"Beat that you little troutsniffer"

The Sticky Bandits

New York City, New York

1992

Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window

"The sunny mornings I'd sit on the patio enjoying my books, my kief and the Catholic churchbells. . . And on heavenly starlit nights just to lean on the roof rail (concrete) and look to sea till sometimes often I saw glittering boats putting in from Casablanca I felt the trip had been worthwhile. But now on the opium overdose I felt snarling dreary thoughts about all Africa, all Europe, the world--all I wanted somehow now was Wheaties by a pine breeze kitchen window in America, that is, I guess a vision of my childhood in America -- Many Americans suddenly sick in foreign lands must get the same childlike zen, like Wolfe suddenly remembering the lonely milkman's bottle clink at dawn in North Carolina as he lies there tormented in an Oxford room, or Hemingway suddenly seeing the autumn leaves of Ann Arbor in a Berlin brothel. Scott Fitz tears coming into his eyes in Spain to think of his father's old shoes in the farmhouse door. Johnny Smith the Tourist wakes up drunk in a cracked Istanbul room crying for ice cream sodas of Sunday afternoon in Richmond Hill Center."

Jack Kerouac

Desolation Angels

blood

"It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire in history, and its arrogant overlords were loathed by their oppressed neighbors across the Irish sea. The other -- small, poor, with virtually no valuable natural resources -- supported a people conspicuously lacking in political gifts and afflicted with an extraordinary incidence of alcoholism. "It is a very moist climate," Churchill once observed. Yet endowed with immense charm, romantic vision, and remarkable genius, it was the homeland of Swift, Shore, Yeats, Joyce, Millington Synge, O'Casey, O'Faolain, and Dublin's Abbey Theater."

"In August 1919, when the Dail was proclaimed an illegal organization, Churchill, then still minister of war, told the cabinet that the time was not propitious for an Irish solution. Yet something had to be done. Violence had become the official policy of Eire's real leaders. The relationship between their "Irish Republic" and Great Britain amounted to a state of war. In the United States -- where he had raised over five million dollars from Irish Americans -- De Valera, describing negotiations between Dublin and London, said that 'the hand of Irishmen held out in good faith was spurned and spat upon.' Eire's hands now held grenades or revolvers. That year the IRA was responsible for eighteen murders of Englishmen, seventy-seven armed attacks, and an attempt to ambush the viceroy. In 1920 it grew worse. On March 26 the resident magistrate in Dublin was dragged from a streetcar and slain on the spot. Clementine wrote Winston: 'This new Irish murder is very terrible.' He replied that Irish terrorism was 'really getting very serious. . . What a diabolical streak they have in their character! I expect it is that treacherous, assassinating, conspiring trait which has done them in bygone ages of history and prevented them from being a great responsible nation with stability and prosperity.'"

William Manchester

The Last Lion: Volume I

the dope fiend and the artist

There he goes poking through his bathrobe pockets looking for a lost coidenetta, forgetting he already ate it the night before -- He has the typical bleak junkey dresser, with a full length mirror on each creaky door, inside which hang battered coats from New York with the lints of the pockets strong enough to boil down in a spoon after 30 years of drug addiction -- "In many ways," he says, "there's a great resemblance between the dope fiend so called and the artist so called, they like to be alone and comfortable provided they have what they want -- They don't go mad running and looking for things to do 'cause they got it all inside, they can sit for hours without movin'. They're sensitive, so called, and don't turn away from the study of good books. And look at those Orozcos I cut out of a Mexican magazine and put on my wall. I study those pictures all the time, I love 'em -- M-m-m-m-m."

He turns, tall and wizardly, preparing to begin a sandwich. With long thin white fingers he plucks a slice of bread out with the dexterity you might expect from tweezers. He then puts ham on the bread in a meditation that takes almost two minutes, carefully arranged and rearranged. Then he puts the other bread over it and carries the sandwich to his bed, where he sits on the edge, eyes closed, wondering if he can eat it and going hm-m-m-m. "Yes sir," he says, starting to search in his bedside drawer again for an old cotton, "the dope fiend and the artist have lots in common."

Jack Kerouac

Desolation Angels

1965