LaPetiteCeinture

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Kastor wants whatever Damen has because he thinks it should have been his.

He feels comfortable speaking when he really shouldn’t because Damen is so loyal and Kastor rarely faces real consequences for anything he does.

So, I just finished my read through of Banana Fish.  Yes, I cried my eyes out.  I then finally got around to reading Angel Eyes all the way through for the first time, and man, what an awesome side story.  There’s so much to talk about from it, and so much to explore, but there’s something really specific I noticed, which I think ties into my other post about other people’s perceptions of Ash, and which also relates to the last conversation we see between Ash and Blanca.  

In the first three quarters of Angel Eyes, Ash comes across as very cold, as very unfeeling, and even frightening.  Even Shorter at one point is so scared of Ash that he doesn’t want anything to do with him.  Of course, by the end of the story, we realize his cold demeanor was, again, a total front.  A wall put up to keep people away from him, including Shorter, because he seriously doesn’t know who he can trust.  He’s wary of Shorter precisely because Shorter’s being nice to him, and nobody’s ever been nice to Ash for no reason.  Ash is only going by his experiences in life to inform his decisions.  His experiences tell him that anybody being nice to him is doing it because they want something from him.  This, coupled with Frankie essentially submitting to Shorter’s demand that he stop harassing Ash at the beginning, and Ash’s having already pegged Frankie as an assassin, naturally makes Ash even more suspicious of Shorter.  Eventually of course he realizes, after talking to Shorter and asking him if Frankie is part of his crew, that that’s not the case.  But he still doesn’t trust Shorter.  He still keeps him at a long distance and doesn’t tell him anything about himself.  Well, why would he?  He’s just met him a week ago and Ash’s life experiences tell him he can’t trust anybody.

Well, the thing I wanted to really talk about here, and I think this is a prime example of how it is that Ash was never this ruthless, cold-hearted killer, is the moment directly following the fight between Ash and Frankie, where Ash very nearly kills him.  He only doesn’t because Shorter shouts at him as he’s charging Frankie with the pool cue and distracts him enough with that that Ash messes up his aim.  Shorter runs after Ash afterward to thank him for “going easy” on Frankie, and we see Ash start to laugh, seeming almost demonic in his reaction as he explains to Shorter that he didn’t “go easy” on Frankie.  He meant to kill him.  Of course, when we later realize that Ash knew Frankie meant to kill him, his own intent to kill makes more sense.  But there’s a very important bit of dialog between Ash and Shorter afterward, which speaks volumes about who Ash really is inside.

He thanks Shorter, and then starts saying “So that’s it.  Deflect it slightly at the last second.  I didn’t DECIDE to go easy on him.  But now I finally know how.”  He says I “finally” know how.  

Now lets take this back for a moment to Ash’s last conversation with Blanca in the park, when they start talking about how Blanca never taught Ash how to go easy on an enemy.  He says to Blanca “”Never let your enemy escape alive.”  You’re the one who taught me that.  I never learned how to go easy on someone I’m fighting.”  And then Blanca replies, while smiling fondly, “That’s because I was told there was no need to teach you that.”.  

These two pieces of conversation taken together tell us everything about Ash, and his attitude towards the idea of having to kill, even for reasons as justifiable as self-defense.  

Blanca taught Ash how to kill with the efficiency of a professional hit man.  He taught him how to react and kill in the quickest, easiest and most efficient way possible.  He never taught him how to hold back once he was in the midst of a fight.  Once he got going, he would become a killing machine, so to speak.  And we see this from Ash throughout the series.  Once he starts fighting someone with the intention to kill them, he goes through with it with frightening precision and effectiveness.  Blanca never taught Ash how to simply incapacitate an opponent using a deadly weapon, he never taught Ash how to only maim, instead of kill.  All of his lessons were geared towards showing Ash how to take the life of an enemy, nothing more, nothing less.  Dino didn’t want Ash to carry out threats or warnings.  He wanted him as a hit man.  But Blanca’s words to Ash, that he was told he never needed to teach Ash how to go easy on an enemy, tells us that someone, Dino most likely, told Blanca that Ash was already too soft-hearted and too merciful, and that he shouldn’t bother with teaching Ash anything but how to kill.  Dino wanted to use Ash as a weapon, to carry out hits for him.  He didn’t have any use for Ash’s own ambivalent feelings about killing.  He didn’t care how Ash felt.  He needed to mold him into the most effective weapon he could.  We see Dino remind Ash, early on in the series, and in a mocking way, about how Ash always used to cry over every job Dino made him do.  Ash never wanted to kill anyone, and it was an upsetting enough experience for him that it used to reduce him to tears.  He didn’t want to do it, but Dino forced him into it, like he forced him into prostitution.  

But let’s go back to what Ash says to Shorter.  He says “But now I FINALLY know how.”  What this tells us about Ash is that he WANTED to know how to pull back while fighting someone so that he didn’t kill them.  He wanted to know how he could stop himself from always taking someone’s life if he happened to get into a physical altercation with them.  He’s happy that he’s learned how to pull back in just this one way.  He’s been trained only to know how to kill, but Ash hates killing.  He only does it because he has to.  And we know Ash never would have even tried to kill Frankie if Frankie hadn’t first tried to kill him.  Even later on, Ash let’s Frankie go, when he could have killed him.  Even here, we see Ash show mercy, despite this asshole and his crew just trying to murder him.  It’s the same as Ash only seducing Ricardo as a means of getting Frankie to make a move and show his hand.  Because Ricardo made clear his own intention to try and rape Ash.  So Ash uses Ricardo’s intention to his own benefit in forcing Frankie’s hand and to find out who sent him to kill him.  I don’t think Ash ever intended to “sick Ricardo on Frankie and let him do his dirty work for him”, like Shorter accuses Ash of.  Ash saw Frankie beat Ricardo’s ass earlier, when they got into a fight over him, so he knows Ricardo can’t take out Frankie.  Ash wouldn’t ever send someone to do a job for him like that anyway, as we see in the main story line of Banana Fish.  He takes care of his own business when someone’s after him specifically.  He never sends his own boys to do it for him.  He acts dismissive of Shorter’s accusation because, again, he’s putting up a front of cold-hearted detachment because that’s the only way he knows how to protect himself.  By showing no emotion.  Even Shorter basically tells him to utilize a form of this earlier in the story, when he advises Ash to let himself be raped if he gets caught, and to be as quiet and passive as possible.  Ash already knows those sorts of tactics, obviously.  By this point in his life though, he’s been raped so many times, he’s got more sophisticated means of getting through it. So he uses Ricardo as a means of sussing out who it is that’s gunning for him on the outside.  Because he knows if Frankie thinks he’s got a Sugar Daddy in Ricardo to protect him, it’s going to make it more difficult to kill him, which is why Frankie acts like he wants to make Ash his “bitch” in the first place.  So he forces Frankie into making his move by making him think him and Ricardo are a “thing”.  Ash was expecting Frankie and his crew to make a move on him.  When they attacked him in the library, he was ready.  Because he knew the act he’d put on with Ricardo was going to make Frankie act, thinking he needed to get Ash before Ash could find protection.  And Ash then used that opportunity to find out who had sent Frankie to kill him in the first place.  The whole thing was just so he could find out who it was that wanted him dead.

He’s using sex as a weapon, because it’s one of the few ways he has of defending himself.  I think Ash starts crying and is so upset when Shorter says if he keeps manipulating people like that, he’ll be just like the assholes who try to hurt him, because that was never Ash’s intention.  He was just trying to protect himself.  He never wanted to control anybody, or hurt them, or dominate them.  He only uses tactics like manipulation to try and keep himself from getting more hurt.  He’s not trying to hurt anybody, or control them because he wants power over them.  He’s trying to control what’s HAPPENING to him, and because what’s happening to him is being perpetrated by these bastards who want to rape him, or kill him, the best way to control the situation is to control THEM.  It isn’t some power play on his part, or born from some sick desire to dominate the other person.  It’s the only way he has of protecting himself.  He starts shaking and crying and gets so upset, because the last thing he wants is to be like the people who hurt him, and because he never did the things he did for the same reasons as them.  It hurts him badly that Shorter thinks he could be like them at all.  That he could be like that, or have that kind of twisted mindset.  He doesn’t, and he never did.  It’s why he tries to explain to Shorter later why it is that he did what he did with Ricardo.  He wants Shorter to know and understand the reasons for it.  That it isn’t because Ash likes it.  It isn’t because he gets his kicks out of controlling somebody, or manipulating their feelings.  It isn’t because he wants to have power over them, or because he gets a thrill from the idea of having power over them.  It’s because he hopes it will make his own suffering at their hands less awful.  

It’s just he was brought up in such an unforgiving and cruel world, that those sorts of things were the only means available to him of staying alive. He couldn’t say no, or fight them off, because that would just lead to his getting more hurt, either by the person doing it, or by Dino, or Marvin, or whoever had him on a leash.  Like Ash later explains to Shorter, because he’s so good looking, guys are always trying to force him to have sex with them, and he only figured that it would make it easier on himself, if he took the lead when guys made passes at him like that.  If he takes the lead and makes these bastards happy, he can control what’s happening to him, at least to some extent.  Shorter wonders then where Ash learned to do that.  Well, the answer is obviously Club Cod.  Ash HAD to learn to do that to keep himself from getting killed eventually.  To keep himself from getting hooked on drugs and used up and destroyed, like most of the kids that ended up in that club.  You can easily imagine that many of the “patrons” of that place were violent on top of their twisted sexual perversion, because those two things often go hand in hand.  A lot of them probably physically hurt the kids there, were probably extremely violent with them.  And we even see that happen to Ash in Private Opinion, when Blanca finds Ash in that motel room after he’s been raped by Marvin.  His hands had been tied to the bed frame, and he had bruises all over him.   He’s been beaten up on top of being raped.  Ash obviously had to learn to “play nice” and be seductive just to keep the physical harm he suffered to a minimum.  If he could make the men molesting and raping him think he was liking it, they were probably less likely to hurt him.  If he “submitted” and pretended to like it, if he played into their sick fantasies of being this submissive little boy that they could control and do with as they pleased, that they could have total power over, then they wouldn’t be angry, and they wouldn’t make it worse.  Like Ash even says to Shorter, the guys who rape you aren’t doing it because they want to get laid.  They’re doing it because they want to hurt you and dominate you and control you.  The more you struggle, the angrier they get that you aren’t submitting to their will, the more violent they then become, the more brutal the rape.  If they think they’ve tamed you and that they’ve broken you to their will, if you act receptive to their advances, then they’re satisfied, and they won’t hurt you more than what they think is “necessary”.  It’s truly horrific.

But anyway, back to the scene between Shorter and Ash after the fight with Frankie.  Shorter takes Ash’s laughing and words as a sign that the kid is crazy and dangerous.  He thinks Ash is laughing because Ash is a lunatic who gets his kicks killing people.  It’s a misinterpretation from Shorter.  It’s after this interaction with Ash that he starts worrying that Ash is Arthur’s assassin, come to kill him.  Ash is confused by Shorter’s sudden anxiety around him, as we see in the scene of them at night in their cell, when Ash gets up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water.  Shorter tenses up in fear, thinking Ash is going to kill him.  Ash smiles at Shorter and asks why he’s so tensed up, and then jokes, asking “You think I’m gonna rape you or something?”  Ash then smiles at him again and says, in the friendliest tone we’ve seen Ash use on Shorter so far “G’night Shorter.”  

Shorter looks completely confused, because it just doesn’t jibe with this picture he’s formed of Ash as this cold hearted killer that’s just waiting to pounce.  

We see Shorter again later in the library, still worried that Ash might be the assassin, but then he realizes that he just doesn’t get that vibe off of Ash, and doesn’t sense that he’s got anything to do with Arthur.  Which of course is true, and Shorter gets his first real glimpse of who Ash actually is, when he finds him in the stacks, sitting up on a ladder and just reading.  It’s the first moment Shorter realizes that Ash looks just like the angel on his Christmas card, and we start to see Shorter’s fear of Ash dissipate in that moment.  

The thing is, Shorter’s perception of Ash gets skewed for a while by the fear mongering of the other inmates.  Nico, who we eventually realize is working with Frankie, is the first to stir it up, to start disseminating the idea that Ash is some kind of devil or demon, and that people should be wary of him.  He spreads this ridiculous story that he claims his grandmother told him about this evil woman who came to her village and drove all the men insane and eventually drove them all to kill each other.  Everyone laughs at first, because it’s an absurd story and Ash is just a kid.  But after what happens with Frankie the first time, Nico doubles down on his fear mongering and won’t shut up about how Ash is the devil, and how he’s evil.  He’s trying to turn the other inmates against Ash, because he’s with Frankie, and Frankie is working for Arthur.  And eventually, even Shorter starts to get effected by all this talk, and starts to be afraid of Ash to a paranoid degree.  Eventually Shorter realizes it’s just bullshit, and Ash really IS just a kid who’s just struggling to survive, and they become friends after that, and Ash no longer seems like this cold, emotionless and frightening devil, but just a cool kid he can shoot the breeze with and really talk to.  By the end, they’re real friends, sharing jokes and laughing together.  It’s only at the end of Angel Eyes that both we the reader and Shorter himself finally see the real Ash.  Again, just this sweet kid who’s surviving in an uncaring and brutal world. 

We see Ash say “… The way I look… I’ve had guys make passes at me tons of times.  And all of them- it’s like, they can’t believe it when I fight ‘em off.  And then they always get really mad.  It’s like, how dare I mess up their fantasy, you know, like I’m not even a real person to them.  And that’s why, I figured it’s a lot easier on me if I take the lead.  Get them wrapped around my finger and do whatever I want them to do…”

We then hear Shorter think to himself “Yeah, but where’d he learn it, what I saw him do to Ricardo?”

One of the important things to note about this scene, is what Ash doesn’t tell Shorter.  Ash doesn’t tell Shorter about the actual kind of abuse he’s been through.  He says “I’ve had guys make passes at me tons of times.”  But we know, of course, that it’s way, WAY worse than that.  That Ash was first and repeatedly raped by his baseball coach starting at the age of seven, and then right around the age of ten, he got picked up by Marvin and sold to into a child sex trafficking ring in Club Cod.  We know Ash was repeatedly and brutally raped by Marvin, Froggy, Dino, and countless patrons of Club Cod, and from what some of the police at the beginning of the story say, we know that Ash also worked as a prostitute on the streets of New York, which very likely involved instances of rape itself.  Ash, in trying to explain to Shorter that what he did to Ricardo was just him trying to defend himself, doesn’t go into actual detail about the true depth of the horrors he’s been through.  Of course, if Ash had, Shorter would have understood far better than he did why Ash acted the way he did.  We see Shorter still confused, wondering where it was Ash learned how to seduce someone like he did Ricardo, because he doesn’t have a full grasp of the actual severity of the abuse Ash has suffered.  Ash doesn’t tell him about being sold into child prostitution, no doubt because he’s horribly ashamed and humiliated by the fact, as victims of child sexual abuse usually are.  

So When Ash tries desperately to defend his actions to Shorter in the library, when he says Shorter has no clue of even half the crap he’s been through, well, he’s actually right.  Shorter says he gets it, but he doesn’t really.  How could he?  Even if he knew the details of what Ash had experienced, he couldn’t possibly understand how Ash feels, because he’s never been through even remotely the same thing.  Shorter can guess, after seeing Ash’s reaction to his advice about just staying quiet and submissive if he gets caught by a pervert, that Ash has likely been raped before, and more than once.  But he doesn’t have even remotely a full understanding of just how bad it’s been for Ash, and I don’t think Shorter ever really fully understood it either.  In Cape Cod, he learns for the first time about what happened to Ash with his baseball coach, and he looks horrified and shocked.  But it’s obvious that Ash never breathed a word of his actual experiences of sexual abuse to anyone, not until he told Eiji about what happened with the coach anyway.  We see the police mock Ash at the beginning of the story, asking him what his gang would think, if they saw the films of him when he’s a ten, eleven year old boy, getting raped by Marvin and others, and Ash during this scene is basically paralyzed by his trauma, unable to do anything but stare blindly ahead with a stricken, terrified expression on his face.  We can infer that Ash has never told anybody in his gang about those experiences.  

He talks in a dismissive, unconcerned manner to Max about having sex with Senator Kippard at Club Cod, and we can infer from this that, by the time that particular event happened, Ash had begun to learn to at least use his sexuality somewhat to his advantage, to try and control, to some extent, the situation that was happening to him.  To not just be a submissive, helpless victim, but to fight back using his own attributes, using the very thing these disgusting men were lusting after, and wanting to use to hurt Ash, to his own advantage.  Shorter wonders where Ash learned to do this, and the answer is obvious to anyone who knows Ash’s actual background.  He learned to do it in Club Cod as a means of survival.  As a way to keep himself from going completely insane from the endless, horrific abuse he was constantly subjected to.  Ash’s ability to cope with the horrors he’s lived through is tied directly to this defense mechanism he’s developed.  This small amount of control he’s able to gain from an out of control situation.  If Ash can steer these instances of sexual harassment and abuse in the direction he wants them to go, then it isn’t as bad for him.  It isn’t as overwhelmingly out of his control, isn’t as much something someone is doing TO him without his consent.  Of course, this is a coping mechanism, and the truth is, it’s still only happening because these perverts can’t leave Ash alone to begin with, try to force themselves on him, and to force him to do things he doesn’t want to do at all.  It’s still a situation that’s happening against Ash’s will and against Ash’s wants.  It’s still, in that sense, something completely out of his control.  The event itself is out of his control.  How that event plays out is the only thing he can somewhat dictate, by, as he says, taking the lead.

You compare Ash’s cool, controlled responses to these sorts of things happening, like the situation with Ricardo, or the gang rape he suffers through in prison in order to help Griff, to his responses when he wasn’t able to control at all what was happening, when he had no say in the direction it turned, like when he’s a very young child being raped by Marvin or Froggy or Dino, or later, when Foxx rapes him, and it tells you everything about why Ash uses what weapons are available to him when he can.  Ash is nakedly terrified when Foxx starts to touch him in ways he doesn’t want to be touched.  He cries out for Foxx to stop, to get off of him, actually stumbling over his words, his eyes wide with panic and fear.  He doesn’t want this to happen.  Not again.  But there’s nothing he can do about it.  He’s helpless, bound with his hands behind his back, and this wasn’t a situation that arose through any preemptive measure on his part.  He’s captured by Foxx through threat to Ash’s friends, and Ash clearly isn’t expecting Foxx to do what he does.  And when Ash realizes Foxx isn’t going to stop, that this is going to happen, he’s going to be raped, again, Ash resorts to a defiant attitude, telling Foxx he can do whatever he wants, that it doesn’t matter, because Ash’s mind and spirit will always be his own.  This is Ash’s last line of defense.  In a situation that’s completely out of his control, in which he’s, once more, having the most horrific and traumatizing thing happen to him, forced on him by a man in a position of total power over him, and in which there’s nothing else left to defend himself with, no other options, Ash’s only recourse is to pretend he doesn’t care.  It’s utterly heartbreaking.  And we see later that, in fact, Ash is severely traumatized by the event.  He breaks down and begins shaking uncontrollably, looking like he’s going to be physically sick, falling mute.  It’s the same exact response we saw from Ash in that police station, when he was forced to watch videos of himself as a little boy being raped.  It’s the same response we see from Ash when he’s remembering what Froggy did to him, and all the others.  This is what happens to Ash when he can’t take back any amount of control of what’s happening to him, when he can’t to any extent control the outcome of the sexual abuse and harassment that’s constantly and continuously thrust upon him by sick, depraved men.  He loses it, for how deeply scarring and traumatizing it is.  He physically and mentally shuts down, rendered helpless and overwhelmed by the pain of his suffering.  

With that in mind, we understand better not just why Ash uses seduction to head off these sorts of things and try to control the direction it takes, but why he HAD to.  If he hadn’t, Ash would have lost his mind years before, for the severity of the abuse he actually experienced.  He would have gone insane with despair and pain.  

I think this is important in understanding why Ash reacts so angrily to Shorter’s words, that if Ash keeps playing with people’s feelings, he’ll be just like them.  Why he starts shaking and crying, why he screams at Shorter and then runs away.  And why, later on, he tries to explain himself to Shorter, to make him understand.  He doesn’t want Shorter to think that about him, because it’s not true.  Ash isn’t anything like the people who abuse him, and the idea of becoming like them, or of anyone even seeing him in the same light as them, is unacceptable and unbearable to Ash.  Ash tries to make Shorter understand why he did what he did to Ricardo, because he doesn’t want Shorter to think of him as being like Ricardo, or any of the other bastards that have abused or targeted him.  Ash wants Shorter to understand the reasons he does what he does, and goes out of his way to explain them, hoping Shorter will get it and not compare him to those people anymore.  But because Ash feels so much shame and is so damaged by the actual extent of the abuse he’s suffered, he doesn’t and can’t go into greater detail about it, simply making vague reference to guys “making passes” at him, the grim and far worse reality still being kept locked away for Ash to cope with on his own.  It leaves Shorter only more confused, because he still doesn’t have a full grasp of the kind of trauma Ash has suffered, and so he never fully understands or grasps Ash’s pain.  To him, Ash is still this mysterious, amazing person who looks like an angel, and who’s a total badass.  

//

I do think Ash was thanking Shorter sincerely, and that he was being sincere in that scene after the first fight with Frankie, after he almost kills him. The reasons for this are a few. One, we know from Ash’s final conversation with Blanca that Blanca never taught Ash how to go easy on an opponent, and instructed him to always kill his enemies. Blanca replies to Ash that the reason he never taught him is because he was told there wasn’t any need to. The implication here is that he was told there wasn’t any need, because Dino thought Ash was already too soft hearted and he wanted Blanca to make him into a killing machine that wasn’t weighed down by anything as “inconvenient” as guilt.  This is also supported by how, at the beginning of the story, we see Dino mockingly remind Ash about how he used to cry with every job Dino gave him, and also by how repulsed Ash is by how dismissive Dino is about the act of taking a life.  He can’t believe the way Dino acts like it’s no big deal, killing someone.  What this tells us about Ash is that it’s a VERY big deal to him, to have to kill someone.  And that too is supported by the absolutely crushing grief and guilt Ash feels throughout the story over the lives he’s taken.  He’s haunted by it.  He can never forgive himself for it.  He can never accept any excuses for it, even as there are so many justifiable reasons for why he had to.

Killing for Ash was always a horrible, difficult decision he had to make.  A very serious act which carried with it devastating consequences and implications.  Something he never wanted to do it from the beginning, but was forced to do it because he was thrust into a world of violence, into situations where it was kill or be killed.  It tells us that from the very beginning that Ash was reluctant and deeply uncomfortable taking life, but he simply didn’t have a choice if he wanted to survive himself.

The other reason I think Ash is being sincere in that scene between him and Shorter, that he’s genuinely thanking him, is that it’s being told from Shorter’s perspective. We have to remember that Shorter at that point in the story is scared of Ash, that fear reaching a peak during this scene, due to what just happened with Frankie and the pool cue. He’s been listening to Nico work everybody up into a frenzy, talking about Ash like he’s some sort of devil or demon, and now he’s just seen Ash almost kill somebody. Shorter’s perspective here of Ash is warped. Instead of seeing the little kid that Ash actually is, he’s seeing that devil that Nico has been scaring everyone into thinking he is. So Ash’s laughter and attitude comes across as sinister to him. It’s the same as Shorter thinking Ash is going to kill him in the middle of the night when he gets up for a drink of water. Ash seems scary and spooky in that scene too, even though he literally just got up to get some water, and Shorter is confused when Ash tells him “Goodnight” in a friendly manner. It doesn’t jibe with the malicious perception Shorter had started to form of him. Because he’s so scared of Ash, every action of his, all of his behavior, is being colored in this sinister and malicious tint. It’s twisting Shorter’s ability to see Ash clearly.

 Later on, when Shorter starts to realize Ash isn’t this horrible monster that everyone kept saying he was, he started to see Ash in a more accurate light, Ash’s whole appearance to him beginning to soften, Ash beginning to look more like what he actually was, which is a little boy. Ash definitely comes across as sinister in that scene where he thanks Shorter, but it’s because we’re seeing it from Shorter’s perspective, and he’s scared to death of Ash at that point.

 I think the reason Ash was laughing during that scene wasn’t because of sarcasm, or because he was mocking Shorter, but because this stupid guy that had been harassing him since he’d arrived in Juvie inadvertently showed him how to do something that none of his expensive, world renowned tutors that Dino had been paying god only knows how much to teach him, had been able to. Ash wanted to know how to pull back and control himself, but no one ever showed him how. Ash was basically talking to himself when he says, “So that’s it. Deflect it slightly at the last second.” Him saying “So that’s it…” shows that Ash had been thinking about and wondering about how to not kill in a situation like that. He’d been trying to figure it out before this scene, but couldn’t, because nobody ever showed him, or told him, or thought that it mattered if he knew how, because Ash’s own feelings never mattered. Nobody ever asked him what he wanted, or how he felt.

Ash thinks it’s funny then that he would learn something like that from someone who, at that point, he saw as a ridiculous, annoying person. So it wasn’t sarcastic laughter, it was genuine amusement and, like you said, relief, because he finally knew how to do something he’d always longed to know, and he learned from the most unexpected and unlikeliest source.

I think you have to read the whole story of Angel Eyes from beginning to end to understand that, a lot of Ash’s cold, frightening appearance at the beginning is being exaggerated by the fact that it’s being seen through the specific perspective of Shorter. We see this throughout Banana Fish itself, when other characters are talking about Ash, and Yoshida draws these panels where Ash is rendered in this otherworldly way, where he looks like a demon or a devil or a god. In those panels, where the other characters are thinking of him, he never looks quite human. This is how other people often see Ash, even as, in reality, those perceptions of him are completely warped and not at all reflective of the truth. Who Ash really is, of course, is just a young boy who’s fighting tooth and nail for his freedom and to simply survive. Ash is standoffish and a loner at the beginning of Angel Eyes because he can’t trust anybody, and so he keeps people at a distance. As the story progresses, this standoffishness, and Shorter seeing how dangerous Ash actually is, coupled with the fear mongering Nico’s been doing, causes him, for a time, to have the same problem everyone else has when it comes to Ash, which is he starts to see him not as a human being, but as a demon. This is also reflected in how Shorter thinks he sees actual lightening go through Ash’s body and explode out of him right before he moves into action before fighting Frankie.  Of course there isn’t ACTAULLY lightening sparking off of Ash.  Shorter just imagines there is because Ash moves with such intensity and focus.  Shorter’s perception of him is being altered by how efficiently Ash moves, because nobody else he knows or has ever met moves like that.  And when he realizes that Frankie is no match for Ash, and that Ash fully intended to deal a lethal blow in their fight, he freaks the hell out, his already compromised perception of Ash going out of control.    Shorter is definitely being influenced by Nico’s fearmongering too, with the way he’s trying to rationalize seeing red in Ash’s eyes as just the lightening outside creating an optical illusion.  But you can tell when Shorter says this, it’s like he’s trying to convince himself, because he’s actually afraid that Nico is right, and that Ash is actually the devil.

 Eventually, by the end of the story,  after he’s spent more time around Ash and they’ve really started talking, Shorter comes to realize that this initial perception he had was wrong, and Ash isn’t this cold, emotionless killing machine, but just a scared and hurt kid who’s doing what he can simply to make it to another day.  

 Another thing to point out is how Shorter is one of the only people who allows himself to get close enough to Ash to see him as a person, and this relates back to how Ash initially acts around him.  Particularly, the scene between Ash and Shorter in the library, when Shorter accuses Ash of seducing Ricardo to get Ricardo to take Frankie out for him.  Ash never intended to use Ricardo in that way. I already explained why in another post of mine, basically explaining that Ash seduced Ricardo because he knew it would force Frankie into making a move against him, and Ash knew once that happened, he would be able to find out from him who was trying to have him killed. That was the only reason he seduced Ricardo.  But the point is, Shorter makes an accusation here which is wrong and false, but Ash doesn’t defend himself against it.   He instead says “Yeah, so what?”,  acting like he doesn’t care and that he sees nothing wrong with using Ricardo to take care of a problem of his.  It’s important to remember here that Shorter’s accusation is wrong, and that Ash WASN’T using Ricardo in this way.  He acts like he doesn’t see anything wrong with what Shorter is suggesting, because he’s to push Shorter away.  The question is, why is he trying to push Shorter away at that point?

 Basically, Ash is trying to control the direction of how things go between the two of them, so that Ash doesn’t later end up getting hurt.

 It’s exactly what he explains to Shorter later on, when he talks about how he tries to make the first move against people who want to sexually assault him, figuring if he makes the first move, he can control the outcome, if only even a little.  Again, when we stop to really think about the kind of life Ash has had, how horrifically alone he’s been since, well, since Griff left for the war, so since he was seven, and the kind of abuses he suffered in that period until he’s fifteen in Angel Eyes, and then we see the way he acts, pushing people away, keeping them at a distance, acting like he doesn’t care, you come to the realization that he’s pushing people away so they don’t get close, because if he lets them close, they’ll hurt him.  That’s all he’s ever known in his life.  People using him for something, people taking something away from him, people treating him like a disposable commodity instead of a person.  You realize also that Ash has never actually had any friends his own age.  He’s never interacted with other children in a normal, healthy way.  Nobody has ever shown any interest in JUST being his friend. He’s never had a relationship like that with another person.  

 I think with Shorter, when Ash realized he really was just a nice guy and he didn’t have any ulterior reason for being nice, Ash was probably even more scared of letting Shorter close, because he probably felt like if Shorter really got to know him, he’d end up deciding he didn’t like him and reject him. Ash had never had any real friends, and if he suddenly had one, that would mean he suddenly had something else to lose, whether because the person he thought was his friend turned out being like everyone else, using and abusing Ash, or ended up not liking Ash and rejecting him.  In other words, if Ash let his hopes get up about Shorter really being his friend, and it turned out not to be true, or turned out badly somehow, the pain of that loss would be exponentially worse than never experiencing friendship at all.  At least, that’s how Ash probably felt.

 We also see Ash talk about himself in truly disparaging ways throughout the series, like when he tells Ibe and Max that everything will be okay with sending Eiji back to Japan, because by the time he goes, he’ll be sick of Ash anyway. Ash really believes that once people get close to him, they’ll think he’s a worthless piece of trash, because that’s how he sees himself. So initially, when Shorter accuses Ash of wanting to use Ricardo to take care of Frankie, Ash acts like that accusation doesn’t bother him, that he doesn’t care what Shorter thinks he was trying to do, because he doesn’t want Shorter to think Ash cares what he thinks of him at all.  It’s like a preemptive strike, pushing someone away before they can hurt you. The problem for Ash is that he DOES care. He probably felt really good, knowing someone actually wanted to be his friend, that someone liked him enough to talk to him just because they wanted to talk to him, that someone was being nice to him just because, but feared that once Shorter got close to him, he would turn out like everyone else and either start using Ash or just outright reject him as a “bad apple”.

So he tried to push Shorter away before that could happen.  Before he could really hurt Ash’s feelings.

Acting like he didn’t care what Shorter thought of him. But he does, of course, because Shorter’s the first person who ever acted like he really wanted to be Ash’s friend. Imagine what that must have been like for Ash, to have a kid close to his own age actually want to be friends with him, when all he’d ever known before was what it felt like to be used and treated like an object.