Your laughter is like cool water to me," I said. I felt my heart sob at these strange words, and it would not have been hard to summon tears: Strange. " "You are so serious all of a sudden," she told me. "I am not any one thing," I said. (137)

I had never been with a woman for longer than a night, and they had always been whores. And while throughout each of these speedy encounters I tried to maintain a friendliness with the women, I knew in my heart it was false, and afterward always felt remote and caved in. I had in the last year or so given up whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness.

Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man.

...but I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.

It is true, I thought. I am living a life.

I lay in the dark thinking about the difficulties of family, how crazy and crooked the stories of a bloodline can be.

I thought, When a man is properly drunk it is as though he is an a room by himself--there is a physical, impenetrable separation between him and his fellows.