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v. Jack Ruby Spends His Last New Year's Eve with His Sister, Telling the Truth as He Knows It: Parkland Hospital, December 31, 1966
- University of Wisconsin Press
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128 So ask me how many times did I know anything, really, in this life. Ask me did anyone ever bother handing over anything I could use. These days almost no one recognizes me. Up here on the sixth floor, I’m Jack Shit in a bathrobe. And the doctors making their hypodermic rounds are claiming everything’s for the pain, as if that’s what they’re trying to get rid of. I’m not supposed to realize they’re delivering more of the cancer because obviously someone out there still thinks enough of me to want me gone, especially now with my conviction overturned, and instead of getting the Chair I’m down for a new trial out of town, somewhere that isn’t Dallas. These last three years that’s all I’ve asked for: let’s go someplace else and talk. I should live so long. I’d say a few things so good, they’d stay said that way forever. Three years go by, and I’m not your same brother. I’m related to history now, condemned to keep repeating myself until someone finally listens. I want to put things right. But not here. After that sorry Oswald collapsed, I admitted doing it to show the world that Jews have guts. Or to spare the widow Jackie another trip to Dallas. At the time, I was shooting for impulsive or sympathetic—reasons enough, it turns out, to convict me anyway. But now someone’s decided anything I said clearly should have been inadmissible. My lawyer Belli tried to sell the jury I’m a victim of psycho-something epilepsy—all you need to know is blackouts, Jack. Hell, I wouldn’t buy that myself if Jesus Christ was giving it away V. Jack Ruby Spends His Last New Year’s Eve with His Sister, Telling the Truth as He Knows It: Parkland Hospital, December 31, 1966 129 on the courthouse steps. It took the jury less than an hour to figure of course I’m guilty, and what else could they say. No one in that courtroom was expecting an order of death, but that’s what the jury recommended. I could have gone for something lighter that early in the morning. Death seemed a little much. Real guts would have been telling Marcello’s guys to shoot their craps in hell when they called me of all people, wanted me to know some unsuspecting putz I’d never heard of in my life had failed to leave the country fast enough or else— by sheer coincidence, you understand—get taken out himself. Instead, he’d been brought in by the wrong cops, unexpectedly alive. Lee Fucking Oswald—another one of history’s three-name nut jobs. And I could feel it slipping away, that moment he was still their unfortunate problem more than he was mine. They were thanking me already for remembering who I should gladly thank for being still alive in the nightclub business. And this is when I figure out what’s going on for myself: it’s not some half-cocked flake on the loose by himself in Dealey Plaza. And this is when I know I’ve got to take the play. If I don’t, all kinds of things get taken from me, fast. And I know people in this town who would never be able to get enough of that: Yessirreee . . . hitting a Catholic boy’s not bad at all, but can we still get us a Jew? I came out of fucking nowhere, and I’ve been working my way back ever since. But there’s no way I’m about to die even close to guilty in the eyes of the law. I’ve been reversed for two months now, and it’s as if what happened never happened—my part of it, at least. I’m almost beside the point. I said it before: I’m history. I’ll stay written down forever in the Warren Commission Report. Twenty-six books it took those guys [3.81.222.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:24 GMT) 130 to dish out all the bullshit required to conclude what they already had in their made-up minds to begin with: Oswald. Only Oswald. Once they’ve got that down cold, the Ruby, only Ruby part’s a snap. I’ve got my own Magic Bullet Theory, and this one you can take to the...