Is it being in an airport or hotel knowing no one and with a lot of time to kill? Is it, specifically in this instance as I pen this from a shabby food court, my elbow avoiding a semi-colon-shaped
http://www.pestingers.net
coffee stain left by someone else, a layover here in Cincinnati, looking out over my laptop to a bank of windows that take in a snow swept runway the same color as the dirty white sky?
These days are long gone, but there was probably a time when someone could take you to the airport or meet you at the airport and have a meal or drinks with you there. Haven’t seen you in a while, we ought to get together. Sure, but when? Hey, I know – I have to fly on Thursday, meet me for breakfast at the airport and we’ll catch up. No more, no more.
I’m well armed, I have three books, work, plenty to write, DVDs. I have inspiration, too. Earlier this week I was teasing my EoT colleagues. I told them my piece on Marlowe would be so good they’d want to quit writing in despair at the comparison of their copy to mine. Facetious, of course. But then I turn around and Richard Condon does the same thing to me with 1959’s The Manchurian Candidate. You probably know the movie but, gawd, the book! What story but, more important, what prose! What dialogue!
“I have to be a fraud,” she said, slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset.
The part that made me want to cry was his description of New York, “rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis,” “patrolled by strange looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted ‘Fire!’ and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own.”
All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.
My final destination is New York, by the way. Thank God it’s not Condon’s. But anyway which is the lonelier, the businessman or the writer? The suit coat-clad Ulysses or the troubador that hears a Master sing?
