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Show •77 stole his wonderful yellow truck and drove it to New York; I abandoned it in mid-Manhattan on a Saturday night, parked under the puffing Camel Cigarette sign, ladder and boom extended to the smoker's mouth, from which they seemed to stick down like a long rigid red tongue. "If we haven't found out what happened to my father by the end of the week we'll go back to L.A.," I told Morgan. "Why so soon?" "Because this town gets my goat. It hasn't changed at all. I see all the places where I used to play when I was little and it reminds me that I'm going to be an old man someday." With no teeth, no hair and no urges, I thought. I looked at Morgan's legs with something like regret already. Even with the greatest of luck I was more than halfway through my life and I hadn't learned a damn thing yet. In particular I hadn't learned how to give it all up gracefully. "We all get old," Morgan said. "I don't know why. How does it work? Do you really believe you were a little child once? I don't. And someday I'm going to be walking around with bifocal glasses, brown spots on my hands and a shrivelled-up ass, but do you think I believe that lie either? It was somebody else in short pants thirty years ago, and it'll be another person then too. But what I want to know is what's going to happen to me. My true self. Do you understand?" |