Jackpot

Al Dooley, graduate student in sociology at the University of California, and bored, sick of being bored, bored with being bored, had thought that his service in the Army would provide a nice, unpleasant break in the easy slide of his life. Well, it didn't. He beat it without meaning to.

Dejected, he informed his parents, who ran a travel agency in Santa Barbara, specializing in five-day tours to Acapulco. They were happy. They preferred their son in his Ivy ease and sloth. They preferred not to worry about the future, except for the slackening boom in Acapulco.

Rejected, he then drove over to his girl Peggy's apartment on Dwight Way in Berkeley--his girl Peggy with her cable-knit sweaters, her long smooth legs and thighs, her pert and perky healthy little face with no make-up at all if you don't count the eye shadow, mascara, and the job of curling on her eyelashes. She was a trifle vain about her blue-green eyes. She picked her clothes to match--nighties, sweaters, and such. She had a powder-blue TR-4, too. Rejected and dejected, Al came drooping pad-ward. "You beat it?" cooed Peggy through buttery lips. "You beat it? Ooh, goody. Let's celebrate. Let's make out."

"First, don't you want to hear?" he asked.

"Ooh yes." She folded her hands in her lap to indicate desire to hear. Legs in ski pants folded under rump on couch to indicate desire to hear. Desire to hear all over, and she fluttered her lashes. They caught the mild Berkeley sunlight through the slats.

He had reported for the preinduction physical. It turned out that he had suffered a skull fracture as a boy, and for a whole year, at age eight, he had been mighty depressed about life. Missed school (third-grade arithmetic was a bore, anyway), trouble using right leg, double vision. Then it passed. He attended school, used his right leg, saw single. He was blithe again by age nine. But the Army doctors had pried, prodded, knocked, tapped, squeezed, mumbled, listened, and shined lights at him. No decision. They mumbled some more. Then a psychiatrist had brought him cannily into a private office and offered him a cigarette and extended a whole bunch of shrewd questions: "Wanna be some kinda artist, hey? Wanna live alone? Wanna grow a beard? Ever sleep with a man? Ever wanna?"

Al had answered no to all these questions. The doctor, sucking furiously on his pipe, shook his head in the grip of metaphysical agony. His cheeks grew white, then red, then white again. Finally, through clenched teeth, his breath broke; the strain was relieved; the tobacco drew. There was a wet sizzle in the stem of the pipe. The doctor reared back, popeyed; reared forward. He speared a pencil, using index finger and opposable thumb. Like Cro-Magnon man, he had made a discovery. He wrote something on a yellow form and nodded to a corporal standing at the door. The corporal took Al's papers and, with a somewhat swaying tread, led him to the door.

"Well, am I in?" Al asked.

The corporal held his papers by two fingers and merely winced at the question.

"It's important to me, Corporal. Am I in the Army now?"

The corporal handed him a folder and said with fine contempt, "We don't want you."

"May I ask why?"

"Becauth we jutht don't want you."

"But why?" Al insisted.

The corporal breathed lispingly. "Thinuth, you crumb. Clogged thinuth. Me with my adenoidth, they took me in, but you with your thinuth..."

"Ah, oh, ooh," said Peggy, plucking at her sweater, "there was a shadow on the bone when they shined the light up your nose, I guess it was."

Peggy was undressing while she talked. She respected him. He was intelligent. His breath smelled pretty. Therefore she didn't shove any one of her various perfumed, cared-for parts at him until he had finished discussing. This took some forbearance on Peggy's side, because Al was a talkative, coffee-drinking, theorizing graduate student. And for her health's sake, Peggy needed lots of loving. She furnished her apartment near the Berkeley campus with a Buffet print, Montoya playing the guitar in stereo, and lots of athletic loving to supplement her skiing and tennis. She had been used to loving since the first summer after high school. Addicted to both mildly mentholated cigarettes and the prance and squeak of love, she preferred to get the cigarettes by the carton from the drugstore on the corner and the loving by the fireside from her honey bunch, Al. He was nice. Though he was long-winded, he was also long-winded, if you get what she meant by that. She liked him medically. "Mmm, honey, let's make out," she whispered when she could forbear no more. She touched his knee and blushed. But she kept her hand there. Still blushing, she stroked the inside of his thigh, but only a little. A girl mustn't be too forward with a really manly man like Al.

Afterward, walking down Telegraph Avenue, with the late strollers of the perpetual mild April of Berkeley clogging the street, Al tried counting the cable-knit sweaters on boys and girls, tried counting the pretty girls, tried finding a short-legged one, tried to find some variation in the succession of espresso coffeehouse and bookshop and sports cars and sweet California pleasures. No! Not enough! he thought. To slip downhill into my Ph.D. and teach sociology in some good Western school and marry and Peggy and look slim and elegant until I'm 50, skiing and art movies and fathering long-legged California children and ... Oh, no! he cried out, with exhausted, pleasured, Peggy-pleasured loins empty.

He insisted that he go home that night; he wanted to think about things. The future lay before him. Peggy, her treadmill health insured once more, sleepily assented. She was cooperative. He cooperated with her and she would cooperate with him. Fair is fair. She only added, dropping down to sleep with her cashmere littering the floor and her undies piled neatly on a chair: "Kizmee."

He kissed her.

And now, back in the sweet eternal April of the Bay area, he was trying to figure out what to do next. If he had been a Jew, he could have gone to fight in Israel, if there were a war in Israel. If he had been a Negro, he could have gone to register at some Southern university, if there were need of him. If he were an artist or a writer, he could go art or write. But what could a clever-to-very-clever-grade sociology student find to do dial might make an exception of his ordinary life? Join the Peace Corps? Get rich? Commit a crime?

Well, the Peace Corps seemed a bit political to Al, who suffered from that tendency to cynicism which is one of the diseases of the bored. Another of the diseases is melancholia. These led him to ask such questions as: "In a time of general disaster, why catch infectious hepatitis in foreign climes? Why teach one Asian to read when a thousand illiterate ones are being conceived every minute? Why not get my jaundice at home?" Which only meant that the Peace Corps did not engage him. That settled the Peace Corps.

Falling in love had been listed among the possibilities. But Al sensed that, once sex is taken care of, taken care of in Peggy's or some other Peggy's sincere California fashion, love is not an option to be chosen by an act of will. It may happen along with the magic of a life that is exciting in other ways. No love in sight. OK.

That left getting rich. Or committing a crime. Why not combine the two, crime and riches?

He would take off the summer to become a rich criminal in San Francisco or Berkeley. It was more personal than being a draftee, anyway. The phrase "heist job" came fizzing through to his bemused spirit. He like the sound of it. Heist, con, strong-arm--an energetic young maestro of psychopathic behavior! He would have money for specialties in sex, travel, cars, fun. Large doings! Aberrations! He could break out of the mold for a major splurge in exceptional life. For Al Dooley, depressed and cynical, this was the moral equivalent of the Peace Corps. He needed something to make the pot boil beneath him.

The student criminal Al Dooley, formerly melancholic, took a hot shower before bed. He left the glass door of the stall ajar, so that it went drip drip drip on the tile, but before he could get up to close it, he had fallen asleep. He was 23 years old. He had not suffered very much in his span on earth. But he had a taste for meaning: he wanted life to have meaning: he wanted to be different. This rude ambition breaks molds.

• • •

How does a young man from a good school, with a father in travel in Santa Barbara, enter the life of crime? It's not easy. Perhaps because of long association with students bucking for a Monsanto Chemical or Civil Service, Al thought of becoming a Mafia trainee or an apprentice gangster in some small racket. But where were the advertisements to answer, the references to offer, the curriculum vitae or resumes to prepare? Where was the trade journal called Safecracking Today? Where was the Prentice-Hall text on how you, too, can learn to pass counterfeit money in your spare time? It almost seemed as if they were deliberately trying to make things hard for a young fellow seeking to make his way in the world. They favored their own. You had to have pull--like for appointments to West Point or the Naval Academy. No smiling and crewcut recruiters from The Black Hand visited the campus to talk with seniors and graduate students in the social sciences.

The Bible says to do whatever you do with a full heart. With a full heart Al Dooley had been doing nothing.

He moped, trying to find a dishonest way in life. He needed something special. He sought to leave the ruck of the easy and ordinary.

Inevitably it occurred to Al to visit Milly Peck in her upstairs pad on Grant Street in San Francisco's North Beach, but he hated to involve Milly in his problems. Still, she was as close to the criminal world as anyone he knew. She had been his girl during his freshman and sophomore years, and then had dropped out when she met a smalltime operator named Poopie Cola in a coffeehouse. But to go to Milly would not be to make a clean break with his past, Al decided. It was a compromise. First, he would look around all by himself.

He took to hanging out in pool halls, but all he found there were admirers of Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman. No nice hustlers, no heist men, just a few creepy geezers, killing time, calling each other Oakland Fats and Slim-from-Richmond.

Next he tried sleazy night clubs in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco--whores of both sexes, trying to take him for a ride, suggesting a hotel room or a Turkish bath. But without going through the unnerving sex round, Al saw no way toward satisfying illicit enterprise through the people he met in the Winner's, Gimpy's or the Whazzat-Bar. Anyway, they were mostly office boys, waitresses or relief clients in their daytime lives, and about the worst thing they ever did was to make off with a box of paper clips or a tablecloth stamped national linen supply. He saw a promising type in a dime arcade on Market Street, looking at the sex films--three minutes of a girl all by herself for a dime, for a quarter in color--and he said: "Psst, I'm looking for a job--"

An answer came back rapidly, requesting that he do to himself what the man watching the filmstrip was obviously doing all by his lonesome in this popcorn-scented corner of the lonely arcade.

"Hey, Louie! Here's a beauty!" shouted (continued overleaf) a sailor with his eyes pasted to the machine.

The man to whom Al had applied for a job repeated his invitation to the sailor. He sought beauty, not fortune. The promising type was gloomily satisfied by his three minutes in color of a Mexican lady wriggling out of a black girdle, still wearing her pumps.

Wriggling up from the bottom of Market Street was not the way for a man of Al's ambitious intensity to enter a life of crime. Just as in so many other businesses, he would have to use pull. He would go to see Milly Peck in her North Beach pad. He was tired of brooding over cheap whiskey and waiting to be spoken to by a weary second-story man in need of a side-kick to give him a boost. Even the water in these bars where he bided his time tasted of whiskey, bad whiskey, and the whiskey tasted of bad water, and finally people did talk to him, but only about the ball game, about Fidel Castro, or about the fine climate of the Bay area. Extreme measures were called for. Milly Peck.

Milly, a small, intense girl with a fine miniature figure and long reddish hair and a bad complexion, had left school in her junior year to join forces with Peter A. (Poopie) Cola. Milly was the daughter of a Hillsboro stockbroker. She had gone to a finishing school and to the most expensive dermatologist in San Francisco. Dermatology and French by the conversational method did not do for her. Even accompanying herself on the guitar as she sang The Blue-Tailed Fly did not put her hormones in lasting order But under the constant care of Poopie, her hickeys went away all by themselves. Her complexion was clearing up nicely. This made Al a little jealous, since she had suffered from skin trouble continuously during the two years of their going steady, but of course Al was young and inexperienced and Poopie had never been young, and never been inexperienced. "He's so considerate, Al," she said. "It's a little folkway he learned."

Maybe Milly just outgrew skin troubles. She was growing into her type--a small, graceful, slow-moving, long-haired girlfriend of a Grant Street pander and marijuana peddler. He liked her to wear ski pants and her hair in a single braid. It did something for him. In return, he wore elastic pants he bought at the Sword & Whip, Men's Sportwear, on Polk Street. He had once bought a leather bikini at the S & W, but when it shrank and locked on him at the beach and he had to go screaming to be cut out. Poopie retreated to more conservative garb. He only wore his flaring black-leather cape on chilly evenings.

Poopie had given up pimping for love of Milly. He had given up a wife and three children for love of Milly. He truly loved Milly. He just liked to stay around their apartment above a pizzeria, occasionally beating her up to keep his hand in, cashing the stock from her small inheritance, getting to know each other. All this he did for love of Milly. For love of Poopie--but only when all the stock was sold--Milly would hit the street under Poopie's guidance. Until then, Poopie was a sort of kept man, loafing in loafers, loving on the love seat, wearing the cape, entertaining Milly in a way she had never been entertained as an undergraduate at Mills College. Later he could be a man and really earn his keep, selling Milly's pelt in the clubs of Broadway.

Poopie yawned in Al's face when Milly said, "Al Dooley, you remember, I told you all about him the night you broke my front tooth, darling."

"Yeah. Hiya, sport."

"Come on in, Al, I'll put the tea on."

"Why thanks, Milly, I'd love it. Brr, that fog."

But it was Poopie who made the tea. He rolled it in a little piece of paper, licked the cylinder, and passed it around. The fog had billowed through the Golden Gate, across Twin Peaks, across Russian and Nob Hills, and now even this cozy little apartment above the V-Day Pizzeria & Zen Coffeebar was enclosed in a dense warm muff. They sat cross-legged on the rugs Milly had brought down from the family house in Hillsboro and enjoyed the traditional Grant Street Tea Ceremony together. Al decided that Poopie wasn't so bad for a criminal type. He was a sadist and a parasite and a cheap crook, but he was friendly. And that's what counts in this world of difficult contacts, where every man is an island entire of himself. Poopie passed the tea from hand to hand. He was nice. He was sociable. He made conversation. "There's a funny thing about me," he said, "I never did like a toothache. Funny. And a foot injection--I never did like a foot injection. And a guy who makes trouble neither. I'm a funny guy that way." He was thoughtful. He meditated his goals in life--no toothaches, foot injections or troublemakers. Al reminded himself not to have cavities and to dry carefully between his toes.

To get to know Poopie was to get to like him. He was the greatest little complexion-clearer-upper of all the petty thugs on Grant. He was sweet, though he did have that death's head grin. He was nice, despite his habit of wearing a sweater without a shirt underneath and his way of laughing in your face without telling why. He was a great guy, really swell, one of the best. Easy to see why Milly picked him when she wanted to let her father in Hillsboro know that he had somehow failed to communicate with her, really communicate, and dermatology and guitars and stock in her own time were mere materialism compared to the love of a fine, upstanding, greasy little man.

Al inhaled deeply, held it, gasped, and passed on the tea. He smiled at Poopie. Poopie frowned back. He had a slight head cold, infecting both Milly and Al, but that wasn't his fault. Anyway, as the Army docs had said, Al's sinus was susceptible.

Later, while a quiet little bossa nova long play filled the thoughtful silences, Al finally asked Poopie's help in his quest for an introduction into the life of crime.

"Hah?" said kindly, friendly, postnasal Poopie.

"A heist team. Safecracking. Burglaring, you know," said Al.

"Oh Al!" Milly cried, slapping his wrist. "What would your parents say? Listen, you should know the trouble I get in with my daddy over just living with Poopie, much less if I went to work for him. Parents are so square, honest. Daddy thinks I'm going to peddle my ass--oops, sorry, Poopie doesn't like me to use that language--sell it to the Johns. Poopie wouldn't ask me to do a thing like that, would you, Poopie? Remember, you promised, Poopie. Poopie? Poopie?"

"Yah, I promised," he said.

Milly smiled gratefully. "You see, I told you. But of course if bubble comes to squeak and it's a question of taking good care of my honey bunch, well, there's nothing I wouldn't do for my very own Poopie."

"Count on you," said Poopie, showing his gums.

"Daddy says I'm just going through the stage of parental rebellion, but I known better. It's purely true love and economic. I'd do anything for Poopie. I'm twenty-one and it's time to live my own life. I wish Dad understood, he'd like him if he saw him the way I do, in his cape and all. Poopie's so nice, I mean."

Al interrupted this scene of connubial bliss. "Help me out?" he asked nice Poopie.

"Naw," said Poopie with that frankness for which Milly loved him.

"Just give me some advice, maybe?" Al asked.

"Yes and no," said Poopie with that tactful deviousness for which Milly loved him. "What's in it for me, sport?"

An appeal to responsibility for his fellow man would be inappropriate, Al believed. And yet hatred of his fellow man also failed to ring the proper bell. Al sighed and shook his head doggedly. It was so hard to communicate. He got up to leave with a sense of having spent just one more pleasant evening in a life of pleasant evenings. It was Sunday, the sky was fogged in all over the Bay area, the kids back in Berkeley were having their last espresso of the weekend and getting ready to do a bit of studying after the day's hard fun. But somehow (continued on page 138)Jackpot(continued from page 74) fulfillment had not yet come to Al Dooley. He stood up shyly to say good night.

"You leaving so soon, sport? Aw, gee."

"Well, gee, Poopie--"

But Poopie was just grinning, showing his gold teeth. Apparently he had planned to beat up Milly in front of Al as an educational method of showing her that he didn't approve of her collegiate associations, she should have outgrown all that; but Al's abrupt decision to depart took him by surprise. "So soon?" he repeated. He clucked his tongue. "Nice talkin' to you, sport."

Milly also stood up to say goodbye.

"Goodbye, Al," she said. "Come again soon."

Naturally Poopie flew into a rage. "You stand up when he leaves, but me? Nothing! And what you mean asking him to come again? 'Come again soon,' she said"--he mimicked her shrilly, appealing to justice at the tangle of wires on the ceiling where there had once been a chandelier. "Come again soon! Come again soon! You putting me down to this college spook? Why you little--"

And he slammed her across the room. Her head hit a bookshelf filled with her old textbooks from Mills College. Cushioned by soggy, worn-out educational material, she dropped to a group of floor pillows and cried out, "Poopie, please, honey, we have a visitor."

Before Al could move, Poopie was at her again, slapping her face with his open hand. "Ooh, Poopie," she said in a wee voice, looking surprised.

In an instant Al came fully alert. He would not put up with this, even though it meant interference in the family life of the underworld. Although Al had a lot of respect for folkways, he leapt at Poopie and pulled him off. He was surprised at how easy this was: Poopie was a very small and slender man, with a figure like a preadolescent girl's. In Al's imagination he had been a thick criminal with a menacing heft. Instead, when Al yanked him to his feet by his leather sleeves, he found himself gasping into the limp face of a blinking, unhappy little pimp. Al started to say something when the cyclone struck. It was Milly protecting her guy. Shrilling and screaming, she leapt at Al; she scratched and kicked: she was all over him, like a crazed she-panther in her den.

Al dropped Poopie. He also slipped free of Milly's claws. He escaped down the stairway and into the foggy street with her shrieks pursuing him: "Leave Poopie alone, you brute! You college boy! You monster! You--"

Al shut his ears to a continuing series of pejorative remarks that culminated in an allegation about his intimate relationship to his mother. The accusation was plainly false. His mother lived far away in Santa Barbara and was devoted to her husband, Al's father, even sometimes working late with him in the agency, helping arrange tours to Acapulco.

Al limped down Grant. He was happy to escape with his life. He was not worried about his reputation. Unfortunately, he had lost a shoe in the battle with Poopie, or rather, in the assault by Milly, and this preoccupied him. The street was damp and cold. One shoe is worse than none, it seemed. His quest of certainty was hard on his bruised and wet feet. Walking through the fog with one shoe on, one shoe lost, leads to bitter thoughts.

Fortunately, an Army and Navy surplus store--known locally as the Beatnik's Brooks Brothers--remained open late on Sundays and Al could buy a pair of Japanese war surplus tennis shoes. His luck was good. The glue started to come unstuck from the soles before he had gotten a block farther on, but they would last until he reached home again. He felt like unstuck surplus merchandise himself. His luck was good, but not superb. He had also bought a package of Navy surplus mints to take to bed with him. It was time for some serious thinking. A man cannot expect others to solve his problems. He can raise the sugar level of his blood and do his own problem solving. Al and the melted-together mints would work together now. He pried them apart with his fingernails. To hell with Poopie and Milly. To hell with Peggy.

Oh-oh. He finished the mints and still couldn't sleep. School and the Army and his mother and his father and finding a decent job and finding work he liked and Milly and Poopie and Peggy and West Berlin and Cuba and why Johnny can't read and suburban sprawl (which is destroying our great cities) and the plight of oppressed peoples everywhere (including the human race) all got on his nerves. He tossed and turned. Expecting to go into the Army, he had left some papers unwritten. This would be one of those nights.

He sat up, blinked in the dark, and lit a cigarette. He telephoned Peggy. She flew over directly in her powder-blue Triumph. "I, too," she proclaimed, "was thinking about you this evening, Al."

Thinking of each other helped them both to find sweet repose. Afterward he moved to the far side of the bed in order to symbolize the fact that he was alone in a world he never made. He had been made by it; by everything, including Peggy; by circumstances. He slept with a minty taste of Peggy clinging to his tongue.

During an early-morning hour, when Peggy sprang up to make breakfast, he awoke briefly to the buzz of the machine grinding the hearts out of oranges, to the smell of decimated oranges, to the click of the fridge in which a glass of orange juice was being placed to chill--nice Peggy; then he stretched out, sighed, and fell asleep again. He dreamt of mini-flavored money, chocolate dollars and the lonely responsibility of outlaw freedom. Crocker-Anglo is the name of a bank in San Francisco. There are many neighborhood branches of the Crocker-Anglo National Bank.

Al opened his eyes. Peggy had brought him a tray. She was wearing the top of his pajamas. She had dimpled knees.

"Scrambled eggs," she said. "Toast and marmalade courtesy of your marmalady. The juice is in the fridge. I know you like it after, not before, the coffee. When you've got something in your tummy. I know everything about you, Al."

"Crocker-Anglo," said Al.

"Wha?"

"You see, you don't know all about Al. Crocker-Anglo, I said."

He was thinking: With a note. With a toy pistol. I could do that all by myself and not have to complicate things. Just dollars to fly free with.

"You thinking of starting a Christmas Savings Account?" Peggy asked. "Because if it's for me, just any old present will do, Al. It is the thought that counts, I always say. Where'd you get those scratches on your face? Answer yes or no. Hey. I can tell you're not listening, bad boy. You're dreaming, Al."

"Thinking," he burst out savagely, "thinking."

"If you can think on an empty stomach, why can't you drink orange juice, Al? Al!"

• • •

Al spent the day alone, thinking it over. There was a nice little branch bank down on Market Street. It would be busy during lunch hour, and there would be a sexy little crowd on the street to melt into. Al made a few purchases: GI suntans in the Army-Navy store, dark glasses, a pair of rubber gloves in the Safeway, a toy pistol in the Woolworth's. The clothes were to be thrown away later: the rubber gloves would beat the fingerprint problem. He had to dump one glove, since they were having a three-for-two offer on rubber gloves (for housewives with an extra hand?). He rented a coin typewriter in the public library for a half hour to write a very brief message to whom it might concern:

Fill this bag with bills of medium denomination. no fuss. The pistol is loaded. I am nervous.

That was a morning's work. It's not so hard to be a lonely bank robber, but you have to lay in your supplies. He then drove back across the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, like a sick dog heading home. He hadn't lied when he wrote that he was nervous. The part about the gun was a fib, but the part about his nervousness was all true. He lay on the floor of his apartment to quiet his pounding heart. He flung himself down and just rested there in the cool dark, staring at the ceiling, with the shopping bag containing his recent purchases flung to the floor beside him. He thought of getting some tranquilizers, but decided it would be cheating, and this moral decision made him smile. It tranquilized him. He would take another day to get ready. The next morning he would spend hanging around the neighborhood of the bank, learning the patterns of streets and crowds. He would not try to make a big scientific thing of it. He would just be an intelligent, hunchy, old-fashioned entrepreneur. He knew from the movies and mystery novels that the clever, scientific criminals always made one fatal mistake. He would avoid that pitfall. He would make a lot of mistakes, perhaps, but enjoy good luck and happy inspiration. He would improvise, like a jazz musician. He would swing.

There was a good chance of being caught. There was a good chance to get away. He would try his best chance.

Before he left the next morning, the telephone rang and it was Milly Peck. Her low sweet voice was whispering little apologies to Al for what she called "the unpleasantries" of the other evening. She didn't know what got into her. She realized that Al just wanted to protect her from that awful Poopie. She had behaved foolishly--ungratefully. She was coming back to herself, she promised him. This was a phase of rebellion. But Poopie had gone too far now. She would not put up with it. There were teeth marks on her cheek. The shoulder isn't so bad, but the cheeks! Poopie was cruel.

Al murmured that he certainly wished her well in all things, and that she get bit less where it showed.

He had been ready to rob a bank before Milly called to apologize. But afterward, he was absolutely determined to rob a bank. Anything--gunshot, police sirens, torture by sadistic insurance investigators--anything to get that racket out of his ears. They had a nice conversation and said goodbye. Al decided: Poor Milly, actually she's a bright girl. She's just looking for an exceptional way in life, her way. And I'm doing it in mine. Poopie happens to be her Peace Corps.

He drove back across the Bay Bridge and took another look at the Crocker-Anglo Bank on Market near Grant. Just up Grant in North Beach was Milly's apartment, but he put her out of his mind after he thought: We're both finding our exceptions on Grant Street. Then he poked unobtrusively around the bank, noting sleepy guards--retired and slow policemen--boy tellers with Continental pants and girl tellers with beehive hairdos and spinster tellers with lusterless nylon faces. On the bank's Muzak there was Muzak, "I love Parr-ris in the springtime," played by the massed Lobotavani strings. It looked easy, so easy.

Why wait?

He had put his equipment in the trunk of his car. He drove out by the Bay, under the Embarcadero Freeway, and in the cool beneath the elevated highway, he parked, dove into the trunk, and came up with rubber gloves, GI clothes, toy pistol and note. He scrunched down in the back seat to change his clothes. Fortunately, a long life as a teenager, necking in automobiles, had trained him for this back-tormenting exercise. Al be nimble, Al be quick, he thought. Al will now get in his lick.

He dove up from the floor of his Chevy with a new soul. No, it was the old soul, but now equipped with GI surplus clothes, dime-store sunglasses, toy pistol, rubber gloves, cloth sack and typewritten note, and that meant a new soul. He had new intentions and there was action ahead. He drove with brisk authority. He parked the car in a no-parking zone near the bank. A new soul in action. If he received a ticket, he would pay it. They would not connect the ticket with the bank--not if he was getting away--and if he didn't get away, well, the parking ticket wouldn't be much to add to what would be on his back already. He sat in the car in that pregnant moment just before noon, when the counters and diners and restaurants of the neighborhood were beginning to fill up with those in a hurry for their lunch. He waited for the noon whistle. The first jet of early escapees from offices was emerging from the mouths of buildings. They were running about and lining up for lunch. They would not have to wait. Later eaters would have to wait. If you don't have much money, you often have to stand behind the stool in a diner and wait. You feed like an animal. You're caught like an animal. Al wished to get out of this line. He sat slumped, his hands sweating in the rubber gloves, thinking. Then abruptly he peeled the gloves off and let them drop to the floor of the car. He would just not touch anything. The gloves were unnecessary.

Al grinned. This was not one of those perfect heist jobs. This was an improvisation.

And it began neatly, like a perfect improvisation.

Just after the screech of the noon whistle, he sauntered into the bank, past a sleepy guard cleaning his ear with one finger, past a host of women shoppers and bill payers, up to a window. There was a lank little lady on a stool there, watching life through the bars. He handed her the note. Her eyes turned black; the spreading iris took over. He hissed at her: "Don't press that button. I'll shoot."

"I know," she said softly, with a sexy hoarseness. "I know, I know, oh I know." And the hands below that frantic face were deftly filling a bag with wrapped currency. It was as if the hands belonged to an efficient machine. The face was perishing.

"Enough," he said after a few seconds.

"Don't shoot me." The hands went on packing stacks of money into the bag.

"I said hand it over quick."

"I know, I know, oh I know," she said.

He took the bag under his arm and ambled toward the door, waiting for the scream. There was steel pounding in neutral gear in his knees. He planned to break into the crowd at the first sound.Not a murmur. But just as he passed the doo'r and into the pushing crowd of Market Street, the scream finally came, piercing the air. He leapt like a dancer into the crowd. One shriek, and then probably she fainted. He glanced over his shoulder and saw no stir in the crowd behind him. He held his pace to a medium-rapid walk. His Chevy was still there. Not even a ticket.

Into the car.

It started nicely. He drove leisurely up Grant Street. A pink glint of rubber glove shone up from the floor mat at him in the reflected sunlight. A few blocks away, he finally heard the police sirens on Market Street. He dropped his sunglasses out the window and heard the crunch under tires.

How sweet to improvise, he thought.

How nice to break loose.

And then his body just fell apart and he had to pull over to the curb and fight to keep from soiling himself. He struggled, groaning; he left the bag of money on the seat of the unlocked car; he ran into a Chinese restaurant and used the men's room. He came out gasping, but lightened and joyous. It was an airy sensation of being freed. He had vomited, defecated, urinated, and now felt light as air, light as spirit. He was liberated at last. He felt as if he would never need to soil himself with food again. He could live on air. He could live on adrenaline, self-created. He floated in an adrenaline high toward his car, perfectly confident that the money would still be there, and it was. His luck, the luck of a happy improviser, held firm.

He had not yet even peeked into the bag. But there was enough money inside--50-dollar bills, 100-dollar bills, stacked and wrapped--to buy him a long space of power and freedom.

He drove straight up Telegraph Hill and parked beneath Coit Tower, the smooth gray phallus said by San Francisco legend to honor Lucy Coit's passion for firemen. And there, in a parked car at the top of the city, with the cool yellow-gray sky above him, and the town with its lesser hills below, and the Bay spread out around him, he at last looked into the cloth sack. Very light and calm, he counted. He had expected a few thousand dollars. But there must have been some kind of delivery from the treasury. Someone had forgotten the routine. Someone had neglected to put away the fresh cash. That teller must have been intimidated by his expression of determined improvisation. There was over $16,000 in crisp new bills of high denomination, every one of them newly minted and smelling like metal, wrapped in crisp paper, crackling and eager to speed their way into the universe.

Al took this news rather calmly.

Then he looked again. The bills were new and untouched and the serial numbers were perfectly consecutive. At the bank they would have an exact record of the serial numbers. These bills shone as if they could burn their way into the brains of anyone who looked at them. They were almost as identifiable as if they had been painted with fluorescent mustaches on the Presidential heroes memorialized by fiscal engravers.

Al took this news less calmly.

The money suddenly seemed useless to him. He felt that his luck at improvisation had run out. He stuffed the bills back in the sack and stared out across his steering wheel, like any visitor enjoying the view of San Francisco on a fine day. It was not yet one P.M. A few people with bag lunches were sitting on the parapets. When he heard the sirens, and saw motorcycles swinging like moths in a mote of light up Lombard Street, he was sure that the bad luck had begun to radiate toward him as if he were the hub of a wheel. But it was only a fire. Al was OK. Up on his hill beneath Lucy Coit's tower, he waved abstractedly at the policemen following the trucks below. He hoped they got the fire in time.

A girl with a motor scooter came up to him and said: "I love a fire--anything--excitement, pops! Say, what's that, your lunch in that sack? You like to look at the city while you eat your lunch?"

Al supposed that she would like to share his sandwich while they enjoyed the view together, but this was not one of his sociable times. She shrugged and jogged her Vespa over toward the telescopes that looked out at the bleak rock of Alcatraz on its island in the Bay. She put a dime in the slot and the telescope unlocked. Now she looked at Alcatraz.

Al put his hands on the sack of money. The little bundles protruded sharply. It was like carrying a body around with him. They were as useless as a corpse in that bag, and as dangerous. With this sack on his hands, he didn't need a telescope to see Alcatraz sharp and clear in the midday sun.

• • •

The sun, the air and the view also sharpened Al's thoughts. The sociable girl on the Vespa shared a container of cottage cheese with a young man in a Citroen 2CV (two plastic spoons and some welded sculpture on the back seat), and Al had another little improvisation. Milly. He would chat with her about the unusable, overclean, consecutively numbered dollars of high denomination. She could help him find a remedy for the disease called Consecutive Numbering, Marked Bills. He took the precaution of telephoning. Her voice was unguarded. Poopie was not home. He had gone to Las Vegas for two days. "On business," she said. "Do."

By the word do, she meant do come up. He did.

It had been two hours since he robbed a bank. Now he was not the same man. It was one of the finest banks in California. He was a bigger person than Poopie in every way. He wondered if the change in him was visible. He wondered if Milly would see that he was a different man, a cool, desperate and accomplished man.

And she did see something.

She saw that he had the shakes and she put some brandy in his coffee. "Mmm, hot, good," he said, holding his hands around the mug. "Ah, good."

She made a maternal grimace of pleasure. "You had a hard morning?" she asked. She had changed since Al had known her at school. Poopie had changed her. In addition to pinching, biting, kicking, and sometimes blackening her eyes, he had softened her. Perhaps the pounding had softened her. She was sorry for Poopie. He brought out the maternal in little Milly Peck. And the maternal which Poopie Cola had brought out in Milly Peck now appealed to Al Dooley. Though he hated to admit it, he had never felt so close to a girl before; exhausted physically and emotionally, frightened, bewildered, isolated from the ordinary by an act of wildness, rich with new dollars in exact serial order, he wanted someone to take care of him. Milly. He needed Milly. He needed Milly's help. He also wanted her to rock him and protect him.

Sensing something of this, Milly spoke soothing words and refilled his mug with coffee and brandy. "You know that shoe you lost the night you jumped Poopie?" she asked him. "And I had to protect him because you are so big and strong, Al? Al? You know? How big and strong and brutal you are? But nice? Well, I returned it to you. The shoe. I did. I knew you'd need it, so I returned it to you. Didn't you receive it? I threw it out in the street after you, but I guess you didn't notice, what with the fog and all. Gee, and I wanted to return it to you."

"I stubbed my toe later." Al successfully banished the whimper of complaint in his voice. He cleared his throat.

"That was a bad scene, Milly."

"Gee, well I do know how a fellow needs his both shoes, Al. So I returned it to you."

"OK. It's the intention that counts."

"The good will in a girl's heart, 'cause I certainly didn't want you to go without shoes, even if you did pile into Poopie like a wild man or something, ooh, Al, I never knew you were such a wild man, so impulsively instinctual and all." Al hunched over the coffee mug, warming his hands. Milly gazed proudly at him and this, to Al, did more than the brandy to restore his sense of dignity and hope. She continued fondly: "So how come you didn't pick it up?" (She meant the shoe.) "I saw it in the gutter the next day. Gee, Al, it looked like a person, all sad and beat-up from the cars and the wet and all. It just made me want to cry and take care of it, Al. But I left it there because you know about Poopie, he's so jealous, he loves me so. That poor, sad, lonely shoe. I covered it with a newspaper."

Al choked a little.

"Say," Milly asked, "now that Poopie's gone for a few days, aren't they doing a revival of a Charlie Chaplin at the Surf? Oh. Oh, Al. Oh, you had something else in mind."

She was on the right track.

"Oh, but let's talk," said Milly. "Getting to know you is the important thing, not technique. A girl needs security. A girl needs the sense that a man really cares. Now take your technical types, you know, the lovers who practice all that nasty stuff, ooh, you know, the things I like, for instance--"

It was agreeable to Al to discuss matters. He had had his little problems with love, but he had a particular problem with bills of large denomination. He sought advice, comfort and contacts from Milly. He would listen for a while, let his hands stop their trembling and the heat in his forehead go down, and then he would explain everything to her. In the meantime, as she talked, she might talk herself into enlisting on his side.

The afternoon passed. Milly had brought her grandfather's clock, which stood on the floor, out of her parents' house in Hillsboro. It ticked away the hours. The golden pendulum swung back and forth. Milly spoke of her hopes and dreams, her need to fulfill herself, her fondness for Al. When she saw him grow listless over the cold coffee, she kept him alive with an injection of fondness. He had a place in her heart. He had a special place. She knew that he was intended for great things.

Al cleared his throat and raised his hand. He wanted to speak. The late sun was streaming through the window halfway up Telegraph Hill on Grant Street in North Beach. Business in Las Vegas had called Poopie away for a few days. Al desired Milly and also needed her help. Now seemed to be his chance, and it was: his chance to talk about Poopie. "Look at my teeth marks," she said. "Here. Her. And here."

Al looked. "I want to tell you what happened to me today," he began.

"And here, too. Ooh, it still stings when I just touch it."

"It's not exactly what happened to me," Al said, "it's something I did."

"Ooh, Al, maybe? Maybe you would? Maybe you'd rub oil in my Poopiebites?"

Al sighed and decided that maybe, with a loving, maternal and gentle type of girl like Milly, you should take your cues from her and not try to tell her how and whether you robbed a bank until she was ready to listen.

"Ooh, goody!" cried Milly when she saw that Al would consent to rub soothing lanolin in the bites. In an instant she had her clothes off and was lying on her belly on a fluffy cotton rug. Rays of sunlight striped her sleek, small, slightly bitten back. Al knelt by her side with the itch and grime of bank robbing still clinging to his body, but a bottle of feminine lotion in his hand. "There," she said. "Ooh, there. Around there, too. He bites me everywhere. It's got vitamin D added. Yes. Yes."

He cupped his hands and rubbed lotion even where she was not bitten. She did not mention it, but her voice grew husky and she smiled and wrinkled her nose at him.

With a voice growing husky, she informed him that she was just looking for the courage to leave Poopie. He was nice, but mean. He was sweet, but nasty. He beat her and took all her money and sometimes hinted that she should go to work for him. Despite all his virtues, she was beginning to tire of him. "Yes, yes, yes, you do that so good," she said. "More."

She also told him more.

Then said, "Ooh, Al, what are you doing? Ooh, Al, but we're just friends. Ooh. Al, but how did you know I still think of you that way? Ooh, Al, ooh."

Afterward, when the sun had gone down and the bites were eased, the itches were eased, Al and Milly took a bath. "Poopie wouldn't like it if he knew we took a bath together in our tub--his," she remarked. Al helped her clean the tub. As he bent to wipe it, she swatted him on the behind with a knotted towel.

"Ouch!"

She smiled maternally. "That's a little trick I learned from Poopie," she said.

Then finally, relaxed, clean, eating Rice Krispies with honey, nuts, raisins, bananas, wheat germ and fortified skim milk--Milly knew that good health promotes healing--Al was ready to talk. Milly was right to make him wait until he was relaxed. She understood. He told her.

She listened in silence as he explained about his boredom with Peggy and his studies, about the Army, about his quest for meaning, about the sense of useless-ness in his career, about his need for exceptional action, and about the bank. And then about the problem with the bills: new, consecutive serial numbers, and he was afraid to pass them. Could Milly, without going to Poopie--somehow Poopie did not inspire his trust--make contact with someone to whom he might sell the money at a discount and get out clean?

Milly listened to this story in silence, brooding. Apparently there were depths in Al, though he didn't bite. Al had surprised her at last. And now he needed her; the maternal in her was aroused. She could help him. He had called to her for help. Milly searched deep into his eyes, abstractedly scratching an old wound on her bare buttock.

Al watched in silence as her thoughts raced about the pretty little head with its thick undone coil of reddish hair. At last she spoke: "Any better at it than I am, Al?"

"What?"

"That Peggy of yours--she any better'n li'l ole Milly? you know? at it? 'Cause you say yes and I'll scratch your eyes out. I will."

Al sighed. She had spoken like a true-blue American girl in his time of trouble. She had rallied round him all right. He stood up to go. "Just don't say anything," he said. He was suddenly bone tired. "I'll figure out something."

"Ooh, Al, 'cause I'm a girl, you know? I care for you an awful lot, that's why I get so jealous." She followed him to the door. "Listen, I'm thinking, Al. Here, listen." She forced his head to her bosom. He stumbled and she caught him. "Hear me thinking?" He sprung his neck and rubbed it to get the circulation going. She went on: "Now I'm just going to worry over your problem, Al. I'm going to consider it our problem, how's about that? Just 'cause you were kind to me about Poopie and his bites and all. You were good to me, Al. You were. You still like me."

He explained that he would give her one of the new crisp bills, but he was afraid of passing them and being traced.

"Ooh, that's all right, Al," she said. "I did what I did--you know, doncha? ooh, doncha?--only because you love me and you rub my bites so good and I wanted to. That bastard Poopie. Bye now."

But she did look longingly at the bag as he toted it out toward the car, concealed in a Macy's shopping bag which Milly had lent him. He promised to return it soon.

She stopped him halfway down the stairway by running into his arms. "Darling," she cried, "I know I'm a little ridick. I just want to tell you something--you trust me." A tear trickled from her eye and made its way down her healthy rounded cheek. "Look, I'm crying, Al. It's because you trust me. I can't tell you what that means to me, that somebody trusts me--"

But she began to sob, ran back, locked the door.

He looked up at the window from the street. There she was, all at once radiant, smiling and waving and blowing kisses. She stood waving as he walked the few steps down the hill to his car. Suddenly, in the San Francisco night, with a chill fog blowing over the town through the Golden Gate, he felt a movement of dread in his chest. But Milly was still waving at him. It was probably fatigue. After robbing a bank and making love, he had a right to rest.

He drove home to Berkeley, tumbled into bed, and slept the sleep of the fulfilled and of the exhausted.

• • •

But Milly needed to fulfill herself, too. While Milly cast about for ways to fulfill herself, Al rested. Al could rob a bank, but Milly could not. It wasn't fair.

Al slept for the better part of two days, just dead in sleep, occasionally waking for a few minutes, staggering to the refrigerator for a glass of milk and a handful of raisins, and then back to bed and down again. Once, practically sleepwalking, he brushed his teeth. During his few minutes awake, he hoped that Milly had figured out who might buy those numbered dollars from him at a discount. Soon perhaps he would be awakened by a call from Milly. With his knuckle he cleaned a mashed raisin from between his teeth and flopped down again. Tired he was now because he had worked before. Sleep he would now, and be awake when it was again necessary.

The mild Berkeley sun turned twice over his apartment. The telephone rang; Peggy called; he mumbled inconsequently and stumbled back into the sack. It was as if he had fought a long battle and the power circuits of life and death had been shorted. He slept.

Deep in a dream of freedom and soaring in the air--he was a bird, he was an eagle with a man's head, he carried off his prey in his beak--a harsh ring filled his studio room. He struggled up from sleep to answer the telephone; it would be Milly, it would be Milly with news; he blinked open his eyes and it was not Milly. It was the door. They were buzzing and pounding at his door. Before he could blink himself enough awake to answer, a shoulder splintered the door, four cops came pounding through, with pistols drawn. Behind them, protected by them, lounged a civilian figure in wide-wale Continental corduroy pants, loafers without socks and a tan Ban-Lon shirt. This smiling, lounging person pointed his pinkie finger at Al--Al particularly remembered that he used the pinkie, not the index finger--and said, "Yeah, that's him. That's our boy."

"You willing to swear, Poopie?" one of the cops asked.

"Just look around. You won't need me to swear," said Poopie. He turned gracefully on his toes, almost like a ballet master. "There," he said, pointing to a bag which still sat on the chair before Al's desk. It was resting on a paperback edition of Wolfgang Kohler's study of apes and a book called The Place of Value in a World of Fact. "Them's nice pajamas, Al-boy," he said. "Stripes look good on you."

Al felt very calm. His long sleep had revived him, filled the nerves with fluid. He felt unsurprised and calm, though a little disappointed in Milly. He would really have preferred to be rich and free and powerful and successful rather than under arrest for bank robbery. Well, a young graduate student can't hope to have everything all at once. He might as well start at the bottom with a good long prison term. It teaches humility, also sewing and license-plate making.

"Don't make trouble, son," said one of the cops. "You be nice and we'll let you dress."

They even let him wash his face. They were sweet cops.

Then they drove him with the siren working through the streets of Berkeley to the police station. He was important enough to make all the strolling students on the streets turn and watch. He was crowded in between two cops, and his shoulders felt cramped in the back seat. Another cop drove; Poopie slouched contentedly in the front seat. Still another cop followed them on his motorcycle. I'm like the prime minister of a new African nation, Al thought. They're showing me the campus. They're treating me so good. I'll give up being one of the emergent unaligned states; I'll be a gallant ally with missile bases.

Whoops, thought Al: mind wandering a bit.

The cop to Al's left considered himself a student. He tried to suck in his gut and preferred to be described as a "social worker in uniform." He took extension courses in criminology at San Francisco State. As part of a paper he was writing, he questioned Al on the way to the station. "Why did you do it? What did you hope to gain? Didn't you realize how antisocial conduct gets you no place unless you got good connections?"

While he kept the sociology in motion, he gripped the barrel of his pistol so that he could use the butt if Al tried any funny business. Since he ran a little at the mouth, he also told Al what had happened to him: "Your friend Milly made him a little jealous. Our friend Poopie there. Then she told him about your problem. She made him promise to keep the secret, but Poopie broke his promise."

"Yeah," called Poopie up front, "I broke the promise. Now can I just get at him a sec?"

"He's in the hands of the law," Al's friend, the sociologist, proclaimed. He then settled back and explained to Al: "Broke his promise. There's the reward, you know? And the jealousy."

That made it fair. After all, Al was a criminal who broke the law and there was a reward and the jealousy. Poopie just did his duty as a citizen. Al should understand.

"Oh I do," said Al.

"The code of the underworld and all that jazz," said the educated cop.

Al came partly alert. Through narrowed eyes he asked his one true friend in that sirening police car: "But the code! No squealing, isn't it?"

The cop took that under advisement. "Hmm," he said, "you got a point there." After all, he didn't have his master's yet. He wasn't a real fast thinker yet. "Well, you're a nonprofessional," he decided at last. "They don't like that. Amendment to the bylaws of the code, buster."

The local police were not accustomed to intelligent young graduate students in sociology who robbed banks. Therefore, they treated Al with special consideration. Instead of flinging him into a urine-stinking cell with no top for the toilet and a curse for company, they flung him into a urine-stinking cell with no top for the toilet and a command not to commit suicide for company. They took away shoelaces and belt. His thoughts they left him. They left him alone.

He found that he disliked Poopie more than ever.

About Milly, he felt resentful. He should not have trusted her good nature. She had too much of it. Her cup ran over, but all he got was the runover. Poopie got the cup.

Peggy, snug in college, came to mind as a true friend. He longed for Peggy--comfortable Peggy with all her cashmere and steady affection. He bawled a moment with self-pity, and then resolved to face the future. The future would be something to occupy the idle hours. He wasn't really a psychopath--he felt sorry for himself.

Having been slept out, he sat awake, staring into the blue aisle light and listening to the drunks moaning in adjacent cells. A cop lounging under the bulb and flicking his cigarette butt against the wall. Cabbage smell from someplace. Hopelessness of men who were not hopeless just for the experience. Al understood, with grave and lonely clarity, that he was in trouble.

• • •

During the next few months Al was in a kind of nervous state, sort of jumpy. His mother pointed out to his father and his father pointed out to the court-appointed psychiatrist: It's only natural that our boy Al be a little nervous, you know, not crazy, just jumpy, just not guilty by virtue of insanity, since he had been betrayed by his close friend Milly and his other close friend Peggy small comfort to him because she was writing a term paper and those bills were so new and clean and consecutively numbered and Poopie strutted around as if he had won the London-San Francisco international tiddlywinks match. "Does like I say, that girl," Poopie bragged, proud of his lady Milly, though he did splinter her guitar and beat her up a bit after she confessed that she had been weak in the flesh with Al. Poopie was saddled with an outmoded moral code. He didn't realize that, after all, he had been away for a whole weekend.

Also.

Also there were lots of other complications. Dr. Bessie Frisch, who had his own problems, fiddled with the hearing aid attached to his horn-rimmed glasses while he listened to everybody. The hearing aid led both to his ears and to a miniature transistor tape recorder built into the Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from a chain interlocked with his vest buttons. Dr. Bessie Frisch had been teased so much about his first name as a child--named after his mother's favorite sister, and had worn bangs until he was 14--that he was given his choice by fate at the age of 20: Become a psychiatrist or remain nervous, jumpy. Well, it was more profitable to take up psychiatry. He took it up.

Now, handling other people's problems, he oftentimes became nervous, jumpy. Also he suffered from swollen glands. But he was shrewd. Shrewdly he asked Al: "Do you think you developed a criminal mentality out of protest, hm? against the name Al?"

"Hm?" Al asked cagily.

"It must be short for Alice, I presume, hm?" asked Dr. B. Frisch. (He was called "Bee" by his close friends, who sought to avoid embarrassment whenever they could.)

It turned out that Al was short for Allan. Dr. Bee Frisch decided to try another tack. He interviewed Peggy, Milly, Poopie, the police officers, including the talkative one who went to extension courses, and the bony little lady who had been teller in the bank. Recently she had left that job to work at the notions counter of a Woolworth's. She reported on Al's behavior when he had been robbing the bank: "He looked like a fine young man, well brought up, intelligent, kind and considerate. Only he seemed a trifle nervous, jumpy. I would say temporary insanity, Doc."

"Hm," said Bessie.

"No, try it again," said the lady.

"Temporary insanity. That's what I would say."

Since he was nearsighted, Bessie failed to note that the bony little ex-teller wore a heavy tan. She had just returned from an all-expenses-paid trip to Acapulco, courtesy of Al's father.

Well, the wheels of justice ground away with their inexorable clatter. No power on earth could stop the march of American social work. Most people, with the single exception of Poopie, agreed that it would be a shame if such a fine young man, adventurous, farsighted, ambitious and nervous, should be put away among a lot of criminals, men delinquent in their alimony, bank robbers, and many such antisocial types who were sure to exert a bad influence on him.

Poopie, on the other hand, argued for the gas chamber. He believed that strong punishment was a deterrent to crime. He had friends in the John Birch Society who advised him on sociological matters. When asked if he was a member himself, he put forth an objection. "I ain't gonna tell you," he said.

Later, after the investigation, there was a short legal hearing which settled the matter for Al. The judge in his robes pounded for silence. All interested parties were questioned. Al explained that he had really meant to go on a freedom ride or join the Peace Corps, but he just hadn't thought of it in time. He had wanted to do something exceptional. No one had invited him to be an astronaut. He would have liked to explore inner and outer space. No one had shown him how to float a new electronics stock. He would have liked to abscond to Brazil. Later on he would have returned home to face the music. That's the kind of embezzler he would have been. It kind of irritated Al. He had wanted to break out of his routine. He, too, could be an exceptional man. He had wanted to get rich quick. The judge interrupted:

"That's enough out of you, Accused!"

His defending lawyer, who had an M.A. in psychology and a Ph.D. in sociology in addition to his legal training, leapt to his feet in protest: "Your Honor! In this modern world of today! The misunderstood youth of a troubled urban culture!"

"Objection sustained," said the judge.

Milly, wearing a black veil, lifted the lace with one finger in order to shoot Al an apologetic, heavily shadowed look. It shot soggily all the way across the courtroom to where Al waited in the witness chair while his lawyer engaged the judge in a duel of wits.

"Objection!" cried Al's lawyer.

"I already said sustained!" cried the judge.

At last Al's lawyer was satisfied. He could not demand an abject apology from the presiding judge. He pinched the bridge of his nose where it had been pinched by his gold pince-nez glasses. Step down," he said kindly to Al, and offered him an arm.

Milly kept on shooting look after look at Al as he walked unaided to his chair. Al's trouble had matured Milly. She was grateful to him. Poopie had discovered the undiscovered depths in her, thanks to Al. She didn't really care so much about the guitar. When Al settled himself in his oaken courtroom chair, she lowered her veil and the looks of apology subsided. Also Poopie's ire was being stimulated. He sure did make demands on a girl.

However, Poopie was in good humor. He enjoyed getting on the side of law and order when the opportunity presented itself. He was still smiling, with just a little bit of ire, when Al's lawyer called him to the witness stand. Poopie declared: "I just asked her and she tole me. Does like I say, that chick." Then he had a surprise deposition to make. "But seems to li'l ole me like Al never intended for to make a bank heist. He was driven out of his skull, you know, he flipped ..." He caught Al's father's eye. "Er, your Honor, I would say he was nervous and jumpy because he didn't feel so good."

Poopie also had a nice tan.

Then Peggy mounted the stand as a character witness. "I was mean to him, like, for instance, I did everything he told me to, your Honor. A man needs some resistance, some challenge to his manliness in this our culture of modern rootlessness. Did I forget anything? I feel so nervous and jumpy up here."

And Al's parents also were invited to speak, at considerable length. It turned out that Al had always been foursquare behind the American Constitution and carefully selected numbers from The Top Ten Bill of Rights, in favor of a hard line in Berlin, and spent many a desperate hour with accompanying night sweats at the thought that the Communists might someday succeed in their design to take over the Sovereign State of California and use it as a base of operations against the fallout shelters in Arizona and Nevada. His worries about the future of America made him kind of--

"I know," said the severe but kindly judge. "All of us here in these chambers believe in tempering justice with a bit of largess, do we not? Don't we? But I'll make the decisions around here. So much talk makes me jumpy," he declared, looking about him nervously. It was a legal hearing, not a trial, but still a fellow can't be too careful. He toyed with a small set of copper cuff links which he had just brought back from his recent vacation in Acapulco.

Dr. Bessie Frisch tamped out his pipe and testified briefly. He summarized his report. "Good, good," he said to the judge. "As it emerged in my examination, the name. 'Al,' for this particular patient, seems to recall feminine dominance over his childish parataxic Oedipal frustrations. Now if we take the name seriously, 'Alice,' say, or 'Alberta' ... Somewhat jumpy, even nervous," he concluded.

The verdict followed inexorably. Al was found Not Guilty by Virtue of Jumpiness. He was put on psychiatric probation, ordered to consult with a qualified physician (Dr. Frisch suggested a referral), and told to eat lots of wheat germ and celery in order to help calm his nervous feelings. A young man should watch the physical as well as the psychiatric parts of his character. Counseling the patient against violence, the kindly old judge stated, "An ounce of wheat germ is worth a pound of karate."

Peggy flew into his arms. "I'm so proud!" she cried. "Of you! You're so interesting, Al."

"Aw," he said, "all I did was rob a bank and get betrayed by my moll because she was neurasthenically bound to a crooked, double-crossing pimp, was all I did."

"I don't care," said Peggy through her soft, buttery lips. "I forgive your frustrated reversion to a girl not worthy of you. I have found a purpose in life--caring for you. You're unusual, Al."

"That's nice of you, Peggy."

"And you know what? Your nice daddy says he will send us to Acapulco for our honeymoon if we promise to be good. Let's be good, Al."

Al realized, as the future washed over him, that at last he was on the right track. Married, settling down, he could quickly get off probation, write a dissertation on the criminal mind and find a job teaching in a quiet little college. A record as a bank robber would mark him off as a little different from other young-instructors in sociology. In a world which admired slight distinctions, an occasionally dreamy, melancholic character, this could only work to his advantage. "We'll have adventures together," Peggy promised him. "Life will be our adventure."

And, of course, if he got bored with Peggy or the job in a small college, he now knew how to vary the routine. He might take off after Poopie in a typical underworld act of revenge. He had that insurance. He could break the monotony. The murder of a stool pigeon by a handsome young sociology professor would lead to a bigger job in a better university, still more forgiveness by wife and family, and a sense of pride that Al Dooley could bring some variety into the steady hum of American life. He had found his own little way to hit the jackpot.