The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Part 2: Chapter 12 Summary
Since the weather is warm again, the Sunny Dixie Show is always crowded.
Jake (who's still working there) tries to stop drinking, but the withdrawal is awful. He starts having very strange, vivid dreams about wandering through a crowd.
Eventually, he meets the dude who wrote the graffiti on the wall. Unfortunately, the guy is a religious zealot, a fanatic named Simms.
Jake is disappointed – he hates Simms. In fact, he likes to torment Simms and make him scream. Very nice, Jake.
One day in April, a white girl with a hunchback and a black girl get into a fight over a ticket and nearly come to blows.
As it turns out, Jake has to bust up fights quite a bit at the Show. Of course, he also starts some, too.
At one point, he hears two guys who work at the show gossiping about him and calling him a crazy "Red Bolshevik" – they say that's he's pathetic and hilarious. Jake gets really upset and confronts them.
Not so surprisingly, Jake starts drinking again.
One night, he goes out into the street outside his apartment and starts screaming about how everyone is stupid and no one sees the truth.
His neighbors tell him to shut up.
Later in April, Jake finds the body of a young black man who has been murdered. (Never a dull moment around these parts.)
Time goes on, and Jake spends most of it in an alcoholic daze.
One day he goes to visit Singer and learns that Willie has come home. Jake wants to go see him and talk to him: he has the sudden urge to go on a justice crusade.
And so, Singer takes Jake over to the Copeland house.