Speedboat Read Online Free PDF Page B

me in the middle, or they don’t work out. I have never been any good at bridge, chess, or Scrabble, either. Some people gain momentum on envy or rage. I tend to blast myself out of bed into situations that are drastically odd, with a moral edge, perhaps, and an element of risk. I took a plane once from an Angolan island of eccentrics to what was then Biafra, on a Joint Church Aid load of fish. In the thunder and lightning, and Valium and a sense of incongruity, it was fine.
    There were only three journalists there then, in the penultimate days of Biafran misery. We had been told to bring cans of food, jerry cans of gasoline, and a lot of Scotch. One evening, we drank some of the Scotch in a bungalow, which was several miles from mine. At sunset, I thought I should go home, meaning my bungalow. One of the journalists said he knew the way, even in the dark. We could walk there later. The rain was total. We got lost. I could not quite believe it. Planes overhead somehow. We kept bumping into sentries, who could not believe it, either. Finally, we found my bungalow. I’m out. We’re still here. Biafra’s not. Before the Six-Day War, I had bought a Patek Philippe watch and a Chanel suit. I don’t know why. They had a song on the Biafran roads. “He is dead. Got to bury him. He died in a state of courage. May his soul rest in peace.”
    The truth, I would like to say here, is as follows. But I can’t. In some places, it may already have begun, the war of everybody against everybody, all against all. “The Great Game,” the lady philosopher used to say, quoting from Kipling, “is finished when everyone is dead. Not before.”
    I often wonder about the people who linger over trash baskets at the corners of the city’s sidewalks. One sees them day and night, young and old, well dressed, in rags—often with shopping bags—picking over the trash. They pick out newspapers, envelopes. They discard things. I often wonder who they are and what they’re after. I approach and cannot ask them. Anyway, they scurry off. Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
    I visited the University of California at Santa Cruz once. It was rich, and near the sea, and full of redwoods. The students who did not care to walk to class were conveyed by surreys with fringes. There was no real way to stage a student strike, since most things were permitted. Attendance in the classes was not taken. The only way to be on strike was to attend a class, and wear a black, identifiably striker’s armband. The students wanted to strike on behalf of the local people of Santa Cruz—who loathed them. The strike was a boycott of grapes. The students picketed the local stores that sold grapes. The locals bought up all the grapes and waved them in the students’ faces. There seemed to be no understanding among anybody. The troopers were there to protect students from club-bearing locals. The students thought the locals were oppressed by troopers. Education, perhaps, in its own way, suffered. “The only way you can get even a quorum of a class here,” a professor told me, “is with a class in Sensitivity Training or Transcendental Meditation.” I left soon.
    One night, in Paris, during the last days of the Algerian crisis, I was studying in a common room at the Cité Universitaire—where I used to live and where four apparently interchangeable Americans incessantly played bridge. A bomb went off. The explosion was enormous. Windows smashed. Doors fractured. The reception desk blew up. The lights went out. The first words after the thunder and reverberations in the darkness were an imperturbable, incredulous, “Two hearts. “ Another night, one of the intermittent bridge players wandered, barefoot, into the common room. She was known for