Old gangsters never die.

edited 2011-09-04 20:15:05 in General
Except the few that pass away in cinemas at midnight, lay lightly there sprawling in the footlights for the usherette or the ice cream girl to find.

And if I die--God knows I might--don't make me die in black and white. Don't make me share a haunted screen with all those other ghostboys who stood tremblin' in the foyer sipping wine, and coughed, shoot their cuffs, checked the time, and stepped outside to get--cut down! By dead policemen faces strobing in the panic-light, their long dark cars parked out the back, their halos black against the night! And John Dillinger's name in the finest bullet silver etched upon their hearts, a cold tattoo upon their skin right next to where the badge is pinned.

Comments

  • edited 2011-09-04 20:35:17
    Touch the cow. Do it now.
    John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds' strange mercy in the movie images that hadn't quite yet faded from his eyeballs - Clark Gable going off unregenerate to fry in the chair, voices gentle out of the deathrow steel so long, Blackie... turning down a reprieve from his longtime friend now Governor of New York William Powell, skinny chinless condescending jerk, Gable just wanting to get it over with, "Die like ya live - all of a sudden, don't drag it out-" even as bitchy little Melvin Purvis, staked outside the Biograph Theatre, lit up the fatal cigar and felt already between his lips the penis of official commendation - and federal cowards at the signal took Dillinger with their faggots' precision...there was still for the doomed man some shift of personality in effect - the way you've felt for a little while afterward in the real muscles of your face and voice, that you were Gable, the ironic eyebrows, the proud, shining, snakelike head - to help Dillinger through the bushwhacking, and a little easier into death.
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