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The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn’t bother him enough to give him the shakes. At The Dancers they get the sort of people that disillusion you about what a lot of golfing money can do for the personality.
Them booze hounds just make a man a lot of trouble for no fun. I got a philosophy about them things. The way the competition is nowadays a guy has to save his strength to protect hisself in the clinches.” “I can see you’ve made a big success out of it,” I said.
I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don’t read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.
“Mostly I just kill time,” he said, “and it dies hard. A little tennis, a little golf, a little swimming and horseback riding, and the exquisite pleasure of watching Sylvia’s friends trying to hold out to lunch time before they start killing their hangovers.”
“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that’s wonderful.” I agreed with him.
So do I.
“Alcohol is like love,” he said. “The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”
It was one of those hypersensitive moments when all your automatic movements, however long established, however habitual, become separate acts of will. You are like a man learning to walk after polio. You take nothing for granted, absolutely nothing at all.
“Nobody knows that answer,” Green said patiently. “It happens all the time. Men and women both. A guy takes it and takes it and takes it. Then he don’t. He probably don’t know why himself, why at that particular instant he goes berserk. Only he does, and somebody’s dead.
“You’re just a little old cop-hater, friend. That’s all you are, shamus, just a little old cop-hater.” “There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn’t be a cop.”
The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.
He would be like that for the rest of his life and that was what his life was. You would never know how he got that way because even if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it. There is a sad man like that in every quiet bar in the world.
The world seemed to be full of people Mr. Edelweiss was not knocking. He put some money on the desk.
“Why don’t you get sore?” “Nothing to get sore about. I’m just listening to you hate yourself. It’s boring but it doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
Let’s go outside and glance at a choice selection of the sort of people you get to know when you make enough lousy money to live where they live.”
Of course I hadn’t seen him drunk. I didn’t know what he would be like drunk. I didn’t even know that he was an alcoholic. There’s a big difference. A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.
“I hate people who make stagy scenes like that. Not that he isn’t a fine doctor. He has played that scene with half the men in the valley. Linda Loring is no tramp. She doesn’t look like one, talk like one, or behave like one. I don’t know what makes Dr. Loring behave as if she was.” “Maybe he’s a reformed drunk,” I said. “A lot of them grow pretty puritanical.”
“Who built this place?” I asked her. “And who was he mad at?”
I ought to have asked him how the book was going. Maybe you always ought to ask a writer how the book is going. And then again maybe he gets damned tired of that question.
Sure there’s such a thing as law. We’re up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers.
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make a note never to buy any.
Chandler predicted YouTube ads?
