| OCR Text |
Show Anting Alone Page i79 paranoiac frame of mind. He sapped himself of what little physical vitality he'd possessed in the first place. So that he just got fatter, greasier - even more middle-class-appearing than before, even more repugnant to the rich youngsters than before. Vicious cycle. Sam was starry-eyed about the rich, like F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose very name is getting tiresome these days). But, Sam was too quintessentially lower-middle class; his Mormon peasant ancestry too much in evidence; the vestiges of unself-conscious robust energetic enthusiastic simple peasant stomping whoopee shit uncoolness were too evident in his behavior. Once in a while he forgot himself and laughed with his mouth open, like he used to do before he got his pubic hair and his class-consciousness. And that was enough to convince the rich kids that he was not deep-down jaded and cool like them. So they treated him with open contempt, considered him a source of mild irritation; and occasionally they would use him as a source of mild amusement. One of their favorite pastimes was to make the big harelipped goon wrung out on strychnine right in his mom's own kitchen. Right before Sam's mom's eyes Sam would almost OD on spurious mescaline - or even angel dust on one late occasion, when his mom almost allowed herself to notice something. "Sammy! Sit up straight at the table!" she'd cried. "Wake up!" - and everybody laughed openly, the bankers' children, the politicians' children, the psychiatrists' children, the surgeons' and dermatologists' and Anaconda executives' snotty little sociopathic children, they laughed openly and asked for some more cookies and grape juice. And Sam - well, he was only a teenager! He checked his fly to see |
