said.
We loved O. Henry. “He knew a lot about people,” I said.
“Prison was his school,” he said. “He did his bit in Ohio, working in the hospital—”
“Selling blue boys no doubt, if they have ‘em over there.”
We laughed.
When my mother came over that month she asked me about Dido and I told her he was the most intelligent convict I had met in prison. He’s about my age and his mother lives in California and he’s a swell friend, I said. It was all about Dido. But she wasn’t sold.
But his mother was entirely sold on me. Her next letter was addressed to her “two sons,” and she said as soon as she got the money she was coming to visit us both; she wanted to see us very much.
“If you get out this summer I want you to go and live with her,” he said.
“Is she as nice as you?” I asked.
“Oh, she’s much nicer.”
“Maybe I’ll fall in love with her,” I said. “She seems very young and I go for the Dido family.”
He was very enthusiastic. “You will, Jimmy. I’ll write her and tell her you’re coming. You will love her—” he broke off. His face settled so abruptly it was ugly in the change. “You said you’d fall in love with her. What did you mean?” he asked. His voice was flat as mud.
I could have told him that I didn’t mean a thing because I didn’t. But some perverse impulse made me say, “After all, I’m a man. I’ve been in here five years. What else could I mean?”
“She’s not like that,” he said. “She’s just as good as your mother. She’s better than anyone’s mother. She’s deeply religious.”
“But she’s a woman just the same,” I said, impelled by some imp of cruelty. “And she’s beautiful.”
He stood up, dull-eyed, dopey-faced, remote. His shoulders sagged, his head drooped forward, his hands hung lifeless at his sides. I noticed that they were large hands.
“There were some swell moments, Jimmy,” he said. “I’ll remember those.” There was a grinding nonchalance to his voice that jarred me. His lips twitched as if he was trying to smile, and then they stopped as if he had given up and his eyes filled with hurt. He was very ugly. He turned away as the hurt came into his eyes, and walked down the aisle with his knees buckling again.
For a moment I stood there, watching him. Then I thought, well, that’s Dido. I sat on the bench and leaned back against the table and lit a cigarette. And then it hit me, a wave of hurt. My stomach became hollow and sick and I filled with a cold, draining fear. I realized suddenly that I was trying to get up and go after him. But the thousand emotions which were rushing through me had assumed weight and the weight anchored me to my seat. I was stunned. After a time I began trembling violently. I had to get up and walk about to stop it. I passed him in the aisle but he looked away without speaking. I winced.
In twenty minutes everybody in the dormitory knew that we had fallen out. I went over to my bunk and stretched out, fully dressed. Signifier came over and asked me what was the trouble. I shook my head. I couldn’t talk. Then Candy and Dew Baby and Wrinklehead came over. “No beef,” I said. “We just cut out, that’s all.” They started planning how they would gang up on him and run him out of the dormitory. But I shook my head again. “Let him alone,” I said.
Later that night he got into trouble in the poker game. A fight started between him and Starrett and Starrett went after a knife. Dutch gave Dido a knife. Signifier came over and told me that Dido was about to get into a knife fight. It made me sick enough to vomit. It was like hearing of your sister in a knife fight. I pulled myself up and went out and tried to talk to Dido. He was standing in the aisle waiting for Starrett. His face was a dead dopey white, his lips a bluish bruise, his eyes lidded. There was that drugged remoteness in his face. He had the knife in his hand and when I saw the naked blade a drawing coldness moved from the front of my body through to my back, contracting my lungs and heart. Goose flesh rippled down the back of my legs.
“Don’t do it, kid,” I said.
He turned and looked at me. “Frig you and everybody else,” he said.
Bleakly pitying, we looked at each other. “Honestly, I didn’t mean it,” I said.
A flicker of life brushed across his face. “But you, Jimmy, I put you in the stars.” His voice was accusing.
I went down to Starrett’s bunk as he was getting his gang together. I pushed one of the fellows to one side and leaned over and touched Starrett on the shoulder. He had his big dirk out and was wrapping his left arm with half of a prison blanket. He went into a crouch.
“If there’s a fight here tonight you’re going to die,” I said. Then, before he could reply, I backed away and returned to my bunk. I stood there wondering what I would have to do. I could feel my lips trembling. I couldn’t keep them from trembling. There are some things which I just don’t understand, I thought. Who’d have ever thought a person like Dido would take what I said like that?
Everyone in the dormitory had seen me talk to Starrett and they all knew what it meant. But Candy was the only one who came down to see if he could help me. He had a couple of knives he had borrowed and a piece of loaded pipe. I didn’t even see anything funny about so many weapons. I took them and laid them on my bunk and said, “Thanks, Candy, but you stay out of this.”
“I’ll be around,” he said. He went out and sat at the table.
Starrett came out into the aisle and looked over at me and stood for a moment, indecisive.
Someone had gone for Captain Charlie and he came down the aisle. Starrett went back to his bunk. Dutch came out from between two bunks and said something to Dido and Dido walked down towards the latrine with Dutch. I put the two knives and the piece of pipe underneath my pillow.
Captain Charlie stopped at my bunk and said, “You don’t want to get into this kind of fight, Jim. You behave yourself. I want to see you get out of here.”
“It’s all over now,” I said. “It was just a little rumble.”
“Let the others fight,” he said. “You’ve got more sense than that.” He was very angry with me. “What kind of fellow is that Dido, anyway?”
“He’s all right,” I said. “You just got to get to know him.”
He pursed his lips and walked away without replying. A few minutes later the lights winked. When I tried to unbutton my shirt my fingers seemed numb. Finally I got undressed and got into bed. I turned over on my stomach and lay watching the dormitory. Every time someone got up to go down to the latrine I tightened up. I lay there all night, wide-awake. That was the most miserable night I had ever spent. I was so damned scared.
All the next day I was scared. I saw Dido again at breakfast time but he didn’t look at me. I was scared to death for him. He never had a friend but me, I thought. And then I had let him down. But he must have really thought that we were right, I thought. I was just beginning to believe it because I never had.
He was with Dutch all that day. He was very reckless and sneering and don’t-caring and treating everyone like dogs. I hated seeing him with Dutch. But I knew Dutch would protect him for a time and I wasn’t quite as scared. Late that night, long after the lights were out, Dido came down to my bunk. “Could it ever be the same again, Jimmy?” he asked.
“It ought to be better,” I said. “I’ve learned so much.”
“You’ll probably never learn that all life is give and take, Jimmy,” he said, “but I can’t blame you, for that’s mostly a tough lesson.”
“The trouble with me is I’ve been in prison too long,” I said.
He was brooding. “I hate myself for doing this,” he said, “but I can’t help it.”
“Take me out of the stars,” I said. “It’s just a dream—it isn’t true.”
“All dreams are true, Jimmy. They’re true as long as you dream them.”
“Let’s not be so deep, boy,” I said. “We’ll get our beards entangled.” Suddenly we were laughing. It was very good to laugh again.
But we knew what it would be like if we ever broke up. We had only felt the breath of the loneliness—the scared cold nights and empty days—and we knew what the full measure would be. It stained our friendship with a hopeless, futile desperation, as if it was only borrowed and would have to be returned.
25
THEY PUT SOME more bunks in the dormitory and shifted us about so that Dido wound up in the corner where he could look out into the street. We’d stand with our feet on the bottom-bunk frame and lean across his bunk, side-by-side, and look out the window at the gray winter days and talk. He liked to talk about Los Angeles and the people there. He told me so much about Hollywood Boulevard and the time he drove somebody’s car at ninety miles an hour and got arrested when he was twelve, that I felt I had been there too. He liked to tell me about the people. He loved the people there.
“They’re the most natural people in the world,” he said. “They do the things they want to do, and aren’t afraid to live.”
“Everyone else seems to think a lot of them are rather queer.”
“Queer? That’s a funny word.”
“I mean sexually.”
He looked at me strangely. ‘There’s really nothing lost when a physical change is made unless you feel that it’s wrong. It’s the feeling that it’s wrong that makes it queer.”
“How did you feel?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“It never came to that,” he said again. I didn’t know why I needed to be reassured so often.
“Do you think queerness in prison is right?” I pressed.
“That’s an odd question—” he began.
“Why is it odd?”
“Do you?” he countered.
“Not particularly so,” I said.
“You can be rather brutal, Jimmy,” he said, hurt.
We talked of feelings and reactions. He told me how he abhorred fat people and how his mother’s best friend had wanted him to love her when he was twelve and how distasteful the suggestion had been. I asked him about women and he said he had had many women, perhaps more than the average person, but while he satisfied them they had always left him with a vague incompleteness.
“Emotionally I was never satisfied,” he said. “I needed to swoon. I couldn’t surrender; I needed to be conquered.”
I was shocked and repulsed but entirely fascinated.
“By a woman?” I asked. I really wanted to know.
“By love,” he said. “It’s like when you keep crying after you’ve been whipped, until finally you love the one who whipped you. I needed to be exhausted.” He broke off and looked at me. “Have you ever been exhausted by love?”
“I reckon not,” I said.
“Does it sound low?”
“Not particularly so,” I lied. “I just don’t like to hear about it.”
“You don’t have to worry, Jimmy,” he said. “You give me everything just as you are.”
We talked of our past lives too, and I told him of my dreams when I was a little boy. “I read a lot,” I said, “and I guess I must have built up a dreamworld about me. I came to feel that the things I did and the things which happened to me, such as eating and studying and sleeping, were things which really didn’t count; the real things were the things I dreamed, the castles and the soldiers and me being a general and a hero and all.”
“Tell me more,” he said. “It explains so many things.”
I told him about my growing up on a farm, and living in my dreams, and how tense I’d become when my parents moved to the city. “I felt that I was different from other boys,” I said. “I didn’t want to be different. It was then I came to feel that I had to prove something. At first I hadn’t cared much for doing it. It was like fighting. I hated to fight. But when someone hurt you, you fought them. That was the way it had been in books. And if you won they stopped. That was the way it had been about proving something. It was something I had to do to prove I wasn’t scared or different. I was always looking for something that wasn’t there.”
“Oh, God, Jimmy, do I give you anything?” he asked.
“You give me everything,” I said.
“I want to—I want to give you everything.”
We were silent, and he said, ‘Tell me about the girls.”
“There weren’t any girls. Not then,” I said. “I was pretty much alone.”
“Were you ever in love?”
“Once, I guess.” I told him about a girl I had known for one day when I was thirteen. “I guess she’s the only one I ever really loved. I never felt quite that same way about any of the others.”
We were silent for a long time while twilight deepened into dusk, and then I told him about high school and getting hurt. “I’d planned on enlisting in the army but I got hurt before I was old enough. I guess that scared me more than anything. I had always been sort of athletic and after I broke my back I felt that I was no more good for anything. I tried to go to college but I couldn’t stand it. I felt I was the only Jodie there. There was something about being a Jodie at that time that killed me—now I wouldn’t even give a damn.”
“What were the women like?”
I smiled at him. “All kinds. When I quit school I bought a car.” I told him about Margie killing herself. “I really liked her but I felt I was too young to get married. I couldn’t bear the thought of being tied down. I told her I’d pay for an abortion.” I took a breath and let it out. “But she didn’t want it that way.” He let the silence run. After awhile I said, “I guess that wa
s the end of me. My parents were divorced soon afterward, but that was anticlimax.” We watched the car lights pass on Spruce Street. “You know the story,” I said. “It’s very trite. It’s been told a hundred-thousand times and it’s always the same. Who gives a goddamn, anyway?”
“I like the way you tell it,” he said.
“How else could I tell it?”
“You know how you could tell it. Like all the others do. With that touch of gaudy glamor.”
“But I’m talking to you,” I said, and that explained it.
After a time he began telling me of himself. He said that when he was born his father left his mother, and she went to work as a nurse for an old invalid woman who was a member of a very wealthy family in Pasadena. He grew up with the three small grandchildren. And then one day when he was seven the youngest of the grandchildren had a birthday party and he wasn’t invited. He went out to the garage and put his arm against the doorjamb and slammed the heavy swinging door against it. Both bones were fractured and his arm bent double. Then he ran into the house where the party was in progress and showed them his broken arm.
“I wanted them to make over me,” he said. “When it healed up it left a tiny hole in my arm. I still have it.” He balled his fist and a tiny dimple appeared in the muscles of his forearm. “I went about showing everybody the hole in my arm. I was very proud of it.”
“I imagine you were very spoiled,” I said.
“There wasn’t any way for me to keep from being,” he said. “My mother lived for me. She got me everything I wanted. I never saw my father until I was fifteen, then my mother went to live with him and I ran away. I joined up with a carnival that had a pitch out on Wilshire Boulevard, and went to Texas with it. At first I was a roustabout then I got a job doubling for a guy who was faking as a Spanish Duke. His name was Harry Smith. He got into trouble with Poochy’s wife and had to scale. Poochy was the guy who owned the act. I got the part steady after that.”
Cast the First Stone Page 31