No Beast So Fierce

This was the Mecca of the American Dream, the world that everyone wanted. A world of sleek young women (allied with Slenderella to be so) in shorts and halters, driving 400-horsepower station wagons to air-conditioned, music-serenaded supermarkets of baby-sitter corporations and culture condensed into Great Books discussion groups. A life of barbecues by the swimming pool and drive in movies open all year. It did't appeal to me. Fuck health insurance plans and life insurance. They wanted to live without leaving the womb. It made me more alive to play a game without rules against society, and I was prepared to play it to the end. A tremor almost sexual passed through me as I anticipated the comming robbery.

My letters seeking a job, though truthful, diminished the full truth. Face would blanch if the facts had been complete: "Dear Sir," I thought. "Do you have a position for a journeyman burglar, con man, forger and car thief; also with experience as armed robber, pimp, card cheat and several other things. I smoked marijuana at twelve (in the 40's) and shot heroin at sixteen. I have no experience with LSD and methedrine. They came to popularity since my imprisonment. I've buggered pretty young boys and feminine homosexuals (but only when locked up away from women). In the idiom of jails, prisons and gutters (some plush gutters) I'm a motherfucker! Not literally, for I don't remember my mother. In my world the term, used as I used it, is a boast of being hell on wheels, outrageously unpredictable, a virtuoso of crime. Of course by being a motherfucker in that world I'm a piece of garbage in yours. Do you have a job?

Life was precious. Life was all that mattered. Yet it meant nothing if you weren't living as you wanted.

Your basic problem is emotional immaturity. You want life to be like in the movies, full of excitement. That's how a child's mind works, but the adults accept regularity, tedium, frustration.

But the human mind, when it reaches the bottom of the abyss, must bounce back or disintegrate entirely.

One of the best things in being a criminal is having no schedule.

Hope is still ahead of you - but someday it will be behind you. That's really the point of children, to have someone to pin hope to.

Those who lack experience with violence are unafraid of its threat - but they shatter completely when hurt by its reality.

We shook hands. In prison, the gesture was more than empty ritual. It was the clasp of friendship.

That when it comes to truly behaving as a beast — to killing wantonly and without reason — it is our kind, not theirs, that is the fiercer of the two

I felt as if I could ride the bus through eternity and be happy.

-Poor Jerry. He's giving all of himself to something he's got to loose. -So does everybody...sooner or later. -Freeze on that. -On what? -On all that heavy philosophy bullshit. I'm talking about here and now and everyday important things that people live by. If you extrapolate everything-nothing matters.