Sublime

Happy Place HE HATED GROCERY shopping, hated the time it took. But he came up with a method. People bought the same things, more or less. So he would look for someone of his type, sneak up behind them and roll their fully-laden trolley off to the checkout. It made life interesting. Often there were things he would never have bought; once there was

one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

I can tell you now that this was my first meeting of Samir, who called himself the Seller of Dreams. But I came to know him as an unserious man, a liar, and a thief. That is why I killed him.

“the king of gamblers,” Nick the Greek.

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

Vic is a pointy-faced man of about forty with slicked-back dark hair who looks like a weaselly sort of hood, or maybe just a weasel, with his small eyes and vicious smile. Before landing here at the DMV, Vic worked as a bouncer, a roadie, a security guard, a fitness trainer, an auditor, and a head cook—name a job where you got to intimidate people

C’est ainsi que Cassady prend d’emblée dans son esprit une place de « marginal intégral », incarnation de l’individu sans concession, personnage qui ne peut que plaire à Kerouac, le déplacé-déclassé. « Merde pour les Russes, merde pour les Américains, merde à tous. Je vais vivre ma vie de feignant et de bon à rien, un point c’est tout », écrit-il d