Nonconformity Read Free Page A

offers, before anybody throws her out. “You certainly will,” he assures her.
    Give her another decade and she’ll show up, just before daybreak, with neither handbag nor shopping; and no stockings at all. Just a weary old weirdie who would lie down to rest. “You got a checkout room for me, mister?”
    Meaning any room vacated by a full-paying guest before his allotted time was up; leaving an hour, or even two or three, before somebody else able to pay rent around the clock shows up. Weary Old Weirdie gets it for half price—and into the clerk’s pocket that goes, you can bemighty sure. Weirdie takes her own chances—she may be rooted out of last night’s sheets in an hour. But if there’s no particular run on rooms she may be left alone up there till evening.
    Those are the chances you take if you’re an old weirdie with most of your hours, save but a few, left behind in the disheveled sheets of a thousand checkout rooms. If nobody tells you anymore to give a phony. Knowing that even your true name has become a phony.
    Wanderer untroubled by names and numbers: unregistered, unattached, uncounted and unbereaved in the files of the American Century. There are no insurance policies to bereave her, no bankbook to grieve her, no driver’s license nor visa, no hospitalization plan nor social security number to say, the day after the nameless burial, what her true name was. Nothing but the hardwood subway bench and the Twelfth Street Station to remember: W. O. Weirdie once took rest here.
    Self-styled actress; self-styled stunt man; self-styled world traveler, part-time entertainer and full-time veteran; self-styled heiress: their names are no more than the names of certain lonely hours. They sought someone to tell who they were, and never found anyone; for they did not know themselves who they were. They looked whole lifetimes for an answer without knowing what the question was.
    The pool shark hitchhiking to Miami or Seattle, the fruit pickers following the crops in a 1939 Chevy withone headlight gone and the other cracked; carny-men and pitch-men, punchboard operators and unemployed blackjack dealers; pigeon-droppers and penny-matchers, young touts in Hollywood tattersalls and coneroos from the Good Old Days in dirty London collars; freelancing phonies and necktie salesmen with furtive eyes; and the stripper forced to a stint of secret hustling after the Super Breakfast show is done, to get up her Daddy’s fine because Daddy’s doing thirty days for going on the drunk again. (Daddy would blow his top, she boasts, if he knew what she was doing. It’s all right so long as he’s allowed to pretend he doesn’t dig a thing. Daddy is smart enough not to ask questions and Baby is smart enough to act as though there were none to ask. It makes things easier for Daddy. And what’s good for Daddy is good for the country.) 39
    These aren’t the great gray wolves that run the winter wilderness, but only the toothless, half-tame jackals that prowl the outskirts of dude-ranch camps when night-fires start to wane. Hard-time nomads or easy-livers, zigzag zanies or phony martyrs, young band-rats or elderly satyrs who buy a little and sell a little, work a day and rest a while. Sleep by day and play by night, they abide in an evening country where ten a.m. always looks more like five in the afternoon of any season at all. Theirs is that ancestral hour when the little deeds are done.
    All those who, between sleep and selling, between rest by day and play by night, do the little deals.
    “But do you know,” somewhere one of Dostoevsky’s odd fish cries out suddenly, “do you know it is impossible to charge man with sins, to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so meanly that man cannot help but perpetrate villainies; when, economically, he has been brought to villainy, and that it is silly and cruel to demand from man that which, by the very laws of nature, he is impotent to perform even