micklpkl
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response 80 of 104:
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Jul 30 01:54 UTC 2001 |
Okay, hopefully this one will sound familiar to somebody:
As Peter stood there, he recognized three young men strolling
up the street. They were a strange trio: one was a hoodlum, one
was a dope addict, and the third was a poet.
The hoodlum---Jack---was a sleek, handsome youngster from
Tenth Avenue, who claimed that he was born "on a barge in the
East River" eighteen years before. He was well-dressed, seemingly
composed in his bearing and quiet, almost dignified, in his man-
ner. It was only that he could never concentrate; he was always
looking around as though anticipating something. His eyes were
hard and blank, almost elderly in their stony meaningless calm.
He talked in a swift, high-pitched, nervous voice, and kept look-
ing away stonily, twirling his key chain.
The dope addict, whose only known name was Junkey, was a
small, dark, Arabic-looking man with an oval face and huge blue
eyes that were lidded wearily always, with the huge lids of a mask.
He moved about with the noiseless glide of an Arab, his expres-
sion always weary, indifferent, yet somehow astonished too, aware
of everything. He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable
in the world.
The poet---Leon Levinsky---had been a classmate of Peter's at
college, and was now a merchant seaman of sorts, sailing coastwise
on coalboats to Norfolk or New Orleans. He was wearing a
strapped raincoat, a Paisley scarf, and dark-rimmed glasses with
the air of an intellectual. He carried two slim volumes under his
arm, the works of Rimbaud and W. H. Auden, and he smoked
his cigarette stuck in a red holder.
They came along the sidewalk, Jack the hoodlum swaggering
slowly, Junkey padding along like an Arab in the Casbah, and
Leon Levinsky, lip-pursing, meditative, absorbed in thought, twin-
kling along beside them with his Charley Chaplin feet flapping
out, puffing absently on the cigarette-holder. They strolled in the
lights.
Peter walked up and greeted them.
"So you're back finally!" cried Levinsky, grinning eagerly. "I've
been thinking of you lately for some reason or other---actually I
guess it's because I've so much to tell you!"
"Why don't we go and sit down?" proposed Junkey wearily. "Let's
sit in the cafeteria window there and we can talk and keep an
eye on the street."
They went in the cafeteria, got coffee, and sat down by the
windows, where Junkey could resume his pale vigil of Forty-
Second Street---a vigil that went on a good eighteen hours
a day, and sometimes, when he had no place to sleep, twenty-
four hours around the clock. It was the same with Jack---the
same anxious vigil of the street, from which the watchers of
the Street could never turn their eyes without some piercing sense
of loss, some rankling anguish that they had "missed out" on
something. Junkey always sat facing the street, and when he
talked, sometimes with intense earnestness, his eyes kept never-
theless going back and forth as he combed the street sweep-
ingly under drooping eyelids. Even though Peter and Leon
Levinsky sat with their backs to the window, they could not help
turning now and then just to see.
Leon Levinsky was about nineteen years old. He was one of the
strangest, most curiously exalted youngsters Peter had ever known.
He was not unlike Alexander Panos, in a sense, and Peter had
been drawn to him for this reason. Levinsky was an eager, intense,
sharply intelligent boy of Russian-Jewish parentage who rushed
around New York in a perpetual sweat of emotional activity,
back and forth in the streets from friend to friend, room to room,
apartment to apartment. He "knew everybody" and "knew every-
thing," was always bearing tidings and messages from "the others,"
full of catastrophe. He brimmed and flooded over day and night
with a thousand different thoughts and conversations and small
horrors, delights, perplexities, deities, discoveries, ecstasies, fears.
He stared gog-eyed at the world and was full of musings, lip-
pursings, subway broodings---all of which rushed forth in torrents
of complex conversation whenever he confronted someone. He
knew almost everyone Peter knew, a few thousand others Peter
did not know. Like young Panos, Leon Levinsky was also likely
to show up suddenly morose and brooding, or simply disappear
from the "scene" for months and Peter liked that too.
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anderyn
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response 89 of 104:
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Aug 15 16:09 UTC 2001 |
Ohkay. This is from a favorite book of mine.
Damerel rode slowly back to the Priory, for a considerable part of the way
with a slack rein, allowing the gray to walk. The frown did not lift from his
brow: rather it deepened: and it was not until Crusader, startled by the
sudden uprising of a pheasant, stopped dead, throwing up his head and
snorting that he was thrown out of his abstraction. He admonished Crusader,
but leaned forward to pat his neck as well, because he knew the fault was
his. "Old fool!" he said. "Like your master -- who is something worse than
a fool. *Would she could make of me a saint, or I of her a sinner--* Who the
devil wrote that? You don't know, and I've forgotten, and in any event it's
of no consequence. For the first part it's too late, old friend, too late!
And for the second -- it was precisely my intention, and a rare moment this
is to discover that if I could, I would not! *Come* up!"
Crusader broke into a trot, and was kept to it, until, rounding a bend in the
lane that brought the main gates of the Priory within view, Damerel saw a
solitary horseman, walking his horse, and ejaculated: "Damn the boy!"
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