White Tiger on Snow Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

him most of himself.
    Next I watched him get a haircut and beard shaping. Then we met his trainer, and I read the paper while they squatted and thrust. It was a pleasant enough way to earn three hundred bucks and, feeling magnanimous, I agreed to hit the 101 Coffee Shop for fried chicken and black-and-white milkshakes before strapping him in for the night. As soon as our food arrived, he started to rebutter me.
    “I know this sounds like a bunch of crap now, but your book really did change my life.”
    I stuffed my mouth with fries and gravy. “You’re right, it does sound like crap.”
    “Anyway, I fully intend to buy another copy, no matter how hard it is to find. I still remember that story where you shoplifted Burroughs and Ginsberg and everyone. It was like a reading list to me. I got every book. Except I paid.”
    So had I. The story was based on an incident I had witnessed, when a clerk at St. Mark’s Books caught a punk kid stealing but let him go because his taste was so good. In mystory the clerk, an old-time beatnik, befriends the kid and turns him on to dope.
    “I actually read Kerouac first,” I said, “and immediately ran away to hop a freight train, but the cops brought me home. Then I started on Burroughs. I read
Junky
and ran right out to cop dope.”
    “Me too.” Derek laughed. “I couldn’t wait to try heroin.”
    “I took the bus to Avenue B and got ripped off.”
    “I got ripped off in Hollywood, trying to buy acid after I read
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
”
    “Me too. In Washington Square.” I hadn’t thought of it in ages. “I bought a Disney sticker and licked it.”
    “I paid twenty bucks for a piece of gum.”
    “What about
Cain’s Book
?” I asked him.
    “Great. Though being a junkie on a tugboat sounds nauseating. What about
Basketball Diaries
?”
    “I loved it. Though I didn’t love his poems.”
    We went on to discuss
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Jesus’ Son,
and
Confessions of an English Opium Eater,
dipping too into the whiskey-logged volumes of that fine old American firm Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Wolfe.
    “And Bukowski!”
    “Right, the Poet-King of Beers.”
    What was it, this subterranean river that flowed between addiction and literature, those two measureless seas? And which was the costlier habit? Did I inspire young Derek, up in his bedroom, to start writing or to start sniffing glue? I remembered another story, this one unwritten but true: I no longer owned a single one of those books. I’d sold them all to buy drugs.
    Derek and I drove home in a stupor, burping contentedly, and he seemed almost comforted when I locked him to his bed and said good night. Then I checked my email, and there it was:
Thank you for a letter. I am happy to receive. Miss you too
You are in LA writing the movie? Excite! See you maybe soon
Sunhi
    I was so excite I had to read twenty pages of Derek’s book before I fell asleep.
    We sat side by side on the plane. The Lionheart ceremony was tomorrow, when I’d toast his success with one last cup of pee. Although it should have been a victory lap, our mood was a bit melancholic. Derek confessed that he felt safer with me around to tuck him in and keep him in line with dildos. For my part, though I’d made a decent chunk of money, I still saw a vast, hopeless void ahead. Except for one bright spot: Sunhi.
    I’d answered her last email, sidestepping the question about my screenwriting job, and mentioned how I’d be staying at a swanky hotel in Manhattan. To my delight, she agreed to visit that midnight.
    We put up at the Pierre. Afraid of losing my charge so close to home, I didn’t even visit my apartment. The suite was far larger anyway, with a view of Central Park, and I had my own room. It was as if I were visiting some other, finer city, also by chance called New York.
    Lionheart folks came and went. Derek’s suit was tried on and adjusted. We ordered room service, and I perched on the couch, mooning for