I want to be moved and grooved, taken where I’ve never been before

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Ah, it was good to be back among my people again. And I’m not talking about southerners. I’m talking about Americans. Naked Americans. In the parking lot there were cars and pickups with tags from as far away as Illinois. The fight was being held in an enormous building that must have once been a paint and body shop of some sort, a building large enough to accommodate at least five hundred people. There were as many women there as there were men, but no children that I could see. The building was closed and blue with smoke. If there was a hand there that didn’t have a whiskey bottle or a beer can in it, I didn’t see it. Money was everywhere, balled in fists and folded between fingers and hanging from shirt pockets. There were men standing in $400 suits and others in overalls. There were lacquered women who didn’t seem to sweat at all and other women who would have sweated if you’d shucked ’em down and put ’em in a deep freeze. There was an incredible din, the noise of violence, viciousness, and the lust for blood and money. The naked American. Nothing fake here. Life insurance and retirement plans were forgotten, children were forgotten, there was no future, only the moment, and the moment was savage.

there is an imperative against telling outsiders the truth about anything

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“And the thing I learned is this: I am what I am. I’m crazy, I’m hostile, I got a lot of drive, I got a lot of hate, a lot of fear. For most of my life I tried to put that away and be like other people, and therapy didn’t change me. But what I learned is and what I want to tell other people whether they’re kids or grownups or whatever they are: if you can get to the place where you can take whatever you are and use it out there in the world, not try to put it away and say I’m not angry, I’m a good boy, I’m not scared of the dark anymore … whatever your problem is … instead of going into the corner like a dog and chewing on your own feet. If you can take that … that whatever is in you, and turn it up and say that’s what the hell I am, an I gotta find a way to make that work, then you’ll be OK.” ...
He had eyelashes and an eyelid tattooed around his asshole. It looked just like a kind of bloodshot eye and he could make it wink. For $2 over and above the regular price of admission to the ten-in-one show, you could go behind a little curtain and he’d do it for you. Carnies have nothing but a deep, abiding contempt for marks and what they think of as the straight world, and nowhere is that contempt more vividly expressed than in the Tattooed Man’s response when I asked him why he had the eye put in there.

“Making them bastards pay two dollars to look up my asshole gives me more real pleasure than anything else I’ve ever done.”

I had a Mason fruit jar full of amphetamines and a bottle of Wild Turkey

 

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All I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all those screwworms that I'd dug out of pigs and all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had made me the grit I am and will always be. Once I realized that the way I saw the world and man's condition in it would always be exactly and inevitably shaped by everything which up to that moment had only shamed me, once I realized that, I was home free … I consciously try to write the strongest beginning, whether it is an essay or a novel or anything. I try to write the strongest beginning I can write and try to live up to it. You know, say, "All right, boy, that fucking beginning sings, Jack. You're from the Hell's-a-Poppin' School of Literature and that motherfucker is exploding there." I say that to myself whether it is or not. A writer's the worst judge of his work … I wrote a screenplay for The Gospel Singer. See, I sold The Gospel Singer outright to Larry Spangler, and he sold my screenplay to Tom Jones. I went to see Tom Jones, and he hit on my wife. That was fun, hit on her while I was sitting there. Sally was beautiful though; she's a very beautiful woman. Tom Jones hit on everything that moved. I'm surprised that he didn't hit on me.

"rather than the bullshit most mommas & daddies tell their children..."

 

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A lot of people over the past 25 years have given me a good deal of grief over the fact that there are in my books so many of what they choose to call freaks. I found out early on that I could say more and say it more memorably, more than about what is called 'normal,' by writing about what is abnormal. I expect to catch all kinds of grief about that. Including the charge that I am making fun of them, if you can believe that, that's been leveled against me, that I'm making fun of freaks and that I'm an anti-feminist, that I look down on women, whatever. I have been a feminist before feminists were invented. I have seen what women have been through, they could not own land, and if they had a job it was a schoolteacher or a whore. And they were passed from their daddy to their husband, and to this very day women doing the same work as men are paid less. And that kind of thing just outrages me.

"To be anything, you’ve got to be abnormal. Normal is for shit."

 

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He got out of the car and dragged the flapping hawk after him. A very white hippy sat on the bottom step of the porch with a black Frisbee in his lap. He was sitting up without support but he looked to be asleep, or maybe dead, because he didn’t seem to be breathing. George would have given anything if he could have made the hawk sit on his wrist. He didn’t want to have to walk by the hippy with the bird dangling. He thought for an instant that he was going to be able to sneak by the boy without being seen, but just as he put his foot on the step the boy spoke very loudly, saying:

“Oh, wow!”

“What was that?” said George, with more anger in his voice than he had intended. He was looking right into the boy’s face. The boy’s eyes were closed.

“Far out!” said the boy without opening his eyes.

George bent closer to the boy. “What does that mean?”

“Oh, yeah!” said the boy. He snapped his fingers, then snapped them again.

“Damn you,” said George. He swung his arm and struck the boy’s head with the hanging hawk. “What are you saying to me?”

The boy’s eyes popped open. George could not see the iris. They were so red the sockets might have been bleeding. “Fuck off, Mac,” the boy said. “Go watch your own movie.” He closed his bleeding eyes and snapped his fingers. “Yeah, get it on now,” sang the boy in a lilting whisper, “Get it on get it on get it on get it on get it on get it on get it on.”

It was the kind of dirty life you read about in the newspaper

 

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“You know which direction is the Wal-Mart in?”

She made talking look like some kind of showman’s trick, as though a ventriloquist might have his hand under the back of her blouse. For the first time Hickum smelled himself. Probably the heat, he supposed. He had no answer for the woman on the other side of the car, because he could no longer remember the question.

“You deef and dumb or just what?”

“My grandmother used to say that.”

“Well, damn my soul to hell. Your own grandmother used to tell you you was deef and dumb? That’s a by-God good one!”

“No.”

“No? You playing with me? Because if you are, you might oughta quit. Do you get my drift? I ain’t the sort of person just every Tom, Dick, and Harry plays with.”

“I bet you’re not, not a woman like you.”

“Now he’s being sarcastic, and all I ever asked for or wanted in the first place was for him to tell me the direction the goddam Wal-Mart is in at.”

“What I meant was, my grandmother always said deef, too. Just like you do.”

“And?”

“Well, what I mean is, that’s not the way to say it. The word is pronounced deaf, not deef. But half the people in the South say it the way you just said it, so don’t worry about it.” 

“I only wanted to know where the goddam Wal-Mart is at, and this guy is trying to give me a English lesson. Just let me get this leash off and I’ll give you a frigging lesson you won’t forget real soon.”

“I wasn’t looking for any trouble, lady.”

“I don’t know what you were looking for, asshole, but I know what you found.”

“all of his stuff is full of freaks. It’s just one freak after another."

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Blood leaked between his fingers. The drunk was an enormous hairy man dressed in a bagged-seat sandy bathing suit and nothing else except shower clogs. His wife, a dwarfed blond with a forehead like a cretin, stood just behind him eating a candy apple. She was wearing a black one-piece with the straps unfastened and hanging down the front of her breastless body. Nothing but hope apparently held the suit up. She raised her face from the apple. She had red candy on her upper lip and over her chin. She was drunk too.

“Lady,” said Lazarus. He put his face down next to hers. “Did I pinch your ass?”

She sighed and it looked as if she wanted to cry. “Nobody’s pinched my ass. I’ve told him. Nobody’s pinched my ass. He knows it. But he keeps hoping and hitting people.” The back door of the Volkswagen camper suddenly opened and the tall beautiful boy with the long hair and dead eyes got out and stretched, flinging his arms wide and arching his body and giving a satisfied groan. He was naked. The drunk pushed past Lazarus and hit the boy and knocked him entirely back into the camper. Then with his hands balled on his wide heavy hips he said: “That’s for squeezing my wife’s ass.”