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Show -265 along with fear of devil-possession and a trust in astrologers A new generation of home-grown barbarians was on the move. Maybe the whole damned complicated structure of world-scientific thought was beginning to crack. In retrospect I felt a fondness for old J. Cash, who belonged more to my generation than to Jenny's. With his plastic teeth, his bad knee, his old truck, his whisky with the swampy taste and his being a thief-with all that he had a certain wisdom. I thought that he and Nathan Weinstein might have agreed about an important matter: how to be a man in a failing world. Those old Jewish-Puritan litanies our fathers sang might be the true music after all. Even my father, though he deliberately sang them backwards, never changed a note. "What are you thinking about?" Carlo said. "The day I left home." "What was the fight about?" "It's complicated." In cool weather, when he didn't wear his blue overcoat, Adam wore his poncho. It was a coarse woolen South American affair, dyed in brutal somber colors. My father's bearded head stuck up incongruously through the hole in the middle; his long clever hands hung down below the fringe of red and white balls. "Do you have to go out looking like that?" I asked him. "What?" |