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.