Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [88]
It struck him with horrible force. His parents, whoever they were, had probably made love out of just such an itch. For fun, for this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was obviously inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he, the life they had created while they were being careless and thoughtless, was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown, just something disgusting to be gotten rid of in secret and forgotten. Cold rage filled him, rage at his unknown parents, rage at the life he had been given, and for such trivial, stupid reasons! For one wild second of ejaculation! For that, he had been born. This same thing that was keeping him awake nights, and inexorably turning him into a prancing faggot, was the cause of his existence. Fifteen or twenty minutes on a forgotten bed between two probable strangers had given him twenty-four years of misery, pain, and suffering, and promised, unless he were to die soon, to go on giving him misery for another forty or fifty years, locked up in one small room or another without hope of freedom, love, life, truth, or understanding. A penis squirts, and I am doomed to a life of death. It has got to be insanity; there has got to be a God, because only an insane God could have created such a universe.
There was no reason at all why Jack should not do exactly as he pleased. He and Billy became lovers. It was an arrangement, coldly conceived for sexual satisfaction, without even words that first time, but limited by coldly precise and rational language from there on out. The terms were that they would use each other’s bodies for that ornate form of masturbation called Making Love, but there was to be no question of emotional involvement, or prying into one another’s soul. This, they decided coldly, would keep them from going crazy or queer.
Fifteen
Things had been going much too well at the bowling alley, perhaps that was what was the matter. Billy’s shoeshine stand was right next to the check-out counter and only a few feet from either the all-night lunch counter or the pool tables, and he had a team of four boys who did the actual shining of shoes (although Billy would take over for special customers, big spenders, etc.) and there didn’t seem to be anybody in Seattle who could beat him at his own games of one-pocket, nine-ball, or straight pool. He was making money, very good money, not only from his stand but an actual salary from the management: Billy was in charge of maintenance, and he had discovered in himself a talent for managing things, for halting arguments, for overseeing the hundred details of a 24-hour establishment without undue strain on himself.
Perhaps Billy’s status as resident pool artist was as important to the management as anything else. Billy drew people to the bowling alley, especially from 2 A.M. to dawn, when nothing much else was open, and the poolhall habitués from all over Seattle would gather, sitting in the double row of theater seats overlooking the pool section. These men, especially the better players, respected Billy for his talent, and among them there was an inner circle, including and revolving around Billy, of men who had been out on the road and played in the big poolhalls of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and who could talk about the great players and the great games; who had adventures of their own to tell the younger men, the boys, who had never been on the road. And of course they all played, especially the kids, and the usual winner