Page 185
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
Joe tells the runaway to leave, then turns the patio evening into music and role-play, making warning, entertainment, and wounded memory part of the same performance.
The patio becomes a stage again, but the performance has an ethical edge. Joe's guitar, mimicry, and song are not just self-display; they are how he metabolizes danger, memory, and care without surrendering to sentimentality.
Joe's 'soundless weep' and his blunt 'Get out of here' fuse tenderness and self-protection in one gesture as he sends the runaway off to 'a Japanese gardener'; then the evening reassembles into performance, with Joe doing Al Jolson's 'I Got Plenty of Nothing' as if for 'thousands' while Animal and Jaugeline laugh 'from an inside laughter.' The closing image, Joe as 'both audience and player to the flashbacks of the cinima,' is the page's real subject - entertainment as a way of replaying one's whole life. This reading remains provisional because the right-margin handwriting beside the music passage is unresolved and was omitted from the transcript.