more like a young Don Knotts, or Don Adams (in a crazy caper movie, starring “the three Dons”: Don Knotts, Don Adams, and Dom DeLuise! O.K., so one of them’s not really a Don! Still, check your brains at the door, and prepare for a non-stop rollercoaster ride of laugh-a-minute hijinks with the three Dons!).
The only way you can hope to score with Les, I told myself, sipping my drink and staring into the fire, is in the “handy-woman’s special” category.
Yes…sometimes a formidable/ attractive woman like Les will take on a broken-down loser like myself as a special project,
if she sees some potential
. She’ll buck him up, put some iron in his rubbery backbone, light a fire under his flabby ass, and (ideally) turn him into a success. Then, when he hits it big, she gets a mate who is not only successful, but also profoundly grateful, faithful, if not downright emotionally dependent on her.
In theory, anyway. In the real world, unfortunately, “handy-woman’s specials” have a way of backfiring. Sylvester Stallone comes to mind. His wife, Sasha, helped him go from Palookaville to superstardom. They were living in a coldwater basement apartment in Chicago when she typed his rambling thoughts into what later became
Rocky
. Then he hit the big time, and dumped her, as we all know, for a Scandinavian starlet/model who sent a fan letter with a naked picture of herself attached.
Still, you wind up with the alimony, ladies, which in the case of someone like Sly can be quite significant. I know it’s not adequate recompense for your time and efforts, but at least you can fume and stew in style.
I found I wasn’t tired, not in the least. Somehow, all the booze, lies, lack of sleep, drugs, lack of food, lust, fear, tears and beers of the last 36 hours combined to create a powerful adrenalinlike stimulant, some mysterious alchemy transmogrified the poisons and toxins in my system into an elixir that made me feel well-rested, clear-headed, alert, awake, even…fit. I must be in really bad shape, I think. I’m hallucinating health, I’m experiencing the DTs in the form of a simulacrum of sobriety.Some people brush red ants off their sleeves; I feel like I just ran 30 laps, had a steam bath, rub-down, and cold shower.
I checked out old man Lawson’s bookshelves to see if there was anything to help lower me into sleep. He wanted to be a writer himself, once, Les has informed me. But he got married, had children, went into advertising, and — in part because of his facility for phraseology — quickly rose through the ranks. Wound up forming his own firm. It’s still there, at Bloor and Church, Winston Lawson, Ltd.
He became rich: did the right thing by his family, but he never wrote a thing. The only way his name will be remembered is through his children, and the corporation he founded. Not such a bad thing but that’s not the route I want to take.
His collection is fairly pedestrian. The canon, basically, heavy on the Brits — the Brontës, the Austens, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence, etc., along with a sprinkling of Europeans and Americans, and a fairly heavy medicinal dose of Canadian writers. Also a disproportionate number of books by and about fighter pilots.
Finally, I spot
Hunger
by Knut Hamsun. I’ve heard about him, but never read him. Won the Nobel Prize, later threw in his lot with Hitler and his gang of thugs. The introduction is by I.B. Singer. Funny that a Jew should write the introduction to a book by a Nazi sympathizer, but Singer’s very forgiving, saying only that Hamsun “was guilty of a tragic mistake,” and that his role in modern literature is pre-eminent.
Well, I thought. I’ll bite. I slid into the big leather Barca-lounger, angled the lamp over my shoulder and began to read.
“All this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania — that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him,” I read.
Soon I was transfixed.
I woke up the next morning on
The only way you can hope to score with Les, I told myself, sipping my drink and staring into the fire, is in the “handy-woman’s special” category.
Yes…sometimes a formidable/ attractive woman like Les will take on a broken-down loser like myself as a special project,
if she sees some potential
. She’ll buck him up, put some iron in his rubbery backbone, light a fire under his flabby ass, and (ideally) turn him into a success. Then, when he hits it big, she gets a mate who is not only successful, but also profoundly grateful, faithful, if not downright emotionally dependent on her.
In theory, anyway. In the real world, unfortunately, “handy-woman’s specials” have a way of backfiring. Sylvester Stallone comes to mind. His wife, Sasha, helped him go from Palookaville to superstardom. They were living in a coldwater basement apartment in Chicago when she typed his rambling thoughts into what later became
Rocky
. Then he hit the big time, and dumped her, as we all know, for a Scandinavian starlet/model who sent a fan letter with a naked picture of herself attached.
Still, you wind up with the alimony, ladies, which in the case of someone like Sly can be quite significant. I know it’s not adequate recompense for your time and efforts, but at least you can fume and stew in style.
I found I wasn’t tired, not in the least. Somehow, all the booze, lies, lack of sleep, drugs, lack of food, lust, fear, tears and beers of the last 36 hours combined to create a powerful adrenalinlike stimulant, some mysterious alchemy transmogrified the poisons and toxins in my system into an elixir that made me feel well-rested, clear-headed, alert, awake, even…fit. I must be in really bad shape, I think. I’m hallucinating health, I’m experiencing the DTs in the form of a simulacrum of sobriety.Some people brush red ants off their sleeves; I feel like I just ran 30 laps, had a steam bath, rub-down, and cold shower.
I checked out old man Lawson’s bookshelves to see if there was anything to help lower me into sleep. He wanted to be a writer himself, once, Les has informed me. But he got married, had children, went into advertising, and — in part because of his facility for phraseology — quickly rose through the ranks. Wound up forming his own firm. It’s still there, at Bloor and Church, Winston Lawson, Ltd.
He became rich: did the right thing by his family, but he never wrote a thing. The only way his name will be remembered is through his children, and the corporation he founded. Not such a bad thing but that’s not the route I want to take.
His collection is fairly pedestrian. The canon, basically, heavy on the Brits — the Brontës, the Austens, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence, etc., along with a sprinkling of Europeans and Americans, and a fairly heavy medicinal dose of Canadian writers. Also a disproportionate number of books by and about fighter pilots.
Finally, I spot
Hunger
by Knut Hamsun. I’ve heard about him, but never read him. Won the Nobel Prize, later threw in his lot with Hitler and his gang of thugs. The introduction is by I.B. Singer. Funny that a Jew should write the introduction to a book by a Nazi sympathizer, but Singer’s very forgiving, saying only that Hamsun “was guilty of a tragic mistake,” and that his role in modern literature is pre-eminent.
Well, I thought. I’ll bite. I slid into the big leather Barca-lounger, angled the lamp over my shoulder and began to read.
“All this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania — that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him,” I read.
Soon I was transfixed.
I woke up the next morning on
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