Rebel Without a Cause (7 page)

I don’t read much. My eyes are so bad.

I was reading a
Life
magazine this morning. I remember the army maneuvers at Fort Knox. They had pictures of tanks and the men needed to operate them. I hear and read so much about war and politics and economics that there is not time for anything else.

The light that is coming in over the transom reminds me of the light that comes into my cell through the small window. When I lie in bed after 9:30 I watch the light and it makes a complete turn, a complete circle. I see some dark spots in the circle. My eyes probably cause that. The day before yesterday I watched it go completely around. Sometimes when I lie in bed looking at the light I get bright spots before my eyes.

It’s hard to sleep at night because of the heat. Usually after the siren blows I get about fifteen minutes sleep until count-time.

Sometimes I get more real sleep in those minutes than I do all night. To get to sleep at night I think about what I am studying or I count. Most of the time I just try to keep everything out of my mind so I can fall asleep.

Right outside my window is the garden. The circular bed with the flowers bordering the lawn is right in the center. There are big red flowers in the center. They are called Canna. They remind you of Gladiolus. They are an old-fashioned flower, growing from a tuber like Dahlia. A Dahlia tuber reminds one of a carrot, soft, not as hard as a carrot, about three or four inches long and pointed at each end. A Canna tuber is not pointed: it is long and thick and rounded at the ends, and it has eyes like a potato. From these eyes grow the flowers.

When I was at my aunt’s farm, I used to help work my friend’s place. I used to help digging potatoes. They had a team of horses and a plow. I used to drive ahead and two people would follow behind and pick up potatoes and throw them on the wagon.

Me and Toby palled around together. We had Saturday and Sundays together. Those were the only two days we ever had.
There was no place to go except to a little town a couple of miles away, twenty-five thousand people and a couple of movie houses. But we didn’t go to the movies very much. We’d go out in the car to see how fast it would go, how fast uphill and how fast downhill.

Toby was a better driver than I. I only drove it once or twice. Hank, his brother, would drive it a lot. Hank was a Sunday driver, always on the right side of the road and very careful. Toby didn’t care and just drove anyway. We used to race cars and sometimes we’d wind up in a ditch. We liked to drive over ramshackle bridges fast and feel the boards rattling underneath us.

There was a little town, Arcia, nearby. It had about fifteen hundred people and a nice little church. My grandmother used to make me go to church. My uncle was just like me. He didn’t like to go to church, but when grandmother was there she made him.

My uncle used to drink a lot. After he married my aunt he stopped drinking. I guess they still live on the same level. The farmers don’t seem to progress there like they do in other sections. There is a shortage of markets for what they produce.

Farmers in the south don’t make as much as those in the north. Transportation facilities are better in the north. And then markets are more easily available. In the south there are not enough cars for them to load their products. Farmers can’t make a contract for their products at a certain price. The cotton farmers have a pretty hard time now. I talked with a fellow whose father has a farm and he says it hardly keeps them alive. This fellow used to be interested in electrical appliances. He used to sell all kinds of appliances, like washers, toasters and such things. Many men in this country work and work as hard as they can. There are not ten million unemployed as they say but twenty-five million. One hundred and ten percent more than what the average believes. Of course many of those have part-time jobs. And the WPA.

The WPA is supposed to be a business stimulant; it circulates the money. It is the pet idea of the New Deal, but I think it stimulates mostly the automobile industry. According to some statisticians, families live on ten thousand a year and some on one thousand. It shows that a man living on a certain standard spends as much as he can for pleasures. Money seems to be a substitute for anything in the world. There are many men in this world who don’t care much for money.

The question is production and consumption. Money is just the exchange value. You buy something with it. And then the money is still there. The commodity you bought is destroyed but the exchange value is still there. This is something I can’t understand. When you buy an automobile, as you use it, it is being destroyed. The cash you used to buy it with is moving on to produce more. When I think about things like that I get a headache. How is it made and how is it destroyed? Eventually I think I’ll be able to understand.

I am not interested in making money. I am interested much more in understanding and finding out things, and in writing books. I don’t know whether I can write. At night, when I am in my cell, I have a pencil in my hand to write down what I think. Anything, poetry or anything else. And in the morning when I look at it I find it more of a puzzle than the night before.

I have been thinking of how to get money to buy a typewriter. My handwriting is bad. I scribble something down and one letter is too big and one too small. When I think of something and I want to write it down I scribble so hard I can hardly read it. Other times when I am not thinking about it I can write pretty well.…

We went to a factory, my cousin Pete and I. We went there and neither of us got the job. I was rejected and they put him on the list. I don’t know if he is working there now, but I believe he is. My other cousin, John, (he’s Pete’s brother) is getting married soon. I think when a man gets married he settles down and lets the world go by and pays no attention to anything after that. He goes to work and settles down and the world slides by. The same thing, day after day. I think when a man gets married he has a big obstacle in his way. No great man in history ever aspired to get married.

I don’t think I am going to get married.

At least I’m not going to get married right away. I want to write some books on politics and economics. I think I want to get up to my aunt’s place, away from everything and everyone and write.

It gets just as hot up there as it does here. Only up there it is cooler at night and in the morning because of the mountains. My aunt has a home at Mount Abel. There is a little school there, two rooms and a teacher or so.

It’s very hard for most of the kids in that part of the country. Most of them are of foreign parentage, Polish and German. It’s very hard for them to concentrate on English grammar and mathematics. To them it is something entirely new. In their homes the language the parents speak is the only one they hear.

I was out there several years in the summertime. There was a Polish girl I used to go with. She was a year older than me. I never had any sexual relations with her. She was a plumpish, dark girl. Dark hair. I don’t remember what color her eyes were. She weighed about one hundred and ten pounds. She was the oldest child in her family. I don’t remember much about it now. She was a funny sort of girl, a sort of mongrel I guess. There wasn’t a Sunday she wouldn’t attend the church activities in Mount Abel. She had a brother almost as old as I am now. He and I were always good friends. He was not muscularly built; a thin sort of lad. He was the pet of their father. He used to have more privileges than the other children. He would never speak to girls. This girl’s name was Amy. My sister was a good friend of her sister.

Amy was the mother-type. She used to feel sorry for me. I was a wild kid, fast-driving and all that. She used to tell me not to go with guys who drive fast. She used to pity me. There really was no reason for it. I don’t know whether she is married now or not. My sister corresponds with her sister but she never mentions Amy in her letters. I hardly ever think of her now.

I feel as if I am in a daze or up against a big cliff. It seems somehow as if my path is blocked.

I don’t think of this girl anymore. O, once in a while I wonder what’s become of her. She used to mother me.

Before my uncle bought the farm he used to live across the road from their home. The first couple summers I never even noticed Amy. She came to visit my aunt once in a while but I was never in a position to talk with her. The third year I was there my sister introduced her. I used to get a lot of fun out of seeing how many girls I could speak to and what their actions would be if I spoke to them.

My aunt always tried to impress me with what a fine church-going girl Amy was … a typical saint. She probably married some farmer and then did what other farm girls do.

The last year I had no desire to go to my aunt’s place but I wanted to get away from the city where I lived and spend a few months away from everything.

I used to go with a girl in the city. She was a small, thin girl, with kind of strawy hair. I don’t think she weighed a hundred pounds. She was a year or two younger than I. She lived with her sister and brother-in-law and their four or five children and another sister. They all lived together. I knew this girl about one or two months. Her name was Lila, I believe. She was oversexed, very much oversexed. I had intercourse with her several times. I don’t know how I didn’t contract some venereal disease from her. She was loose, I guess: she would play around with anyone who would say hello to her. She had very, very, very soft breasts. She became so—I don’t know—very nervous and excited; her fingers and arms would twitch when someone would touch her breasts. She used to cry a lot. I don’t know why. I used to spend a lot of time with her; had nothing else to do: didn’t have a job. She always used to tell me that she was in love with me. She used to cry because she couldn’t resist anyone who wanted her. She was the real reason I went up to Mount Abel that summer. I wanted to get away from her. When I came back I found she was going around with some Italian fellows who had gonorrhea. I never even spoke to her again. I just hung around and did nothing but think how I could get some money, maybe stealing here and there from cars and pawning what I stole. I don’t know what gave me the idea for the crime I am in here for. I knew there wouldn’t be much chance.

Just about two weeks after this fellow and I had been sitting around conspiring the best way to pull off this job he went to the probation
officer. I was then on probation for a holdup. So there were some men from the FBI at the probation office when I came in.…

I never had anything outside; never cared if I had anything to eat or any clothes.

At first I didn’t say anything but after several hours of questioning I decided. I knew they didn’t have much proof, but I identified some of the things. Three months later I was tried.

But I really don’t care about this. I am getting more benefit out of this institution than from 10 or even 20 years outside. If I were still outside I would probably have taken a gun and held up somebody. If they resisted I probably would have shot them.…

I used to go to High School outside. I went about two years to High. I was getting along alright. There was a teacher there who used to help me because of my eyes. She was the mathematics and science teacher. She was a thin, cold woman almost five feet ten, grey hair. A very fine woman.

In High I studied German; one and one-half years of German, a year or so of math, algebra, geometry and English. I always liked science. There is one thing I always tried to understand; one experiment about why water always reaches its own level. I am still trying to understand. O, I know now, but at that time I was always trying to understand. The experiment went like this: we had three glass tubes with a hose attached to the bottom of each tube. If you raised one of the tubes the water would sink in the others. Of course, now I know that it is due to the air pressure and the pressure of the water.

Our High was not very big, just about one city block. They taught everything there; mechanical drawing, engineering. I was never interested in anything very much, but math came easily. English seems to have been pretty hard.

I took German instead of Latin because of a girl. Ella. She sat across the aisle from me. I don’t think I ever learned anything there. And I very seldom bothered Ella. I just fooled around the classroom and made a lot of useless noise. I guess our classroom was the noisiest in the whole school. They all had me marked down buggy. The German teacher was an old man. I can’t recall his name; this was when I was about fifteen. He used to get terribly mad when we put a swastika on the blackboard. He used to get so mad he pulled
his hair—what he had left of it. The class I was in was the most unruly class they ever had.

I didn’t like English very much but I don’t know why. I used to cut a lot of periods. I used to cut the first period in the morning and then not go back sometimes all day. My cousin was the same way. That’s the one who is getting married. John. He’s getting married soon. I never liked him very much. If he hadn’t been my cousin I wouldn’t have bothered with him.

I didn’t associate with many people outside.

I used to go down to the river bank a lot. There was a highway along the shore of the river. About two hundred feet away from the Boulevard there was a steep grade, sort of a decline down to the river. There was a fence on the edge of the highway to warn the drivers about this grade. Often times I would sit on that fence and watch the boats go by. The river is not very big. We used to spend a lot of time on the water, swimming or boating. Often we would get a hitch back down the river again. Many times I used to just sit and watch the water, greasy and dirty. There was a big steel company on the other side of the river, and big swamps between the factories. We used to get boards and wood there and make a raft and take it out in the middle; and when a boat came along we’d pull up the anchor and put the boat on one side. The middle of the river always seemed to be the nicest. It was the coolest part.