Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [1]
After an incident involving a break-in, Jack is sent to reform school in Woodburn. His stay includes months in solitary, detailed by Carpenter in a frightening, bravura piece of writing. Jack’s next stop is a stint in the state mental institution in Salem. He is released; boxes semiprofessionally; does jail time in Peckham County, Idaho, for “rolling a drunk”; and gets work in eastern Oregon “bucking logs for a wildcat outfit.” Drifting down to San Francisco, he meets up with Denny Mellon, now in his mid-twenties and a full-blown alcoholic, in a poolroom. They go to Denny’s room in a flophouse overlooking Turk Street, and hook up with two brittle young women, Mona and Sue. Jack has his way with both of them. The sex is loveless, mechanical, and artfully described. Here Jack begins to feel the first touch of self-awareness and realize his true nature:
You know enough to know how you feel is senseless, but you don’t know enough to know why. Sitting in another lousy hotel room waiting for a couple of girls you’ve never seen before to do a bunch of things you’ve done so many times it makes your skin crawl just to think about it. Things. To do. That you dreamed about when you couldn’t have them. When there was only one thing, really, that made you feel good, and now you’ve done that so many times it’s like masturbating. Except you never really made it, did you. Never really killed anybody. That’s what you’ve always wanted to do, smash the brains out of somebody’s head; break him apart until nothing is left but you. But you never made it.
Jack’s realization is not enough to save him. He hits bottom with Denny Mellon, with Mona, with himself. He goes on a long drinking binge and considers taking his own life:
For a moment he felt a drifting nausea as his mind helplessly moved toward the idea of suicide. He steadied himself and faced it, as he had known all the time he must: I am going to die. Why not now? He felt cold and sick. Well, why not? What the fuck have I got to live for?
The whiskey bottle was in his hand, and he lifted it, holding it up before his eyes. Do I want some of this? Do I want another drink? Suddenly it was very important to know. If he did not want a drink, he did not want anything. If he did not want anything, he might as well die. Because he was already dead.
"Bullshit," he said aloud. “Bullshit. I’m just in a bad mood.” He tilted the bottle to his mouth and drank, his eyes closed.
Jack stumbles once again, as he knew he would. Trusting the wrong people, not yet fully understanding the mechanics of a system that has kept him incarcerated his whole life, he’s sentenced to adult time at San Quentin in Chino. There he meets up again with Billy Lancing, in for “bopping” aa check. They become cell mates and confidantes. And, in what must have been a shocking plot development at the time of the book’s release, they become lovers. Carpenter’s handling of masculinity issues and homosexuality at San Quentin, where “the prison seemed alive with affairs,” is matter-of-fact, nonexploitative, and frequently moving.
One day while Jack was walking past the salad table with a stack of hot clipper racks, he happened to glance over in time to see one man slip a plastic ring on the finger of another man. Both were ordinary-looking men, one a burglar and the other a thief, but the expressions on their faces were ones Jack could never remember having seen on a man: one of them shy and coy, an outrageous