Cast the First Stone (39 page)

“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

T
HEY 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 was 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.”

“Is that where the ‘Duke Dido’ business comes in?” I asked. “She was a queen, you know, a really beautiful princess.”

He gave me a slow, strange smile. “Do you think so?”

“Your mother’s name is Davis. Is that yours too?”

“No, my father was named Medina. Alonzo Medina.”

“Was he Spanish?”

“I don’t know what he was, other than a bastard.” I was shocked by the hatred in his voice.

“So you fell in love with Poochy’s beautiful blond wife and had to scale, too,” I said.

He looked startled. “It does sound like a pulp story, doesn’t it? But she really was beautiful. She had long silky golden hair, and cuddled like a cat. You would have liked her,” he said, looking at me out of the comers of his eyes.

After a moment he said, “She ruined me for other women. She never got enough; she wanted buckets of it. I was just sixteen and she was the first woman I ever had. We showed in White City and then Elkhart. That was where Poochy caught us and I had to run away without any clothes. I wore tails and a top hat for my act and I had to run away in that.”

“Where did you go?” I asked, amused.

“Chicago. I think Poochy liked me for himself. He saw me in Chicago once and wanted me to go to the hotel with him.”

I hated him when he talked like that. It made me sick thinking of what he might have been to someone else.

“After that I hoboed South,” he said. “I got caught for grand larceny and did a year on a Florida chain gang. That was tough. My mother sent me some money then, to come home on, but I went to Philadelphia instead and got a job as an entertainer in a honky-tonk. Oh, I had plenty of gall. I worked out a song act, playing my own accompaniment on a banjo uke, but it didn’t take so I tried to work in a dance routine with it. I might have made it go, sooner or later, if I hadn’t broken my kneecaps.”

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Oh, I was riding a freight, coming out of Pittsburgh, and got to fighting with a guy. We were in a boxcar and he wanted to make me and he knocked me off the train.”

It made me sick to hear him confess such things. I tried to change the conversation. “And after that what did you do?”

“I began impersonating females in the cabarets. There was a big call for that and I did all right. I didn’t need legs; I did my song-and-banjo act. The toughest thing was dodging the patrons. It seems as if every old fat bald-headed man in the joint wanted to make the female impersonator, as soon as he had a few. I know you will think this is funny, but I was always a little hysterical about girls. Not sexually; I told you how I felt toward them sexually. I wanted to keep them up, buy them diamonds and furs and stuff. All the trouble I was ever in came from me trying to get something for some woman or other.”

I fished out a cigarette and he took it and I lit another one. He strung his uke about his neck. ‘That’s about all of it, Jimmy,” he said. “I joined the army and then deserted after three months. That was after I did my bit in Florida. When I got arrested here the army came and got me and made me serve six months for desertion, and then they turned me over to the reformatory and I served two years. I was out twelve days and now I’m doing ten.” He gave me a look and suddenly began grinning. “All right, I’ll break out the blues,” he said. “We’re just a couple of old sob sisters, aren’t we?”