Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [150]
What a bum life.
There's a one man band parading up and down the hall making strange tuneless lip farts.
August 17
Man, I'm sitting here really feeling like an idiot! It's about 7:30 in the morning. I missed a nice opportunity yesterday, didn't I?
Would you believe that it just now became clear to me? I missed a swell chance to touch you on your sweet little cunt. You said something like 'you won't get another chance' but I didn't quite hear you, like I sometimes don't. Now this morning it fell into place-the fucking posse had momentarily turned their heads and I just sat there like a bump on a log. God, Baby, my mind was elsewhere . . .
I'm really kicking myself in the ass right now. I'm so dumb.
August 18
There's a guy washing his face in the drinking fountain-I hope nobody sees him, I'm sure that must be some kind of offense. A couple women from the ladies side just came over to the office here asking for a plunger. This one dude told 'em, "I got a plunger, pucker up." I thought that was pretty cute.
August 19
These are some of the most silent days I've ever spent.
August 20
What a bunch of punks. I'll bet I could take any one of them posse punks and fuck him in the ass and then make him lick my dick clean.
I was interviewed by a couple of psychiatrists today. They wanted lurid details . . . crazy.
Chapter 21
THE SILVER SWORD
After the accident, early in August, Nicole's car was a mess. First, it would only go in one gear, then something slipped into place again and she had all three forward gears operating, but reverse was out. Sometimes, none of the gears would shift. The clutch was acting crazy.
She had stopped sleeping with Barrett about the time of this accident. Barrett never said a word but moved up to Wyoming, and came back every week or so to the room he kept in Springville. Once in a while, he would drop around and ask if she needed any help. If he had money, he sure wasn't showing it, but one day he did offer to fix the car. Considering she still wouldn't go to bed with him, he couldn't have been nicer about it. So she did give him something that night.
Next day when she came back from visiting Gary, the car was gone. Barrett had towed it away. His rooming house wasn't that far from her place in Springville, so she walked over, and there he was working on the car in the back lot with friends. She kind of had fun helping get it up on the blocks. Then progress stopped. There was something, the bell housing, or whatever he called it, that was welded together from her driving it too hot. Then, after Barrett got the transmission out, sitting on the ground, he discovered she needed a new main clutch plate. There was no money for that. It was a problem she could resolve, but she did not like to think about how.
Nicole went and saw Albert Johnson who was the manager of a food store in the area. He was about twice her age, just a pleasant-looking family man, and she used to shop at his store a couple of years ago and buy a couple of things she would pay for, while shoplifting with the other hand.
One day they stopped her out front. She was caught with a pound of margarine and some jars of baby food in her purse. When they brought her up to the office, she said she was stealing 'cause her kids were hungry, but he let her think he was going to call the police, anyway. She sat and sweated it out, and got scared real good, began to cry. She had been picked up on something like that a year before in another store. This time she thought for sure they would send her away.
After fifteen minutes, however, of hearing her story, Johnson told her she was a nice young girl, with all kinds of bad breaks, and that she'd never had an opportunity really to climb the ladder. He was going to let her go. They got friendlier and he explained to her that his store might look like a shoplifter's paradise because it was long and narrow with short aisles across, but the losses got so big, they had put a walkway up in the attic with one-way mirrors looking down. Tell her friends to beware.
He talked quite a bit. He