Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

“Just as I’m about to buy the ticket, I see the ticket-taker walk into the John. So I ask the cashier for change of a bill and then — very nonchalant — I walk past the doors and into the movie house. I skip my usual bag of popcorn and I go and find my favorite seat. On the left side toward the front.

“Very soon there’s a little commotion at the back and I figure — Fuck, man, I’m discovered. Down comes the usher with his light. Now the usher is a kid I know and his name is Bruce. Bruce and I were at Midwood together. We have a strong mutual contempt. Bruce stands there shining his light in my face and I become extremely upset.

“Because Bruce is really very intelligent Bruce has always had girlfriends and now he has a girlfriend, the sister of a guy I know, the most beautiful girl you could imagine. Bruce is a superb athlete. Bruce has a scholarship to Cornell.

“So Bruce shines the light and he says — in his cultivated about-to-go-to-Cornell voice — ‘O.K., Danskin, wise guy, where’s your stub?’”

Danskin shrugged as he drove, and mocked himself in falsetto.

“‘I don’t have a stub, Brucie. I lost it.’

“So he laughs at me. He says, ‘You were with another guy, there’s two of you, where’s the other guy?’ So me — quick thinker — I say, ‘No, Bruce it was just me.’

“The manager is there now, they’re both standing over me with the light, they’re both laughing. ‘Danskin,’ Bruce says, ‘come with me, please.’ They escort me up the aisle, past maybe twenty people I know or who know me and outside to the cashier’s box.

“‘This is where you buy the tickets,’ Bruce says. And just before he went inside he gave me a look, a little expression, a little twinkle of the eyes which says, ‘Danskin, what a schmuck you are, what a contemptible idiot, what a fucking fool.’”

Danskin sighed.

“Needless to say, I no longer felt like the movies. I walked home and all I could think about was how after the show Bruce is going to meet his girlfriend and he’ll tell her. They’ll laugh about the moron, the funny animal. She’ll tell Bruce how clever he is.

“I got home and for a couple of hours I worked on my stamp collection. That almost always calmed me down. Only this time, it didn’t. I couldn’t get it out of my head, you understand. I realized…” He turned to Converse ferociously. Converse looked nervously at the road.

“I realized this was it! There was nothing else for me to do. I had absolutely no choice.

“First I took my whole stamp collection — I started it when I was about six — I took the whole thing to Prospect Park Lake and threw it in. I could have been mugged. A cop could have grabbed me. But they didn’t. Then I went in my father’s truck and I got a tire iron. I called up Bruce’s mother and she told me he was on a date. He wouldn’t be home until late.

“New Utrecht Avenue, there’s a playground between the subway stop and where Bruce’s house was. I waited in the playground, I sat on a bench holding the tire iron in my lap. Must be four in the morning — out of the subway — here comes Bruce. He didn’t see me until I was right on top of him. I was careful because he knew karate. He would, right?

“When he saw me, man, he knew! He knew then and there.

“The first one is right across the face and he’s down. No karate. Not a sound. I just stood over him and bam! Bam, that’s for your girlfriend. Bam, that’s for your scholarship to Cornell. Bam, that’s for the little twinkle. Bam bam bam bam bam. Lots and lots of times and Bruce’s little twinkle and his scholarship to Cornell is just a lot of mucus on the asphalt. Every light in every building on the street is turned on, three hundred cops are there, and I’m still pounding crud into the street and the playground looks like a meat market.”

“So they locked you up.”

“So they locked me up,” Danskin said. “I feigned mad ness. I babbled, I recited Heine. Nine years. Here I am.”

They rode in silence for a while.

“But you’re still pissed off.”

“Now more than ever.”

“Are you sorry?”

“I’m sorry I got put away. I’m not sorry I wasted Brucie. The fucking guy would remember me all his life. He’d be a rich doctor or the Secretary of Interior and he’d have this picture in his mind of me being thrown out of Loew’s. I’d rather have done the time.”

He seemed to be growing angry again. His jaw trembled.

“He’d be married to Claire. She’d say, remember the great fuck we had the night you threw that schmuck whatshisname out of the movies?”

Danskin released an asthmatic sigh and relaxed.

“That’s not the way I want to be remembered.”

“When I went to school,” Converse said, “they used to tell us to offer our humiliations to the Holy Ghost.”

“That’s sick,” Danskin said. He shuddered with revulsion. “That’s fucking repulsive. Why the Holy Ghost?”

“I guess He likes to see people fuck up.”

“He must get a kick out of you, huh?”

“I think the idea was to make something balance.”

Danskin shook his head.

“People are so stupid,” he said, “it makes you cry.”

“So what happened,” Converse asked, “after you got out?”

“I came out of there with a Jones, that’s what happened. I was dicking this wiggy nurse and she turned me on. On grass. On acid. On screwing for that matter. She was queer for madmen.

“We’d go down to the swimming pool and shoot dilaudid tabs, then morphine. It was really nice. The shrinks would try to get to me so I’d chew the rug and I’d just smile, man. Just — hello sunshine! They’d look me up and down, going hmmmm hmmmm — you know what I mean? And I’m standing there so fucking loaded I think I’m in Rockaway. They wouldn’t go for that now, but in those days it never occurred to them.

“Finally I hit the street and I know shit from nothing. I got a habit the size of Manhattan Island and no dealer will touch me. I appear and they run, right, because I’m incredibly naive and uncool — I grew up in the fucking mad house. I run after them on the street — Please, please — they say Get lost, Lemme alone, Help — I get one guy who’s so far gone he’ll sell to me, and the fourth or fifth time out — slam! We’re both busted by a spade in an army coat and sneakers.

“So my status was weird because I’m just out of the hatch. I got passed around from one guy to another and I end up in the Federal Building having a long talk with this Irish man. I can have a break if I’ll go out to this college on Long Island and hang with the radicals there. They have me by the balls. On account of the bust they can put me back in the madhouse for life. If I bitch anywhere I’m crazy. If I do what they want, I’ll get maintenance and stay out.

“Well, I went out there, man, and after a while I really got interested. I played a couple of colleges in the East — the Feds passed me from one handler to another and I worked up some far-out shit. Chicks want to rob banks with me. I say Let’s go to Nyack and kill all the cops there, they say Great! I say Let’s blow up Orange Julius — they say Right On.

“I knew some people in the movement,” Converse said. “I don’t think they would have gone for you.”

“You can say that,” Danskin said, “but you never saw me work. I got their scene figured. You’re an American college kid — that means you get anything you want. You get the best of everything that’s in — think it up, you got it. So revolution is in — boots and cartridge belts and Chinese shit. All the rich suburban kids — their parents never bought them cap pistols, now they want to kick ass. Revolution — they gotta have that too.