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[...] Porpentine closed his eyes. He'd blown it, all right. This was what happened when one blundered right in. The policemen surrounded them, stood at attention. "All right," Porpentine said. He and Goodfellow arose and were escorted out of the theater. "We shall desire your passports," one of them said. Behind them on the breeze came the first sprightly chords of the opening scene. They marched down a narrow path, two police behind, two in front. Signals had, of course, been arranged years before. "I shall want to see the British Consul," Porpentine said and spun, drawing an old single-shot pistol. Goodfellow had the other two covered. The policeman who had asked for their passports glowered. "No one said they would be armed," another protested. Methodically, with four raps to the skull, the policemen were neutralized and rolled into the underbrush. "A fool trick," Goodfellow muttered: "we were lucky. "[...]
i love how dry this is
[...] one night they'd had a serious division of views over Berlin. "I know what they ought to do," Grover yelled (he always yelled — at walls, at anything else solid that happened to be around -to let you know it wasn't you he was mad at but something else, something to do with the scaled-up world adults made, remade and lived in without him, some inertia and stubbornness he was too small, except inside himself, to overcome), "exactly what they should do." But when Tim asked what, Grover only said, "Never mind. The thing we argued about isn't important. But now we don't talk; that is important. When I'm home now they let me alone and I let them alone." [...]
It had been a year before, in the early fall, a little past the opening of school. Hogan had come over to Tim's house right after supper, and the sky was still light, though the sun was down, and they had been out in Tim's back yard shooting baskets. Or Tim was: Hogan had had this conflict of commitments on his mind.
"Afraid he'll start drinking again," Hogan said, answering Tim's question. "I'm taking this along" — holding up a carton of milk. "If he wants to drink, he can drink this instead."
"Gah," said Tim, who didn't think much of milk.
"Listen," said Hogan, "you never outgrow your need for milk. Let me tell you about milk. How great it is."
'Tell me about beer," Tim said. Being lately fascinated with the idea of getting drunk.
Hogan took offense. "Don't make fun," he said. "I'm lucky I went through that when I did, that's what my father says. Look at this guy I got to go sit with. He's thirty-seven years old. Look at what a head start I got on him."
this storyline is so funny
"Listen, what did you call us up for?" Hogan said. He was talking in an obstinate, rhythmic way that meant he was going to bust out crying any minute. "Why did you get in touch with the A.A. at all, if you were just going to get drunk anyway?"
"I needed help," explained Mr. McAfee, "and I thought they would help me. And they really helped, didn't they? Look at what they sent me."
"Hey," said Tim, and Hogan started to cry.
[...] It was as if Mr. McAfee too were broadcasting from somewhere quite distant, telling about things Tim would not be sure of in the daylight: a brother who'd left home one morning during the depression and got on a freight and disappeared, later sending them this one postcard from Los Angeles, and Mr. McAfee, just a boy, deciding to follow him there the same way, only that first time he got no further than Houston; a Mexican girl he'd been with for a while, and she used to drink some stuff all the time, a word Tim couldn't make out, and she had a baby boy who'd died from a rattlesnake bite (Tim saw the snake, headed for him, and bounced up out of the dream in terror, yelling), and so one morning she'd just gone away, like his brother vanished into the same deserted morning, before the sun was even up; and nights when he would sit by himself down around the docks and look off into the black Gulf, where the lights ended, just cut off and left you this giant nothing; and gang scuffles, day after day, up and down the neighborhood streets, or fights out on the beach in the summer's harsh sun; and gigs in New York, L.A., bad gigs with tenor-sax bands it was better to forget only how do you? [...]
"There's an address someplace." He went away. Silence fell on the line and it was right around then that Tim's foot felt the edge of a certain abyss which he had been walking close to — for who knew how long? — without knowing. He looked over it, got afraid, and shied away, but not before learning something unpleasant about the night: that it was night here, and in New York, and probably on whatever coast the man was talking about, one single night over the entire land, making people, already so tiny in it, invisible too in the dark; and how hard it would be, how hopeless, to really find a person you needed suddenly, unless you lived all your life in a house like he did, with a mother and father. He turned around to look at the man on the bed and there came to him a hint then of how lost Mr. McAfee really was. What would he do if they couldn't find this girl? And then the man came back and read an address, which Tim copied, and the operator wanted to know if she should try Los Angeles information.
"Then we're integrated," Tim said. "Hey." "Yeah. They don't know it, but we're integrated."
Then Tim's and Grover's folks, and even, according to Hogan, the progressive Doctor Slothrop, started in with the telephone calls, and the name-calling, and the dirty words they got so angry with kids for using. The only parent who was keeping out of it seemed to be Étienne's father. "He says why don't people stop worrying about Negroes and start worrying about automation," Étienne reported. "What's automation, Grovie?"
“You’re too sensitive.” Yeah, there was so much else she ought to be saying also, but this was what came out. It was true, anyway. For a couple years he’d been a used car salesman and so hyperaware of what that profession had come to mean that working hours were exquisite torture to him. Mucho shaved his upper lip every morning three times with, three times against the grain to remove any remotest breath of a moustache, new blades he drew blood invariably but kept at it; bought all natural-shoulder suits, then went to a tailor to have the lapels made yet more abnormally narrow, on his hair used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon to throw them further off. The sight of sawdust, even pencil shavings, made him wince, his own kind being known to use it for hushing sick transmissions, and though he dieted he could still not as Oedipa did use honey to sweeten his coffee for like all things viscous it distressed him, recalling too poignantly what is often mixed with motor oil to ooze dishonest into gaps between piston and cylinder wall. He walked out of a party one night because somebody used the word “creampuff,” it seemed maliciously, in his hearing. The man was a refugee Hungarian pastry cook talking shop, but there was your Mucho: thin-skinned.
“But our beauty lies,” explained Metzger, “in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. They’ve done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly.”
“What do you want to bet, then?” She knew. Stubborn, they watched each other’s eyes for what seemed five minutes. She heard commercials chasing one another into and out of the speaker of the TV. She grew more and more angry, perhaps juiced, perhaps only impatient for the movie to come back on.
lol familiar