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Howard: Why, did it stink?
Danny: Not especially. It smelled like a cave.
He knew maybe a half second before he said the word that it was the last word he wanted to use. And by then it was out: cave.
Danny’s face went hot. He made himself look at Howard, but his cousin was watching the window. Light hit his face and brought out deep lines, like someone had scratched them with a pencil. And right then, for the first time, Danny recognized his cousin physically. The eyes gave him away, those same sad brown eyes. It was Howie.
Danny waited. What else could he do?
Howard: What the hell does a cave smell like?
And he looked at Danny and grinned and it was gone, all that. Gone like it never happened. Howard let it go, and Danny felt a rush of relief so intense it was like an oxygen burst to his head. He actually laughed.
Howard: Keep it coming, buddy. I want to hear the rest.
What I want to know, Tom-Tom says, after I read out my stuff in class, is which one of these clowns is you?
Clowns? I squint up my eyes at him. Clowns are a touchy subject with Tom-Tom. I’m surprised he brought it up.
Okay, he says. Assholes.
[...]
Who says any of these assholes is me? I ask Tom-Tom now.
Well, you sure as shit didn’t make it all up.
I did make it up, I say, because I want Holly to think that. Otherwise it’s all just stuff a guy told me, so why not be impressed with that guy instead of me?
No one could make this shit up, Tom-Tom says. It’s too ridiculous.
this interjection comes in at the right time [the reader is starting to wonder if this is actually fiction]
I’ve tried everything to get her to look at me: clamming up, asking questions, laughing, stretching, knuckle cracking. Every week I bring in something to read, and after I read it out she glances my way because she has to, but her eyes don’t connect—they’re looking next to me or behind me or even through me. I guess the stuff I wrote about the guy fucking his writing teacher made her nervous. And I feel like telling her, Babe, it wasn’t you, okay? That writing teacher was an actual blonde, not to mention she was under thirty, no wrinkles around her eyes, and had curves on her like you wouldn’t have if you ate Snickers bars around the clock, plus she wore dresses—ever heard of those? And she smelled like strawberries. Or mangoes. Or licorice. Hell, I don’t know. But being inside changes everything. Stuff you’d call common or even flat-out invisible in the outside world turns precious in here, with magical uses you never thought of. A broken pen is a tattoo gun. A plastic comb is a shank, meaning a knife. A couple of plums and a piece of bread are next week’s hooch. A packet of Kool-Aid is dye, an airshaft is a telephone. Two paper clips in a light socket plus a piece of pencil lead will light up your cigarette. And a gal like Holly, who maybe you wouldn’t raise your head to look at out in the world—in here she’s a princess.
My cell: six feet by ten, two metal trays nailed to the wall with mattresses on top that look like old taped-up cushions from patio chairs. No one ever wants the top bunk—people cut each other over bottom bunks—but I like the top because it gives me the best view of our window: five inches wide, twenty-four high. It has some kind of special glass that smears up what’s outside into murky gray shapes, maybe to keep us from masterminding our grand escape, or maybe because a window you can actually see through would just be too nice. But get this: after that second class with Holly when the door in my head opened up, I sat down on my bunk and looked at the window and all of a sudden I could see through it straight to the yard: concrete, fences, guys sucking in fresh air. I practically yelled. But I stopped myself because sudden movements or noises are not a good idea around my cellie, Davis.
But around the same time that our window glass got straightened out, Davis’s workouts started hitting me a different way. It happened when I listened to his words. The more shaky and worn out Davis gets from his push-ups, the more the normal words we all say every day start getting mixed up with old words he must’ve used at some earlier point in his life: goon and dildo and asswipe and your mama—words left over from a life that’s long gone. And once I noticed the old words Davis uses I started hearing them everywhere, because this place is a word pit—words get stuck in here, caught from when the clock stopped on our old lives. So now when a fight starts up I don’t walk away like I used to, I crowd in and wait for those ghost words to start coming up. I’ve heard chump and howler and groovy, I’ve heard fuzz and kike and kraut and coon and square and roughhouse and lightweight and freak show and mama’s boy and cancer stick and fairy and party hearty and flyboy and knuckle sandwich (don’t forget we’ve got lifers in here with false hips and false teeth who can tell you tales about rolling bums on the Bowery if you get them going), and I grab up these expressions, I trap them in my head and I save them. Because every one has the DNA of a whole life in it, a life where those words fit in and made sense because everyone else was saying them, too. I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I’m keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank.
[...] all of which was fine but none of which was the thing. Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny’s whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he’d forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he’d never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was.
He loved her. She had a sly, proud face and a fuzz of invisible hair over every part of her. She made the girls he’d slept with before—models or might-as-well-be models (would be, could be, wished they were, mistaken for, proud they weren’t, etc.), girls with elastic faces who ate a lot of popcorn and green peppers and nodded respectfully whenever he went on about his moneymaking schemes, whereas Martha said once, You can find out it’s bullshit by wasting a chunk of your life or just admit it’s bullshit right now and drop it—made them seem interchangeable. And some miracle had led Danny through that clutter of identical girls to Martha.
She flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the pool. It floated for a second, then sank. She said, I don’t like facts.
Danny: I don’t like nouns. Or verbs. And adjectives are the worst.
Nora: No, adverbs are the worst. He said brightly. She thought hopefully.
Danny: She moaned helplessly.
Nora: He ran stiffly.
Danny: Is that why you’re here? To get away from all the adverbs back in New York?
Who says I’m from New York?
Aren’t you?
Nora cocked her head. Short-term memory problems?
Oh, yeah. Facts.
Nora: Anyway, there’s no getting away from adverbs. They’re rampant.
Danny: She confessed anxiously.
Nora: They’re in our heads.
She cried desperately.
Nora: I hope you don’t actually write like that.
Danny: I write for shit.
Nora: I’m an excellent writer.
She said smugly.
Nora: Not smugly. Factually.
Danny: Ah. So you’ll make an exception to brag.
kinda cute
She smiled at Danny, this ancient crone, alone and weak, nuts if she thought she could operate a battering ram on her own. She was powerless any way you sliced it, but she thought she was strong and that made it true in a way. This astounded Danny. He’d never seen it before.
I handed them up. She slipped them in her bag, and the next week she gave them back to me (still not looking) with these beautiful green marks on the edges of every single page, Nice! and Cut? and More of this? and Careful and Heavy-handed? and Strange and Good tension and More? and More? and More of this? and Yes and Wow! and Yes and Very nice! and this is as close to sex talk as it gets for me in here, so you bet I enjoy it. I never look at my part, the stuff she’s talking about—who cares? What I want is more, and the only way to get more is to write more, and every week I try harder so I can rake in all those yeses and nices and wows. Not just blabbing stuff down but really trying to make something out of it.