"Joe Gores - The Second Coming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gores Joe)

Joe Gores

Though this story was originally published in the sixties, you can hear the eighties and nineties in
it-hear Joseph Wambaugh and James Ellroy and Sandra Scoppettone and Sara Paretsky and
Marcia Muller in it Hear race riots and angry cops and sad blown-out urban ghosts skittering on
the very edges of existence. And hear hotshot TV reporters who would much rather tell us lies
than truths.

And, of course, you can hear in it the kind of writer Joe Gores himself would go on to
be-inventive, restless, eager, and, most especially, unafraid of new approaches to old writing
problems.

Gores spent a long time in Hollywood working on movies and TV shows. Fortunately, he’s done
his penance by producing four new and wonderful novels in a reasonably short span of time.

Even in his comedies, and he’s written some good ones, there’s always an abiding melancholy in
the protagonist, a man desperately trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense at all.



The Second Coming

“But fix thy eyes upon the valley: for the river of blood draws nigh, in which boils every one who by violence injuries
other.”

Canto XII, 46-48 THE INFERNO OF DANTE ALIOHIERI



I’ve thought about it a lot, man; like why Victor and I made that terrible scene out there at San Quentin,
putting ourselves on that it was just for kicks; they were a thing with him. He was a sharp dark-haired cat
with bright eyes, built lean and hard like a French skin-diver. His old man dug only money, so he’d
always had plenty of bread. We got this idea out at his pad on Potrero Hill-a penthouse, of course-one
afternoon when we were lying around on the sun-porch in swim trunks and drinking gin.

“You know, man,” he said, “I have made about every scene in the world. I have balled all the chicks, red
and yellow and black and white, and I have gotten high on muggles, bluejays, redbirds, and mescaline. I
have even tried the white stuff a time or two. But-“

“You’re a goddamned tiger, dad.”

“-but there is one kick I’ve never had, man.”

When he didn’t go on I rolled my head off the quart gin bottle I was using for a pillow and looked at him.
He was giving me a shot with those hot, wild eyes of his.

“So like what is it?”

“I’ve never watched an execution.”