Jim not that way Jim. That's no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and yanking at the handle so the door jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, son. Let's see you bend at the healthy knees. Let's see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle feeling its subtle grain and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you. Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy, let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling's set of spiderwebbed beams. Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in, heat roiling out, hot. Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust. Your mother is a shover and a thruster, son. She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. She's never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way. It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born, before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner, son, your mother had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie. Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by. A major thespian moment, believe you me. She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who? Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed
“There’ll always be difficult moments in your life, you can’t always hide. That’s what growing up means.”
📚🔔 Tatil zili çaldı!
Bir yıl boyunca verilen emeklerin ardından şimdi dinlenme, keşfetme ve yeni maceralara atılma zamanı. 🌞
Bu yaz bol kahkahalı, bol anılı ve elbette bol kitaplı geçsin. Tüm öğrencilere keyifli tatiller diliyoruz! 💙📖
So Sweetheart...
“Anybody hungry?” asks Plutarch. No one replies. “Let me see what’s
cooking.” He withdraws, locking the car door.
I nudge Louella with my elbow. “Hey, girl.” I offer her my hand.
Hers slips into mine, icy cold. “Hey, Hay,” she whispers. “Wasn’t fair
how they took you.”
For the first time, I consider this. Fair? It sure wasn’t. My reaping was
irregular, maybe even illegal. But the number of people in the Capitol to
whom I could plead my case is exactly zero. I’m nothing but an amusing
tale for Drusilla to tell between the caviar and the cream puffs.
“For me or anybody else,” I tell Louella. Her little face is so pinched
that before I really think it through, I ask, “So, are you going to be my ally
or what, sweetheart?”
She actually smiles. It’s an old joke. When she was five and I was
eight, she decided she was my sweetheart and trailed after me, telling
anyone who’d listen. It lasted about a week, then she transferred her
affections to a boy named Buster who gave her a bullfrog. I think her heart
would’ve moved on anyway, as you’re probably not too stuck on someone
you have burping contests with, but we’re still good buddies. If I had a little
sister her age, I’d want her to be just like Louella, and I’ve harbored the
hope that she’d wait for Sid to grow up before settling on a real sweetheart.
Now, of course, her chances of growing up are nil. She’s frozen forever at
thirteen.
The Blinds
I moved to Philadelphia for some peace and quiet after New York City. After paying a week’s rent in a roominghouse, I walked down the street to look for the nearest bar. Half a block. I walked in and sat down. It was the poor part of town and the bar was fifty years old. You could smell the urine and shit of one-half a century wafting up into the bar from the restrooms.
I ordered a draft. Everybody was talking, screaming up and down the bar.
It was unlike Los Angeles bars or San Francisco bars or New York bars or New Orleans bars or the bars of any of the cities I had been in.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Two guys were fighting in the center of the room. Everybody ignored them and kept on talking and drinking. The guy to the right of me was named Danny, the guy to the left, Jim. A bottle came looping through the air and just missed Danny’s nose. He grinned as it sailed past his cigarette. Then he turned in his seat and said to one of the fighters:
“That was pretty close, you son of a bitch! Come that close again, and you got a real fight on your hands!”
Then he turned away.
Almost every seat was taken. I wondered where they came from, these people, how they made it. Jim was quieter, older, very red-faced. He had a kind of gentle weariness created by thousands of hangovers. It was the bar of the lost and the damned if I had ever seen one.
There were women in there: one dyke who drank as if she didn’t enjoy it, a few housewives, fat, merry and a bit stupid, and two or three ladies who had come down from better times and were unattached. As I sat there one girl got up and left with a man. She was back in five minutes.
“Helen! Helen! How do you do it?”
She just laughed.
Another jumped up
"Hey, um, I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm looking for a friend of mine," he says. "Have you seen her? She's a tiny little thing, cries a lot, spends too much time with her feelings-"
"Shut up, Kenji!"
"Oh wait!" he says. "It is you."
