Caldwell almost bust a gut laughingHe liked his...
Caldwell almost bust a gut laughingHe liked his good time, Caldwell
Dove was visibly shocked"I can't say I've ever seen anything like thatGod, isn't it disgusting, you're out in the open air like this, and the chaplain's probably giving his services now
"Well, we really shouldn't be talking like this on Sunday," Conn agreed, "but what the hell, we're all men He lit a cigarette, and speared the match in the sandThe crack of Dalleson's carbine sounded again, and a few shouts came from the water where some officers were having a water fight in the shallow surf"I've made a study of parties," Conn said, "and there's just two ingredients to have a good one, enough to drink and some willing slitsReady, willing, and able
Hearn squinted along the sandYou could reduce it probably to four kinds of partiesThere were the ones that made the newspaper society columns with the senators and the important representatives, the industrialists, the high brass, the foreign dignitaries, even his father had gone to one of them once, and been miserable no doubtBut then they all were miserable thereIt was the highest flowering of an industrial capitalist culture, and a good time was segregate from the gucci bag black social forms, the power swappings, the highly elaborated weather talkEveryone hated everyone else as a matter of course, for if they came to do business they found they could not, and if they came as snobs bearing gifts they were contemptuous of the men who had the power and lacked the conventional aptitudes
There were the hotel parties with field officers and congenital lower-level brass, the American Legion -- Washington Extension, and big small-business men with nice factories in Indiana, and call girlsA desperate boredom always lay over those things until they got drunk, and then they all had a wonderful time, and went back with refreshed loins and new Pullman tales to their desks in Washington and IndianaSometimes, if you could get a hold of a representative who was a regular guy he would come along, and your business would be consummated with a couple of drunken bear hugs, a sentimental cognition that everybody was a hell of a good guy, and a call girl yelling into your ear, "Break it up, honey, break it up His father had never mentioned it, but of course he had gone to that kind of party too
There were the parties his own friends gave, with the quiet sustained drinking and louis vuitton replica bags essential joylessnessAll the American college intellectuals, the ones who weren't sick, with their clear logical voices, their good manners, their kindness, their tact and their miserable, dreary and lucid intelligencesThey were all in government now, or they wore bars and had hush-hush jobs, and they talked of Roger who had been lost on some OSS mission, or they analyzed politics, sometimes hopefully, sometimes sadly, with a detached and helpless and intrinsically superior attitudeThere was good wit, incisive but always peripheral information, and the dry dejuiced hopelessness of all of them with their rational desiccated minds and their wistful contemplation of lusts and evils they would never understand with their bodiesWilliam Blake angels, gray and clear, hovering over horseshit
And Dove's partiesBut of course they were common to San Francisco and Chicago and Los Angeles and New York at timesThe American Legion -- Washington Extension, Junior AuxiliaryOnly with something moreIn a proper light with proper glasses, these parties were sometimes magical and sad, festooned with all the echoes of all the trains that had brought them there, all the advance awarenesses of the great hollow hermes birkin 35cm stations that would bear them away again, And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbitsAnd they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phonyIt came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn't have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseasIts origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfieldsBut nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with themAnd they did magical things like pouring whisky on each tiffany's necklace other's hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmenOf all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too oldand damn if we didn't find out she had hair growing clear up her belly," Conn said, finishing a story"If Jane knew the things I've done
Their talk had ended by revolting himHe was becoming a prude, Hearn decidedHe was disgusted and there wasn't sufficient cause for itSlowly he extended his arms and legs, lowered himself gradually to the ground, feeling the muscle tension in his stomachThere had been an instant when he was tempted to hug Conn and Dove with his arms, and rather deliberately knock their heads togetherAll right, he was toughBut there had been too many thoughts like that lately, in officers' mess, the time he wanted to strike the General, or just nowIt was the trouble with being a big manHe raised his head and stared across the bulk of his body, pinching the roll of fat that had started on his bellyUnder the hair that covered his chest his flesh had become whiteFive years more, ten at most, and he might be having to buy it from womenWhen a big man's body started going, it fell apart 925 tiffany and co. jewelry quic