Rebel Without a Cause (22 page)

I dreamed that our cells were next to each other, there was a wall between that might keep us from being too close; then we were separated by a floor. That’s probably why I became very angry, because it separated us. He moved first, then I got notice to move. I didn’t want to move out of my cell. We have been good friends for a year: he probably likes me more than he does anyone else; maybe he is in love with me. I kid him once in a while. I give him a look: I look at him and smile, and he walks up and down. When I smile at him he just can’t sit still. As long as I can avoid those situations I get along with him. That was the first time he did anything like that. He hasn’t said a word about it since. Usually I try to think about something to argue about with him so he doesn’t say anything. For instance, this morning we were waiting for our turn to come to get in line and I thought of something a fellow once told me about eschatology. I figured he wouldn’t know anything about it but he did. He always gets you somehow. He said I should do more of my own work before I talk about things like that. He says he knows something about everything. Sometimes I kid him. I tell him how smart he is and pat him on the back. He likes that.

As for the dream, I don’t know. We don’t live next to each other. I’ll tell you how it is: he lives on the second floor and I live on the third. Our cells are not directly above one another; there’s a cell between us. We talk to each other out of the windows once in a while.

I was really angry with him. He hasn’t said anything since and
I’ll probably never tell him; I’ll probably just forget about it. When I start thinking about a person, the first thing I think about is what do they think about my eyes.

L: ‘All along you’ve said you resent any reference to the condition of your eyes.’

Not always: not when
you
say something, for instance.

L: ‘Well, most of the time. Doesn’t that lead you to believe that you are anxious to hide, not only from other people, but also from yourself, the nature of the thing that lies behind the condition of your eyes?’

I see what you mean. Probably I can’t think of what caused it. I see what you mean. You know I don’t care what
you
say. To me you are the psychologist. I don’t dislike you when you are talking like this afternoon. I look on you as someone different from other people. I’m willing to do my best for you.

L: ‘Then you are willing to accept that statement?’

L: ‘In other words, you hate to have anyone remind you of the thing that precipitated your condition.’

But … I don’t know …

L: ‘Either you don’t know it or you don’t want to know it. Which is it?’

I think the more precise definition would be the second one. Maybe I’m afraid of knowing it. That seems the best. I don’t want to know it; yet I want to bring it out, bring it out if I can.

I don’t know why some people tell me that they are coming along better. I don’t want to listen to it.

Perry says he wishes you weren’t working with me.

If I could only think of an answer. It’s got to come out somehow.

I don’t remember much about my younger days. O, some small memories, little bits of pictures, but there was so much.

I believe I told you as well as myself the reason I so much dislike homosexuals. I don’t dislike Perry but I hate a lot of these people they call wolves. It all goes back to that incident in the clubhouse when I was about eight or nine. I think it all goes back there. I think it was an important part of my life. It caused me to feel about sexual acts the way I do, but it couldn’t have been the cause of my eyes being like this, because I distinctly remember that my eyes were like this when I was that old.

I was always believing in my mind, ever since I was ten, that when I’d get to be twenty-one I’d either be dead or my eyes would be fixed.

Something always told me that. Now I’m past twenty-one and I’m not dead and my eyes are getting fixed.

I don’t know whatever made me think of that. I used to go to see different doctors and they’d prescribe glasses for me and things like that. Once the Board of Health sent me to an eye specialist and he told me I would grow out of it before I was twenty-one. He said my eyes would be almost perfect and I believed it. Still I always had some doubts. I don’t know how I figured I’d be dead or have my eyes fixed. I’m not dead, but I’m in prison.

I feel that I have told you almost everything in my life but there is something, there must be something missing. The things I mostly talked about were the things I did most. The things I did only once and the things I intended doing are unimportant. I forget about them. I can’t remember them. The same things every day. When I go back further, to when I was ten or less, I have a picture in my mind of the class room … and the teachers, the pupils, how all the desks were lined up. I can see that …

I had a lot of fun out at the shore with my cousin, a very nice kid. She liked to sit out on the lawn at night, looking at the stars, sometimes until two o’clock in the morning. I know she liked me a lot. I went pretty far with her. Not too far, though; just far enough that I know I won’t have any trouble with her when I leave here if I ever see her again. If I ever see her again. I doubt if I ever will.…

I think I was about eight when I had a girl for the first time. I remember it was one of two sisters. I know it was when we lived on B—— Street. We lived there from the time I was about five, maybe younger than that. I remember we lived on F—— Street and moved from there to B—— Street and lived there for a few years. My father had a garage there and in his spare time he assembled
cars, put them together and sold them. Well, back of the garage, between the fence and the garage, there was an old cab body that had a seat in it. I think it was on that seat that I had the girl. I don’t remember how it was. Most of the kids used to play there. I remember it was late in the afternoon when I started playing around with her. She was about seven or eight. I don’t know if she went over to the same school as I did. I think she went to St. A—— School when I went to H—— Street. I don’t remember which girl it was, one of two sisters whose brother got his leg cut off on the railroad.

I recall several other young kids too. We were about seven or eight and we used to sneak out of class into the cloak room with cigarettes and smoke them. There was a kid everybody used to joke around: he was a barber’s son and he always had hair tonic on his head. Everybody used to kid him about it.

One time I was going to the corner grocery store for my mother. I remember I went into the wrong store. It was a funeral director’s place I went into instead of the grocery store. I don’t know why I went in there. I knew just how many stores the grocery store was from the corner, and I knew where the funeral parlor was and still I went in there. The man didn’t say anything to me. As soon as I went in I knew it was the wrong place.

We had a clubhouse behind the billboard, raised up against the billboard with the planks laid across the base and a hole in the side to get in. We had pictures of naked women all over the walls. I wasn’t the oldest fellow that belonged to this gang, nearly the youngest. Most of the others were ten or twelve years old. They used to make little guns, I guess you call them catapults, to put snowballs in. They were made just like a shot gun, thick and round, and they used to put rubber bands inside for snowballs. You pull them with a cord from the rear and shoot them out. One time we were trying to dig a tunnel from the clubhouse to the yard. We dug a hole first and started to go in toward the lot, and then one day it rained and everything caved in and we had to fill it all in again.

I can remember when Wazeki’s mother was taken away to the insane asylum. I looked out the window and saw the ambulance there. They put her in a straight jacket and put her on a stretcher and covered her with a sheet. That’s what they said; my father and
mother were talking; my mother was saying how sorry she was for the woman. I can remember her. She always was good to me. I only knew her a little while. She was raving and hollering and pulling her hair out, my mother was saying, and her husband was having her put away. Wazeki was about twelve then, I guess. He had a sister that I used to lay in bed with a lot when I got older. I’d go upstairs where they lived when nobody was home and start kissing her and putting my arms around her. I was about ten then. I don’t remember much about her mother being taken away. I was sleeping then on the davenport in the parlor, and my father and mother were in the window looking out and talking. There was a victrola in that room. One time I got a licking from my father from cutting it. He had a straight razor and it was hid in a bureau, and I took it and chopped the bureau and got a licking. Everytime I remember that I can hear somebody singing and the victrola playing. I guess it only made me madder.

My youngest sister slept in the cradle in my mother’s room and my mother’s godfather and I used to sleep on the davenport. One time when I was sleeping I heard somebody at the window. I looked and I saw a strange man with his hat pulled over his head, and he tried to open the screen. I don’t remember what happened then. I fell asleep: next morning I told my mother.

One time when I was about six I was sitting on our front porch and I remember I s——t all over the porch, right through my clothes and everything.…

There was a fellow by the name of Jimmy and he and my cousin Benny and myself hung around together. This Jimmy had a sister Lolly, a skinny freckled-faced kid, shy. One time we were at a dance hall and I was drunk and I saw her with Benny and I started kissing her on the floor; stood right in the middle of the floor and kissed her, and Benny got mad because they were engaged. I know she liked me. My cousin Riggs tried to make her but I don’t know if he succeeded.

Benny and me used to go to the show together late at night. One time we went to a show and we came out pretty late in the evening, and when we came out Benny had a knife on him and he dropped it. He was about twelve then and I was ten. I hadn’t spoken to Benny for a long time, eight years maybe, then one time I saw him in the
park near our house. Lolly was with him. She worked where my sister and my cousin Riggs did and he’d tell me how he tried to make her. I didn’t like that; it didn’t seem right to me when one cousin was going to marry her that the other cousin should try something like that.

I didn’t like St. A—— School much. I was the worst kid in the class and I always got punished for everything, because I didn’t have my lessons done, because I didn’t learn my lessons, because I wasn’t doing this or that. I was a regular customer for getting slapped with the ruler on my hand. I don’t know why my mother made me go to that school. They had a very fine pastor there in the church and he was also in charge of the school and everyone had a good thing to say about him. But when I got there they had a mean priest. He hit the kids with his cane. Once I saw him give such a beating to a fellow that the poor kid collapsed.

In H—— Street School in third grade there was a young teacher who had a habit once in a while of putting one of the kids under her desk. It was a big desk and a lot of the kids wanted to go in there thinking that they could look up her dress; so they’d make noise and the teacher would put them there. I was there once but I couldn’t see anything. This teacher also would send all the kids who made noise into the cloak room, so sometimes even before we made a noise we’d go in the cloak room and smoke a couple cigarettes. We’d buy these cigarettes for a penny; not real cigarettes but cubebs.

When I was about thirteen in the seventh grade there was a girl that lived on M—— Street who used to sit right behind me and across the aisle. She used to spread her legs apart and pull her dress over her knees. She was not very pretty in her face. There was another one that sat across from me in the same row too who had black hair. She was real pretty and once in a while she’d pick up her dress too. The first one, the blond-haired one, lived on M—— Street and she would ask me to come over to her house but I didn’t go because they had a pretty tough gang of kids there and I was scared of them. When I got older these fellows disliked me: they hated me because they were afraid of me. Once in a while I would hang out with some of them. I committed crimes with some but they never bothered me and I never bothered them …

There was a small community house near the school where I went quite often when I was about seven. It had a room where all the kids played checkers and dominoes and things like that. They’d show movies in the summer once a week outside where there was a big yard. I don’t know who sponsored it. All the kids from the neighborhood would be there. It was before they had talking pictures. They’d hang the screen on the side of the garage and they’d set the camera about a hundred feet back. I don’t remember much about that. I don’t remember much about any of my ambitions then. I know we played soldiers a lot. Putting tin hats and aluminum pots on our heads for helmets was a lot of fun, and we’d use wash boilers for shields and wooden swords.

One time I found two cocoons on a twig on the branch of a tree and I kept watching them for a week or two. Once when I came I found them open, but I looked and looked and didn’t see any butterfly or anything. I was always wondering about that. When I took the empty cocoons off the twig they were sticky-like and silky.

Around this time my mother took me and my sister to a drug store on the corner of B—— and F——. We had little red sores all over our chests. I don’t know what they were. The druggist gave us something and after a few days it went away. I guess I was never very sick. My sisters had diphtheria but I never had it. When my sisters had that the younger one slept in the baby carriage and the other one in the crib.