Stolen Pleasures Read Online Free PDF

he had eaten, not the kind of breath to accuse anybody with.
“And that meant me, of course, because I’m what’s known as your constant companion, that meant old ignoramus Berger. For a guy who’s got all the famous relatives you’re always bragging about—big dam builders, big mummy diggers, big marine commandants—you ought to be able to come up with a miserable nickel once in a while.” He held out his hand for the coins that David was searching for and found.
    â€œWhat the hell.” David gripped his guitar between his knees again, settling back uncomfortably. “You sore because they wanted me to play?”
    He shifted into low to start the car again. “You don’t know what anybody wants, you’re too busy playing all night.”
    The boy waited a minute, then sprang the big psychological question with a rare timidity in his voice: “You sore because it’s me that’s going to play for Torres tomorrow?”
    â€œJaysus Christ, I’m sittin’ next to Freud here!” he cried, disgusted.
    They went on in silence over the long bridge. The deputy at the toll gate reached out his hand to take the coins that Berger pressed into it with his gray-gloved fingers, suede driving gloves to keep his hands warm so that he could commence to play soon after entering a room, but David wore no gloves, came with cold, thin hands into a room and played slickly, charmingly, his first number and afterward blew on his fingers to impress upon the audience how cold they were still and how much they had accomplished even so.
    Along under the neons of the motels, assured by the rainbow lights and the traffic signals that the time had passed for his abandonment on the bridge, the boy spoke again, “Listen yourself, I’m
not the one who’s destroying himself, you worry about yourself. Some day you’re going to explode, a hundred different colors and a sonic boom. Big little David, folks will say for miles around, got too big for himself. God, you slaughtered that Purcell. If you play that for old Torres he’ll ask for a change of rooms after you’re gone.” He unloaded now all the complaints accumulated against the boy—criticism of his teacher-companion that David made to friends: “Berger could be the best, good as Tomas Torres, but he doesn’t look the part, hasn’t got the urbanity, short you know, big shoulders, like a wrestler’s that don’t fit him, big face, and the way he telegraphs his mistakes to you before he makes them, like ‘this hurts me worse than you, dear audience.’ But the best, really the best, could have been the best, but came to it too late, a jazz musician until he was thirty, still got the mannerisms of a jazzman in a nightclub, smiling at the audience, smiling at himself. You can’t do that with a classic guitar. He’s good all right but he should have come to it at eighteen, twenty, then he would have been great.”
    â€œThings come back to me!” Berger was shouting. “For a man of few friends, like you say I am, they come back to me!”
    He drew the car to the curb, leaned across the boy to open the door. “Get out here, man. From here it’s just a mile to your mother’s place. I’d take you there but it’s a mile out of my way.”
    â€œUnder the green-blue motel neon, David stepped out to the sidewalk, knocking his guitar case against door and curb and hydrant.
    â€œYou’re doing it to yourself,” said David again, warningly.
    â€œYou keep knocking that guitar around like a dumb bastard with a normal IQ!” he bellowed, slamming the door.

    He went through the amber lights of intersections as if they were red and he was drunk. Somebody else on the verge of fame, somebody else awaiting the encircling arm of the already great, sent him, Berger, over the edge, down into the abyss of his own life. It was not fame he wanted for