After the wrestling match

. . . we began calling him Israel.

***

Joseph Potter had decided to die. It was a nagging, incessant thing — this desire for a grand death, an important and poetic death. And it obsessed him long before he accomplished it. “I have decided to die,” he would say, “pleased to meet you.” Pat you on the back. Light a cigarette. Find some drugs.

He was a writer, and when his first novel came out, it was certainly one of those touchstone “events.” His great talent as a writer was, perhaps, nourished by the fact that he wasn’t handsome — artists can never be too beautiful — and what struck you most when looking at him were a pair of tired, effeminate eyes.  Set in plush clouds of yellow-white marble fat, his eyes had no white or colour, simply long dark tunnels, leading blindly away from the light of the world.

But it must be said, to look at him you couldn’t help thinking that beneath the dreariness, there was an undeniable handsomeness, hiding — as if you could remove a layer and discover not bones and veins and muscle, but a perfect Brando, a model of the dark, beautiful America from which he ran screaming, and returned to searching for his death.

***

to be continued, and surely, re-edited

- Tobin Dalrymple, Mon. May 4, 4:03 a.m., Buenos Aires

*** UPDATE: I deleted half of this. I'm working on it and I think I'll probably scrap the whole thing later. Waste of your time, I know.

But while you are here, here's a blog-bite for you: last night returning by cab at 2 am I met a pure bread Nazi - he was the driver. Born in Germany, now some 60 or 70 years old, his daddy was an S.S. trooper and died in the war. "I am a racist!" he tells me with vigour, and pride. "But nothing to do with black or whites . . . for me, it's all about religions."

I was gonna tell you about how after a few inquiries he took me to a secret meeting place and we sacrifice a goat, all wearing hoods coloured with blood; but it never happenned, and if I tell you it did, I'm just being drunk.