508
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
he wouldn't die!" His parents, after all, would have the sorrow of
his disgrace. "God had no right to punish his parents for what
he had done! Already they had been made to suffer too much.
Already they had made too many sacrifices for him. He, alone,
deserved punishment." (These are youthful sentiments, recalled
later. Chessman died an atheist, rejecting religious rites and burial
and saying that for him to call upon God would be hypocrisy.
One of his lawyers thought this his worst trait of character.)
It
is hard to avoid the thought that Chessman's conscious
feelings about his parents masked other feelings of great distress
to himself. Shortly after his discovery that he would have to live,
he began to risk everything. And the story of his life, at the point
of its greatest recklessness and violence, becomes more truthful.
Self-knowledge increases, as nostalgia, adolescent emotions, ac–
ceptable fears and longings withdraw.
Cars:
"That night he stole two cars and committed three
burglaries." The young offender's dreams are alive with the
embraces of warm, fat, forbidden cars. The car is freedom, power,
exhilaration, madness. "Driving was a joyous form of creative
expression. Driving made him free. Driving was his personal,
triumphant accomplishment." Yet, the pleasure of driving is no
greater than the joy in wrecking. ". . . he practiced driving or
'tooling' these hot heaps. He learned to corner, to broadside, to
speed and snap-shift them. He purposely rolled and crashed them.
He sent them hurtling through traffic at high speeds. He sought
out patrol cars and motorcycle cops and taunted them into chas–
ing him, just for the thrill of ditching them, just for the hell of it,
and for practice." The car is escape-and capture. No sooner are
Chessman, and the other reform boys, out of jail than they are in a
stolen car, running through a stop light, alerting the police, who
start after them and put them back in jail. The car is not stolen,
altered, driven, to provide accommodation for the criminal on the
run.
It
is wrecked just when it would be most useful.
It
is driven
conspicuously, not stealthily.
Capture:
Capture is courted with all the passionate energy
that just a few weeks previously went into escape. "I stepped into
a stolen car the Glendale police had staked out and was promptly
arrested by two detectives with drawn guns." Or "I wanted peace
