"Lavie Tidhar - Midnight Folk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tidhar Lavie)

Midnight Folk
Lavie Tidhar

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“Bukowski made me writer letters to dead people. “You do what you have to do”,
he said, “and I will do her”; he pointed at the heavy woman in the corner of the bar
and lit a cigarette. We got drunk with Ginsberg in Paris, and passed out under stars
burned out like dripping candles. “You do what you have to do,” Ginsberg said,
“and I will do a little of this acid.” Burroughs was already shooting at the tourists
with his shotgun. He saved the rocket launcher for special occasions, and was
understandably upset when the police confiscated it. “Pigs”, said Bukowski,
smoothing down the betting slip on the table, like a bookmark for a chequered
account of his life. Imaginary conversations, imaginary lives; only the deaths were
real.”

MY NAME IS SAL PARADISE, and I’m a private investigator.

The skies outside my shoe-sized apartment’s windows were like a dull grey
numbing pain that perforated through the urban landscape like a burrowing worm,
eating away at the rows upon rows of identical brick houses. It was winter, and I
was alone.

I wasn’t always a private investigator. I used to be on the road. I’ll tell you
about it later.

I arrived in London, England, one rain-drenched evening in November,
looking for nothing more than a refuge, a safe-house, a place where I could be alone
and where my past could be safely filed away in the great sweaty tumbling reams of
paper that were left behind me in New York when I fled my old life.

I took the train to town, in turns sweating and freezing as the aftershocks of
Benzedrine hit me repeatedly. I was a washed-out boxer getting pummelled on the
ring of life, and the punches were coming in like a pile-up of cars on the Golden
Gate bridge, fast and painful and without an end in sight. The people on the train,
gentle Englishmen and delicate girls with pale, beautiful faces, looked at me in alarm
but left me to my thoughts. I came to learn England is a place where the mad
are—not revered, no, but allowed a quiet respect, a space around them like a shield
of protection and comfort.

I’m sorry, I’m not making much sense, am I. My therapist says I’m getting
better. Making progress, he says, and laughs like a big ol’ Texan cowboy, stroking
his great big white beard all the while. He so reminds me of Carlo Marx sometimes I
want to jump up and hug him and dance around the room with him and talk about
poetry.

But I don’t, anymore. I’m getting off Speed, and Carlo Marx is dead and
besides, this is London, not New York.