You'll Always Remember Me by Steve Fisher Page A

Fisher’s and Woolrich’s noir work flooded Hollywood; see my Introduction to I Wake Up Screaming (Centipede Press 2009).
    As noir historian Woody Haut observes: “Steve Fisher was one of the hardest working script writers in Hollywood, with over fifty film credits to his name. But, on the basis of one novel, I Wake Up Screaming , and films like Dead Reckoning and The Lady in the Lake , Fisher deserves a place on the short list of influential innovators of the noir thriller.”
    One of Fisher’s most memorable achievements is his greatest short story, “You’ll Always Remember Me” from Black Mask (March 1938). It is a story so rare in quality that its first person narrative still shocks us with the impact of real psychopathology.
    This vivid tale also looks forward to William March’s 1954 novel, The Bad Seed , and anticipates the pervasive 1950s theme of juvenile delinquency, particularly as raised to the level of social pathology in the short crime fiction of Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, and in his iconic novel of 1953, The Blackboard Jungle.
    â€œYou’ll Always Remember Me” is as chilling a first person presentation of psychological derangement as any that ever appeared in an American magazine in the last century.

You’ll Always Remember Me
By Steve Fisher
    WATCH OUT! HE MAY BE AFTER YOU!
    As chilling a masterpiece of psychological derangement as any story published in America in the 20th century
    I COULD TELL it was Pushton blowing the bugle and I got out of bed tearing half of the bed clothes with me. I ran to the door and yelled, “Drown it! Drown it! Drown it!” and then I slammed the door and went along the row of beds and pulled the covers off the rest of the guys and said:
    â€œCome on, get up. Get up! Don’t you hear Pushton out there blowing his stinky lungs out?” I hate bugles anyway, but the way this guy Pushton all but murders reveille kills me. I hadn’t slept very well, thinking of the news I was going to hear this morning, one way or the other, and then to be jarred out of what sleep I could get by Pushton climaxed everything.
    I went back to my bed and grabbed my shoes and puttees and slammed them on the floor in front of me, then I began unbuttoning my pajamas. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask the guys in this wing. They wouldn’t know anything. When they did see a paper all they read was the funnies. That’s the trouble with Clark’s. I know it’s one of the best military academies in the West and that it costs my old man plenty of dough to keep me here, but they sure have some dopy ideas on how to handle kids. Like dividing the dormitories according to ages. Anybody with any sense knows that it should be according to grades because just take for instance this wing. I swear there isn’t a fourteen-year-old-punk in it that I could talk to without wanting to push in his face. And I have to live with the little pukes.
    So I kept my mouth shut and got dressed, then I beat it out into the company street before the battalion got lined up for the flag raising. That’s a silly thing, isn’t it? Making us stand around with empty stomachs, shivering goose pimples while they pull up the flag and Pushton blows the bugle again. But at that I guess I’d have been in a worse place than Clark’s Military Academy if my pop hadn’t had a lot of influence and plenty of dollars. I’d be in a big school where they knock you around and don’t ask you whether you like it or not. I know. I was there a month. So I guess the best thing for me to do was to let the academy have their Simple Simon flag-waving fun and not kick about it.
    I was running around among the older guys now, collaring each one and asking the same question: “Were you on home-going yesterday? Did you see a paper last night? What about Tommy Smith?” That was what I wanted to know. What about Tommy Smith.
    â€œHe didn’t