the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt eight)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

I felt the impulse to add: I’m not as cowardly as I seem.

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt seven)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

“Thanks,” I said to her.

“I’m fat and pesty,” she answered, “but I’m also very loving.”

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt six)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

We were so busy with the simple events of everyday life—rather, with the happiness of being together—that I swear I completely forgot about the seventeenth, which is our anniversary. After dinner one night, goodness knows how, I remembered the date and right then and there I got up the courage to confess my neglect. Courage, every once in a while, receives its rewards. You’ll never guess what Diana said.

“I forgot it too. If people love each other all days are equal.”

“Equally important,” I said, articulating slowly and contentedly.

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt five)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

“What do you love most about Elvira?”

Even his double chin blushed bright red. After a while he said something which filled me with amazement.

“Maybe one loves the image he has.”

“I don’t follow you,” I admitted.

“I’m lucky in that Elvira never contradicts that image.”

“Good. If I love Diana physically, perhaps I’m not so wrong. Perhaps Diana is no less her physical self than Elvira the image you have of her. One doesn’t have to dig so deep.”

Aldini answered, very matter-of-fact, “You’re too intelligent for me.”

I don’t think I’m more intelligent than other people, but I’ve thought a lot about certain subjects.

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt four)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

One thing seemed obvious: in my troubles I would do well not to ask for understanding from the women around me. Ceferina took on a smug air as if to say, “Didn’t I tell you so?” I would like to know what the old woman was blaming me for. I didn’t marry my sister-in-law, I married the missus. You’ll say, “It’s a well-known fact, a man thinks he’s marrying a woman and he’s marrying a whole family.” Let me make it clear that, if necessary, I’d marry Diana all over again, even if I had to carry Adriana Maria, Don Martin, and Martincito on piggyback. It’s true that in those days I was really sorry that my sister-in-law looked so much like the missus. I was always confusing one with the other, which kept startling me by making me feel that I had Diana back. I’d say to myself, I’m going to do my best to make sure she doesn’t fool me again. Believe me, in my situation, it’s not good to have a similar person in the house, because it always reminds you of the real one’s absence.

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt three)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

The dog school occupies the spacious but bumpy lot which, when we were kids, had been the place of Galache’s orchard and chicken yard. The building, as the German calls it, is the old lodge, only now it’s older, with its dried-up wood—since Galache’s times it hadn’t been given what you call a paint job—and with rotten, unnailed boards here and there. I was always amazed that the orchard produced such fragrant peaches, because the whole place was covered with the smell of chickens. Now, it smells of dogs.

I don’t know why I became so suspicious as I got close to it. You’ll say, “You’re afraid of dogs.” Believe me, that’s not it. It was a fantasy: I imagined that by entering without warning I would discover a secret that would bring me sorrow. I thought, Things should be open and aboveboard. I’m telling you this detail because it shows how my mind was working; before knowing a thing, as if I had forebodings of the trials they’d put me through, I was flying a bit off the handle. I thought, Things should be open and aboveboard, and I started calling out. After a while the professor came out. He didn’t seem happy about my visit.

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt two)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

That night of my birthday, Professor Standle, talking about dogs, cornered everybody’s attention. It was remarkable how those present became interested not only in dog training, but in the school’s organization. I am the first—if the professor is not lying—to recognize the school’s results, and I won’t deny that for the space of one or two minutes those animal stories bewitched me. While others spoke of the advantages and disadvantages of the training collar, I let myself be carried away by pure fantasy and in my heart of hearts I wondered if those who denied that dogs had souls were in the right. As the professor says, between their intelligence and ours there is only a difference of degree, but I’m not sure that difference always exists. Some pupils of the school develop—if I can rely on the German’s accounts—just like honest-to-God human beings.

the last book I ever read (Asleep in the Sun (New York Review Books Classics) by Adolfo Bioy Casares, excerpt one)

from Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares:

I know that some people said I wasn’t lucky in marriage. Outsiders would do better not to talk about private affairs, because they’re generally wrong. But who would dare tell the neighbors and the family: you are outsiders.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt fourteen)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

Rheinhardt, after unsteadily introducing several of the speakers and retiring to the gunfighter’s labyrinth for a last marijuana cigarette, had conceived a passion for the greenness of the grass.

“Farley,” he kept saying, “look at that grass!”

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt thirteen)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

He took a five dollar bill from the bar, walked to the girl and put it in her hand.

“I bring you good news,” he said. “Never – ever – in your entire life will you see me again. I solemnly assure you of that. Under no circumstances.”

The girl took the money without looking at him.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt twelve)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

He poured out a shot and drank it, grimacing.

“You’re the only one I know who gets so mad on pot.”

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt eleven)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

“Why, you see,” he said swallowing, “they send me her benefits because I manages her business affairs.”

“Doesn’t she have to sign for them?”

“He signs for them,” Clotho said.

Hollywood Rainey began to perspire under his makeup.

“Uh, I sign for them,” he said very slowly, “yes, uh that’s correct. I act as her powerful attorney.”

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt ten)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

“How?” Marvin said. “Why does anyone come to California, man. The sea, the sky, the air, man!”

“This isn’t California, Marv,” the girl said gently. “This is Louisiana here.”

Marvin started to his feet in alarm. “Louisiana,” he cried. “Louisiana! Holy shit, man, that ain’t no place to be! We gotta get out of here.”

“Louisiana is where New Orleans is, man,” the girl explained. “There’s no way around it, actually. California was another time.”

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt nine)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

“We had raccoons,” Marvin said. “At night – raccoons.”

“Raccoons of the mind,” Rheinhardt said idly.

“Fuck that,” the girl said.

“Yeah,” Marvin said. “Raccoons are groovy, but not so groovy are the raccoons of the mind.”

“Oh,” the girl said, shuddering now and moaning with revulsion, “the dirty raccoons of the mind.”

“That’s the word kind of raccoons there are,” Bogdanovich told them with a scholarly air. “The ravagey little raccoons of the mind.”

“Are they in the mind’s California?” the girl asked fearfully.

“No,” Bogdanovich said, “the raccoons are actual raccoons.”

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt eight)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

I went in there a son of a bitch and I came out the same way except now I have some money and I’m eating shrimp.

You like shrimp, don’t you?

I love shrimp. I have always loved shrimp. What’s the matter, do you find that gross? Is that a betrayal of the spirit or something, my whining fat boy of a soul? Do that bug you?

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt seven)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

In Shreveport, the local newspaper announced its sponsorship of a quick-draw contest with cap pistols as a feature of the annual rodeo; the contest open to all white adults.

There followed a digest of the week’s segregation protests including a number of militant statements by Negro leaders that was marked for attention by Southern subscribers. People were being locked up in McComb and Jackson; there was a march in Birmingham, a boycott in Montgomery, a little street rough stuff in Memphis and New Bern, North Carolina. In Mobile, a Baptist minister pointed out that it was legally impossible for a colored man to get his feet wet in the Gulf of Mexico for some six hundred miles, unless he contrived to fall off a shrimp boat. A Negro citizen of Biloxi then horrified weekend bathers by darting past desperate policemen and immersing himself to the neck – the beach was closed. The subsequent evening by the moonlight was punctuated with exchanges of small arms fire on the edge of the Negro district.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt six)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

Engineers! Engineers were forever standing behind glass windows looking at you, they did the same thing at radio stations. It was possible to imagine them loving in their glass cubicles, considerations of comfort and sanitation aside. But of course they did not live in them, they lived in houses way the hell outside of town where all the other clean young men lived.

Like this cat, Rheinhardt thought, exchanging looks with the window again, he lives in a house way the hell outside of town. A nice little house, certainly. He’s an engineer. He has this little house, and a little wife who goes to the supermarket in tight pants, and a little kid. And a little car. Every evening, like zoom he tells them goodbye and he drives his little car like a maniac so he won’t be late to stand behind a glass window and watch a room full of stooges futz with soap. The word was very strange, Rheinhardt thought, all sorts of things were working you never ordinarily picked up on. Like engineers. He would have to ask Farley about that some time, Farley always knew what was going on.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt five)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

Farley and Natasha were lovers like Eloise and Abelard. Through her, Farley discovered how far you could travel with your shoes off; it occurred to him that in all his years as a physical fitness consultant he had really been missing the whole point. To him, Natasha was spikenard from the East, an oriental sesame of dandy surprises; she was the end of all he required from the race of women, his gold and frankincense and myrrh. He loved the way she looked at him. Farley had heard of Eloise and Abelard.

Natasha thought Farley was like the ultimate in cosmic philosophy; her friends allowed he was a pretty cat – she told them he got his muscles from having been a lox fisherman. Farley was a gas – could they go to Nova Scotia and like live on an island and like wring their existence from a cold and hostile sea? Could he play bagpipes? Natasha thought the Church of the Vision of the Power of Love was the End Bit. She had heard of Eloise and Abelard, too.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt four)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

So she stayed on at the bar, seeing little of the baby, which went sickly about a month later and was pale all the time and didn’t take much nourishment and had convulsions finally and died. After that, things were a little blurred. She had moved around a lot. That was most of her life it felt like, the four years since then. It had turned out that there were barmaids and barmaids, and if you stayed at it long enough you just naturally made the second category. And sooner or later by some law of circulation you ended up in Texas. You gotta go up or you go down, they said – down always turns out to be Texas and you can figure anywhere else is up.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt three)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

But I got to come back, she thought. Woody, that was his name, had not had the .38 that night and she was alive. Best probably to go back to West Virginia when she had the money. If she could get a job in New Orleans she might get it together. But then there wasn’t anyone much back home. Her mother was long dead and her father had died in Cleveland without an address anybody knew. An old unknown aunt still lived in Welch, but any other family she had were in Birmingham or Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago. Everybody was leaving – the mines were mostly closed or closing; the men took their full unemployment, sat around drinking and watching television for six months and then packed up.

Geraldine watched the sky, dark now, and the towers, glowing like the lights of a city. Like Birmingham.

She and L.J. had gone to Birmingham after they were married – she was sixteen then, he was around eighteen – they had gone down looking for work. Rotten it had been. The rooming house was rotten, the baby was all the time catching cold, like back there in Galveston it seemed always to rain. And L.J., whose family was Hard Shell and temperance, had started in to drink most of the time. He was always out, hanging around – they were always broke.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt two)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

Another bourbon – thank you – and a cigarette – maybe if he took a shower again – yes – but quite suddenly he saw very clearly a girl with gray eyes which were very sad and friendly, who smiled ruefully around a front tooth which had been broken in a fall in the wash room of Knickerbocker Hospital the day after a baby named Rheinhardt was born to her – who used to break into a run suddenly while they were walking in the street, who liked to laugh and cried because she couldn’t play the piano and Rheinhardt taught her to play a little of Chopin and who once wrestled with this Rheinhardt when he was berserk and paranoid with pot and he had slapped her three times until she cried from the pain and then put her hands on his shoulders and said, “All right, all right,” and turned her face away – and suddenly he was sitting bolt upright on the hotel bed, trembling, his mouth open in shocked surprise at the fact that his insides had been ripped out and stamped on and stuffed down his throat in the half-moment since he had stopped thinking of snow and Central Park.

the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt one)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

It was light but sunless. The sky was a low gray sheet over an eternity of wet witchgrass that stretched to meet it in far-off mist; it was gray desolation, a waste. He lit a cigarette and watched it sweep by the window. The bottle, he remembered, was empty at his feet.

Where was it he had gone to sleep? Gulls. A foghorn. The sea? A hotel porch where electric light shone on tortured iron flowers. Mobile. And it was New Orleans; he was going to New Orleans now.

the last book I ever read (Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong, excerpt eleven)

from Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong:

When the girls were hustling they would wear real short dresses and the very best of silk stockings to show off their fine, big legs. They all liked me because I was little and cute and I could play the kind of blues they liked. Whenever the gals had done good business they would come into the honky-tonk in the wee hours of the morning and walk right up to the bandstand. As soon as I saw them out of the corner of my eye I would tell Boogus, my piano man, and Garbee, my drummer man, to get set for a good tip. Then Boogus would go into some good old blues and the gals would scream with delight.

As soon as we got off the bandstand for a short intermission the first gal I passed would say to me: “Come here, you cute little son of a bitch, and sit on my knee.”

Hmmmm! You can imagine the effect that had on a youngster like me. I got awfully excited and hot under the collar. “I am too young,” I said to myself, “to even come near satisfying a hard woman like her. She always has the best of everything. Why does she pick on me? She has the best pimps.” (I always felt inferior to the pimps.)

the last book I ever read (Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong, excerpt ten)

from Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong:

When I got home Daisy was not in. She was sitting at the window of her friend’s house with about ten bricks sitting beside her. But I did not know this. Just as I was about to put the key in the lock one of Daisy’s bricks hit our door. Wham! This really scared me. To my surprise, when I turned to see where the bricks were coming from, I saw Daisy cursing and throwing bricks faster than Satchel Paige. There was not anything I could do but keep on ducking bricks until her supply ran out. And when it did she came flying downstairs to fight it out with me. Quick as a flash I stooped down and picked up one of the bricks she had thrown at me. I cocked up my right leg as though I was going to pitch a strike for the home team and let the brick fly. It hit Daisy right in the stomach. She doubled up in a knot screaming: “You’ve killed me. You’ve killed me.”

I don’t know what else she said because I was not there to hear it. Someone had called the police station (people will do those things) saying a man and a woman were fighting, and they were certainly right. When I heard the patrol bell ringing I tore out for the back fence and sailed over it so fast I did not even touch it. I could hear the policemen blowing their whistles and shooting their pistols into the air to try to stop me. That did not faze me. I was gone like the turkey through the corn.

the last book I ever read (Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong, excerpt nine)

from Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong:

Clarence loved buttermilk. When the buttermilk man came around hollering “But-ter-milk. But-ter-milk,” Clarence would wake up and say: “Papa, there’s the buttermilk man!”

Clarence was going on two, and he was a cute kid. He became very much attached to me, and since I was a great admirer of kids we got on wonderfully together. He played an important part in my life.