More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I could use that, if the family jewels weren’t in pawn to Uncle Junk.”
The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners and on the proposition that for social purposes all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.
He had aged without experience of life, like a piece of meat rotting on a pantry shelf.
A silence peculiar to Mexico seeped into the room, a vibrating, soundless hum.
Three Mexican fags were posturing in front of the jukebox. One of them slithered over to where Lee was standing, with the stylized gestures of a temple dancer, and asked for a cigarette. Lee watched them from an inner silence. He registered something archaic in the stylized movements, a depraved animal grace at once beautiful and repulsive. He could see them moving in the light of campfires, the ambiguous gestures shadowed out into the dark. Sodomy is as old as the human species.
An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face.
Allerton disliked commitments and had never been in love or had a close friend. He was forced to ask himself: “What does he want from me?” It did not occur to him that Lee was queer, as he associated queerness with at least some degree of overt effeminacy. Allerton was intelligent and surprisingly perceptive for a person so self-centered, but his experience was limited. He decided finally that Lee valued him as an audience.
Lee bought a lottery ticket from a boy of ten or so, who had rushed in when the waiter went to the kitchen. The boy was working the last-ticket routine. Lee paid him expansively, like a drunk American. “Go buy yourself some marijuana, son,” he said. The boy smiled and turned to leave. “Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos,” Lee called after him. Allerton smiled. “Thank God,” Lee thought. “I won’t have to contend with middle-class morality.”
This driver, for example, hates gringos. But if he kills someone—and very possibly he will—it will not be an American. It will be another Mexican. Maybe his good friend. Friends are less frightening than strangers.”
Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or a child.
“Well, this old Jew was nailed at the airport on his way to Cuba. I hear they got like a mine finder out at the airport rings a bell if anybody passes the gate with an outlandish quantity of metal on his person. So it says in the papers, after they give this Jew a shake and find the gold, a large number of Jewish-looking foreigners were seen looking into the airport window in a state of excitement. ‘Oy, gefilte fish! They are putting the snatch on Abe!’ Back in Roman times the Jews rose up—in Jerusalem I think it was—and killed fifty thousand Romans. The she-Jews—ah, that is, the young Jewish
...more
“Got an idea for a new dish. Take a live pig and throw it into a very hot oven so the pig is roasted outside and, when you cut into it, still alive and twitching inside. Or, if we run a dramatic joint, a screaming pig covered with burning brandy rushes out of the kitchen and dies right by your chair. You can reach down and pull off the crispy, crackly ears and eat them with your cocktails.”
Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee’s affection irritated him. Like many people who have nothing to do, he was very resentful of any claims on his time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure.
“A game for thinking machines,
Lee considered buying a half interest in the Ship Ahoy. Allerton existed on credit at the Ship Ahoy and owed four hundred pesos. If Lee were half owner of the joint, Allerton would not be in a position to ignore him. Lee did not actually want retaliation. He felt a desperate need to maintain some special contact with Allerton.
Now that Lee could spend days and nights with the object of his attentions, he felt relieved of the gnawing emptiness and fear.
The Swami wants to be alone with his medications.’ Come to think of it, that is the wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says, ‘How the fuck should I know?’”
Something Japhy Ryder would probably endorse.
When Allerton was asleep, he rolled over and threw his knee across Lee’s body. Lee lay still so Allerton wouldn’t wake up and move away.
They sat down in a little coffeehouse where some German refugees hung out, talking about visas and extensions and work permits. They got into a conversation with a man at the next table. The man was thin and blond, his head caved in at the temples. Lee could see the blue veins pulsing in the cold, high-mountain sunlight that covered the man’s weak, ravaged face and spilled over the scarred oak table onto the worn wooden floor. Lee asked the man if he liked Quito. The man said, “To be or not to be, that is the question. I have to like it.”
Nazi "refugees"?
He saw himself desperately rummaging through bodies and rooms and closets in a frenzied search, a recurrent nightmare. At the end of the search was an empty room.
Automatic obedience, synthetic schizophrenia, mass-produced to order. That is the Russian dream,
He walked on, looking at every face he passed, looking into doorways and up at the windows of cheap hotels. An iron bedstead painted light pink, a shirt out to dry … scraps of life. Lee snapped at them hungrily, like a predatory fish cut off from his prey by a glass wall.
The city, like all Ecuador, produced a curiously baffling impression. Lee felt there was something going on here, some undercurrent of life that was hidden from him. This was the area of the ancient Chimu pottery, Lee’s wet-dream country. Here salt shakers and water pitchers were nameless obscenities: two men on all fours engaged in sodomy formed the handle for the top of a kitchen pot. What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes?
One of the boys was urinating against a post and smiling at the other boys. The boys noticed Lee. Now their play was overtly sexual, with an undercurrent of mockery. They looked at Lee and whispered and laughed. Lee looked at them openly, a cold, hard stare of naked lust. He felt the tearing ache of limitless desire.
Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman’s body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other’s body. “I’m not queer,” he thought. “I’m disembodied.”
felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. “Someday I am going to have things just like I want,” he said to himself. “And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.”
Lee smoothed Allerton’s eyebrows with his thumbs. “Do you mind that?” he asked. “Not terribly.” “But you do enjoy it sometimes? The whole deal, I mean.” “Oh, yes.”
And, Gene, for the love of Christ, when we do overhaul this character, please don’t say, ‘Doctor Cotter, I presume.’”
Down by the waterfront I saw a dark young Indian on a fishing boat. He knew I wanted to take his picture, and every time I swung the camera into position he would look up with young male sulkiness. I finally caught him leaning against the bow of the boat, idly scratching one shoulder. A long white scar across right shoulder and collarbone. Such languid animal grace.
Typical 'noble savage' rhetoric.
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
