Thrasher: Skid Row Eskimo/Anthony Apakark Thrasher/1976
11/29/2010
There's an old Eskimo legend that if two people take the same action at the same time it's a sign that something bad will happen. Tommy and I stopped on a piece of ice and we both took a leak at the same time.
"Let's go home," Tommy said, "something bad will happen."
I didn't believe him and we kept on hunting.
About an hour later, when I was trying to hook a muskrat we had shot, I heard Tommy holler. I looked around quickly, and I saw that the hook had caught Tommy, just above his right eye. It had just about pulled it out.
It scared the life out of me, and we turned for home and paddled full blast all the way, some five or six miles. That incident made me a believer in legendary warning signs./pg 43
I wandered from one hotel to another, looking for a drink, sleeping where I could. Most nights it was a little burnt-up shack we called the Sugar Shack. I went there the first time with an Indian girl I met outside the liquor store on 97th Street. She was with the other prostitutes, and winos, waiting for the doors of the liquor store to open at ten o'clock. Her name was Riverbank Mary. Everybody was fucking her down by the riverbank./pg 91
I met many women in Edmonton. Once I met two girls, one Indian and one white. The white girl was Dorothy. She was wild at lovemaking. The Indian girl told me that she was a nymphomaniac, and Dorothy said the Indian girl, Sylvia, was a dirty prostitute. They argued over me, but I satisfied them both the same night./pg 98
We went and bought Cutex and glue at a drug store down the street. The man handed us the Cutex out of a big cardboard box of bottles he had sitting right there on the front counter. Mary and I walked down a dark road and she got a bag and poured some of that stuff into it./pg 108
I laughed at what I saw, but deep down inside I felt sick. Those homosexuals were mixing it up in there./pg 126
I couldn't even escape it when I attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. One night this big half-breed guy came to a meeting and I saw him go into the washroom at the back of the room. Soon a lot of guys were filing in there. They were taking turns with the half-breed./pg 126
The jetliner. It was like a prison without bars. Like one of those ships the niggers in P.A. told me used to carry slaves from Black Africa, only this one sailed the skies and not the seas. All the seats closest to the portholes were filled with prisoners like myself. Fort-eight of us, we were headed for institutions in British Columbia on transfers from penitentiaries across Canada./ pg 139
Democracy/Joan Didion/1984
11/??/2010
In fact they did run into each other.
Here or there.
Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure in each other's presence or untoward interest in each other's activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.
Quick, alive.
Something to think about late at night.
Something private.
She always looked for him.
She did not really expect to see him but she never got off a plane in certain parts of the world without wondering where he was, how he was, what he might be doing./pg 92
By the time I got back to Los Angeles a congressional subpoena had been issued for Jack Lovett and the clip of Inez dancing on the St. Regis roof had made its first network appearance. I have no idea why this particular clip was the single most repeated image of a life as exhaustively documented as Inez Victor's, but it was, and over those few days in January of 1976 this tape took on a life quite independent of the rather unexceptional moment it recorded, sometimes running for only a second or two, cut so short that it might have been only a still photograph; other times presenting itself as an extended playlet, reaching a dramatic curtain as the aide said "Hold two elevators" and Harry Victor said "I'm just a private citizen" and Inez said "Marvelous" and band played "Isn't It Romantic."/pg 231
White Noise/Don DeLillo/1985
11/14/2010
We ran into Murray Jay Siskind at the supermarket. His basket held generic good and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled CANNED PEACHES. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words IRREGULAR PEANUTS. Murray kept nodding to Babette as I introduced them.
"This is the new austerity," he said. "Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort."/pg 18
We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection./pg 170
"Room behaviour. The point of rooms is that they're inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave on way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a roon is to agree to a certain kind of behavior."/pg 306
Closer/Dennis Cooper/1989
10/12/2010
John had the punk and George lie side by side on the bed. he crawled over their bodies while they masturbated, examining each in great detail and making comparisons. Below the neck they were just about even: smooth, washed-out, skeletal. Facewise the punk wasn't much. His eyes were drab, his nose had been broken, his ears were caked with wax, his skull was shaped like an egg. He would have been nothing without punk. John sympathized at first. Then he realized he'd better not care or he'd never get hard enough./pg 8
Alex is slumped in his wheelchair. "I was asleep for a week. When I woke up I..." He lifts the front of his T-shirt. Using a finger, he draws a jagged line across his stomach. "Below that's the vulture meat," he says. "Go ahead, kick it or shoot it or something."/pg 82
I don't know what to say. We're in bed. George has passed out or gone to sleep. His ass looks like somebody threw a grenade at it. He said he fell on some glass. I covered it with a blanket as soon as he dozed off./pg 117
Jim: A Life With AIDS/June Callwood/1988
9/26/2010
For a while only one funeral home in Toronto -- Humphreys -- would bury a person with AIDS. Those of the gay community who attended the AIDS funerals became experts at finding their way around that funeral home. They knew where to find the coffee maker and where the extra sugar was stored. Most of them had only one suit appropriate for funerals, so even the wardrobes became familiar./pg 224
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