A Lonely Life
Don Carpenter’s Brutal Hard Rain Falling Could’ve Been about Himself

By John Hood

Maybe it was his name. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you. It’s as strong and as sensible an American name as any other that springs from the Scottish practice of employing a person’s occupation. But (a certain cinematic superstar withstanding) it’s hardly the kinda moniker one would choose if they wanted to be noticed. And in the writing racket, getting noticed is half the battle.

Perhaps it’s the fact that many of his direct contemporaries achieved success while he remained relatively marginalized. I mean, his ’50s Army stint had him writing for “Stars and Stripes” alongside Shel Silverstein. And he spent the bulk of the ’60s among Bay Area writers such as Evan S. Connell Jr., Curt Gentry and Richard Brautigan, not to mention Beats like Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, all of whom would go on to varying degrees of infamy.

Maybe it was because he “lived, worked, raged, exulted and suffered” in “a tiny, cluttered” Mill Valley, California apartment, riddled with TB, diabetes, and glaucoma the last 15 years of his life. And at the end, his body was so broken it allowed him to write for no more than 20 minutes at a time.

Whatever it was, on Thursday, July 28, the man pulled a pistol from the top drawer of his dresser and shot himself dead. And the world lost another one of those talents it never really knew it had.

Such is the story of Don Carpenter, a Berkeley-born writer who penned some of the most brutally beautiful works in the English language. Among those works was his first, “Hard Rain Falling” (New York Review Books, $16.95). And you won’t find another story as uncompromising.

Enter Jack. Offspring of two know-nothing teens, he’s institutionalized, in one form or another, for much of the rest of his life. And during the few stretches when he is on the streets, he’s either putting his fists into somebody’s face or taking a tire iron to his own gut. In other words, Jack may be set loose, but he’s hardly free.
Jack knows a pale-skinned, black cat named Billy. Billy’s a pool shark, so he gets to hang with the crackers, though most of the crackers only begrudgingly give him respect. Billy’s also quite bright. But to show it would put him out in the cold.

The two cross paths throughout their short and stunted lives, most crushingly in San Quentin, where they end up sharing a cell. It is in the Q that both find a deep completeness neither ever had known before. And it is in the Q where one will die.

Imagine Bukowski by way of John Fante and you’d get some idea of the desperate degradation inherent in “Hard Rain.” Throw in some good, old-fashioned loser tale like Jack Black’s “You Can’t Win” (reportedly Burroughs’ favorite book), and you’ll get some of the unjust rewards.

In a better world, Carpenter’s book would’ve been a bestseller that launched a robust career. But in a better world it’s unlikely Carpenter could’ve written this book. No, he needed the gutter to reach these heights. And he needed to be downtrodden.

There is no sweetness and no light in “Hard Rain.” This book will not leave you humming a tune. Things get tough; then they get tougher. And that’s on the good days. But if you dig clenching, wrenching storytelling, and if you’re unafraid of the dark, this will be your kinda black-and-blue.

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