Postmodern Novels

"Patricide: Patricide is a bad idea, first because it contrary to law and custom and second because it proves, beyond a doubt, that the father’s every fluted accusation against you was correct: you are a thoroughly bad individual, a patricide!—member of a class of persons universally ill-regarded. It is all right to feel this hot emotion, but not to act upon it. And it is not necessary. It is not necessary to slay your father, time will slay him, that is a virtual certainty. Your true task lies elsewhere."

"“What are you going to do after we leave?” she asks. “Go back to work, I guess.” “That what you want to do?” “Work is God’s best invention. Keeps you all seized up and interested.” “I wish I could do something.” “You could always go to school.” “I don’t like standing in lines.” “I know what you mean. The Army used up most of my standing-in-line capacity.” “But suppose you’re at a reception and you’re going to meet the President and there’s a long line of very well-dressed people—” “I’m not in a hurry to meet the President. If he wants to come over and have a drink and a little guacamole dip, that’s fine. My door is always open.”"

"When I asked you to help me, [the Dead Father] said, it wasn’t because I needed help. Of course not, said Thomas. I’m doing this for you, essentially, the Dead Father said. For the general good, and thus, for you. Thomas said nothing. As so much else, said the Dead Father. Thomas said nothing. You never knew, said the Dead Father. Thomas turned his head. You told us, he said, repeatedly. Oh well yes I may have mentioned the odd initiative now and again. But you never knew. In the fullest sense. Because you are not a father. I am, Thomas said. You forget Elsie. Doesn’t count, said the Dead Father. A son can never, in the fullest sense, become a father. Some amount of amateur effort is possible. A son may after honest endeavor produce what some people might call, technically, children. But he remains a son. In the fullest sense."

"The walls of the architecture labs at Penn had been covered with graffiti. “This is hell, nor are we out of it.” “Hell is other architects.” “The road to hell is paved with naugahyde.”"

"Best not to anticipate too much, said Thomas, it jiggles the possibilities."

"Dore is angry. She’s holding the box that the frozen pizza came in. “You’re actually going to feed us this pizza?” “What’s the matter with it?” “This frozen pizza?” “So it’s frozen.” “Do you know what it’s got in it? Enriched flour.” “What’s the matter with enriched flour?” “The enriched flour has in it flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, and riboflavin.” “All great stuff. I remember riboflavin from my childhood. They put it in Wheaties or something.” “We’re just getting started. We’re just going into our windup here. We get water, hydrogenated soybean oil, yeast, salt, and something called dough conditioner. The dough conditioner’s got sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium sulfate and sodium sulfite.” “Soybeans are good. Invented by Martin Luther King.” “Moving right along, we get cooked pork and mozzarella cheese substitute. The mozzarella cheese substitute contains water, casein, hydrogenated soybean oil—you notice the soybean is doing a lot of work here—salt, sodium aluminum phosphate, lactic acid, natural flavor whatever that is, modified cornstarch, sodium citrate, sorbic acid, sodium phosphate, artificial color, guar gum, magnesium oxide, ferric orthophosphate, zinc oxide, B-12, folic acid, B-6 hydrochloride, niacinamide, vitamin A palmitate, xanthan gum, thiamine mononitrate—I ask you.” “What?” “Is this food or a chemistry set?” “Doesn’t taste too bad.” “I could make a nuclear weapon with less stuff than this pizza has in it.”"

"“I once heard [Buckminster] Fuller speak for seven straight hours. I only understood a tenth of what he was saying. By the end of the evening there were only five people left in the audience. He’d started with three hundred. I went home and began to make tetrahedrons with Play-Doh and toothpicks at two o’clock in the morning. ...”"

"The Dead Father’s head. The main thing is, his eyes are open. Staring up into the sky. The eyes a two-valued blue, the blues of the Gitanes cigarette pack. The head never moves. Decades of staring. The brow is noble, good Christ, what else? Broad and noble. And serene, of course, he’s dead, what else if not serene? From the tip of his finely shaped delicately nostriled nose to the ground, fall of five and one half meters, figure obtained by triangulation. The hair is gray but a young gray. Full, almost to the shoulder, it is possible to admire the hair for a long time, many do, on a Sunday or other holiday or in those sandwich hours neatly placed between fattish slices of work. Jawline compares favorably to a rock formation. Imposing, rugged, all that. The great jaw contains thirty-two teeth, twenty-eight of the whiteness of standard bathroom fixtures and four stained, the latter a consequence of addiction to tobacco, according to legend, this beige quartet to be found in the center of the lower jaw. He is not perfect, thank God for that. The full red lips drawn back in a slight rictus, slight but not unpleasant rictus, disclosing a bit of mackerel salad lodged between two of the stained four. We think it’s mackerel salad. It appears to be mackerel salad. In the sagas, it is mackerel salad. Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead."

"And what did philosophy teach you? asked the Dead Father. It taught me that I have no talent for philosophy, said Thomas, bbbbbbut— But what? But I think everybody should have a little philosophy, Thomas said. It helps, a little. It helps. It is good. It is about half as good as music."

"You see! Thomas exclaimed. There it is! Things are not simple. Error is always possible, even with the best intentions in the world. People make mistakes. Things are not done right. Right things are not done. There are cases which are not clear. You must be able to tolerate the anxiety. To do otherwise is to jump ship, ethics-wise."

"“Anyone who sees Parsifal twice is a blithering idiot.” “You mean the movie.” “In any form. Land, sea, or in the air.” “Well I won’t take you. You have my word.”"

"“When I got married,” she says, “I married this guy who was a Catholic. So we had to get a priest to do the job. So I called this priest and explained the situation. I said I was not a Catholic. And the priest says, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ Then I told him I was still married to another guy, the guy I was married to before I met this guy. And the priest says, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ So I just thought I’d tell him that I was born without a vagina, that I just had this sort of marble insert where the vagina was supposed to be, to see if he would say, ‘Well, we can work with you on that.’ ”"

"Carol, when they were twenty-five and twenty-six, had been a smart-ass, an admirable smart-ass. “I love you but it’s only temporary,” she had said. She was fond of saying to people, “Here’s wishing you a happy and successful first marriage.”"

"Q: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me? A: Perhaps your wife? Q: Of course she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book. A: German? Q: Dutch."

"He lost nine pounds (a great blessing) during the eight months they lived in the apartment. They had not been slow to criticize his toes, teeth, belly, hair, or politics. “It seems to me,” Veronica had said one day, “that you have no social responsibility.” “My first social responsibilty,” he had said, “is that the building doesn’t collapse.” “Right right right,” she said, “but you are after all a creature of the power structure. You work for the power structure.” This was true enough, revolutionaries don’t build buildings, needed only closets to oil their Uzis in, no work for architects there. On the other hand Veronica and the others derived their own politics from a K-Mart of sources, Thomas Aquinas marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Simone de Beauvoir and the weatherbeaten troops of Sixty Minutes. They were often left and right during the same conversation, sometimes the same sentence."

"It’s an architectural problem, marriage. If we could live in separate houses, and visit each other when we feel particularly gay— It would be expensive, yes. But as it was she had to endure me in all my worst manifestations, early in the morning and late at night and in the nutsy obsessed noontimes. When I wake up from my nap you don’t get the laughing cavalier, you get a rank pigfooted belching blunderer. I knew this one guy who built a wall down the middle of his apartment. An impenetrable wall. He had a very big apartment. Concrete block, basically, with a fiberglass insulation on top of that and sheetrock on top of that."

"I feel like I’ve known Hunter S. Thompson for most of my life. I first encountered him in 1981, when I was twelve. A family friend had moved out after a long stay in the guest room, and I decided to find out what he’d left behind. On the nightstand I found a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I liked the cover art, so I read it. It changed my life. The book made me want to drop everything (specifically, the sixth grade) and take up journalism. It made me want to travel the world with a pen and notebook, having adventures, recording my observations, and speaking fearlessly on behalf of truth as a sworn guardian of the First Amendment. But mostly, it made me want to do drugs."

"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

"I shrugged. "That's not me", I said. "That's a guy named Thompson". He works for Rolling Stone... a really vicious crazy kind of person."

"I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."

"After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him..."

"When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies."

"All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel."

"KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, But his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can't find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command-including yours. BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck. - The Chief"

"The news was on again. Nixon's face filled the screen, but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was “sacrifice.” Over and over again: “Sacrifice...sacrifice…sacrifice." I could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. “Just stay relaxed,” he said over his shoulder, without looking at me. “Don't try to fight it or...you'll just wither up and die.” His hand snaked out to change channels."

"The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods…At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds [345 kPa] each — which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were "experimental" tires. But fifty pounds each didn't help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy-five. He shook his head nervously. "What's wrong?" I asked. "You think they can't take seventy-five?”…In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It's not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac."

"There was evidence in this room, of excessive consumption of almost every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D. It could only be explained as a montage,"

"This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality The only bedrock rule is Don't Burn the Locals... if Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big."

"I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My blood is too thick. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped."

"What do you want? Where's the goddamn ice I ordered? Where's the booze? There's a war on, man! People are being killed!" "Killed?” He almost whispered the word. “In Vietnam!” I yelled. “On the goddamn television!" “Oh...yes...yes,” he said. “This terrible war. When will it end?" “Tell me,” I said quietly. “What do you want?"

"You'd better take care of me, Lord...because if you don't you're going to have me on your hands."

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. p. 89"

"Even a goddamn were-wolf is entitled to legal counsel..."

"Well, I thought. This is how the world works. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along."

"In a scene where nobody with any ambition is really what he appears to be, there’s not much risk in acting like a king-hell freak."

"It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of 'history' it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

"I hate to say this," said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry-Go-Round Bar on the second balcony, "but this place is getting to me. I think I'm getting the Fear."

"What were we doing out here...? What was the meaning of this trip? Did I actually have a big red convertible out there on the street? Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?"

"Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the army: the shark ethic prevails-eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity."

"What's happening here? What's going on? Then you hear yourself mumbling: "Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine. Watch out!...Why money? My name is Brinks; I was born...Born? Get sheep over side...women and children to armored car...orders from Captain Zeep.""

"This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel...total loss of all basic motor skills: Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue-severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally...you can actually watch yourself behaving in the terrible way, but you can't control it."

"This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

"Let it roll!" he screamed. "Just as high as the fucker can go! And when it comes to that fantastic bit where the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that fuckin' radio into the tub with me!"

"The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange."

"The Circus-Circus is what the whole world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos . . . but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space."

"Saturday midnight...Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: "Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes...photos?...Lacerda/call...why not a helicopter?...Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers...heaving yelling." Another says: "Sign on Paradise Boulevard-'Stopless and Topless'...bush-league sex compared to L.A.; pasties here-total naked public humping in L.A....Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbator/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers...house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd""

""Goddamn, What day is it; Saturday? -More Like Sunday."

"The possibility of complete mental and physical collapse is now very real."

"We promised, but the moment we got inside we lost control. The tension had been too great. Debbie Reynolds was yukking across the stage in a silver Afro wig...to the tune of "Sargent Pepper." from the golden trumpet of Harry James."

"Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat."