Speedboat Read Online Free PDF

was head of a chemical corporation in Cincinnati. The girl was beautiful. She held séances. She had an Austrian boyfriend, older than she by enough to have been a true Nazi in his time, who threw stones through her window and shouted “Annelise, Annelise,” in a kind of whisper-shout each night while she fed her little alligator halves of worms. Her name, in fact, was Anne. The girls in another dorm bought ducks. The girl three rooms down the hall from me had an orgone box. She believed in silence at breakfast, and used to enforce it by staring craftily at a bread knife with jam on it. An African princess, in her third year and wildly in unrequited love, tried to kill herself one evening by taking an overdose of Epsom salts. She fell in convulsions in front of the dining-room door. Rumors had begun to reach the dean’s office. Something amiss. Anne asked me to hide her alligator in my room for a night or two. I thought, This must be college, what the hell. Three nights I heard dry feet and scales dragging forlornly across my floor. The creature missed the damp. I took it to the bathtub in the early-morning hours. The third day, I left it there. Just before nine, the fascist’s daughter decided to let it be known that her snake was lost. It must have crawled out through its mesh. She thought it had entered the radiator and was now at large in the heating system. It was a very small snake, red, yellow, and black. Bootsy went straight to her room, locked the door, and screamed. For thirty-six hours, she refused to come out. The rest of us, rather dreading the emergence of the snake from our own radiators, avoided our rooms. Bootsy just stayed, and then, the following evening, came quietly out and took a bath. Neither the alligator nor the snake was seen again. Those of us who were studying the English Drama Until 1642 (Excluding Shakespeare) resumed our course. And now I’m here.
    The girl in the hallway of Sam’s building, as I was rushing home, was much too fast asleep. She did not look sick. She was not unkempt. She just did not seem entirely alive. “Hey,” I said. “Excuse me. Are you all right?” She just sat there, hands clasped in her lap, large purse by her side. A man walked in from the street. “Excuse me,” I said. “Does this girl look all right to you?” He looked at her a while. She made no flicker of a move. “Do you know her?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Do you?” He shook his head, crossed the hall to the elevator, got in, and was gone. I went back upstairs and rang Sam’s bell. I said, “There’s something wrong with a girl who’s sitting in your hall.” Sam came downstairs with me.
    “Hey,” he said, shaking her shoulder a bit. She just sat there, asleep. Sam took one of her clasped hands, lifted it, and let it drop. “Do you think we should call an ambulance?” I said. “Maybe we should look in her bag first, and see who she is,” he said. “Maybe she wouldn’t want an ambulance.” I said, “If you look in her bag, though, they’ll think it has something to do with you.” It was the first time I had ever used this sense of “they.” We stared at the girl. She woke up. She was all right. She went home.
    I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort. Some people get a jump on the morning in other ways—speeding on the highways, making money, doing crossword puzzles, a darker tan, a whiter wash, accumulations of various kinds. The thing about doing the Sunday crossword is that halfway through you may find yourself tracking a mind you loathe. I begin, like most people, with the gap definitions, “53 Down rara—,” and continue with the words I know for sure. I find that if I can manage to fill the upper left-hand corner very early, I am never able to complete the rest. I don’t know why. Crosswords start for