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. . . . "you really got to stop talking about inner city when you mean black. And you really got to stop talking about fucking parents. Kids in the inner city got the usual biological folks. But mostly they ain't got no fucking parents. Mostly the only family they got is the gang, and the only thing that they can insist on is respect. And the only things they got to insist on it with is balls and a gun." (p. 14)
He stood absolutely straight as they did this, and when they took him out he didn't look back.
t"You in for life," Hawk said after Alves was gone, "hope will kill you. You going to survive, you got to keep your mind steady."
t"I know."
t"Ain't much else in there but hate and power."
t"Better than nothing," I said. (p. 24)
t"Two U.S.S Senators," I said. "Yikes."
t"Are you intimidated?"
t"Not so I can't breathe," I said.
tPresident Evans laughed.
t"Well, I must say, as adversaries go, you are a lot of fun," she said. "A small dose of charm."
t"I've found a small dose to be safer," I said. "The full wattage, all at once, and people are sometimes injured."
t"Especially women, I imagine."
t"They often hurt themselves in their frenzy to disrobe."
t"I've been able to conquer the impulse," she said. "You and I remain adversaries, however congenial, and are likely to remain so. You don't seem like someone who will give up easily."
t"Or ever," I said. (p. 39)
We sat and looked at each other. I liked her. There was a calmness in her, a quality of settled self-confidence in the way she leaned back in her chair, the simplicity of her attire, the understatement of her makeup. She knew herself and was happy with what she knew. It made her formidable. 9p. 40)
t"Even Ellis is not helpful," I said. "Hawk said it's because a lifer can't allow himself to hope."
t"I wonder if Hawk has another life as a shrink," Susan said.
t"I'm not sure about Hawk's tolerance for bullshit," I said.
t"We don't call it that," Susan said.
t"What do you call it?" I said.
t"Avoidance." (p. 50)
tThe way I loved her never varied. But how I liked her could go up and down, and it went down most when she was being professional. (p. 51)
t"You matter to me," I said, "more than what I do, or who I am. If you need me to quit, I'll quit."
tShe shook her head again while she carefully chewed her pizza. When she had swallowed and sipped some wine and blotted her mouth with her napkin, she said, "Yes. You would. But you should not. You are an odd combination of violence and concern. You contain the violence very well, but it's there, and I would be a fool, and you would be a fool, to think it was less a part of you than the concern."
t"You're right," I said. "Sometimes I wish you weren't."
t"No need to wish I weren't," Susan said. "You know yourself. You understand your violence as well as you understand your capacity for kindness, maybe better."
t"Maybe it needs more understanding," I said.
t"Yes, it does," Susan said. "Kindness is not dangerous. You have found a way to work and live which allows you to integrate the violence and the compassion. If you had no impulse to violence, your compassion wouldn't be so admirable. If you had no compassion, your violence would be intolerable. You understand what I'm saying?"
t"As long as I pay close attention," I said.
t"You are able to apply the impulse to violence in the service of compassion. Your profession allows you actually to exist at the point where vocation and avocation meet. Few people achieve that," she said. "I would not have you change."
tI was quiet for a moment admiring the amount of time she had spent thinking about me. Even while I was doing this I was also thinking about how beautiful she was.
t"Does this mean you love me?" I said. . . .
tThen she said, "You bet your ass it does." (p. 154-155)
Re-training after being shot:
tAbout a quarter mile from the house was a hill that went up sharply at right angles to the much gentler hill we lived on. Each morning, Hawk and Pearl and I walked up to the foot of the hill and looked at it. Actually Pearl dashed. Hawk walked. I shuffled. But after the first week I shuffled without holding on. Pearl would race up the hill, barrel chested and wasp waisted. Bred to run for hours, she rubbed it in every day, looking puzzled that I couldn't do at all what she did effortlessly. Then we'd walk back to the house and rest. Then we'd walk to the hill and back and rest and walk to the hill and back and rest. We'd do that until noon. Then we'd have lunch. I would take a nap. And in the afternoon we would work on weights. I started with three-pound dumbbells. I would do curls with them, and flies and tricep extensions, and reverse curls. That is, I would do these things with my left hand. With my right hand, I was barely able at first to twitch the three pounds. The consolation was that Pearl couldn't do this either.
tIn the best of times repetitious workouts are boring. When I could barely do it, the boredom became life threatening. I would reach the foot of the steep hill each time gasping for breath, the sweat soaking through my tee-shirt. I weighed less than 170 pounds and I walked like an old man. I wasn't much of a challenge for Hawk any more than I was for Pearl, but if he was bored, he didn't show it. (p. 208-209)
tOne of the oddities of life in Southern California was the sense of timelessness that set in. There were no real seasons in California and each day was about like the last one . People were probably startled out here to find that they'd aged. For me the days were barely distinguishable, a repetitive sequence of effort and sweat and exhaustion and failure, briefly interrupted by sleep and food. Drinking some of the local wine each evening became more exciting than anything I'd imagined. (p. 209)
tI looked up and the crest of the hill was before me, thirty feet away. I let my head drop again and stood entirely focused on the effort to breathe, soaking with sweat, feeling deeply shaky, as if somehow the very core of my self was beginning to fall apart. I felt like I might fall down. Hawk stood silently beside me. I waited. Hawk waited. The rain came straight down. Finally the occlusive pounding began to slow, and awareness expanded enough for me to look up at the top of the hill.
t"One first down," Hawk said.
tI didn't want to waste any breath talking. I took in as much air as i Could, and went up the rest of the hill almost blindly, my jaw clamped, my eyes almost closed, my berth rasping, almost without feeling, barely aware of anything but my exhaustion, in a near anaerobic state, my bad leg useless, my good leg trembling. And made it. And stood at the top looking out across the valley at the vineyards on the far slope and the rain clouds just above them. Hawk stood beside me with comment. . . . The rasp of my breath began to slow. My leg-and-a-half felt weak but the trembling eventually stopped.
t"Be easier going back," Hawk said.
tI nodded. . . . "Be slippery going down," Hawk said, "and all your brakes ain't working yet."
tI nodded. And we started down. Going up, it had been desperately hard to go forward, now it was desperately hard not to. I fell the first time in front of the driveway, and again twenty yards beyond it, and after that I hung onto Hawk until we passed the lemon grove and reached the street, where the grade was mild, even for me, and the effort of walking was returned to human scale. I stopped and looked back up the hill.
tHawk said, "Too soon to try again."
t"Tomorrow," I said.
tHawk shook his head.
t"No," he said. "Skip a day."
tI nodded. (p. 218-219)
tI squeezed a rubber ball in each hand most of the time I was in California. The first time I tried it with my right hand the ball dropped to the floor. I hadn't enough strength to hold it. Hawk hung a heavy bag from a tree in the meadow behind the house and I banged at it every day, weakly with my left hand, barely at all with my right. The next time I essayed the hill, I took Pearl on a leash and she pulled me maybe five yards further each time between stops. Progress. By the end of January, I could go halfway up, and my right leg wasn't dragging. My beard was thick and bothersome. My hair was too long. Hawk and I went up into one of the canyons back in the hills and began to shoot. I held the gun in both hands, though my left was doing al the work, and I was able to level it mainly by pulling my right arm up with my left. My only success was that I didn't shoot myself. I was up to five-pound dumbbells. With my right arm I was actually moving the weight, curling it maybe halfway so that my forearm was at right angles to my bicep. (p. 221-222)
t"Are you aware," Susan said, "that as you walked down the road toward me you weren't limping?"
tProgress.
tIt was raining lightly on a Tuesday morning, but Hawk and I were out hitting the bag anyway. The way we did it was to work on one punch at a time, banging the same punch over and over again into the bag, first with my left, then with my right. And even though the right did little more than twitch, I went through the whole process in the nervous system just as if the right hand moved. By the third week in January, I was starting to thump the bag pretty good with my left, and this morning, a Tuesday, in the light rain, I got a right hook into it. It wasn't much of a right hook. It wouldn't have knocked the lime slice off a margarita, but it was a hook. I did it again, an delight more times. Neither Hawk nor I said anything. But when I finished on the heavy bag that day, I put out my left fist and Hawk tapped it gently with his. Progress. (p. 223)
tThe rains abated in late February. By that time I was beginning to put some right hooks into the heavy bag with enough starch to discourage an opponent. By mid-March I was able to lift the entire stack on the chest press machine at the Y. By the end of March, I was able to shoot right-handed and hit something. Hawk had a speed bag up now, bolted to the inside wall of the garage, and I was starting to hit it with some rhythm. Hawk had the big target mitts on and I was starting to put combinations together on them, as Hawk moved around me, holding the target mitts in different positions. All of us, Pearl included, after I'd slogged up the hill each morning, went down to Santa Barbara Harbor and ran along the beach, down near the water where the sand was harder. . . .
tOne morning I ran up the hill. All the way. (p. 227)
tWe got back to Boston in the late summer. I weighed 195 pounds, fifteen less than I had when I went into the water, and about what I weighed when I was fighting. But I could walk, and run, and shoot. My right hook was nearly ninety percent, and gaining. (p. 228)
tI slid the pin into the bottom notch of the weight stack on one of the chest-press machines at the Harbor Health Club, and sidled in under it, and took a wide spread grip and inhaled and pushed the weight up as I exhaled. Things creaked in my right shoulder, but the bar went up. I eased it down, pushed it up again. I did this eight more times and let the bar come back to rest. Henry Cimoli was watching me.
t"Ten reps," he said. "You got another set in you."
tI nodded, breathing deeply, waiting. Then I did ten more reps, struggling to keep from. And rested and did ten more.
t"That's as good as you did before," Henry said.
tI slid off of the machine and stood waiting for my oxygen levels to normalize, watching the rest of the club members exercise. . . .
t"Weigh in," Henry said, and we walked to the balance scale. I got on, Henry adjusted the weights. I weighed to 210. The same weight I'd carried into the river almost a year ago.
t"I'd say you're as good as new," Henry said.
t"Too bad," I said. "I was hoping for better."
t"We all were," Henry said. "But you can't shine shit."
t"You're awfully short for a philosopher," I said.
t"Hell," Henry said. "I'm awful short for a person. But I'm fun." (p. 238-239)
He stood absolutely straight as they did this, and when they took him out he didn't look back.
t"You in for life," Hawk said after Alves was gone, "hope will kill you. You going to survive, you got to keep your mind steady."
t"I know."
t"Ain't much else in there but hate and power."
t"Better than nothing," I said. (p. 24)
t"Two U.S.S Senators," I said. "Yikes."
t"Are you intimidated?"
t"Not so I can't breathe," I said.
tPresident Evans laughed.
t"Well, I must say, as adversaries go, you are a lot of fun," she said. "A small dose of charm."
t"I've found a small dose to be safer," I said. "The full wattage, all at once, and people are sometimes injured."
t"Especially women, I imagine."
t"They often hurt themselves in their frenzy to disrobe."
t"I've been able to conquer the impulse," she said. "You and I remain adversaries, however congenial, and are likely to remain so. You don't seem like someone who will give up easily."
t"Or ever," I said. (p. 39)
We sat and looked at each other. I liked her. There was a calmness in her, a quality of settled self-confidence in the way she leaned back in her chair, the simplicity of her attire, the understatement of her makeup. She knew herself and was happy with what she knew. It made her formidable. 9p. 40)
t"Even Ellis is not helpful," I said. "Hawk said it's because a lifer can't allow himself to hope."
t"I wonder if Hawk has another life as a shrink," Susan said.
t"I'm not sure about Hawk's tolerance for bullshit," I said.
t"We don't call it that," Susan said.
t"What do you call it?" I said.
t"Avoidance." (p. 50)
tThe way I loved her never varied. But how I liked her could go up and down, and it went down most when she was being professional. (p. 51)
t"You matter to me," I said, "more than what I do, or who I am. If you need me to quit, I'll quit."
tShe shook her head again while she carefully chewed her pizza. When she had swallowed and sipped some wine and blotted her mouth with her napkin, she said, "Yes. You would. But you should not. You are an odd combination of violence and concern. You contain the violence very well, but it's there, and I would be a fool, and you would be a fool, to think it was less a part of you than the concern."
t"You're right," I said. "Sometimes I wish you weren't."
t"No need to wish I weren't," Susan said. "You know yourself. You understand your violence as well as you understand your capacity for kindness, maybe better."
t"Maybe it needs more understanding," I said.
t"Yes, it does," Susan said. "Kindness is not dangerous. You have found a way to work and live which allows you to integrate the violence and the compassion. If you had no impulse to violence, your compassion wouldn't be so admirable. If you had no compassion, your violence would be intolerable. You understand what I'm saying?"
t"As long as I pay close attention," I said.
t"You are able to apply the impulse to violence in the service of compassion. Your profession allows you actually to exist at the point where vocation and avocation meet. Few people achieve that," she said. "I would not have you change."
tI was quiet for a moment admiring the amount of time she had spent thinking about me. Even while I was doing this I was also thinking about how beautiful she was.
t"Does this mean you love me?" I said. . . .
tThen she said, "You bet your ass it does." (p. 154-155)
Re-training after being shot:
tAbout a quarter mile from the house was a hill that went up sharply at right angles to the much gentler hill we lived on. Each morning, Hawk and Pearl and I walked up to the foot of the hill and looked at it. Actually Pearl dashed. Hawk walked. I shuffled. But after the first week I shuffled without holding on. Pearl would race up the hill, barrel chested and wasp waisted. Bred to run for hours, she rubbed it in every day, looking puzzled that I couldn't do at all what she did effortlessly. Then we'd walk back to the house and rest. Then we'd walk to the hill and back and rest and walk to the hill and back and rest. We'd do that until noon. Then we'd have lunch. I would take a nap. And in the afternoon we would work on weights. I started with three-pound dumbbells. I would do curls with them, and flies and tricep extensions, and reverse curls. That is, I would do these things with my left hand. With my right hand, I was barely able at first to twitch the three pounds. The consolation was that Pearl couldn't do this either.
tIn the best of times repetitious workouts are boring. When I could barely do it, the boredom became life threatening. I would reach the foot of the steep hill each time gasping for breath, the sweat soaking through my tee-shirt. I weighed less than 170 pounds and I walked like an old man. I wasn't much of a challenge for Hawk any more than I was for Pearl, but if he was bored, he didn't show it. (p. 208-209)
tOne of the oddities of life in Southern California was the sense of timelessness that set in. There were no real seasons in California and each day was about like the last one . People were probably startled out here to find that they'd aged. For me the days were barely distinguishable, a repetitive sequence of effort and sweat and exhaustion and failure, briefly interrupted by sleep and food. Drinking some of the local wine each evening became more exciting than anything I'd imagined. (p. 209)
tI looked up and the crest of the hill was before me, thirty feet away. I let my head drop again and stood entirely focused on the effort to breathe, soaking with sweat, feeling deeply shaky, as if somehow the very core of my self was beginning to fall apart. I felt like I might fall down. Hawk stood silently beside me. I waited. Hawk waited. The rain came straight down. Finally the occlusive pounding began to slow, and awareness expanded enough for me to look up at the top of the hill.
t"One first down," Hawk said.
tI didn't want to waste any breath talking. I took in as much air as i Could, and went up the rest of the hill almost blindly, my jaw clamped, my eyes almost closed, my berth rasping, almost without feeling, barely aware of anything but my exhaustion, in a near anaerobic state, my bad leg useless, my good leg trembling. And made it. And stood at the top looking out across the valley at the vineyards on the far slope and the rain clouds just above them. Hawk stood beside me with comment. . . . The rasp of my breath began to slow. My leg-and-a-half felt weak but the trembling eventually stopped.
t"Be easier going back," Hawk said.
tI nodded. . . . "Be slippery going down," Hawk said, "and all your brakes ain't working yet."
tI nodded. And we started down. Going up, it had been desperately hard to go forward, now it was desperately hard not to. I fell the first time in front of the driveway, and again twenty yards beyond it, and after that I hung onto Hawk until we passed the lemon grove and reached the street, where the grade was mild, even for me, and the effort of walking was returned to human scale. I stopped and looked back up the hill.
tHawk said, "Too soon to try again."
t"Tomorrow," I said.
tHawk shook his head.
t"No," he said. "Skip a day."
tI nodded. (p. 218-219)
tI squeezed a rubber ball in each hand most of the time I was in California. The first time I tried it with my right hand the ball dropped to the floor. I hadn't enough strength to hold it. Hawk hung a heavy bag from a tree in the meadow behind the house and I banged at it every day, weakly with my left hand, barely at all with my right. The next time I essayed the hill, I took Pearl on a leash and she pulled me maybe five yards further each time between stops. Progress. By the end of January, I could go halfway up, and my right leg wasn't dragging. My beard was thick and bothersome. My hair was too long. Hawk and I went up into one of the canyons back in the hills and began to shoot. I held the gun in both hands, though my left was doing al the work, and I was able to level it mainly by pulling my right arm up with my left. My only success was that I didn't shoot myself. I was up to five-pound dumbbells. With my right arm I was actually moving the weight, curling it maybe halfway so that my forearm was at right angles to my bicep. (p. 221-222)
t"Are you aware," Susan said, "that as you walked down the road toward me you weren't limping?"
tProgress.
tIt was raining lightly on a Tuesday morning, but Hawk and I were out hitting the bag anyway. The way we did it was to work on one punch at a time, banging the same punch over and over again into the bag, first with my left, then with my right. And even though the right did little more than twitch, I went through the whole process in the nervous system just as if the right hand moved. By the third week in January, I was starting to thump the bag pretty good with my left, and this morning, a Tuesday, in the light rain, I got a right hook into it. It wasn't much of a right hook. It wouldn't have knocked the lime slice off a margarita, but it was a hook. I did it again, an delight more times. Neither Hawk nor I said anything. But when I finished on the heavy bag that day, I put out my left fist and Hawk tapped it gently with his. Progress. (p. 223)
tThe rains abated in late February. By that time I was beginning to put some right hooks into the heavy bag with enough starch to discourage an opponent. By mid-March I was able to lift the entire stack on the chest press machine at the Y. By the end of March, I was able to shoot right-handed and hit something. Hawk had a speed bag up now, bolted to the inside wall of the garage, and I was starting to hit it with some rhythm. Hawk had the big target mitts on and I was starting to put combinations together on them, as Hawk moved around me, holding the target mitts in different positions. All of us, Pearl included, after I'd slogged up the hill each morning, went down to Santa Barbara Harbor and ran along the beach, down near the water where the sand was harder. . . .
tOne morning I ran up the hill. All the way. (p. 227)
tWe got back to Boston in the late summer. I weighed 195 pounds, fifteen less than I had when I went into the water, and about what I weighed when I was fighting. But I could walk, and run, and shoot. My right hook was nearly ninety percent, and gaining. (p. 228)
tI slid the pin into the bottom notch of the weight stack on one of the chest-press machines at the Harbor Health Club, and sidled in under it, and took a wide spread grip and inhaled and pushed the weight up as I exhaled. Things creaked in my right shoulder, but the bar went up. I eased it down, pushed it up again. I did this eight more times and let the bar come back to rest. Henry Cimoli was watching me.
t"Ten reps," he said. "You got another set in you."
tI nodded, breathing deeply, waiting. Then I did ten more reps, struggling to keep from. And rested and did ten more.
t"That's as good as you did before," Henry said.
tI slid off of the machine and stood waiting for my oxygen levels to normalize, watching the rest of the club members exercise. . . .
t"Weigh in," Henry said, and we walked to the balance scale. I got on, Henry adjusted the weights. I weighed to 210. The same weight I'd carried into the river almost a year ago.
t"I'd say you're as good as new," Henry said.
t"Too bad," I said. "I was hoping for better."
t"We all were," Henry said. "But you can't shine shit."
t"You're awfully short for a philosopher," I said.
t"Hell," Henry said. "I'm awful short for a person. But I'm fun." (p. 238-239)
