Flats And Quake - Softcover

Wurlitzer, Rudolph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0982015143 ISBN 13: 9780982015148

Verlag: Two Dollar Radio, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

“[Rudolph Wurlitzer] is a writer whose continuing existence is very meaningful to me.”—Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm

“One of the most unique and fascinating American writers.”—Dennis Cooper

“A major American writer.”—Library Journal

“If you can legitimately judge a writer by fellow scribes who honestly extol his work, and count on his inhabiting a plane of popularity and celebrity similar to the one where his endorsers dwell, then Rudolph Wurlitzer should be a name on the lips of sage critics and fans of zesty, transgressive postmodernist fiction everywhere. Wurlitzer might be the closest thing we have to an actual cult author, a highly talented fiction writer.”—Paul DiFilippo

Flats is a post-apocalyptic exploration of the human self. Submerged amidst a cast of characters named after ruined American cities who compete over a shrinking fringe of space, Flats is a modern masterpiece of the counterculture.

Quake chronicles the unraveling of society after an earthquake strikes 1960s Los Angeles. By painting a bleak picture of what people are capable of doing to one another in extreme circumstances, Quake is nihilistic and haunting, as well as uncomfortably foreboding. And more relevant than ever.

Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of five novels, including The Drop Edge of Yonder, Nog, Slow Fade, and the nonfiction book Hard Travel to Sacred Places. Wurlitzer wrote the screenplays for such films as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Walker, among others, and he co-directed the film Candy Mountain with Robert Frank.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rudolph Wurlitzer is an acclaimed screenwriter and the author of The Drop Edge of Yonder, Quake, Flats, Slow Fade, and the nonfiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places.

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QUAKE

a novelBy RUDOLPH WURLITZER

Two Dollar Radio

Copyright © 2009 Rudolph Wurlitzer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9820151-4-8

Chapter One

I WAS THROWN OUT OF BED. THE MIRROR FELL OFF THE WALL AND shattered over the dresser. The floor moved again and the ceiling sagged towards me.

It was dawn and I was in the Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles. There was another trembling through the room and what sounded like wires snapping and windows breaking. Then it was very quiet. I lay back on the floor and shut my eyes. I was in no hurry. There was a high prolonged scream by the pool and then a splash and another shorter scream. I stood up and raised my arms over my head and tried to touch my toes, an early morning ritual I never perform. The wall next to the bed was moving as if it was alive and I walked into the bathroom.

I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. The door banged open in the other room and a lamp crashed to the floor. A small man in black silk jockey shorts crawled towards me. His black hair was parted in the middle and there was an oblong birthmark the size of an ostrich egg on his left shoulder. He managed to crawl to the doorsill of the bathroom before he collapsed. After a long moan, he began to cry.

"The ceiling fell in on me," he whispered. "My hips are crushed. My leg is broken and something bad is happening inside. You got to help me."

He propped himself up by the door, his eyes full of rage and shock.

"I'm room six," he said. "Next door. The phones are out. It's going very fast. I figure it for an earthquake. I'm scared, man. It's going altogether too fast."

Blood was forming on one side of his mouth. His head tilted back. Then he threw up in short violent spasms. When he was finished he wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and looked up at me again.

"It's going to be a long day. But if we're not dead now we probably won't be. I'm hemorrhaging or something. I'll wait here. But don't forget me. You forget me and I'll come after you. Everything is in my wallet. Room six. I got credit cards."

He sank down to the floor and put his arms over his head. He had curled in on himself like a baby. He was very still. I knelt down beside him. He was dead. I stepped over him and walked to the bed. I couldn't find my pants and I pulled off a sheet and twisted it around me. Then I went outside. There were no lights on and I could hear the dial from a portable radio being twisted quickly from station to station. The cabins were arranged on two landings around three sides of the kidney-shaped pool. The open side faced Santa Monica Boulevard where a broken water main squirted a stream twenty feet in the air and a telephone pole swayed forward, as if about to fall across the length of the street. The cabins were a faded blue and white and the brown plywood doors were chipped and smudged from banging suitcases and prodding boots, the law and otherwise. It was a reasonably priced, almost cheap motel, plastic and transient. Except for me. I was becoming known as a regular. I had fallen in three months ago from New York and was waiting for my money to run out. Then I would either borrow more or cop some and take a ride somewhere else, San Francisco or Vegas, it didn't matter. I wasn't above panhandling, spiritual or otherwise, movie extra, weekend carpentry or genteel smuggling. But New York was different than L.A. It had taken time for me to get it together, to get used to a different set of rituals and corruptions. But all that didn't matter right then. I walked over to the diving board on the cabin side of the pool and crawled out to the end. I wanted to sit on the most precarious space available, as if to prove to myself that the event was already over. No one was around except for a body across the pool huddled beneath a bath towel on a yellow chaise lounge. It was suddenly very peaceful, as if the earth had never trembled at all. I lay on my stomach over the length of the board, my arms hanging over the water.

A foot rubbed against my ankle at the end of the board. "Either let me in or give me the fucking key."

I looked up at her torn white sneakers with one pink toenail visible and then at her faded blue jeans. Two inches of her round stomach were exposed between her belt and pale orange tee shirt.

"You're not Jerry," she said. "I thought you was Jerry."

I twisted around to face her. A few feet behind and to the left of her a barefooted fat man in cuffed brown slacks and white undershirt took two steps out of cabin seven, then a quick third, and considered the dawn. A small haggard woman in curlers and an open blue dressing gown that exposed one deflated breast stepped slowly after him. She was crying and scratching her hip with one hand and trying to put the other arm around him. He shrugged her off, preferring to fold his arms across his sagging chest and swing his head back and forth like it was loose on its pivot. The girl on the diving board kicked my leg.

"You look like you're in shock," she said. And then again. "You look like you're in shock."

I looked up at her. Her heavy breasts more than filled her tee shirt and her neck was short and crouched between her shoulders like she was about to snap. Her features were arranged in a strangely geometric order, a kind of precise oasis between her wild brown curls sticking straight out from her unusually small head. She was around eighteen.

"Did the ceiling fall in on you?" She prodded at my foot. I began to suspect that she was not altogether in control.

"I got out all right," I said. "Nothing happened."

She stepped back and stared off across the pool, her arms folded across her breasts. She seemed unable to move one way or the other. A young man in a brown and gold flecked business suit, without shirt or shoes, stepped briskly out of cabin twelve. He cupped his hands around his milk white face and shouted across the pool.

"7.6 on the Richter scale and you should get off the diving board. Did you hear what I said? 7.6 on the Richter scale."

He walked off to the side of us and stood near the office. The girl dropped her arms and then slowly raised one hand and gave him a slowly rotating finger. He stared open mouthed at her, the back of his wrists braced girlishly on his hips. Two stout, whitehaired women rushed out of cabin twenty-three and leaned over the iron railing above him. The one on the left wore blue hot pants, the one on the right a rose patterned black and white mumu. The one with the hot pants leaned further over the railing.

"Did you say 6.5?" Her voice started as a yell but broke into a whimper. The other woman slapped her across the face and then slapped her again. The man in the brown and gold flecked business suit stepped out a little and looked up at them.

"7.6," he yelled. "The whole San Fernando Valley might go. They got a dam out there and if the pressure builds up any more you can forget about it."

The girl sat down cross-legged on the diving board. It was an awkward position for her but she seemed determined to hold it.

"Fuck them," she said. "Pressure. What do they know about pressure? I don't care if the whole state goes. I'm up to here. All I can think about is the goldfish falling out of all the tanks. There must be eight million goldfish in this town."

I wasn't watching myself, so to speak, but the action around the pool. Somehow I felt a need to delay my own reaction as long as possible.

The manager of the motel stumbled out of the office. He was old and white haired and wore baggy yellow flannel...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Two Dollar Radio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0982015143
• ISBN 13: 9780982015148
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 242
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar