Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

yet I would not accept it. The given was not permitted to be given. I would lie in bed and make plans to take a girl to lunch or decide to rent a catboat for a sail. It did no good to tell myself that I was not at home but within a cell in a medium-security prison in Florida. I saw such facts as part of the dream, and thereby at quite a remove from me. I could get off on my plans for the day if only the dream that I was in prison would not persist—“Man,”I would say to myself, “shake these cobwebs.” Sometimes it would take all of a morning for me to get back into the real day. Only then could I recognize that I would not be able to take the girl to lunch.
    Something kin to this was being perpetrated on me now. I had a tattoo I could not account for, a good dog who was frightened of me, a car interior just washed of its blood, a missing wife whom I might or might not have seen late last night, and an ongoing, nicely simmering tumescence for a middle-aged blonde real estate lady from California, yet all I could think of as I took my walk to the center of town was that Alvin Luther Regency ought to have a reasonably serious purpose for interrupting a writer’s working hours.
    Now, the fact that I had done no writing in twenty-five days was not something I bothered to take into account. Rather, like those mornings in prison when I could not enter my day, so was I now like an empty pocket pulled out, and as much without myself as an actor who leaves his wife, his children, his debts, his mistakes, and even his ego in order to step into a role.
    In fact, I was observing the new personality that walked into Regency’s office in the basement of Town Hall, for I stepped through the door like a reporter, that is, I did my best to give an impression that the Police Chief’s clothes, expression, office furniture, and words were all of equal import to me, as equal as the phrases that wouldgo into a feature story of eight good paragraphs of approximately equal length. I entered, as I say, in the full concentration of such a role, and thereby noted like a good journalist that he was not accustomed to his new office. Not yet. His personal photographs, framed testimonials, professional licenses, paperweights and memorabilia might all be laid out or tacked to the walls, two file cabinets could flank his desk like posts at the gates of an ancient temple, and he might sit erect in his chair, like the military man he used to be, his close-to-the-scalp crew cut marking him as an old Green Beret, but still it stood out: he was not at home in his office. But then, which office would be at home with him? He had features that would ask a sculptor to use a jackhammer on the stone, all promontories, ledges and overhangs. In town, his nicknames abounded—Rock-face, Target Shoot, Glint-eye—or, leave it to the old Portuguese fishermen: Twinkletoes. The townspeople were obviously not ready to buy him yet. He may have been Acting Chief of Police for six months, but the shadows of his predecessor hung over the office. The last Chief, around for ten years, had been a local Portuguese who studied law at night and moved up to the Attorney General’s Office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Memories of the last Chief—considering it was Provincetown, an unsentimental place—were now well-spoken.
    I didn’t know Regency well. In the old days, if he had come to my bar, I would have beencertain, doubtless, that I could read him on the spot. He was large enough to play professional football, and there was no mistaking the competitive gleam in his eye: God, the spirit of competition, and crazy mayhem had come together. Regency looked like one Christian athlete who hated to lose.
    I offer this much of a portrait because, in truth, I could not figure him out. Just as I didn’t always say hello to my day, so Regency didn’t always fit into the personality one knew him by. I will provide some details