James Crumley

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue.

Son, never trust a man who doesn__ drink because he__ probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They__e the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They__e usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they__e a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can__ trust a man who__ afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It__ damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he__ heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.

I had done either too much coke or too little, a constant problem in my life.

Stories are like snapshots, pictures snatched out of time, with clean hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.

It wasn__ a party that a Republican could understand--the marijuana smoke sweet on the air, the occasional cocaine sniffle, cold Mexican beer, good food, great conversation, and laughter--but a Parisian deconstructionist scholar might find it about as civilized as America gets. Or at least the one I met, who was visiting at UTEP, maintained. Somewhere along the way, he claimed, Americans had forgotten how to have a good time. In the name of good health, good taste, and political correctness from both sides of the spectrum, we were being taught how to behave. America was becoming a theme park, not as in entertainment, but as in a fascist Disneyland.

Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.