At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles – a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going.
No, we are getting ahead of our story, and only an jackass would do that.
My attorney put down the phone after making several calls. “There’s only one place where we can get fresh salmon,” he said, “and it’s closed on Sunday.” “Of course,” I snapped. “These goddamn Jesus freaks! They’re multiplying like rats!
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun.
For all his Caribbean clothes and his Madison Avenue manners, even with his surfside apartment and his Alfa Romeo roadster, there was so much Kansas in Sanderson that it was embarrassing to see him deny it.
How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard.
Look what happened the last time a Republican president tried to fix a doomed national economy. Remember Herbert Hoover?
So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear – I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don’t I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.
Arriving half-drunk in a foreign place is hard on the nerves. You have a feeling that something is wrong, that you can’t get a grip.
Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them – still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.
Losing in New Hampshire was usually permanent, and winning was a guaranteed fast ride to somewhere – maybe the White House – or at least a fiery exit. Probably soon, but so what?
The wide receiver had a real taste for crime, and he indulged it with an erratic kind of vigor that made him an albatross for Madden and a natural soulmate for my old friend, Al Davis, who remains the ultimate Raider. They were serious people, and John Madden was definitely one of them, for good or ill. Living with the Oakland Raiders in those days was not much different than living with the Hell’s Angels. I.
It was easy to understand why Sala didn’t mind sharing; neither of us ever went there except to change clothes or sleep. Night after night I would sit uselessly at Al’s, drinking myself into a stupor because I couldn’t stand the idea of going back to the apartment.
In the argot of the cycle world the Harley is a “hog,” and the outlaw bike is a “chopped hog.
There is something about the sight of a passing motorcyclist that tempts many automobile drivers to commit murder.
He often swore that if all the people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The Almighty – if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their deviations – there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his hair. Of course Lotterman exaggerated;.
The sun woke me up the next morning. I sat up and groaned. My clothes were full of sand.
Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.
This is old politicians,” says Joel Swerdlow, the twenty-six-year-old who ran McGovern’s operation in the North half of Milwaukee. “We have precinct captains, ward leaders, car captains, the whole bit. That’s the only way you win. But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we’ve got young people who work because they’re interested in the issues.