He wanted to tell her it wasn’t digging; it was loving. True loving. And true love would never die.
The Runner Sees Action was every bit as good as The Runner, only instead of being a stranger in New York City, Jimmy was now a stranger in Europe, fighting his way across Germany, watching his friends die, and finally staring with a blankness beyond horror through the barbed wire at one of the concentration camps. The wandering, skeletal survivors confirmed what Jimmy had suspected for years, Rothstein wrote. It was all a mistake.
Using a stencil kit, Morris copied this line in Roman Gothic print and thumbtacked it to the door of his room, the one that would later be occupied by a boy named Peter Saubers.
His mother saw it hanging there, smiled her sarcastic curl of a smile, and said nothing. At least not then. Their argument over the Gold trilogy came two years later, after she had raced through the books herself. That argument resulted in Morris getting drunk; getting drunk resulted in breaking and entering and common assault; these crimes resulted in nine months at Riverview Youth Detention Center.
But before all that came The Runner Slows Down, which Morris read with increasing horror. Jimmy got married to a nice girl. Jimmy got a job in advertising. Jimmy began putting on weight. Jimmy’s wife got pregnant with the first of three little Golds, and they moved to the suburbs. Jimmy made friends there. He and his wife threw backyard barbecue parties. Jimmy presided over the grill wearing an apron that said THE CHEF IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Jimmy cheated on his wife, and his wife cheated right back. Jimmy took Alka-Seltzer for his acid indigestion and something called Miltown for his hangovers. Most of all, Jimmy pursued the Golden Buck.
Morris read these terrible developments with ever increasing dismay and growing rage. He supposed he felt the way his mother had when she discovered that her husband, whom she had believed comfortably under her thumb, had been cleaning out all the accounts even as he ran hither and yon, eagerly doing her bidding and never once raising a hand to slap that sarcastic curl of a smile off her overeducated face.
Morris kept hoping that Jimmy would wake up. That he would remember who he was – who he had been, at least – and trash the stupid and empty life he was leading. Instead of that, The Runner Slows Down ended with Jimmy celebrating his most successful ad campaign ever – Duzzy-Doo, for God’s sake – and crowing Just wait until next year!
In the detention center, Morris had been required to see a shrink once a week. The shrink’s name was Curtis Larsen. The boys called him Curd the Turd. Curd the Turd always ended their sessions by asking Morris the same question: ‘Whose fault is it that you’re in here, Morris?’
Most boys, even the cataclysmically stupid ones, knew the right answer to that question. Morris did, too, but refused to give it. ‘My mother’s,’ he said each time the question was asked.
At their final session, shortly before the end of Morris’s term, Curd the Turd folded his hands on his desk and looked at Morris for a long space of silent seconds. Morris knew Curd the Turd was waiting for him to drop his eyes. He refused to do it.
‘In my game,’ Curd the Turd finally said, ‘there’s a term for your response. It’s called blame avoidance. Will you be back in here if you continue to practice blame avoidance? Almost certainly not. You’ll be eighteen in a few months, so the next time you hit the jackpot – and there will be a next time – you’ll be tried as an adult. Unless, that is, you make a change. So, for the last time: whose fault is it that you’re in here?’
‘My mother’s,’ Morris said with no hesitation. Because it wasn’t blame avoidance, it was the truth. The logic was inarguable.
Between fifteen and seventeen, Morris read the first two books of the Gold trilogy obsessively, underlining and annotating. He reread The Runner Slows Down only once, and had to force himself to finish. Every time he picked it up, a ball of lead formed in his gut, because he knew what was going to happen. His resentment of Jimmy Gold’s creator grew. For Rothstein to destroy Jimmy like that! To not even allow him to go out in a blaze of glory, but to live! To compromise, and cut corners, and believe that sleeping with the Amway-selling slut down the street meant he was still a rebel!