Nonconformity Read Online Free PDF

’n’ be ready to take off again. Got into all sorts of hell for no reason but just to make something happen. Now I go two hours ’n’ I’m ready to knock off for three days. It’s how to stay out of trouble.”
    “I didn’t get on because of too much pep,” a contrary cat has a different tale. “I got on it because everybody I knew was making sixty-seventy a week and I couldn’t make more’n thirty-five. Some days I couldn’t lay by a dime. Now some days I make more than that before noon. It makes a real little go-getter out of you.”
    “When one is peacefully at home,” Chekhov observes, “life seems ordinary. But as soon as one walks into the streets and begins to observe and to talk to women, then life becomes truly terrible.”
    And when one walks into a courtroom where women are being tried, it begins to seem that they are the innocent ones. That it is His Honor, the arresting officers and that little man who stands beside His Honor whispering, “She was up before you on the same charge last week, Your Honor,” as well as the indifferent spectator, who are the guilty parties.
    Guilty of indifference. Guilty of self-righteousness.Guilty of complacency.
    And what did he mean, the little leaning dreamer, in saying, as he teetered, that whatever happens to him really happens to somebody else? Did he mean something like that other cat meant when she said, “I remember that particular day so well, because I felt like myself for a little while. But I don’t feel like myself anymore.”
    They get to feeling so lonesome for their lost nameless selves, down there in the night-blue bars. “You’re dragging along and you know it’s the end of the end—then a strange kick hits you and nothing seems like it used to be,” is how one cat puts it. “Strange kicks hook you, and the bad times are forgot.” Meaning perhaps that he wants to know his own name, but that there is no one to tell him.
    Strange things still happen from time to time, maybe something will happen to you that never happened to any cat before. Down in the caves of the wilderness, where the loot is large, The Nab greases easy, and they call all peddlers “Jack-the-Rabbit.”
    Where they know when to use bennies and when to use suckies, when to square up and when to goof. A time for M and a time for H and a time for tapering off. An evening country where ten a.m. always looks a little like five in the afternoon.
    Between seven and eleven it is quiet on the street, for the cats are sleeping the strange light sleep. They have an hour now of neither fever-dreams nor fear.
    Till the sleeping blood begins to stir, they wake up sneezing with watering eyes and know: Jack-the-Rabbit is on his way.
    The rhythms of the junkie night are the cycle of the block, for the peddler moves as the blood cries out. “And you know it ain’t habit-forming, cat,” Jack-the-Rabbit assures you with a nudge. “It just makes you want to try it again.”
    They know what M is and what H is and what weed is better than the judges. The Nab knows, but the judges who try them in Chicago are beside themselves with ignorance. “I can tell you what a man on H will do,” Judge Gibson Gorman of the local narcotics court tells an audience, “but I can’t predict what he’ll do on marijuana—he may commit murder and he may not.”
    They know when to plaster a ten-spot onto the skin, under a band-aid, to keep The Nab from getting it all.
    They recognize popular songs at the juke’s first summer-colored note, and ask one another solemnly, “How do you think Coleman Hawkins felt when Lester Young came along?” 50
    They know what squares never do—that every man is guilty unless, by some ruse, he can prove his innocence. They know that, in Chicago courts, it isn’t a matter of discovering who is innocent, but only who is the least guilty. All this they know that no square knows. All this, and much besides.
    Some, the very wisest cats of all, even know how to go to the