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Authors: Rick Whitaker
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resounding yes. “Oh God,” he said, “I’m late again.” Every time he raised his eyes and saw the beauty of the country in the failing light he wanted to do something he had never done before, shout or scream or hit his wife with his fists or something equally unexpected and terrifying.
He is ill-mannered, self-preoccupied, austere—the modern psychologists would probably diagnose him as introverted, narcissistic and manic depressive. Seen from a more sympathetic angle, the picture is quite different. He tops, for one thing, and sometimes when he gets frisky he gets rough.
I consider my thoughts, my frail fucked-up memory. It is made of details. Just a few years ago I learned from my mother that my father always suspected, with reason, that I was another man’s offspring. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. How was it that I did not know? You’re always hearing about these kinds of kinks in royal families. Such are the phantoms we create out of each other.
There are moments when we find it astonishing, this life.
In the real world things were going along about as well as could be expected, that is, not quite satisfactorily. I remember that the days and nights passed like bars of white and black, opening and shutting. But, in all, so vibrant.
To be is a verb.
David, at the kitchen door, caught his breath chokingly. “Do you want to hear something funny? I came here to quit drinking,” he said, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Funny is almost certainly not the right word. David was one of those men of intense feeling who thrust their sufferings deep down and hide them from those who are dear to them, so that when grief overflows, as his did now, they have reached the limit of endurance. “Is it naïve of me in my antiquated way to think that people should do what they say they’re going to do?” He kissed my neck, and sniffed my hair. “I cannot tell to what level I may sink.”
Indeed, I thought to myself, the spirit can’t go wrong if there’s no spirit to begin with.
He began to giggle through his tears. But in a special way. “I was once a man,” he said, “but now I’m not.” This had never happened before. Is he just spouting 12-step truisms he’s picked up God knows where? “I was not joking, my dear; so tell me why you did not come last night.” David was radically incapable of ill-humour for more than a few seconds at a time, and grinned in a less awful manner.
“David, you are being contrary and disingenuous, and just a little hostile, and I’m really not sure why.”
“I’m beginning to hate myself.”
Is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?
David smiles, shyly showing me a photo of a very handsome tough guy who so personifies David’s type. How well I’m getting to know these characters! David had been a “model” himself.
“Fertilize your inner life,” I said.
“Shall we speak in everyday language? Who wrote this dialogue?”
Dinner was not a success. Far from it. To put it in two words: disaster struck. He suffered tortures of humiliation and self-consciousness. From there on it got worse. I left him sitting there wishing he was dead. The end of everything was at hand; it seemed to him he could stretch out his arm and touch the goal. Something must be wrong with us.
He selected a pair of blue pajamas and put them on with care, smoothing the wide collar and sticking a dainty blue silk handkerchief in the little patch pocket over his left breast. “I know how much you idolize the rich.”
And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence,
He is ill-mannered, self-preoccupied, austere—the modern psychologists would probably diagnose him as introverted, narcissistic and manic depressive. Seen from a more sympathetic angle, the picture is quite different. He tops, for one thing, and sometimes when he gets frisky he gets rough.
I consider my thoughts, my frail fucked-up memory. It is made of details. Just a few years ago I learned from my mother that my father always suspected, with reason, that I was another man’s offspring. And that’s what all this is a little bit about. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. How was it that I did not know? You’re always hearing about these kinds of kinks in royal families. Such are the phantoms we create out of each other.
There are moments when we find it astonishing, this life.
In the real world things were going along about as well as could be expected, that is, not quite satisfactorily. I remember that the days and nights passed like bars of white and black, opening and shutting. But, in all, so vibrant.
To be is a verb.
David, at the kitchen door, caught his breath chokingly. “Do you want to hear something funny? I came here to quit drinking,” he said, and tears began to run down his cheeks. Funny is almost certainly not the right word. David was one of those men of intense feeling who thrust their sufferings deep down and hide them from those who are dear to them, so that when grief overflows, as his did now, they have reached the limit of endurance. “Is it naïve of me in my antiquated way to think that people should do what they say they’re going to do?” He kissed my neck, and sniffed my hair. “I cannot tell to what level I may sink.”
Indeed, I thought to myself, the spirit can’t go wrong if there’s no spirit to begin with.
He began to giggle through his tears. But in a special way. “I was once a man,” he said, “but now I’m not.” This had never happened before. Is he just spouting 12-step truisms he’s picked up God knows where? “I was not joking, my dear; so tell me why you did not come last night.” David was radically incapable of ill-humour for more than a few seconds at a time, and grinned in a less awful manner.
“David, you are being contrary and disingenuous, and just a little hostile, and I’m really not sure why.”
“I’m beginning to hate myself.”
Is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?
David smiles, shyly showing me a photo of a very handsome tough guy who so personifies David’s type. How well I’m getting to know these characters! David had been a “model” himself.
“Fertilize your inner life,” I said.
“Shall we speak in everyday language? Who wrote this dialogue?”
Dinner was not a success. Far from it. To put it in two words: disaster struck. He suffered tortures of humiliation and self-consciousness. From there on it got worse. I left him sitting there wishing he was dead. The end of everything was at hand; it seemed to him he could stretch out his arm and touch the goal. Something must be wrong with us.
He selected a pair of blue pajamas and put them on with care, smoothing the wide collar and sticking a dainty blue silk handkerchief in the little patch pocket over his left breast. “I know how much you idolize the rich.”
And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence,
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