Panorama City

The joke was: What are the three parts of an old-fashioned stove? Answer: Lifter, leg, and poker. Your grandfather and his guests, they had been drinking, all of them laughed hard and I didn’t understand why until I was in the so-called heat of the moment with the woman who would become your mother, and so that’s why I was suddenly consumed with gi

I wondered why Aunt Liz had set me up with a job working at the fast-food place, I wondered why she hadn’t set me up with a job as a therapist. I have always been an amateur at talking and listening, but how hard could it be to turn professional, there wasn’t any equipment involved.

I asked the driver what had happened, maybe I had missed something. He shrugged and said, Random. At which point my mind returned to Paul Renfro, I wished Paul was sitting next to me, making a mess of his papers, Paul would have given the driver a piece of his mind, as they say. The word random is a white flag of surrender, Paul’s philosophy, for u

In his ideal world, everyone knew all the films he knew, and they communicated only by using lines from films. With each line came implications and shades of mood and meaning, all perfectly communicated from one person to another. In his ideal world, he would hardly have to talk, he would only have to quote.

When JB talked about being a conduit, he talked about being a conduit for God, but he was in fact a conduit for Scott Valdez.

Paul said, the lighthouse itself, as a symbol, made no sense. Someone had declared it a Christian beacon of some sort, but a lighthouse wasn’t something that led you to a safe harbor, a lighthouse was something that you avoided at all costs, a lighthouse was something you stayed away from lest you and your ship be dashed on the rocks. The most perv

Oppen, my friend, listen, it’s the way of the world, he who laughs last must first endure the laughter of others. Then they took him away.

The police had questions for me, which I answered truthfully, which is a fine strategy for talking to police, though it can confuse them.

JB had repeated Scott Valdez’s phrases without transforming them at all. What came out was what had gone in. Which meant that the phrases hadn’t even grazed JB’s core, they’d only bounced off a series of mirrors inside JB.

He threw another tray, and could I not smile while I worked, it made him crazy, he said, throwing a third tray, it made him crazy to see my teeth and my eyebrows, he could tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, and he could see that my smile was real, and if it had been fake he could have tolerated it, but he could imagine nothing