"You can salt it, but salt's expensiveEspecially...
"You can salt it, but salt's expensiveEspecially in Africa, very, very expensiveAnd they steal the salt thereThese people don't have saltYou have to put poison into the salt over there so they won't steal itOther way is to pack the skin up, various ways, either on a board or on a frame, you tie it, and make little cuts, tie it up and dry it in the shadeThat's what we call flint-dried skinSprinkle a little flint on it, keeps it from deteriorating, prevents the bugs from entering--" Much to my own relief, the outrage had given way surprisingly fast to a patient, if tedious, pedagogical assault, which seemed to gall Jerry even more than being blown down by his father's huffing and puffingIt could well have been that very day when Jerry swore to himself never to go near his father's business To deal with malodorous skins, Jerry had doused the coat with his mother's perfume, but by the time the coat was delivered by the postman it had begun to stink as it had intermittently all along, and the girl was so revolted when she opened the box, so insulted and horrified, that she never spoke to Jerry againAccording to the other girls, she thought he had gone out and hunted and killed all those tiny beasts and then sent them to her because of her blemished skinJerry was in a rage when he got the news and, in the midst of our next Ping-Pong game, cursed her and called all girls fucking idiotsIf he hadn't before had the courage to ask gucci book bags anyone out on a date, he never tried after that and was one of only three boys who didn't show up at the senior promThe other two were what we identified as "sissies And that was why I now asked the Swede a question about Jerry that I would never have dreamed of asking in 1949, when I had no clear idea what a homosexual was and couldn't imagine that anybody I knew could be oneAt the time I thought Jerry was Jerry, a genius, with obsessive naivete and colossal innocence about girlsIn those days, that explained it allBut I was really looking to see what, if anything, could roil the innocence of this regal Swede--and to prevent myself from being so rude as to fall asleep on him--so I asked him, "Is Jerry gay?" "As a kid there was always something secretive about Jerry," I said"There were never any girls, never close friends, always something about him, even besides his brains, that set him apart The Swede nodded, looking at me as though he understood my deeper meaning as no human being ever had before, and because of this probing stare that I would swear saw nothing, all this giving that gave nothing and gave away nothing, I had no idea where his thoughts might be or if he even had "thoughts When, momentarily, I stopped speaking, I sensed that my words, rather than falling into the net of the other person's awareness, got linked up with nothing in his brain, went in there and vanishedSomething about the harmless eyes--the gucci indy bag promise they made that he could never do anything other than what was right--was becoming annoying to me, which has to be why I next brought up his letter instead of keeping my mouth shut until the bill came and I could get away from him for another fifty years so that when 2045 rolled around I might actually look forward to seeing him again You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrongYou might as well have the brain of a tankYou get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong againSince the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperceptionAnd yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so bag chloe paddington ill-equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anywayIt's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong againThat's how we know we're alive: we're wrongMaybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the rideBut if you can do that--well, lucky you "When you wrote me about your father, and the shocks he'd suffered, it occurred to me that maybe Jerry had been the shockYour old man wouldn't have been any better than mine at coming to grips with a queer son The Swede smiled the smile that refused to be superior, that was meant to reassure me that nothing in him ever could or would want to resist me, that signaled to me that, adored as he was, he was no better than me, even perhaps a bit of a nobody beside me"Well, fortunately for my father, he didn't have toJerry was the-son-the-doctorHe couldn't have been prouder of anyone than he was of Jerry "Jerry's a physician?" "In Miami "Married? Jerry married?" The smile rolex watches ladies againThe vulnerability in that smile was the surprising element--the vulnerability of our record-breaking muscleman faced with all the crudeness it takes to stay aliveThe smile's refusal to recognize, let alone to sanction in himself, the savage obstinacy that seven decades of surviving requires of a manAs though anyone over ten believes you can subjugate with a smile, even one that kind and warm, all the things that are out to get you, with a smile hold it all together when the strong arm of the unforeseen comes crashing down on your headOnce again I began to think that he might be mentally unsound, that this smile could perhaps be an indication of derangementThere was no sham in it--and that was the worst of itThe smile wasn't insincereHe wasn't imitating anythingThis caricature was it, arrived at spontaneously after a lifetime of working himself deeper and deeper intowhat? The idea of himself neighborhood stardom had wreathed him in--had that mummified the Swede as a boy forever? It was as though he had abolished from his world everything that didn't suit him-- not only deceit, violence, mockery, and ruthlessness but anything | remotely coarse-grained, any threat of contingency, that dreadful i harbinger of helplessnessNot for a second did he stop trying to make his relation to me appear as simple and sincere as his seeming relationship to himself Unless, unless, he was just a mature man, as devious as the next mature mens gucci watches mNo comments:
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