The Cat's Pajamas

You turn left at the next corner and you’re thinking fast. An accident. Yourself knocked out and bleeding. Unconscious, you’ll never be able to give yourself a dose of those precious little pills you keep in your pocket.

You press the gas pedal. The car thunders ahead and you look back and the other car is still following you, gaining. A tap on the head, the least cut, and you are all done.

You turn right at Wilcox, left again when you reach Melrose, but they are still with you. There is only one thing to do.

You stop the car at the curb, take the keys, climb quietly out and walk up and sit down on somebody’s lawn.

As the trailing car passes, you smile and wave at them.

You think you hear curses as the car vanishes.

You walk the rest of the way home. On the way you call a garage and have them pick up your car for you.

Though you’ve always been alive, you’ve never been as alive as you are now—you’ll live forever. You’re smarter than all of them put together. You’re watchful. They won’t be able to do a thing that you can’t see and circumvent one way or another. You have that much faith in yourself. You can’t die. Other people die, but not you. You have complete faith in your ability to live. There’ll never be a person clever enough to kill you.

You can eat flames, catch cannonballs, kiss women who have torches for lips, chuck gangsters under the chin. Being the way you are, with the kind of blood you have in your body, has made you—a gambler? A taker of chances? There must be some way to explain the morbid craving you have for danger or near danger. Well, explain it this way. You get a terrific ego lift out of coming through each experience safely. Admit it, you’re a conceited, self-satisfied person with morbid ideas of self-destruction. Hidden ideas, naturally. No one admits outwardly he wants to die, but it’s in there somewhere. Self-preservation and the will to die, tugging back and forth. The urge to die getting you into messes, self-preservation yanking you out again. And you hate and laugh at these people when you see them wince and twist with discomfort when you come out, whole and intact. You feel superior, godlike, immortal. They are inferior, cowardly, common. And you are a little more than irked to think that Anne prefers her narcotics to you. She finds the needle more stimulating. Damn her! And yet—you also find her stimulating—and dangerous. But you’ll take a chance with her, anytime, yes, any old time....

It is once again four in the morning. The typewriter is going under your fingers as the doorbell rings. You get up and go to answer in the complete before-dawn quiet.

Far away on the other side of the universe her voice says, “Hello, Rob. Anne. Just get up?”

“Right. This is the first time you’ve come around in days, Anne.” You open the door and she comes in past you, smelling good.

“I’m tired of Mike. He makes me sick. I need a good dose of Robert Douglas. I’m really tired, Rob.”

“You sound it. My sympathies.”

“Rob—” A pause.

“Yeah?”

A pause. “Rob—could we get away tomorrow? I mean, today—this afternoon. Up the coast somewhere, lie in the sun and just let it burn us? I need it, Rob, badly.”

r /> “Why, I guess so. Sure. Yeah. Hell, yes!”

“I like you, Rob. I only wish you weren’t writing that damned novel.”

“If you cleared out of that mob I might quit,” you say. “But I don’t like the things they’ve done to you. Has Mike told you what he’s doing to me?”

“Is he doing something, darling?”

“He’s trying to bleed me. Really bleed me, I mean. You know Mike underneath, don’t you, Anne. White-livered and scared. Berntz too, for that matter. I’ve seen their kind before, acting tough to cover up their lily guts. Mike doesn’t want to kill me. He’s afraid of killing. He thinks he can scare me out of this. But I’m going ahead because I don’t think he’ll have enough nerve to finish it. He’d rather take a chance on a narcotics rap than go up for murder. I know Mike.”

“But do you know me, darling?”

“I think I do.”

“Very well?”

“Well enough.”

“I might kill you.”

“You wouldn’t dare. You like me.”

“I like myself,” she purrs, “too.”

“You always were a strange one. I never knew, and still don’t know, what makes you tick.”