He was still recuperating
from the Royal Wedding
and now this.
He thought of them as friends
who didn’t know him.
Dead. One after another.
Dead.
Almost more than a man could take.
At least now they had an excuse
for never calling him back.
Or answering his letters.
Not too busy now, I bet.
They say, deaths come in threes.
The old writer was worried.
Could he be next?
Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going,
his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad,
only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by,
their little script.
― Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
At the Saturday afternoon movie I would leave my friends to go off to the candy machine —
and wind up in a distant balcony seat, squirting my seed into the empty wrapper from a Mounds bar.
On an outing of our family association, I once cored an apple, saw to my astonishment (and with the aid of my obsession) what it looked like,
and ran off into the woods to fall upon the orifice of the fruit,
pretending that the cool and mealy hole was actually between the legs of that mythical being
who always called me Big Boy when she pleaded for what no girl in all recorded history had ever had.
“Oh shove it in me, Big Boy,” cried the cored apple that I banged silly on that picnic.
“Big Boy, Big Boy, oh give me all you’ve got,” begged the empty milk bottle that I kept hidden in our storage bin in the basement,
to drive wild after school with my vaselined upright.
“Come, Big Boy, come,” screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity,
I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard
on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. – Phillip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Bukowski said,
Find what you love
and let it kill you.
I love life.
And it hasn’t killed me yet.