Absence of the Hero Read Free Page B

wrong. They just add up a set of question and answer figures and you flunk out on the total. It’s too automatic.
    Hell, they ought to let a man lean back in court and explain every­thing at his leisure, if he is able to.
    You know as well as I do, there is all that stiffness, and the judge, and the look of the place. You sit there just a minute or two—not even that, maybe 30 seconds—and you can feel where your shoelaces are tied across your feet and the way your collar runs around your neck.
    You can’t breathe right and are nervous as hell.
    And why?
    Because you know that justice has nothing to do with it. Maybe you’ll see a couple of guys marching around with paper in their hands. They are nervous too. Even the judge is nervous, even though he tries not to be and goes through with it every day.
    Some of them even try to smile and joke a little, especially in cases of minor concern. Those, I feel most sorry for, even if I am the case of minor concern.
    Yes, I’ll have to admit I’ve been in plenty of courts.
    But mostly only on drunk and vag raps.
    But listen, what I’m getting at is that there is nothing you can say, don’t you see?
    You were drunk?—O.K., guilty.
    You were a vag?—also, O.K., guilty.
    They don’t ask you why you were drunk or why you were a vag. A man gets drunk for a damn good reason and a man is a vag for a damn good reason. There’s nothing “guilty” about it.
    No more than being guilty because you’ve got brown hair or 8 fingers and two thumbs.
    O.K., they say I’m a rapist.
    An attacker.
    A ravisher.
    In fact, they’ve got me up for two counts of rape, child molestation, breaking and entering and everything else.
    Well . . . as they say. . . . I’ll begin at the beginning.
    The whole mess started like this: I was in the cellar picking up the old cardboard Mrs. Weber (she is the woman I am wrongfully accused of raping) said I could have.
    I knew where I could sell it for a little money, maybe for a little wine—which was mostly what a little money meant, anyhow.
    I saw the cardboard one time when the cellar door was open and I was walking down the alley.
    One time later when I saw Mrs. Weber (the woman who I am accused of ravishing) I asked her if I could have this cardboard that was laying around unused in her cellar.
    She said, “O.K., Jerry boy, anytime you want it, it’s O.K. with me. It’s not doing me any good the way it is.”
    Mrs. Weber said it just like that, without even hesitating.
    It took a lot of nerve to ask her. You see, I am pretty nervous from drinking and run down from living in that shack on the lot. I’m all alone and do a lot of thinking. All this thinking has sort of pressed into my mind and I’m not relaxed anymore. I feel so dirty; my clothing is old and torn.
    I don’t feel like I used to some years back. I’m only 32 now but I feel like some sort of animal outcast.
    Christ, it seems not like too long ago when I was going to high school in a clean blue sweater, carrying books on geometry and algebra, economics, civics, and all those things.
    I sort of thought of that when I asked Mrs. Weber for the cardboard and it helped a little. She was a big woman, a clean, big woman just this side of being fat. She had on a different dress every day, bright new colors, and she made me think of soap suds and soft, cool things.
    I thought of when I had been married, of the four years with Kay, the various apartments, the lousy factory jobs.
    Those factories got me down and I began hitting the bottle at night—at first now and then, and after a while, most of the time.
    I lost job after job and then I lost Kay, and I thought of it all as I asked Mrs. Weber for the cardboard.
    I hadn’t always been a wino and a vag.
    As Mrs. Weber walked away I looked at the backs of her legs, the sunshine hugging the nylons. Her arms, and the hair like something to