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Show Anting Alone Page 256 early seventies. He was a ridiculously bad writer, nearly illiterate (they had him teaching technical writing to engineering majors). He was simply a stupid, stupid man with a style like a dead elephant, who wrote late-sixties nostalgia "stories" which he put into "collections." It was all lowbrow nostalgia cloaked in what-a-jungle-Amerika-was-back-then polemics, set in Colorado, of course. A representative line would be: "Man. That windowpane LSD was so intense. Almost blew us away." He was a crier in Dr. A.'s editorial office, needing to the point of schizoid obsession some kind of publication, some kind of editorial endorsement of his current living death - : the standard death-in-life of the standard former amphetamine addict with the standard slovenly wooden house full of the standard hideous unfulfilled cunt of a wife with the eyes of a dead reptile, whose hobbies were feminism and character assassination, and whose perineum was torn and suppurating from having the standard yellow baby who was almost four now but still could not walk or talk or sit up, the standard wrung-out dishrag of a methedrine baby - fold her over backwards, tuck her away like a bad sixties memory, the death of Jimi Hendrix, Vietnam, strychnine, all rolled together in swaddling clothes. . . But it wasn't this pitiful personal life, nor even his fried grey cells, that made Sam's colleague the despicable slug that he was. It was the fact that he had wasted the most valuable experience that humans are allowed on this planet: he'd wasted his earthly ration of pain. Pain, as everybody who has felt it knows in their deepest guts, is potentially the most useful experience we can have, the one experience besides love that, properly exploited, can spur us on to higher, more intense forms of |
