Rebel Without a Cause

by Robert M. Lindner

  Just about two weeks after this fellow and I had been sitting around conspiring the best way to pull off this job he went to the probation officer. I was then on probation for a holdup. So there were some men from the FBI at the probation office when I came in.…

  I never had anything outside; never cared if I had anything to eat or any clothes.

  At first I didn’t say anything but after several hours of questioning I decided. I knew they didn’t have much proof, but I identified some of the things. Three months later I was tried.

  But I really don’t care about this. I am getting more benefit out of this institution than from 10 or even 20 years outside. If I were still outside I would probably have taken a gun and held up somebody. If they resisted I probably would have shot them.…

  I used to go to High School outside. I went about two years to High. I was getting along alright. There was a teacher there who used to help me because of my eyes. She was the mathematics and science teacher. She was a thin, cold woman almost five feet ten, grey hair. A very fine woman.

  In High I studied German; one and one-half years of German, a year or so of math, algebra, geometry and English. I always liked science. There is one thing I always tried to understand; one experiment about why water always reaches its own level. I am still trying to understand. O, I know now, but at that time I was always trying to understand. The experiment went like this: we had three glass tubes with a hose attached to the bottom of each tube. If you raised one of the tubes the water would sink in the others. Of course, now I know that it is due to the air pressure and the pressure of the water.

  Our High was not very big, just about one city block. They taught everything there; mechanical drawing, engineering. I was never interested in anything very much, but math came easily. English seems to have been pretty hard.

  I took German instead of Latin because of a girl. Ella. She sat across the aisle from me. I don’t think I ever learned anything there. And I very seldom bothered Ella. I just fooled around the classroom and made a lot of useless noise. I guess our classroom was the noisiest in the whole school. They all had me marked down buggy. The German teacher was an old man. I can’t recall his name; this was when I was about fifteen. He used to get terribly mad when we put a swastika on the blackboard. He used to get so mad he pulled his hair—what he had left of it. The class I was in was the most unruly class they ever had.

  I didn’t like English very much but I don’t know why. I used to cut a lot of periods. I used to cut the first period in the morning and then not go back sometimes all day. My cousin was the same way. That’s the one who is getting married. John. He’s getting married soon. I never liked him very much. If he hadn’t been my cousin I wouldn’t have bothered with him.

  I didn’t associate with many people outside.

  I used to go down to the river bank a lot. There was a highway along the shore of the river. About two hundred feet away from the Boulevard there was a steep grade, sort of a decline down to the river. There was a fence on the edge of the highway to warn the drivers about this grade. Often times I would sit on that fence and watch the boats go by. The river is not very big. We used to spend a lot of time on the water, swimming or boating. Often we would get a hitch back down the river again. Many times I used to just sit and watch the water, greasy and dirty. There was a big steel company on the other side of the river, and big swamps between the factories. We used to get boards and wood there and make a raft and take it out in the middle; and when a boat came along we’d pull up the anchor and put the boat on one side. The middle of the river always seemed to be the nicest. It was the coolest part.

  Lots of boys from this neighborhood used to take girls over to the other side. Sometimes there was one girl to ten or fifteen or twenty men. I never did a line like that. I hate a lot of fellows for things like that and I hated my cousin. He baited this girl Lila to go over the other side. He and about twelve other fellows told her I was there. It doesn’t mean anything to me now. But I thought then it was a rotten dirty trick for anyone to do. I used to get a lot of fun with girls, talk with them and watch their reactions and try my best to be a gentleman. There aren’t more than one or two girls I ever hit. Lila; I hit her because she went over to the other side with my cousin. The other girl called me a filthy name. I hit her. I was drunk that night. O, I have had a lot of arguments with my sister, but I never hit her real hard. She would throw everything she could lay her hands on at me. But the next day everything would be alright. She could really curse but now she’s changed. She’s quite a lady now.

  My little sister is twelve this month. I didn’t even write to congratulate her. I wrote a poem for my older sister’s birthday. It wasn’t very good: it was pretty lousy. I used to write poetry when lying in bed at night. I should have written to my younger sister. I haven’t seen her for three years now. She’ll be a big girl when I leave here. All my older sister thinks of now is going places and getting all dolled up. I used to think the same way. She works now; gets about thirty dollars a week.

  My mother was always very strict with us. Sometimes I used to stay out until eleven or twelve or one and when I came home I found mother waiting for me. She would be mad at me and sometimes hit me, and I would argue and explain to her. She wanted me to be home at nine. She thought when I didn’t come home I would be out and be around and steal things from people. Maybe I would be doing that once in a while; the other times I would be playing pool in a poolroom, or getting drunk somewhere, or with a girl. She didn’t like that because she couldn’t sleep until everybody was home. She always held my sisters up to me as examples of good children. They were home at a certain time; why couldn’t I?

  My sister was working before I came here and she never went any place. The money I needed I’d borrow from her. I’d have to give her a long story and explanation. I don’t owe her such a lot, about twenty dollars now besides what she’s sent me here.

  Prison doesn’t destroy desire. I still have a desire for a nice little boat. I didn’t ever like automobiles so well. I always liked a boat.

  When I was getting finished with grade school I used to hang around with a bunch of ten or twelve kids. We were always hanging around together. I remember we used to break into lunch wagons and into a paint shop and a butcher store. I got two years probation, an extra year more than the other fellows. My father didn’t say anything. I went back to school and three months later we were hanging around together again.

  There was a railroad running about a block from our house. We used to throw stones at the engines and cars and at the signal lights and break open tool cases and locks. So we went back before the same Judge who sentenced us before. He just hollered at us. My probation officer got me out of it with one year probation. The other fellows got nothing. They just went home.

  At that time they tried to do something for my eyes, so they transfered me to a public school where they had a class for eye conservation or something like that. But it was just a class where they sent some of the kids who had some trouble with their eyes. They had a teacher assigned to help them with their studies, but we attended all classes with the others too. They gave us a typewriter so we could type all our work and taught us how far to hold a book from our eyes. We did very little writing and we wouldn’t read small print. We attended class with children who had normal eyesight. The other fellow who got a year probation too was in my class. We kept to ourselves. He went his way and I went my way. In about a year I graduated and went to High. The reason I quit after two years of High was that my uncle wanted me to come up to his place. My mother wanted me to keep on studying. I didn’t know what to do. So I went up there only for a few months. Then I went back to the city.…

  THE THIRD HOUR

  Yesterday I felt as if I was lying on a cloud somewhere with my head wrapped in cotton. I couldn’t move it. It was as if I were up against a big stone cliff or something.

  Why I said that I don’t know.…

  Yesterday I couldn’t
move my head. I don’t know what it was. I still remember lying on this bed, or on a cloud. I felt as if my head was wrapped in cotton, so soft and yet so hard I couldn’t move it. Sometimes it seemed as if my mind left my body and just went off by itself.…

  Where the association is unimpeded by resistances, this is a common experience among patients.

  I never had many friends on the outside. Usually I’d hang out by myself, go and sit on the guard-rail near the river and watch the river, the dark, dirty river go by. It rolls and rolls by. Then the river turns, it turns and you see it against the sky. The sky so clean and the water so dirty, just like someone took a paint brush and painted grease in a straight line.

  I used to spend a lot of time on the river near my home where I had some small boats, just row boats. I never had no motor boat. And I used to play in the swamp, swampy, muddy grounds with bushes and weeds and some sandy spots. There were old logs and pipes laying around. I used to go there with a .22 and shoot bull frogs. One time I put a match on a tank and I tried to hit this match but the bullets always went over the tank or to the side. I always had a liking for guns. I don’t know why.…

  I used to get hitches on tug boats and barges and go up the river and back. I would just do nothing and waste a lot of time. Sometimes I would look for work but I would never find any. I never had a job, so I would just ignore it; wouldn’t look for work at all; maybe spend a half day in a show and sleep a lot. It would get monotonous, and then I would read books. I used to read the wrong kind of books, I guess; detective magazines and crime stories just to pass the time. I used to listen to the radio a lot too. Most of the time to crime serials but once in a while to music. Not jazz music. Music. Music. Now I know it was classical music. I liked it. I don’t know anything about it. I guess it is soothing to the emotions, makes a person free of everything.

  I spent most of my nights on the outside with fellows. That was on account of my eyes. They don’t blink at night.

  When I was about twelve I used to hang around with fellows from my neighborhood and we used to shoot out street lights and lights on billboards with staples. There was a lunch wagon and we shot out its windows.

  There was a fellow had a motor boat and we shot out all its windows and drilled two holes in the bottom of it. He used to go out fishing in it. One time he threw all the clothes of the fellows when they were swimming into the water, so that’s why we got even with him. Me and another fellow one time stole a row boat, one that belonged to this fellow, and he threw a hammer and a saw at us but he didn’t hit either one of us. We just ran.

  There was a dock nearby where we went swimming and diving off poles. They were real high, forty feet or so. The water was deep there too. Maybe fifty feet. A lot of people used to go swimming there. There was a Park on the other side of the Boulevard from the river. I’d spend a lot of time there too. They had concerts in the summer on the baseball diamond and you would see the grandstand and the baseball diamond filled with people. Up across the street from the Park there was a stand where we used to get ice cream. We’d steal from two to five gallons every week, sometimes two or three big cans a week.

  After I got a little older, all the older fellows used to come around to the gang. I must have been about sixteen then. There was a young kid that got his leg cut off, the right leg at the ankle. That stopped most of the fellows from going to the railroad yard. Right along side of the railroad was a coal company that had a big trestle where the freight cars full of coal used to be pushed. That trestle was on a grade, and they would tie the freight cars so they wouldn’t roll down. One time we unhooked them. They started down the grade and rolled and rolled and rolled.

  There was a church school I used to go to, and an order of sisters that ran it. It was an Irish Catholic school. I couldn’t see the blackboard and I was sitting in the back of the classroom. So I kept the other children from doing their work and used to get beatings for not having my lessons prepared. I think that me and another fellow—he had a paralyzed arm—were the worst two fellows in the class. I used to pal around with the best student in the class too. He used to live about a block away from me. I remember one time we were coming home from school about 4 o’clock and I got hold of a newspaper and was reading it. He made a kind of sarcastic remark to me: “Don’t take the print off.” I never forgot that and we were not such good friends again. I recall how he used to tell me that I might get in trouble, that if I did anything they would give me time. I didn’t pay any attention to him and one time told him to mind his own god-dam business. This boy used to have a blackjack that he carried around with him and one time he hit me on the toe. It hurt bad. When we were about twelve his brother showed me the gun he carried. This brother was nineteen or twenty then. He was like a gorilla, hair all over and big muscles.

  It seemed then that I had to have a gun too.

  We had a clubhouse in an old barn near the railroad station. There was a big sword in the clubhouse, about three feet long, and a big shotgun, a muzzle-loader with a double barrel. We also had some fur skins that we stole from a nearby leather factory.

  To me a lot of these fellows in the gang seemed awfully stupid and dumb. For instance, one time we had a checkbook and none of them knew how to fill out a check. I told them how to fill one out and they all wanted to have a check.

  When I belonged to this gang, me and another fellow found two cans of paint in the cellar of an old house. We threw a match into one of the cans and when it blazed we turned the can upside down. It started smoking and black smoke came. The floor was just dirt and pebbles and stone, and the black smoke was all around, and we were gasping for air. Finally we found the stairs and ran. We heard the firemen coming and they rushed into the house. After a while they came out and said there was nothing there.

  When I was still about twelve we used to build big fires on the river bank. Sometimes we’d catch crabs in the river, over on the other side, and cook them. One time at Christmas we got hold of a lot of trees, about fifty or more Christmas trees, and we piled them on the river bank and lighted them. It made a big fire, a great big flame, maybe a hundred feet high. The fire engines came down and even the fire boat and they put it out.

  We used to steal keys every place we could get them, automobile keys, garage keys, all kinds of keys. We got them and tried to open a lot of locks. I never went inside a garage we opened. We used to steal a lot of batteries right off cars and trucks and sell them for one dollar apiece. That’s how we got some money.

  One time we broke into a paint shop. We pulled two or three boards out at the back of the building. Two of the fellows went inside. There was a police station right across the street from this place. A policeman came from the railroad station and went through the parking lot behind the paint shop. He had a flashlight and we knew it. So I told them to put the boards back in place and we lay down flat so when he would flash the light he wouldn’t see us. He went by and didn’t even flash his light. He went right through to the police station. We got nothing but paint, some ink, some pens, some old junk.

  I remember one time we broke into a butcher stop.

  Shop. A slip of the tongue. Orthodox analysts would regard this as a potent manifestation of resistance.

  There were a lot of cigarettes. One of the fellows took about twenty packs. I told him to take them all; there were about three hundred. When the police found the place where we hid them in the barn the cigarettes were missing. Somebody must have stolen them from us.

  Before I came here we had an apartment over a tavern. There was always a lot of noise and racket going on, but it was quiet when I came home at night. I would sleep, but the next day my mother would tell me about the noise and the racket. My mother now lives at grandmother’s.

  Directly across the street from my grandmother’s house there is a lot. There are two garages on it. My father rents one of the garages and keeps one of his cars in the other. The other car he keeps out in the open. He said he bought this other car for my sister; my
sister said to give it to me but he wouldn’t do that, so my sister said she didn’t want it.

  My sister is about twenty now. She has a job: she likes to work and dress up and go out. She didn’t go to High with me: she quit when she graduated from grammar school.

  Me and Arty, the fellow who was on parole with me, used to hang out at a blacksmith’s shop. We used to watch the blacksmith work and talk with him. About nothing, I guess. Then I stopped hanging around there. There was a trucking company right down the street from the smith’s shop; they used to have crap games there. I never shot craps there: I couldn’t see the dice.

  I used to play pinochle with my cousin. He used to cheat me. My cousin John.

  I’d stay out late a lot, go to a poolroom and play pool, listen to the radio, get drunk, do nothing at all. I’d stay out late and my mother would holler at me and hit me.