“Don’t argue with him, Converse. Let him wail when he’s pissed off.”
It was nearly dark, the brown hills melding into shadow, the stars out.
Danskin looked up and down the darkened road and climbed behind the wheel.
“Sit up here,” he told Converse.
Smitty climbed in the back and slammed the door.
“You think it’s a good idea to drive at night like this?” he asked Danskin. “The border patrol rides around up here.”
Danskin switched on the car lights and started up.
“They have enough to look for. They don’t have our plates on their list, they shouldn’t bother us.”
“Antheil should have cooled them.”
“If we get stopped and rousted,” Danskin said, “we take the fall and keep quiet. Antheil can take care of it after. That means you too,” he told Converse.
They rounded curve after curve in the darkness. There were mule deer in the hills and several times Danskin had to halt the car and kill the lights to let them cross the road. Smitty went to sleep in the back.
Converse was dozing when he felt Danskin nudge his elbow.
“Talk,” Danskin said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m going to sleep here. Say something and piss me off.” Converse looked at him for a moment and then leaned his head back on the seat and closed his eyes.
“Converse.”
“Yeah?”
“I was locked up for nine years, you know that? In the madhouse. For a violent act.”
“Maybe,” Converse suggested, “you’d rather not talk about it.”
“You don’t want to hear?”
Converse hesitated.
“No,” he said.
Having said it, he turned an anxious glance. He could see Danskin’s face dimly in the panel lights; he seemed to be smiling but one could never be sure. Converse shivered.
“You’ve already impressed me,” he told Danskin. “Save it for the next guy.”
“You ever locked up, Converse?”
“Never.”
“Then you’re a fucking virgin. You don’t know what anything’s about.”
“Yes, I do,” Converse said. “Nineteen sixty to nineteen sixty-nine, I was inside.”
“You missed a lot.”
“You think so?” Danskin snorted with contempt. “I missed nothing. Anything was going on outside, man it was going on in there. Sometimes stuff started in there and hit the street later.”
“That I can believe.”
“When I got there, Converse, I was in a dungeon. There was a guy there — anything they put in with him, he’d eat it. A mattress. Your arm.”
Converse nodded.
“I learned to be a pussycat in there. They’d take me down to the shrink and he’d try to piss me off so the goons could bounce me off the wall. I’d smile.
“Finally I got out into population and that was O.K. Nurses, all kinds of dope. I saw it all, Converse — everything you think I missed. We had civil rights assholes come in there. We had a guy who checked into a hotel in Mobile and lived on canned tortillas and tried to radiate love energy all over Alabama until the cops took him out and tied him up. We had a beatnik poet who wore salami patches on his tweed sport coat. The real Mr. Clean — he was there, he was gonna sue Procter and Gamble. A guy who said he was Fred Waring. Another guy, he took a shotgun and blasted four secretaries at Adelphi College. If I hadn’t been there I wouldn’t be talking to you because it was dope and politics in that place, just like outside. But man, they did not want me out of there. I didn’t ever think I’d make it. It was kind of a famous case.”
“All right,” Converse said. “What did you do?”
Danskin nodded with satisfaction.
“You know Brooklyn?”
“Sure.”
“Saturday night,” Danskin said. “The Loew’s Lido, East Flatbush. The Searchers is playing. John Wayne.
“I was seventeen years old, I was a freshman at Brooklyn College. I was a virgin. I had never had a girlfriend. So, it’s Saturday night and I’m going to the movies by myself.
“Just as I’m about to buy the ticket, I see the ticket-taker walk into the John. So I ask the cashier for change of a bill and then — very nonchalant — I walk past the doors and into the movie house. I skip my usual bag of popcorn and I go and find my favorite seat. On the left side toward the front.
“Very soon there’s a little commotion at the back and I figure — Fuck, man, I’m discovered. Down comes the usher with his light. Now the usher is a kid I know and his name is Bruce. Bruce and I were at Midwood together. We have a strong mutual contempt. Bruce stands there shining his light in my face and I become extremely upset.
“Because Bruce is really very intelligent Bruce has always had girlfriends and now he has a girlfriend, the sister of a guy I know, the most beautiful girl you could imagine. Bruce is a superb athlete. Bruce has a scholarship to Cornell.
“So Bruce shines the light and he says — in his cultivated about-to-go-to-Cornell voice — ‘O.K., Danskin, wise guy, where’s your stub?’”
Danskin shrugged as he drove, and mocked himself in falsetto.
“‘I don’t have a stub, Brucie. I lost it.’
“So he laughs at me. He says, ‘You were with another guy, there’s two of you, where’s the other guy?’ So me — quick thinker — I say, ‘No, Bruce it was just me.’
“The manager is there now, they’re both standing over me with the light, they’re both laughing. ‘Danskin,’ Bruce says, ‘come with me, please.’ They escort me up the aisle, past maybe twenty people I know or who know me and outside to the cashier’s box.
“‘This is where you buy the tickets,’ Bruce says. And just before he went inside he gave me a look, a little expression, a little twinkle of the eyes which says, ‘Danskin, what a schmuck you are, what a contemptible idiot, what a fucking fool.’”
Danskin sighed.
“Needless to say, I no longer felt like the movies. I walked home and all I could think about was how after the show Bruce is going to meet his girlfriend and he’ll tell her. They’ll laugh about the moron, the funny animal. She’ll tell Bruce how clever he is.
“I got home and for a couple of hours I worked on my stamp collection. That almost always calmed me down. Only this time, it didn’t. I couldn’t get it out of my head, you understand. I realized…” He turned to Converse ferociously. Converse looked nervously at the road.
“I realized this was it! There was nothing else for me to do. I had absolutely no choice.
“First I took my whole stamp collection — I started it when I was about six — I took the whole thing to Prospect Park Lake and threw it in. I could have been mugged. A cop could have grabbed me. But they didn’t. Then I went in my father’s truck and I got a tire iron. I called up Bruce’s mother and she told me he was on a date. He wouldn’t be home until late.
“New Utrecht Avenue, there’s a playground between the subway stop and where Bruce’s house was. I waited in the playground, I sat on a bench holding the tire iron in my lap. Must be four in the morning — out of the subway — here comes Bruce. He didn’t see me until I was right on top of him. I was careful because he knew karate. He would, right?
“When he saw me, man, he knew! He knew then and there.
“The first one is right across the face and he’s down. No karate. Not a sound. I just stood over him and bam! Bam, that’s for your girlfriend. Bam, that’s for your scholarship to Cornell. Bam, that’s for the little twinkle. Bam bam bam bam bam. Lots and lots of times and Bruce’s little twinkle and his scholarship to Cornell is just a lot of mucus on the asphalt. Every light in every building on the street is turned on, three hundred cops are there, and I’m still pounding crud into the street and the playground looks like a meat market.”