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- All around were cheap, roach-filled rooms; but nobody seemed to be starving: they always seemed to be cooking things in large pots and sitting around, smoking, cleaning their fingernails, drinking cans of beer or sharing a tall blue bottle of white wine, screaming at each other or laughing, or farting, or belching, scratching or asleep in front of the tv. Not many people in the world had very much money but the less money they had the better they seemed to live. Sleep, clean sheets, food, drink and hemorrhoid ointment were their only needs. And they always left their doors a bit open. (12)
- Arlene's response to his feelings for the masses were always the same -- as if not loving the people revealed an unforgivable shortcoming of soul. (12)
- When he felt worst he felt best. (12)
- "Honest to Christ," said Lila. "He just lays around like a sick frog most of the time." (13)
- "People accept what they accept," said Jorg. "They accept far worse." (14)
- "Man is less delicate than the locust," said Jorge finally. [-] "Man is the sewer of the universe," said Serge. (15)
- He was a beautiful man with long fingernails and an expensive apartment. He was studying chemistry and had once won second prize in an opera competition. (15)
- They walked out together, Serge, Jorg, Lila and Arlene. They were all drunk but there was a certain stature about them, something unique. They got out the door and went down the street. (15)
- The young man looked intelligent, only a rather large mole near the end of his nose marred the effect. His girl was fat but lovable in a dark blue dress. She had once wanted to be a nun. (15-16)
- Well, we all ended up dead, that was just mathematics. Nothing new. It was waiting around that was the problem. The phone rang. It was his girlfriend. (17)
- It was 15 minutes to noon. No ambition, no talent, no chance. (17)
- Camus talked about anguish and terror and the miserable condition of Man but he talked about it in such a comfortable and flowery way... his language... that one got the feeling that things neither affected him nor his writing. In other words, things might as well have been fine. Camus wrote like a man who had just finished a large dinner of steak and french fries, salad, and had topped it with a bottle of good French wine. Humanity may have been suffering but not him. A wise man, perhaps, but Henry preferred somebody who screamed when they burned. (18)
- "All you writers are always hollering 'wolf." [-] "Maybe the wolf has finally arrived. You can't live off your soul. You can't pay the rent with your soul. Try it some time." (20)
- Maybe he could sleep. Sleep was something like death. (20)
- Bad party last night. Nothing but starving writers, and professors who were about to lose their jobs. Shop talk. Very wearing. (21)
- "Writers are whores," said Stobbs, "writers are the whores of the universe." (21)
- We're acting like 15-year-olds, Henry thought. We don't deserve to live. I'll bet Camus never peeked out of windows. (22)
- I like hunting your own meat, though. It beats going to the A & P. (22)
- Look what happened to Hemingway, always sitting with a drink in his hand. Look at Faulkner, look at them all. Well, shit. (23)
- He hung up and stretched out again. For 30 years, he thought, I wanted to be a writer and now I'm a writer and what does it mean? (23)
- He stretched out in bed, full, in his unglory. (23)
- There was also a large black maid, Retha, who spent most of her time in the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator door. (25)
- It was one of the few times I was ashamed of being poor. (25-26)
- She was a very heavy woman, but pleasant. (28)
- After he leaves she tells me that she'll be all right if I let her go to a ceramics class every Wednesday evening. All right, I say. But nothing works. She takes to attacking me with knives. There's blood everywhere. My blood. It's on the walls and in the rugs. She's very swift on her feet. She's into ballet, yoga, herbs, vitamins, eats seeds, nuts, all that shit, carries a bible in her purse, half the pages underlined in red ink. She shortens all her skirts another half inch. (28)
- I started getting letters in the mail written in red ink about her dreams. She dreamed all the time. (29)
- I helped Bernard Stachman get into an old brown overcoat. All the buttons were missing off the front. It was stiff with grime. It was hardly an L.A. overcoat, it was heavy and clumsy, it must have come from Chicago or Denver in the thirties. (25)
- Theodore closed his eyes. Margaret sobbed. Outside a dog barked. Somebody tried to start a car. It wouldn't start. It was 65 degrees in a small town in Illinois. James Carter was president of the United States. (37)
- "My name's Mud," she said, which immediately dated her. (41)
- They sat and nipped at their drinks. Outside you could hear the traffic going up and down Hollywood Boulevard. The sound was persistent, like the tide, like waves, almost like an ocean, and jellyfish and octopi and suckerfish and whales and mollusks and sponges and grunion and the like. Inside, it was more like a separate fishtank. (43)
- "I saw [Joan of Arc] burn. It was so horrible and beautiful." [-] "What was beautiful about it?" [-] "The way she burned. It started at her feet. It was like a nest of red snakes and they crawled up her legs and then it was like a blazing red curtain and she had her face turned up and you could smell the flesh burning and she was still alive but she never screamed. Her lips were moving and she was praying but she never screamed." (44)
- "You underestimate the human spirit," said the lady. (44)
- She stood up and put a match to the hem of her lavender dress. The material was thin and gauze-like and the flames began to lick around her legs and then began to crawl up toward her waist. (44)
- I drove along Sunset, late one evening, stopped for a signal, and at a bus stop saw this dyed redhead with a brutal and ravaged face, powdered, painted, that said "this is what life does to us." (47)
- He stirred his coffee. "Those little bubbles on top of the coffee, there. Mother used to say that meant money was coming my way. It didn't work out that way. (48)
- That was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main trouble -- leisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got. There was nothing glorious about the life of a writer or the life of a drinker. (51)
- Diverging viewpoints and ideals. They always cause trouble and there are always diverging viewpoints and ideals." (52)
- "What has any of this got to do with a decent and abiding literature?" asked Eric. (53)
- The swimming pool was empty. It was a nice California morning, smoggy, stale, and listless. (55)
- ...who was lumped over a stale green beer. (57)
- There's something so quiet about a murdered thing, somehow you get to thinking a murdered thing should keep screaming, I don't know. (60)
- Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them. [...] Love is just the result of a chance encounter. (67-68)
- Her boots covered the calves of her legs. Her thighs were bare, and full. "That was some dream." She was 30. Lipstick ever so faintly glistened on her lips. Brunette, very dark, long hair. No powder, no perfume. Never fingerprinted. Born in the northern part of Maine. One hundred and twenty pounds. (68)
- "Get into bed before we die of old age." (70)
- Eddie's mother had horseteeth and I did too and I remember once we walked up a hill together on the way to the store and she said, "Henry, we both need braces for our teeth. We look awful!" I walked proudly up the hill with her and she had on a tight yellow print dress, flowered, and she had on high heels and she wiggled and her heels went click, click, click on the cement. I thought, I'm walking with Eddie's mother and shes walking with me and we're walking up the hill together. That was all--I walked into the store to buy a loaf of bread for my parents and she purchased her things. That was all. (75)
- He read in a loud and dramatic voice but the pitch never varied. Victor was always at climax. That's what attracted the ladies, I guess. Certain of his lines, if taken separately, seemed to have power, but when all the lines were considered as a whole, you knew that Victor was saying nothing, only saying it loudly. (81)
- Valoff was intelligent. He knew there were two ways to spell grey. (81)
- "I say, look, look, look / around us: / all love is ours / all life is ours / the sun is our dog at the end of a leash" (85)
- "You know, doctor, wisdom comes at a hell of an hour--when youth is gone, the storm is over and the girls have gone home." (88)
- Bernadette. She got out of the madhouse, came to L.A., met and married Karl. She told me how she liked my poetry and how she admired the way I drove my car on the sidewalk at 60 mph after my readings. (90)
- She still looked like a high school girl--long silken blond hair[...] The only way you could tell about the hell was to look into her eyes. They were in a perpetual state of shock. (90)
- Surely this thing had not happened. He was in his own bathroom. There was his towel, there was his washrag, there was the toilet paper, there was the bathtub, and under his feet, soft and warm, was the bathroom rug, red, clean, comfortable. (94)
- When you don't remember something it is very strange. It's the same as if it never happened. (95)
- He wasn't sure if he loved Gwen but living with her was comfortable. She took care of all the details and details were what drove a man crazy. He put plenty of butter on his toast. Butter was one of man's last luxuries. Automobiles would one day be too expensive to buy and everybody would just sit around eating butter and waiting. The Jesus freaks who talked about the end of the world were looking better every day. (96)
- "We've been friends for years. Just one thing. Why do you drink so much?" [-] "Hell, I don't know. I guess, mostly, I just get bored." (97)
- Joe Mayer was a freelance writer. He had a hangover and the telephone awakened him at 9 a.m. (99)
- He walked out, got into his car and drove it toward Santa Anita. He drove slowly. He turned the radio on and got some symphony music. It wasn't too smoggy. He drove down Sunset, took his favorite cutoff, drove over the hill toward Chinatown, past the Annex, up past Little Joe's, looking down at the old brown boxcars. If he were any damned good at painting he'd like to get that one down. Maybe he'd paint them anyhow. (99)
- Max was an hour-and-a-half man. He was good for an hour-and-a-half. He never listened, he just talked. After an hour-and-a-half, Max stood up. [-] "Well, I gotta go." [-] "O.K., Max." (102)
- He kissed her as the Southern California moon came through the Southern California curtains. He was Joe Mayer. Freelance writer. [-] He had it made. (105)
- She had on a yellow dress, her hair was piled on top of her head, and goofy pearl earrings swung on long silver chains. [...] Her eyes were the palest green and looked right through him. She carried a bag of groceries with the word Vons printed on it. Her lips were smeared with lipstick. Her thick painted lips were obscene, almost ugly, an insult. The bright red lipstick glistened and Harry reached over and pressed the EMERGENCY button. (107)
- He soaped up good, washed off and stood there, letting the very hot water run down the back of his neck. It took away the fatigue. (108)
- Margie had simply resigned herself to an existence without the male animal. She lived a quiet life with her piano and her brandy and her scotch. And when the sun went down she needed her piano very much, and her Chopin, and her scotch and/or brandy. She would begin to light one cigarette after another as the evening arrived. (113)
- The woman he lived with was odd, too -- sullen, indifferent. Almost in a dream-state. (113)
- "oh, I've got squadrons / of pain / battalions, armies of / pain / continents of pain / ha, ha, ha, / and / I've got you" (115)
- She continued to study Marx's head, she could see everything there: kindness, hatred, fear, madness, love, humor, but she saw mostly the love and the humor. (115)
- "Nice place you got here. You live alone, don't you?" [-] "Yes." [-] "What's the matter, you afraid of men?" (117)
- Needle-like hairs from his beard poked into her face as he kissed her. Then he pulled his face away and looked at her with his tiny eyes. (117)
- Margie went into the music room. She sat down at the piano. The sun was going down. She was right on schedule. She began to play Chopin. She played Chopin better than she ever had before. (119)
- When they first met he hadn't seemed so... much like hardwood. (121)
- Then she felt the bed give way as he sat on the edge, putting on his stockings and his shoes. Then the bed rose as he stood up. She lay on her stomach, face down, eyes closed. She sensed him looking at her. (123)
- I sat glum and pious, drinking beer. (125)
- The post-reading party was the same as always, professors and students, bland and dim. Professor Kragmatz got me in the breakfast nook, began asking questions as the groupies slithered about. No, I told him, no, well, yes, parts of T.S. Eliot were good. We were too rough on Eliot. Pound, yes, well, we were finding out that Pound was not quite what we thought. No, I couldn't think of any outstanding contemporary American poets, sorry. Concrete poetry? Well, yes, concrete poetry was just like concrete anything else. What, Celine? An old crank with withered testicles. Only one good book, the first one. What? Yes, of course, it's enough. I mean you haven't written even one have you? Why do I pick on Creeley? I don't anymore. Creeley's built a body of work, that's more than most of his critics have done. Yes, I drink, doesn't everybody? How the hell you going to make it otherwise? Women? Oh yes, women, oh yes, of course. You can't write about fireplugs and empty India ink bottles. Yes, I know about the red wheelbarrow in the rain. (126)
- When you get into a taxi, that's war. When you buy a loaf of bread, that's war. When you buy a whore, that's war. Sometimes I need bread, taxis, and whores. (128)
- The lights went out. Nobody could sleep, but they all pretended. I didn't bother. I had a window seat and stared out at the wing and the lights below. Everything was arranged down there in nice straight lines. Ant nests. (129)
- When I look at my hands and they are still on my wrists, I think to myself, I am lucky. (129)
- It was over. I still had a woman I cared for. Such magic is not to be taken casually. I looked at her hair and her face as we drove back home. I stole glances at her when I felt she was not looking. (129)
- We drove north up Alvarado. Then to Glendale Boulevard. Everything was good. What I hated was that someday everything would dwindle to zero, the loves, the poems, the gladiolas. Finally we'd be stuffed with dirt like a cheap taco. [-] Ann pulled into the driveway. We got up, went up the steps, opened the door and the dog leaped all over us. The moon stood up, the house smelled of lint and roses, the dog leaped upon me. I pulled his ears, punched him in the belly, his eyes opened and he grinned. (129-130)
- Somehow I could never git into society. I am unfond of humanity. I have no desire to conform, no sense of loyalty, no real purpose. (133)
- My body gnaws at me from one side and my spirit gnaws at me from the other (133)
- He loved the way she did things, softly, carefully. Lita was always on the attack -- all hard edges. (137)
- But you'd have to see her. She had a way of dancing as if she were offering herself as a sacrifice. (138)
- But you know, only boring people get bored. They have to prod themselves continually in order to feel alive. (138)
- The trouble with men who dance or hang out in bars is that their perception is on a parallel with the tape worm. [...] They're caught in the ritual[...] of misdirected energy. (140)
- Francine turned over to him and he slipped his arm around her. 3 a.m. drunks, all over America, were staring at the walls, having finally given it up. You didn't have to be a drunk to get hurt, to be zeroed out by a woman; but you could get hurt and become a drunk. You might think for a while, especially when you were young, that luck was with you, and sometimes it was. But there all manner of average and laws working that you knew nothing about, even as you imaged things were going well. Some night, some hot summer Thursday night, you became the drunk, you were out there alone in a cheap rented room, and no matter how many times you'd been out there before, it was no help, it was even worse because you had got to thinking you wouldn't have to face it again. All you could do was light another cigarette, pour another drink, check the peeling walls for lips and eyes. What men and women did to each other was beyond comprehension. (147)
- Los Angeles was so strange. He listened. The birds were already up, chirping, yet it was pitch dark. Soon the people would be heading for the freeways. You'd hear the freeways hum, plus cars starting everywhere on the streets. Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it. (148)
- He claimed my poetry had ruined him for everybody else's poetry, and I wrote back and said it had ruined me for everybody else's poetry, too. (149)
- Mulloch loved the low-life, and I think he even loved poverty. From his letters I got the idea that H.R. believed that poverty bred purity. (149)
- "Thomas Wolfe," said the parrot, "is the world's greatest living writer." [-] "Wolfe's dead," I said. "Your parrot is wrong." [-] "It's an old parrot," said H.R. "We've had him a long time." (150)
- She looked dark, Italian or Greek, very skinny, with pouches under her eyes; she looked tragic and kind and dangerous, mostly tragic. (150)
- "I like the way you write," said H.R. "You can say a lot without getting fancy." [-] "Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way." (151)
- Afternoon became evening and evening became night, I awakened in the dark. (151)
- Somebody was saying what a good man my father had been. I felt like telling them the other part. (161)
- "You look so much like him." [-] "That's just on the surface. He liked soft-boiled eggs. I like hard. He liked company, I like solitude. He liked to sleep nights, I like to sleep days. He liked dogs, I used to yank their ears and stick matches up their ass. He liked his job, I like to lay around." (163)
- I fixed her another drink, lit one of my dead father's cigarettes and went into the kitchen for a second bottle of wine. We drank another hour or two. The afternoon was just turning into evening but I was weary. Death was so dull. That was the worst thing about death. It was dull. Once it happened there wasn't anything you could do. You couldn't play tennis with it or turn it into a box of bonbons. It was there like a flat tire was there. Death was stupid. (164)
- While I was watching Maria put scrambled eggs and sausage and wheat toast [spread with raspberry jam] into her mouth I realized that we had missed the burial. We had forgotten to drive to the cemetery to watch the old man dropped into the hole. I had wanted to see that. That was the only good part of the thing. (165)
- Her eyes were large, stricken, stale. (165)
- "Don't you know anything about mercy?" [-] "The only people who know about mercy are the ones who need it." [-] "You'll need mercy some day." [-] "I need it now -- it's just that I need it in a different form than you." (172)
- "Man," said Paul, "I need help, not theory." [-] "Unless you understand the theory you'll always need help..." (172)
- Harry walked into the bathroom and looked at his face in the mirror. My god, he had a kind face. Couldn't they see that? Understanding. Nobility. He spotted a blackhead in near his nose. He squeezed. Out it came, black and lovely, dragging a yellow tail of pus. The breakthrough, he thought, is in understanding women and love. He rolled the blackhead and the pus between his fingers. Or maybe the breakthrough was the ability to kill without caring. (173)
- In our society most of the interesting places to go are either against the law or very expensive. (175)
- She opened the door to her study and we went in. It was large and cool with fine Indian blankets and artifacts on the walls. There was a fireplace, the bookcase, a large desk with an electric typewriter, an unabridged dictionary, typing paper, notebooks. She was small with a very short haircut. Her eyebrows were thick. She smiled often. At the corner of one eye was a deep scar that looked as if it had been etched with a penknife. (179-80)
- "Just say that I'm ageless." [-] She was a grand looking woman. I could see her behind the podium at some new college, reading her poems, answering questions, preparing a new generation of poets, pointing them toward life. She probably had good legs, too. (180)
- "How do you approach the writing of a poem?" [-] She paused. Her long fingers delicately stroked the heavy fabric that covered her chair. The setting sun slanted through the window and cast shadows in the room. She spoke slowly, as if in a dream. "I begin to feel a poem a long way off. It approaches me, like a cat, across the rug. Softly but not with contempt. It takes seven or eight days. I become delightfully agitated, excited, it's such a special feeling. I know it's there, and then it comes with a rush, and it's easy, so easy. The glory of creating a poem, it's so regal, so sublime!" (182-83)
- It was cold in east Hollywood. Leslie buttoned the top button on his coat and shivered. He hunched his shoulders against the chill. (185)
- The man had a face like the front of a watermelon, no expression. (185)
- It was all very strange. It was like a half-remembered dream. Leslie couldn't be sure if it was all actually happening or not. At first the blood seemed to hesitate, there was just the deep wound, then the blood gushed forth. (185)
- Leslie never had enough matches, a man was always short of matches, it seemed. Matches and ballpoint pens... (185)
- "No, my old lady's all right. It's just... shit, I don't know. __Things, you know. I can't seem to get into anything. I can't seem to get started. Everything's locked up. All the cards are taken." [-] "Fuck, that's standard. Life's a one-sided game." (186)
- "I used to lay out in the dark at night, drunk, on the street, hoping somebody would run me over. No luck." [-] "That's one of the hardest things, figuring out what your first move should be." (186)
- "You sit there in your torn bathrobe and you're drunk half the time but you're saner than anybody I know." (186)
- Sonny just shrugged. "What I need to know: is there a way out? Is there any kind of way out?" [-] "Kid, there's no way out. The shrinks advise us to take up chess or stamp collecting or billiards. Anything rather than think about the larger issues." [-] "Chess is boring." [-] "Everything is boring. There's no escape. You know what some old time bums used to tattoo on their arms: 'BORN TO DIE.' As corny as that sounds it's basic wisdom." (187)
- The iron curtain, the iron mind, the iron life. (187)
- Francine liked to think she impressed him. But she was an elephantine bore. (187)
- "I had lunch at the Beverly Hills hotel today," she said. "I had a table to myself. I had a salad and drinks. Dustin Hoffman was there and some other movie stars, too. I talked to the people sitting near me and they smiled and nodded, all the tables of smiles and nods, little yellow faces like daffodils. I kept talking and they kept smiling. They thought I was some kind of nut and the way to get rid of me was to smile. They became more and more nervous. Do you understand?" (187-88)
- He ran the dental floss between his few remaining teeth. What an ugliness, this hanging on. He ought to smash out the remaining teeth with a hammer. [...] Well, everything would be gone eventually. (188)
- After that he sat up in bed for a long time with a last scotch and a cigarette. They were, at least, something to do while you waited to see how things would turn out. He looked at the matchbook in his hand and suddenly realized it was the one he'd taken from the man with the watermelon face. The thought startled him. Had that really happened or not? He started at the matchbook, wondering. (188)
- I turned over and went back to sleep. I always slept until noon. It was the secret of my successful existence. (190)
- I put the phone back on its cradle and closed my eyes. It was only 10:45 a.m. and I always slept until noon. Life's as kind as you let it be. (193)
- It was less than a pleasant night. Room 222. What did it mean? He walked inside and flipped on the light. A dozen roaches crawled away into the wallpaper and chewed and moved and chewed. (195)
- She hung up. Marty walked over and sat on the edge of the bed. This would be his last involvement. It took too much out of him. Women were stronger than men. They knew all the moves. He didn't know any of the moves. (195)
- The blonde got up and walked up and down, up and down. "I got drunk the other night, I was out on the freeway, I was listening to a horn concerto, Mozart, that horn ran right through me; I'm doing 85 miles an hour and I'm driving with my elbows listening to this horn concerto, can you believe that?" (197)
- It was his 15th or 16th job and all the jobs had been terrible. (199)
- There was nothing worse than a reformed drunk and a Born Again Christian and Meyers was both... (200)
- Two young blond guys with wisps of goatees. Their faces looked at him. Bland faces like turkey butts with little holes for mouths. (201)
- The Volks ran badly, sputtering, as if to object to its mistreatment on the freeway. (202-03)
- "I like a man who drinks right out of the bottle!" [-] There was somebody sitting next to him. A woman. She was about 38, dirt under her fingernails, her dyed blond hair piled loosely on top of her head. Two silver loops dangled from her ears and her mouth was heavy with lipstick. She licked her lips, slowly, then she stuck a Virginia Slim into that mouth and lit it. [-] "I'm Diana." (203)
- He was handsome in a dumb kind of way, a strand of drunken hair hanging over one eye. (206)
- His cool worried me more than his size. He had something else going for him. (207)
- He came toward me. The moon behind his back made him look like some god-forsaken creature out of a low budget horror film. (211)
- There was a distance between ordinary objects and between events that was remarkable. All at once, he saw the walls, the rug, the bed, two chairs, the coffee table, the dresser, and the ashtray with their cigarettes. The distance between these things was immense. Then and now were light years apart. (221)
- He lifted the bottle and sucked at it as the bright neon lights from the boulevard came through the dusty blinds. [-] He sat, looking out, not moving, watching the cars passing back and forth. (221)
feb 24 2015 ∞
feb 27 2015 +
feb 27 2015 +