Relax.

Love your writing 🌺

Thank you so much! 💚

I think maybe if Soda hadn’t gotten his draft notice that day, he wouldn’t have made such a callous, homophobic comment at the dance party, and Pony wouldn’t have been wandering around early the next morning with so much suicidal ideation.

But I do think that getting drafted does get Soda to back off and try to call a truce. Now that he’s had a little time to process it, it’s very important for him to not leave on bad terms. And to do what he can so Pony is in a better place, even if it goes against his own morals. I have a WIP in my drafts about the Curtis brothers going on a road trip so Pony can go to college interviews/network with the NYC magazine people. Soda makes it happen. If he’s not drafted, I don’t think he’d do that.

I don’t know if you’ll see this, anon, as you sent it back in December…. But that you so much for your kind words, I really appreciate you taking the time to send them to me.

I’m currently working on the epilogue. Much more slowly than I intended, but it will get done and I hope you’ll read and enjoy it once I post it.

It depends on the situation. He’s definitely always ready for a fight, but as he gets older and moves to a different neighborhood he’ll have to fight his impulses. It’s not socially acceptable to deck someone in his middle class neighborhood. That said, your bigotry must be absolutely blinding, if you say something against his wife or his brother within earshot. He’s a big, rough guy. There is a lot he can’t protect them from and that’s hard for him to grapple with.

He is, by a hair. He starts growth spurt immediately after Mark’s removed from his life, though he was growing a bit throughout. He would have hit his growth spurt sooner, without Mark. Sometimes that happens with kids when abuse stops. I’m really interested in the psychical affects of trauma.

And Pony’s height is something I track on my timeline and outline. At the start of Blasted Pansy he’s 5’3ish. At the end he’s creeping to 5’9. Soda’s 5’8. When Soda deploys (~6 months after his notice), Pony’s indisputably taller — almost 5’11.

Steve enlists— well, technically they both enlist. After Soda gets drafted, he is able to enlist. The thought behind this sort of thing was that enlisting supposedly gave you a shot at a better assignment. So Soda and Steve enlist together under the buddy program, which allowed them to do basic training together. They got different assignments, because Steve tests a lot better. Enlisting is not great for Steve’s marriage and his pregnant wife.

(They brought the buddy plan up to Two-Bit, who declined. Two-Bit eventually received a draft notice, but his mother made him drink an absurd amount of Pepsi before his physical. He was disqualified due to his blood pressure. If it was the Pepsi… who’s to say. He might just have hypertension anyway.)

Darry doesn’t have very much contact with Steve. Steve robs Darry’s business. Darry doesn’t press charges, but that’s all the mercy he has for him at the time. He’s getting some gossip about Steve, which is largely factual. And Darry reads the police blotter.

Thank you! And it is truly one-sided. Darry NEEDS to be Mr. and Mrs. Johnson’s favorite in-law. 😂 I adore this ask, because it gives me an excuse to talk about something I haven’t much….

Of course, Yvonne’s roots are firmly in Tulsa and The Johnson family is so important to both her and Darry. So that ties them to Tulsa, but honestly, I don’t picture Darry getting too far from Tulsa. His aspirations, in my mind, take him to a suburb like Jenks, OK. Out of his neighborhood, but not out of Tulsa.

This might be my most controversial Darry take, but I think — in Hinton terms — Darry’s a stayer. I tend to think Pony’s assessment of him, the guilt Pony feels regarding Darry staying, is more about Pony’s projection onto Darry, whether than Darry himself. Pony thinks Darry is angry at Pony for ruining his chances of getting out — because it would kill Pony to stay — but I don’t know how much it matters to Darry. I think his feelings about it are more complicated. He had 1-2 years, before his parents died, where he could have put himself through school. Pony spent think so…. But I do.

College was cheaper and he did have at least one scholarship. I’ll using Oklahoma State University, for example. This is what I found: One credit hour in 1962-1965 was $7. That’d be the same as about $70 today. A full time course load would be about $840/semester. Mind, minimum wage in OK was $1/hour. So it wouldn’t be easy, but I think Darry could have made it work, even without the scholarship, though hopefully it would have taken the edge off.(before his parents died). Unfortunately, though, Darry would have missed the federal student aid and loan programs introduced by the Higher Education Act of 1965. But still.

Maybe the Curtis family needed him to contribute financially for some reason. That’s a possibility. But for my Darry, I think he was held back for more psychological reasons. First-gen-college issues, etc. My Darry isn’t forlorn about it, because he doesn’t have the same animal-in-a-cage feelings about Tulsa as Pony.

Darry’s comfortable in Tulsa. He was a popular jock in high school. Boy of the Year. And his brand of masculinity is celebrated. He’s not out of place. And maybe most importantly— he likes being a big fish in a small pond (perhaps another reason he didn’t go to college.)

Now, he very much thinks Pony should go to college, and I think it’s easier for him to put pressure onto Pony, instead of question his own ambivalence.

I think I got off track. But I’ll also say, Darry’s a man without wanderlust. So even if he wanted to leave…. Where would he go?

I think you’re spot on. Soda had a shallow understanding of their relationship, until the water tower. He doesn’t realize the depth and sincerity of Pony’s feelings toward Mark, but recognizes that Mark has a strong hold on Pony. It doesn’t take long for Soda to realize how tenuous his own relationship has become with Pony.

I think a lot of Soda’s thoughts and feelings about homosexuality are contradictory:“How could something be a crime and an illness? How could I be the victim and the patient and the perpetrator?”

Pony’s same-sex attraction is an illness, and in Soda’s eyes, it’s related to Pony’s Unspoken Mental Illness, which Soda doesn’t have the language to conceptualize. Mark’s same-sex attraction is just a crime, maybe a pathology caused by his parent’s murder-suicide, but Soda has no sympathy for that. Pony’s trauma makes his homosexuality not-so-real, but Mark’s trauma makes him irredeemable. Because Soda is very biased.

Thank you so much! Short answer is yes. I’ll put the more detailed answer under the cut, because I do plan to address this in my next long-fic. So … if anyone cares about spoilers….

I don’t think their paths cross too often, especially in the second half of Blasted Pansy, where Mark is primarily working on selling drugs in places Soda’s not involved. But also, in the heat of the moment, Soda might have put Mark in the hospital, but with a little distance he’s cooled down enough to worry about potential ramifications. Pony will hate him, he could get arrested, people will ask questions, … Mark holds the secret that could get the Curtis brothers separated.

I did think about a scene, just a little companion one-shot, of Mark strolling into the Dx a couple months after Soda walked in on them. I think it’d be interesting. I don’t think Soda’s ever hated anyone as much as he hates Mark Jennings.

Nah, I posted them about 1-2 weeks apart. They came back pretty quick, because I had a few years of sporadically adding a couple hundred words to each. I’m planning to have it all wrapped up by the end of the month.