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narcolini · 2 months ago

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me, crawling out the dirt, blood spattered, dry-lipped, seeing your danny/kathy on the horizon: i made it ma... im alive

this was soooooo good it literally feels like a canonical text. like when they release a book of a film and give you the inside scoop on a characters mind which is funny cause the film is a film of a book anyway but this literally feels like the prologue of bikeriders: danny's side

rUNNNNNIng to part two

Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Part 1

⁂

Pairing: Danny Lyon x Kathy Cross

Word count: ≈ 3.1K

TWS: Allusions to infidelity, love triangles, angst, civil disobedience, mentions of jail.

Notes: (ꔘ) indicates this comes directly from movie dialogue. SNCC = Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student-led Civil Rights activist group in that organized campus sit-ins, boycotts, and other civil disobedience campaigns in protest of segregation in the south throughout the 1960s.

He couldn’t figure why she didn’t kick him out after staying so long, why she’d let him carry on jabbering away about himself like that. 6mos documenting the lives of the Vandals, Danny Lyon’s got new colors, a promising book idea, and a lotta trouble ahead thanks to the highly inconvenient crush he’s got on Kathy Cross. As she’s progressively pushed aside by her husband, Benny’s allegiance to the club and his own personal code of lawlessness, she too finds solace in Danny, their shared half-in/half-out club status bringing the two closer than either bargained for. Forging a bond strong enough to jeopardize his journalistic objectivity and her marriage, the question now is when and where to draw the line.

⁂ “Yeah, so that’s when I punched’a guy. I mean he’s over here all apologizin to me and y’know– I mean jeez what kinda sissy ya gotta be to do a thing like dat?”

“But– okay, so,” Danny responds, squinting, face half-obscured by his Nikon F, “weren’t you the one who dented his car?”

With a lethargic nod, Frankie drags from the cigarette at one corner of his mouth and exhales out the other without disturbing its peace, like the cigarette was always there. Like he’d come out the womb with it right there.

“So, but–” Danny’s confusion, though audible, is still hidden behind the camera as his finger comes down, punching the shutter button and pulling the advance lever twice - punch then pull, punch then pull - grabbing a couple of shots before the vignette of smoke framing Frankie’s face dissipates. “So, why hit him? I mean, you’d already dented the guy’s ride, right?”

“Maaan,” Frankie waves his hand like he’s shooing away a meddlesome pigeon that won’t take no for an answer. “I just don’t got no patience fer those kindsa guys, y’know? I mean, yer not wrong. I’m the one who dented his car, right. But it’s like, then– So whats’a loony fuck apologizin to me fer? I’da respected him more if he’d gotten in my face er somethin, y’know. Least showed some spine. I promise, I know it sounds daft-backwards but it just really got my goat y’know, him apologizin like that.”

Danny can’t help chuckling at Frankie’s logic there, shoulders shaking as he drops the camera. It bobs against his chest drawing the strap taut around his neck while he reaches in his shirt pocket for a joint he’d rolled earlier. Smoke discharges in short, sharp gusts when he lights up because he’s still laughing, pretending like he can’t wrap his head around Frankie punching some guy after being the one to scratch his car. But if he’s honest, Frankie’s logic makes more sense to him than Danny cares to interrogate further just now. There’s a reason he’s on this side of the camera.

Frankie isn’t part of the main cast Danny’s been tagging along with, more a featured guest, a “now introducing” sort of fella. But Frankie’s just the same as the other guys Danny’s gotten to know in the sense that while Danny observed, Frankie didn’t observe him back much. That wasn’t like every job he’d had either. How many times had his subjects challenged him, flipped the script as it were, started giving to his take, that kind of thing. But the club guys were good like that. No one inspects him too closely. He’s as good as another barstool to these guys and they’re as good to each other in the same way.

Which in truth, after the last job, is a welcome relief. And since Danny’s not out to volunteer too much personal information about himself, certainly not all that had happened in his time with the SNCC before he came back to Chicago, he’s liable to slide on by, undetected. No waves, just pictures. Not like his time down south. The protests, the violence, the thin blue line that seemed to crush them from all sides, the hope, the fear, the stark reality in the voice of a promising, young black activist, no more than 18 or 19, from Montgomery; a voice that still rings in his ears like the kid’s there, right in front of Danny in that pool hall.

What’s it mean for you that our struggle’s what puts guys like you on the map? Will you remember us when you’re acceptin that Pulitzer? And if you do, will you say you remember out loud?

To this day, that chafes his ego, ruffles his feathers, the lens fixed on him like that, subjected to being a subject. Because Danny knows how right that kid really is. But as much as he hates it, he also knows the value of, every once in a while, being put in focus like that. Still, he squirms under that kind of scrutiny more than he’d care to admit, an ant under a magnifying glass with the added misfortune of being in the sun’s path. So yeah, it suits him just fine that the club guys don’t look so close. Well, except for the occasional scattered, out-of-nowhere but not entirely unprofound observations. Usually from Zipco.

Out of all the guys, Zipco has a way of taking Danny the most by surprise. Because even as Danny embodies much of what he rails against, Zipco, more than most people, has a surprising capacity to rethink some of the broad sweeping proclamations he’s always making. At first, he might cling to them like a drowning man to a life raft. Until, confronted by the opposition up close, he’d realize the pool he’s in is only waist-deep, at which point he’s forced to let the life raft go, dazed and confused as to why he was holding on so tight in the first place.

Like that time he was going on about pinkos and college boys and the navy, the first car show Danny went to.

…

Danny held the microphone out and away from him, arm extended toward Zipco, “Lookit dese pinko mothafuckers,”(ꔘ) who was moving around so much, Danny already knew the audio was going to be dogs hit no matter how much he messed with the levels. Sound quality doomed the moment they stepped foot outside because who tries getting good audio in an open field with some crappy, used reel-to-reel?

But Zipco was on a roll, “S’like my brudder,” so Danny let it ride. “Y’know my brudder? We swing the same way but only thing is he’s a pinko. There’s somethin in is head, is wrong, y’know? But when he gets drunk he’s just like me. Otherwise he thinks different.”(ꔘ)

“What do you mean by ‘he’s a pinko?’”(ꔘ) Danny asked, still fiddling with the knobs on the tape deck in the hopes he could level set enough so he wouldn’t have to hold the mic out so far. The muscles in his arm were already starting to cramp.

“Ey,” sidestepping the question entirely, Zipco launched into a separate interrogation, “ain’t you s’posed to be takin pictures?”(ꔘ)

“Yeah,” Danny replied coolly.

“So what you got the microphone for all’a time, then?”(ꔘ)

Danny broke focus from the recorder to look at Zipco, “I don’t know. I was thinkin,” pausing to slide his aviators up the bridge of his nose. “I could record people talkin maybe. Use it with’a pictures. Make a book or somethin maybe.”(ꔘ)

“A book, huh?”(ꔘ) Zipco examined him through narrowed eyes like that was the richest, most quaint thing he’d ever heard.

Unphased by the skepticism, Danny just nodded, “Yeah—”(ꔘ) voice trailing off, Zipco’s disbelief deemed either too small or too simple to be bothered by.

“Yeah.”

“—maybe.” Danny redirects the interview back to the original question, “So, what d’you mean by ‘he’s a pinko?’”(ꔘ)

“Pinko, uh y’know,” Zip shrugs, “college boy. Dey wear tennis shoes and short pants, y’know, shit like that.”(ꔘ)

“Uh-huh. And what’s your brother do?”(ꔘ)

“Ah, he’s in the Air Force. Goin to Thailand, next November. Air Force mechanic. Dey took him. Dey wouldn’t take me, y’know. Dey took him cause he’s a clean-cut, all-American boy. Y’know short pants n’ tennis shoes.”(ꔘ)

Danny was altogether unprepared for the nerve he’d struck or the ensuing monologue, as Zip became more and more impassioned.

“I told my brudder– he went to college. One year. I said,” Hand gripping the neck of the glass jug of wine Zipco always carted around with him, he pointed the bottle in accusation, like Danny was actually his brother, “‘Fucker, you don’t quit that college im’a beat da shit outta you!’ And he quit. Cause I tole him I don’t want no goddamn pinkos in my family. Cause I can’t stand dat shit, y’know. Cause if you can’t work wit your fuckin hands, you ain’t no fuckin good.”(ꔘ)

That was when Zipco finally stopped to take a breath, but before Danny could get in a word of follow up, he chugged right along, albeit more calmly this time. “I, uh, y’know I like to work. I ain’t no fuckin prick. Like to work wit my hands n’ shit. I work hard for my money y’know.”(ꔘ)

Danny took a beat, in case he had more left, before agreeing, “Oh yeah, yeah.”(ꔘ)

As Danny put the mic down in the grass next to him to set up the camera, Zip eyed him suspiciously. “So, what d’you do?”(ꔘ)

“I studied photography …” When that was met with no response, Danny dropped the punch-line, real smooth, “… in college.”(ꔘ)

Chuckling, there was a smirk of admiration as Zipco nodded, knowing he’d been got but not as sore about it as he’d expected to be.

And while he had enough respect not to call Danny ‘pinko,’ Zipco had still taken to calling him ‘college boy’ occasionally after that. That is, until a few months later, on a ride-along out to Ohio for a different car show when Danny finally convinced him that he technically did work with his hands.

“Ey, lookee here,” Zip put his foot on the cooler and tipped back the lawn chair he was sitting in as Danny approached from behind, “college boy’s made it to da party, eh?”

“Hey Zip,” Danny said, “Lemme ask you something,” adjusting his lens before kneeling down to snap a picture of Zipco looking right at him, arm defiantly flung over the back of the lawn chair. “You, uh— you ever consider it actually takes hands to do what I do?”

“Fuck outta here. What you mean?”

“I mean,” Danny stood back up again, hands up like the cops got him surrounded, camera in one of them and said, self-satisfied as a politician, “There are no pictures without these.”

Zipco chewed on that for a moment like he couldn’t figure if it was the most profound or profoundly stupid thing in the world. He must’ve fallen on the side of the former when he made up his mind though because there was a little head-bow of agreement and a smile of surrender. He dropped the whole ‘college boy’ bit after that.

But yeah, aside from the occasional mini-revelations from the Gospel of Zipco, these guys don’t look at anything too close.

Heck, if it wasn’t for Kath none of them would’ve even known about the few times Danny’d been to jail. Which of course, he had no way of knowing Kathy was gonna break that news because if he did, he never would’ve told her in the first place. Just considering the possible scenarios as to how it might’ve come up in conversation – one he wasn’t there for, no less – Danny wished a hole in the earth would crack open and gobble him right up.

But boy, were the guys floored when they heard. Worse than a sewing circle the next time Danny came to the bar. Chattering amongst themselves, eyeing him as he walked past the pool tables to greet them like– well, Kathy once described it as, ‘like dey was plannin somethin over dere.’(ꔘ) And the closer he got, the faster they closed ranks and hushed up. Virtually indistinguishable, but for the tattoos and tough stares, from a gaggle of primary school boys talking all kinds of shit by their lockers about that poor kid who didn’t know he’d stepped in dogshit and tracked it through the hallway.

Naturally, Brucie started busting his balls the minute Danny pressed play on the tape recorder.

“Ey, here comes Mr. Forty-Five-to-Life. Tell me, how funny were you walking on yer way outta that place?” Brucie announced it without looking from his newspaper like it was one of the bylines. “Pretty boy like you’s bound to fetch top dollar in dere.”

Talk about deer in headlights. So caught off guard, Danny’s head practically spun. “The heck you goin on about?”

An arm whipped around his neck with the force of a U-lock, and in that low Golden State lullaby of his, Cal joked, “That’s some solid civil disobedience there, brother. And here we all were thinking you’re a law-abiding, tax-paying cit-o-zen,” ruffling Danny’s hair with each over-enunciated syllable.

“Yeah, not some dirty commie,” Corky hooted into the neck of the beer he’d been sipping out of.

Releasing Danny, Cal stood up straight, all serious now and a little bit salty, “Hey, dipshit. Y’know communism and the Civil Rights Movement aren’t the same thing?”

Corky just rolled his eyes, with another one from Wahoo on its heels in a show of support like, Get a load’a this guy.

Johnny chimed in from a stool all the way down at the end of the bar to settle the matter, “You clowns think I let just any ole asshole in here wit’a fuckin camera? Mm-mm, I clocked that this kid weren’t no princess.”

A surprising remark from someone Danny thought he’d made no impression on, nevermind one that favorable. Sure, Johnny let him tag along on rides and take pictures but he and Danny weren’t especially cozy. And Johnny wasn’t especially sentimental. Not out loud, anyway. Second only to Benny, he was the most reserved of the bunch. Except when he was drunk, which Danny noted pretty early on with some fascination, happened less often than the other guys.

Still, uncomfortable as it was, being discussed in his absence, Danny held his breath waiting for it to get worse. For the real kicker to land, the punchline that would launch a feeding frenzy of accusations that he’d been telling tales out of school. Because surely Kathy had told them who’d been in the jail cell across from him. He could already hear the ridicule, the disbelief that didn’t even exist yet.

Probably it’d be Brucie who’d start in, maybe Zipco. So, you mean to tell me you met Mr. Big-Fuckin’-Dreams, Martin Luther King, in a fuckin drunk tank? In middle-of-shit-fuck-nowhere Arkansas?

Before Danny could get the chance, Cal would already be correcting them. Alabama, you nitwit. Not Arkansas.

Cockroach might pipe up, Ey, ain’t dat guy, uh, a doctor er somethin?

Someone else’d interrupt, Nah, dat guy’s a man o’ the cloth wit The Man Upstairs. Deacon, er a reverend, er some shit.

Cal would beat Danny at correcting them, again. He’s both. Reverend and doctor.

And Danny would just sit there, fiddling with the camera, ears red, laughing but the laugh’s all thin and tense because really, how do you convince a bar full of blue-collar bikeriders that you, little old you, met the Martin Luther King Jr. locked up overnight in a rural county jail down south?

Mercifully though, he wouldn’t have to convince them. Because it seemed apparently, Kathy hadn’t offered up that part of the story. So relieved Danny was at the time, he had to hide feeling nearly knocked over with it.

See, because he’d told Kath the whole story. He hadn’t even meant to really. But by the time she was pouring a fourth cup of coffee, the afternoon sun was shining right through the window, lighting up the shag area rug on her bedroom floor, a bright orange reminder he’d stayed past their agreed-upon 12:30 curtain call. And mid-telling her all about how he wound up getting his last job – how he’d been makin pictures since he was 17, how he’d had a knack for it throughout college, but that his time in the SNCC’s what made him a real journalist – he couldn’t figure why she didn’t kick him out after staying so long, why she’d let him carry on jabbering away about himself like that.

Anyway, the punchline never came, and Danny was grateful to avoid the regret he might’ve felt sharing that with her. There was no way the guys would’ve bought that he met the good Reverend King in the klink. That would’ve been dead on arrival. Truth perceived as a lie that he would’ve never lived down. And nothing’s worse than the truth you can’t live down.

But Kath was that good at flipping the script that way, putting him in focus without him noticing. He suspected it was from all the time she’d spent watching Benny, casting her impressions of him and then voicing them, if only to cultivate some back and forth that might resemble a conversation. Because Danny had seen it, Benny was a tough nut to crack. Even for those that knew him, it was hard to know know him. Every once in a while though Kathy would catch him in a sharing mood and that’s the most Danny’d see him talk. It was in those moments, he got it - why they were together, why they got together in the first place. Something special, intangible, that thing called love, that two-person ecosystem insufficiently described by words or pictures no matter how hard we still try.

Yet there was distance too. Always would be. Impossible, really, trying to know someone like that, aloof, prospecting for new info, digging up a bit more each day, piece by painful piece. Because talking to Benny wasn’t like talking to an actual person. It was more like he was some great celestial object and you, always in-orbit; the only way to him was around. In that sense, Danny really felt for Kath.

Still, even as he felt her loneliness like it was his own, like he’d been living it all these years, he also found her love for Benny, her commitment to loving him, altogether compelling even if she still hoped to change him somehow. There was a resilience, a covert reserve of strength in that loneliness, something that made it so sometimes he got to thinking she might even be better at making pictures than him. Like if someone put a camera in her hands and let her run wild in that human zoo they called the Stoplight, yeah, Danny’d bet money she’d make some memorable pictures.

…

There’s no easy way to tell her though - heck, he learned it the hard way himself - operating on the edges of things doesn’t make for the most efficient agent of change. But it’s the best for documenting the moment, the for-right-now. If he learned anything in the Montgomery county jail, if he learned anything from those moments watching Kathy and Benny, it was that.

On the edges and right now are certainly his place, anyway.

═

taglist: @narcolini, @drabbles-mc, @ashlingiswriting, @tofuwildcard, @cositapreciosa, @axreliono, @bellinitini , @complete-nonsequitur, @when-did-this-become-difficult, @ladygoatee (tagged everyone I previewed this to in wc but no pressure to read bc I know not everyone is in this fandom)

#im alive im back im diving head first into dannyland #fic rec

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