Drop City - T.C. Boyle

Date: 2022-06-28
| and every time he said it they all broke up, and then Ronnie rolled
| a joint and she felt so good she made it with both of them.
Chapter: 1


Date: 2022-06-28
| That was what the Keristan Society had to say, but what she was
| thinking, or beginning to think, in the most rudimentary way, was
| that Free Love was just an invention of some cat with pimples and
| terminally bad hair and maybe crossed eyes who couldn’t get laid
| any other way or under any other regime, and she wasn’t having it,
| not tonight, not with Ronnie and what’s her name
Chapter: 1


Date: 2022-06-28
| Propitiate
Chapter: 1


Date: 2022-06-28
| ’d been talking nothing, talking good shit and groovy and the like
Chapter: 2


Date: 2022-06-28
| LATWIDNO, Land Access to Which Is Denied No One, dig
Chapter: 2


Date: 2022-06-28
| would he be worth the investment of time and breath or would he just
| work his way through the women, smoke dope and drink cheap wine all
| day and then show up for meals with a plate in his hand? These were
| smiles with an edge, and they made him feel shy and unworthy.
Chapter: 2


Date: 2022-06-29
| Yeah,” he said, staring at a place just over her shoulder and
| nodding as if he’d been there with them through every turning
| in every soulless gloom-blasted dead-end town Oklatexahoma could
| offer. “I guess. But isn’t that what’s wrong with the whole
| consumer society – brand names? – as if my soap’s better
| than yours? See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet. Buy, buy, buy, kill,
| kill, kill, eat, eat, eat. That’s what the war’s all about
| – products, brand names, keep the economy going and who gives
| a shit if a couple hundred women and children get napalmed every
| day?” She sat up and put a hand on his arm. “Whoa,” she said,
| “whoa. I’m just talking, that’s all.” “That’s okay,” he
| said, and he was looking into her eyes now, no problem at all. “So
| am I.”
Chapter: 4


Date: 2022-06-29
| And this was a crisis, whether people seemed to realize it or not –
| the toilets in the main house were overflowing and there was a coil
| of human waste behind every rock, tree and knee-high scrap of weed on
| the property, and that was primitive, oh yes indeed. Involuntarily
| primitive. Nobody even had the sense to bury it, let alone dig
| a latrine. They didn’t think, didn’t want to get hung up on
| details. They’d dropped out. They were here. That was enough,
| and the less said about it the better. But before long, as Marco
| knew from experience, the county health inspector would have plenty
| to say, and it wouldn’t reflect a higher consciousness either
Chapter: 5


Date: 2022-06-30
| Howard – he was thirty-eight years old, with a head that was
| almost perfectly flat in the back as if he’d been hit with a
| board the moment he popped out of the womb – Howard was the sort
| of man who never threw anything away and never took anybody’s
| word for anything
Chapter: 9


Date: 2023-06-15
| she was dealing cards to Richard Schrader as if dealing cards were
| the chief activity of the human species on this planet and why
| hurry to the end of the deck when you’d just have to deal them
| all over again
Chapter: 9


Date: 2022-06-30
| slippers. How had he ever gotten himself into this mess? What
| had he been thinking? A woman – a good-looking woman, a stunner,
| with strong hands and a stronger back – advertises for a man? What
| kind of world was that? And how could he ever have expected anything
| other than heartbreak and humiliation out of the whole mess
Chapter: 9


Date: 2022-06-30
| peripatetic
Chapter: 10


Date: 2023-06-15
| “My wife’s going to have plenty to keep her occupied,”
| Sess said, a hint of slyness creeping into his voice, “what
| with skinning out carcasses, tanning hides, hauling ice up out of
| the river for water, cutting wood for the stove, sewing, mending,
| feeding the dogs – feeding me, for that matter. Isn’t that what
| wives are for?”
Chapter: 10


Date: 2022-07-01
| the band had been reduced to a single fiddle sawing away at the
| melancholy traces of a classical education
Chapter: 10


Date: 2022-07-01
| deracinated
Chapter: 10


Date: 2022-07-01
| when she and Sess got there, when they’d beached the canoe and
| sprinted up the bank with no breath left in them, the carcasses
| were already stiffening round the ragged dark openings where the
| bullets had gone to shelter
Chapter: 10


Date: 2022-07-01
| Okay,” Reba breathed, straightening up and smiling now, her face
| a cauldron of tics and wrinkles and wildly constellating moles,
| “give her the eggs, and milk, and if it’ll keep her out of
| my hair because I need a day off sometimes too, believe it or
| not, just half a glass of the juice, okay?” Alfredo was deep in
| conversation with Mendocino Bill – “Hobbits are three feet tall,
| just the size of kids, because it’s a kids’ book, so get over
| it, already” – and he had nothing to say
Chapter: 11


Date: 2022-07-01
| Soul on Ice, Ficciones, Cat’s Cradle, Trout Fishing in America,
| Steppenwolf
Chapter: 11


Date: 2022-07-01
| lingam
Chapter: 12


Date: 2022-07-01
| Agape
Chapter: 12


Date: 2022-07-01
| ingrate
Chapter: 13


Date: 2022-07-01
| Verbie didn’t say. But she sounded freaked out.” “She always
| sounds freaked out.” He was reaching for her, to pull her back
| down into the sleeping bag, but she pushed his hand away. “I’m
| scared,” she said. “After today … the kids, the horse,
| I mean. The whole thing. We’re out of control here, Marco –
| everybody’s out of control.” “Yeah,” he said, giving her
| a smile so faint it was barely there. “But isn’t that the point
Chapter: 14


Date: 2022-07-01
| no music, no candles, nobody playing chess or checkers or settling
| into one of the grease-slicked armchairs with a book. There was
| litter, though – newspapers, magazines, unwashed plates, cups and
| glasses, somebody’s striped shirt, a pair of muddy boots – and
| where there was litter, there was life
Chapter: 14


Date: 2022-07-01
| Perseverance Furthers
Chapter: 14


Date: 2022-07-01
| He looked terrible. Looked as if he’d been buried a week and dug
| up again. But that voice, that tone – there was something raw and
| desperate in it, a quaver she recognized from all those late-night
| disquisitions on God, the futility of life and how impossible it
| was to find a good FM station in the flatlands, and she understood
| in that moment how much all this meant to him. Ronnie. Pan. He
| needed Drop City as much as she did. “Come on, Norm,” he
| nagged. “Come on.”
Chapter: 14


Date: 2022-07-01
| seraglio
Chapter: 15


Date: 2022-07-01
| They were the women. They were the soul and foundation of the
| enterprise
Chapter: 15


Date: 2022-07-02
| She had that little-table look in her eye, he could see it, could
| see the way she was calculating.
Chapter: 16


Date: 2022-07-02
| That was what she was buying into, and it was a matter of choice, of
| her own pleasure and inclination, as much as it was about survival
| – all those little lives would feed her own, as if she were some
| god on high demanding sacrifice
Chapter: 17


Date: 2022-07-03
| Norm came forward, boxy in his overalls, rings glittering on his
| fingers. The bell tinkled at his neck. From the goats atop the bus,
| a forlorn bleat of disenchantment: they wanted down, they wanted out,
| they wanted to graze their way to Boynton. Norm bellowed out his
| name – “Norm Sender!” – and pumped the man’s hand in a
| conventional handshake before turning to the woman and showing the
| gold in his rotting teeth. “We’re Drop City, is what we are,
| avatars of peace, love and the higher consciousness, come all the
| way up from California to reclaim my uncle Roy’s place – Roy
| Sender’s? – on the sweet, giving and ever-clear Thirtymile. And
| we’re all of us pleased to meet you.”
Chapter: 20


Date: 2022-07-03
| Roy Sender was no hippie and never could be because he believed in
| making it on his own, in his own way, no matter how poor the odds,
| and that he was the kind of man who’d lie down and rot in his
| own skin before he’d take a government handout
Chapter: 21


Date: 2022-07-03
| Sess blew through the door like a hurricane, all clatter and gusto,
| and he had Pamela by one hand and the hippie wineskin by the other,
| feeling dense and lighter than air at the same time, and so what
| if the big greasy sack of a nephew was right on his heels and all
| the rest of them too? They were people, weren’t they, just like
| anybody else? Dirtier, maybe. Lazier. They smoked drugs and screwed
| like dogs. But the world was changing–men had hair like women,
| women wore pants like men and let their tits hang loose, and who
| was going to argue with that? Wake up, Boynton, that was what he
| was thinking, wake up and join the modern world. But he wasn’t
| really thinking too clearly and Pamela would never nag – one beer,
| that was all, one beer and they’d stay in the shack tonight and
| go upriver first thing in the morning and let Wetzel Setzler and
| the rest of the town fathers scratch their heads over a busload of
| hippies who wouldn’t know a moose from a caribou. Or a hare from
| a parky squirrel, for that matter
Chapter: 21


Date: 2022-07-03
| greenhorn
Chapter: 21


Date: 2022-07-03
| Sess looked to Pamela. She was giving him the
| let’s-go-home-and-pack-the-canoe look, and she was right: they
| had to get upriver, had to split and dry salmon if they were going
| to have fish come winter, had to tend the vegetables, haul wood,
| erect the new room and fit it out with a stove – and little tables,
| don’t forget the little tables. Still, Sess reminded himself, this
| was Roy Sender’s flesh and blood standing here in his sandals and
| beard like one of the lost prophets, and that had to mean something,
| if only for Roy’s sake. Before he could think, and with his voice
| lubricated with all that beer and the sweet hippie wine that rode
| its own currents and seemed to settle flush in his ringing ears,
| Sess heard himself say, “Why don’t you just camp at my place
Chapter: 21


Date: 2022-07-03
| manufacture and trade
Chapter: 22


Date: 2022-07-04
| semaphore
Chapter: 22


Date: 2022-07-04
| It’s the earth, I guess,” she said. “Nature. You know,
| rejecting material things and living close to nature so you can feel
| the heartbeat of God – or whatever you want to call that force,
| Gaia, the oneness of being, nirvana. And my brothers and sisters are
| part of it – they’re my support group and I’m theirs. I mean,
| just look at me – I’m sitting here by this out-of-sight river
| in this amazing place having a cup of tea with you, and that’s
| something I never would have been able to do on my own.
Chapter: 23


Date: 2022-07-04
| This wasn’t California. This wasn’t Indiana or Texas or New
| Jersey. They were here in this country and they were going to stick
| it out, no question about it, and it was beautiful here, paradise
| almost, but it was a whole lot dicier than any of them could have
| dreamed in their infancy back in California when there was nothing
| more to fret over than is there gas in the car and do they have
| cassava and artichokes down at the supermarket yet? They’d been
| lulled by the sun, by the breath of the river and the scent of the
| trees and the syrupy warm days that went on forever. But now there
| was an edge. Now they knew
Chapter: 23


Date: 2022-07-04
| And that was what she was flashing on – the Jersey Shore
Chapter: 23


Date: 2022-07-05
| littoral
Chapter: 24


Date: 2022-07-05
| smudge fires
Chapter: 25


Date: 2022-07-05
| Merry was giving her a look of undistilled horror. “But to kill
| another creature, another living soul, a soul progressing through all
| the karmic stages to nirvana” – she paused to slap a mosquito on
| the back of her wrist with a neat slash of her hand – “that’s
| something I just couldn’t do.” “You just did
Chapter: 25


Date: 2022-07-05
| sodality
Chapter: 26


Date: 2022-07-06
| Angela was there, Maya, Creamola, Foster. “We’re hip,” Bill
| was saying, and he backed up against the stove to warm the big
| palpitating lump of his backside, “it’s just that nobody really,
| I mean, we just didn’t get it together. Plus the pumpkins were like
| the size of grapefruits when that first frost hit – ” “Snow,
| you mean,” Creamola said.  “We carved a zucchini,” Angela put
| in, and there it was on the windowsill, a collapsed green loaf of
| a thing with a couple of holes poked in it and a pathetic flicker
| of candlelight emanating from somewhere in its pulpy depths. “And
| Reba had Che and Sunshine dressed up like devils – they made the
| rounds, trick or treating here, and then at Star’s cabin and the
| one I’m sharing with like Erika and George and Geoffrey.”
Chapter: 27


Date: 2022-07-06
| can’t believe it,” Merry kept saying, and Jiminy was there too,
| he saw now, looking daggers from one of the top bunks
Chapter: 27


Date: 2022-07-06
| he could have died for a glass of iced tea or a root beer – or
| a root beer float, A&W, just walk up to the window and give them
| your order on a muggy hot upstate New York day that scorched the
| skin off the back of your neck, the cicadas buzzing in the trees
| and the waxed cup perspiring in your hand
Chapter: 27


Date: 2022-07-06
| Crabs. Crab lice. They were one form of life on this planet,
| evolved to fill a niche, as the evolutionists would say. And what
| was the ideal form of life, one that exists independently, preying
| on nothing, creating its own food source through photosynthesis? The
| plant, the tree. Yes, but given that life form, given the tree and
| the leaf, evolution presupposes the insect to feed on it and the
| fungus to break it down, and the bird to feed on the insect and the
| cat on the bird. And here he was, with a gun in his hand and the
| snow driving bristles in his face, doing his level best to prey on
| another and grander form of life. And why not? If the crabs could
| gnaw at his brothers’ and sisters’ groins, then why couldn’t
| he – why couldn’t they – gnaw at the leg of the moose
Chapter: 28


Date: 2022-07-06
| And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly
| woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener
| and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise,
| lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry
| then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of
| a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There was something there,
| a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he’d shot while
| it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground,
| impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? Weak and
| bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he’d put in it –
| a porcupine, that’s what it was, the humped and hobbling old man
| of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs
Chapter: 28


Date: 2022-07-06
| ’s cold enough out there to piss and lean on it
Chapter: 29


Date: 2022-07-06
| That was what communal life was all about, passing things on. But
| what about Marco? What about the responsibility for him, for getting
| seriously worried here, for organizing a search party – were they
| all just going to pass that on too
Chapter: 29


Date: 2022-07-06
| immitigable sky where disaster was in the offing every minute
| of every day.  All right. For him it was the chainsaw and the
| outboard motor, but for her it was the clock, the calendar, the
| thermometer. If it weren’t for the clock she wouldn’t know if
| it was six in the evening or six in the morning, and people might
| argue that it didn’t make a lick of difference, because morning
| and evening were
Chapter: 30


Date: 2022-07-06
| Right,” she said, “right,” as if she’d just solved an
| equation that had been baffling a whole team of mathematicians for
| weeks, “why don’t you tell me about
Chapter: 30


Date: 2022-07-06
| The wind always seemed to find the smallest cracks and slivers,
| as if exposing a cabin’s flaws was its whole purpose and function
Chapter: 30


Date: 2022-07-07
| Pan had the yoke, the plane in a bank left, Joe aiming, but wait
| – these weren’t wolves, were they? No, no, they weren’t –
| they were dogs, and that was a sled, and two figures separating
| themselves from the flowing script of the page below, people, men,
| and what was Joe thinking, had he gone blind or what? “Joe!”
| Ronnie shouted. “Joe, those aren’t wolves!
Chapter: 31


Date: 2022-07-07
| But Sess had the gun in his face, had the muzzle of it resting right
| on the bridge of his nose, the cold kiss of the barrel marking
| the place where his black bushed eyebrows met, and Joe Bosky was
| struggling to say something, final words, and what he said, even
| as Sess Harder lifted the gun out and away from him and rested it
| over one solid moon-white shoulder, what he said was, “Fuck you
Chapter: 32


Date: 2022-07-07
| Over the years the roof poles would rot, the sod would give way
| to the pull of the earth, the walls would buckle, the floorboards
| subside. Birds would nest in the stovepipe, mice in the bureau
| drawers. On a given night, in the still of winter, a wolf would
| trespass in the yard, divine the last dim lingering whiff of the
| scent of Bosky, Pan, Sky Dog, and lift a leg to eradicate it.
| Sess could appreciate that, the natural order – let it stir,
| let it settle again
Chapter: 34