I've always had a fondness for this last line from Ross
Macdonald's "The Instant Enemy," published in 1968. It
follows the hero's tearing up his client's check and tossing
the pieces out of the window onto the Sunset Strip. "It
drifted down on the short hairs and the long hairs, the
potheads and the acid heads, draft dodgers and dollar
chasers, swingers and walking wounded, idiot saints, hard
cases, foolish virgins."
But my all-time favorite is from "Saloon Society" by Bill
Manville, a collection of his lightly-fictionalized
autobiographical New York stories (circa 1960) that he later
cannibalized for a powerful noir tale, "Goodbye." It's the
end of a story involving a party tossed for the narrator by a
friend named Kugleman:
"We kept alive, we kept moving, we crowded against each
other, lied and flirted and left each other when we were
bored; the poets went into the bedroom to read aloud, the
politicians formed splinter parties in the hallway, the booze
poured like sunshine, the cigarette smoke was thick as
dreams, an amorous couple locked themselves in the can, Henry
Harris ate the flowers in the icebox, the clocks were smashed
and stopped, the shades were down, I was single again, it was
only Saturday morning, and A.E. Kugleman had made us
happy."
Dick Lochte
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 May 2002 EDT