Off The Wall At Callahan's Read online

  —Maureen (last name unknown)

  Suicide isn’t just a cop-out; it’s a rip-off.

  —Jake

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: this quote was inscribed on The Wall a full decade before the debate over one’s Right To Die got going. I’ve checked with Jake, and he confirms that the choice by a terminal patient to terminate his or her anguish does not, in his opinion, constitute “suicide.”

  There is so much yammer-yammer on the air and in print these days that nobody could keep up with it, much less remember it. I mean, look at Richard Nixon’s “rehabilitation.” There’s always somebody who didn’t get the word.

  —Joe

  The most important step in mapmaking is to throw out all the old maps you have in the glove compartment. Forget all the reports of earlier explorers. You can’t discover America if you keep shying away from the edge of the world. And if you do find it, you’ll waste years asking to be taken to Kublai Khan.

  —Priscilla (last name unknown)

  Cheering someone up is a little like breast-feeding, or good sex:

  mutually satisfactory.

  —Jake

  Pregnant women aren’t sick.

  —Doc Webster

  We’ve got a world in which physical miracles are commonplace—and nobody’s happy. We’ve got what it takes to feed all the billions of us—and half of us are starving. You can show a dozen guys murdering each other on TV, but you can’t ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned less obscene than a naked woman. Isn’t it about time we started trying to get a handle on love, from any and all directions?

  —Jake

  Get it right, you’re a star. Get it half-right, you’re a gas giant.

  —Joe

  “Champagne is a barometer of happiness. There is a sort of morosity everywhere.”

  —Yves Bernard, chairman of Moët & Chandon, commenting on poor sales

  Be a rapturist—the backward of a terrorist. Commit random acts of senseless kindness, whenever possible.

  —Jake

  The delusion that one’s sexual pattern is the Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim’s fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observation of reality.

  —Lady Sally

  A shrink’s office from which laughter is not heard as often as tears ought to shut down.

  —Jake

  Never been to a shrink. What could be sillier than a priest who doesn’t believe in the soul?

  —Stephen Gaskin

  Where I come from, anyone who says “Excuse me” is a human being.

  —Joe

  Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me…only he’s an imbecile.

  —Jake

  Old age is not for sissies.

  —Larry Van Cott

  It is usually better to not pull a gun than to screw it up.

  —Mike

  The only kind of payment that always guarantees a handsome return is paying attention.

  —Lady Sally

  It’s amazing how much mature wisdom resembles being too tired.

  —Commodore Aaron Sheffield

  People who wear glasses are lucky; we have stars on rainy nights.

  —Jake

  If you can’t cut the mustard,

  you can always lick the jar.

  —Mary

  Improving morale is simultaneously one of the noblest and most intelligently selfish things a person can do.

  Degrading morale is simultaneously one of the sleaziest and most stupidly self-destructive things a person can do.

  Guess which pays better?

  —Long-Drink McGonnigle

  I must have missed something:

  if a guy has truly absolute power, then what could you possibly corrupt him with?

  Acton got it backward: what engenders corruption is paranoia, the perception of inadequate power. Absolute power renders you absolutely immune to corruption.

  —Mike

  I like fashion—and Porsches, and Rolexes—all that stuff!

  How nice of the morons and drones to wear uniforms, so one can avoid them…

  —Long-Drink

  Popular myth to the contrary, drink is not really a good drug for pain. That is, it can numb physical pain, but will not blunt the edge of sorrow; it can help that latter only by making it easier for a man to curse or weep.

  But alcohol is great for happiness: it can actually intensify joy.

  —Jake

  Hip humor: cruelty pretending to be fun.

  —Mike

  In our society, big lush women and small slight men go through life wrapped around a softball-sized chunk of pain; it breaks some, and makes others magnificent.

  —Jake

  Still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.

  —Edgar Pangborn

  Tyranny has its place.

  Universal freedom would deny my right to restrict Jeffrey Dahmer’s recreational and dietary habits.

  —Doc Webster

  Over the years, I have come to learn that if you get a chance to turn anger into laughter, that will be a good thing to do.

  —Jake

  It claims to be fully automatic, but actually you have to push this little button here.

  —Gentleman John Kilian

  Long-Drink McGonnigle’s Tip for Masturbators:

  Sit on your hand first, until it goes numb.

  Then it’ll feel like someone else’s hand…

  The only real perversions are nymphomania, satyriasis and celibacy…but even they should be permitted for members of a free society. The only sex-related acts I would proscribe—for reasons of public health—are those involving former food or former people, and lying about the state of one’s venereal health or contraceptive status.

  —Lady Sally

  Logic is a way of going wrong with confidence.

  —Stinky Kettering

  A truce between the sexes? Are you out of your goddam mind? What else is there to distract us all from onrushing death? Television?

  —Jake

  Art takes whatever—and as long as—it takes.

  —Lady Sally

  Certain kinds of shit are quite palatable, with a little necessity sprinkled on them.

  —Joe

  What you put your attention on prospers.

  —Stephen Gaskin

  Sexual intercourse vests no property rights.

  —Jake

  Perhaps I could stand loneliness if I were not so useless; perhaps I could stand uselessness if I were not so lonely.

  —Mickey Finn

  “You don’t even know if our species are sexually compatible.”

  “The hell I don’t. I can see fingers and a tongue from here; anything else is gravy.”

  —exchange between Mickey (an alien cyborg) and Mary

  Sometimes, just naming your burden helps.

  —Mike

  Writing is a simple trick: all you have to do is sit and stare at a blank piece of paper, until beads of blood form on your forehead…

  —Larry Van Cott

  There are places on the skull where even a gentle rap will reliably drop a man—but the back of the skull bone is not one of them. Try it yourself. Borrow a blackjack from your mother and sap a random sample of ten guys, as hard as you like. I’ll bet you fifty bucks not more than four of them go down.

  —Joe

  So many men seem to have the idea that what women secretly want most of all (no matter what we say, or even believe ourselves) is a powerful and remorseless engine of flesh impersonally hammering away at us without pause for hours at a time. They become upset with themselves if they cannot deliver this silly commodity. I don’t mean that on the one occasion in my life when it actually happened to me, it was an unpleasant experience, exactly. (Until I tried to get up and walk the next day.) It’s just that may
be once in a lifetime is plenty. And I’ve never seen that guy since, don’t much care if I do.

  I mean, you could buy a machine to do that. They exist. And women don’t buy them. Neither do gay men.

  —Maureen

  There are two kinds of people in the world:

  those who think people can be subdivided into as few as two categories, and those who know better.

  —Doc Webster

  From an ergonomic engineering standpoint, the only pardonable object in the typical human bathroom is the towel rack.

  —Mickey

  I’ve tried my hand at matchmaking a few times, and learned that you should approach it like walking into a chemistry lab and mixing two unidentified beakers of chemicals: you might luck into a stable compound, or you might blow your hands off.

  —Jake

  Usually if you’ve got the guilts, it’s because you did a disservice to someone or something you care about. So what you want to do is go and do a service for someone or something you care about.

  —Jake

  It doesn’t have to be the same someone. It’s best, but sometimes the guilt is nonspecific and it can’t be. And sometimes it’s too late. That doesn’t matter so much. The point is just to release the pressure—equal and opposite reaction. Slow and steady, ideally. What I’m aiming for myself is to achieve balance, equilibrium, about half an hour before I die.

  —Merry Moore’s codicil

  You can love only your equals or inferiors—with your superiors, compassion is the best you can do. And it’s pretty damn good.

  —Mary Callahan-Finn

  Some memories you don’t want to put words on…because that would change them.

  Suppose, for instance, you gave a savage a helicopter ride. The experience would be rich and vivid for him. If, on his return to his village, he told friends he had been in a little cave of ice that flew like a bird, at first his memories would still be true, and different from what he said—but the more times he told or rethought the story, the more “helicopter” would become “flying ice cave”…which, after all, is a lesser thing.

  By naming the inexpressible, you lose it.

  —Edison Ripsborn

  Why does a man try to comb hair over a bald spot? Is he afraid you’ll fail to notice he’s a jerk?

  —Maureen

  The Nazz had them pretty eyes. He wanted everybody to see out His eyes so they could see how pretty it was.

  —Dick Buckley, speaking of Jesus of Nazareth

  Vengeance is counterproductive.

  Not to mention the fact that it gets your soul all sticky.

  —Lady Sally

  When I say that she played with me, for the first time in my life I mean that the way a little kid would mean it. She played with me, like a kid might play with another kid who had been whacked on the head recently and needed some diversion. Well, if this was a sane culture, I mean, and kids were allowed to have sex with each other as part of playing, like God intended.

  —Joe

  Art with contempt in it is always sour.

  —Lady Sally

  If it’s sloppy, eat it over the sink.

  —Tommy Robbins

  Now I remember where I know you from. I looked up “ugly” in the dictionary and they had a picture of you.

  —Long-Drink to Doc Webster

  So isn’t it a pity when we common people chatter of those mysteries to which I have referred, that we use for such a delicate and complicated matter such a very short and ordinary word?

  —Anonymous

  We were not making love, we were fucking. Nothing wrong with that; just not enough right with it.

  —Maureen

  I’ve been in hospitals. They take away your pants. Then they hurt you and starve you and expose you to disease. Then they bill you. A lot.

  —Joe

  All humans—without exception—want to love. No organic or emotional or psychological damage can remove that need. Humans can survive, albeit in pain, without being loved—but lock a man in a dungeon and he will find an ant to love, or try to. The sociopath, who feels no emotions, wishes he could love, and is driven mad by his impotence.

  —Mickey

  If you are feebleminded enough to want to believe in good and bad joss, the Constitution so entitles you—but have the decency not to try and spread the virus.

  —Lady Sally

  “Why do men want to leave right afterward so often? When they could be cuddling and being held?”

  “Sometimes because the intensity of the relief, the depth of their gratitude, makes them feel small or out of control. Sometimes because in their secret miseducated hearts they believe they’ve done something disgusting to you, and are glad of it, and so are ashamed. And sometimes just because they were doing something when the dread compulsion came over them, and now they want to get back to whatever it was.”

  —exchange between Mary and Phillip

  (last name unknown)

  Skills are the flowers you get if you water your talent bush enough.

  —Arethusa

  I don’t know why it should be worse to die without time for pain or regrets…but to me, it is. I’m not looking forward to dying—but I’ve spent a lifetime getting ready for it, and I don’t want it stolen from me.

  —Joe

  “Remember what I told you, kid: life is a shitstorm—and when it’s raining shit, the best umbrella you can buy is art.”

  —Pedro Carmichael to Martin Looder, in the film Tune In Tomorrow, written by William Boyd.

  Try to live your life as though one distant day, your descendants will develop time-travel and cloning skills, and come back to resurrect everyone that ever lived who wasn’t a jerk or a creep.

  Maybe at the end, when your whole life passes before your eyes, it’s a high-speed data dump.

  Endeavor to see that it makes you seem worth the trouble of reviving. Try to be the kind of guest they’ll want at The Last Great, Never-Ending Party At The End Of Time.

  It could happen, right?

  Do you know of a better shot at immortality?

  —Sam Meade

  God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there’s some consolation.

  —Joe

  Don’t belittle yourself. If it truly needs doing, let someone else do it. There’ll be no shortage of volunteers.

  —Lady Sally

  What shall it profit a man if he gaineth the whole world, yet he hath no allowable deductions?

  —Mike

  Any man is willing to believe that he was the best you’ve ever had. He knew it all the time.

  —Maureen

  One can dismiss out of hand any so-called religion that puts out death threats on satirists. It is self-evident that God enjoys rough humor.

  —Gentleman John Killian

  Death to anyone wearing a turbine.

  —racist graffito spotted in Surrey,

  British Columbia, by Mickey Finn…

  the only person on Earth

  who fits the description

  It’s damned odd: the fight-or-flight adrenal rush is supposed to be the evolutionary heritage of millions of years of success in surviving crises…and just about every time it’s ever happened to me, it ruined my judgment or my coordination or both.

  —Jake

  In a world like this, a freak is no bad thing to be. They proved that back in the Sixties.

  —Arethusa

  There are few things on earth as dangerous as a liberal vigilante.

  —Joe

  Darling, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin…and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin
or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two millions years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.