In Memorium
"And I will give him the morning star."
That is from Revelation - Once again. I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.
And there is also the fact that I spend a lot of my time on the road, renting typwriters and hustling FAX machines in strange hotels and always too far from my own massive library at home to get my hands on the wisdom that I suddenly realize - on some sweaty night in Miami or a cold Thanksgiving Day in Minneapolis - I need and want, but that with a deadline just four or five hours away it is utterly beyond my reach.
You cannot call the desk at the Mark Hopkins or the Las Vegas Hilton or the ARizona Biltmore and have the bell captain bring up the collected works of Sam Coleridge or Stephen Crane at three o'clock in the morning....In some towns Maria has managed to conjure up a volume of H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain, and every once in a while David McCumber would pull a rabbit like Nathanael West's Cool Million out of his hat or his own strange collection in his office at the Examiner. ....
But not often. Fast and total recall of things like page 101 from the Snowblind or Marlowe's final judgement on Lord Jim, or what Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger when they were both on their knees in front of Abe Lincoln's protrait in the White House on some crazed Thursday night in July of 1974 are just about impossible to locate after midnight on the road, or even at noon.
It simply takes too much time, and if they've been sending bottles of Chivas up to your toom for the past three days, they get nervous when you start demanding things they've never heard of.
That is when I start bouncing around the room and ripping drawers out of the nightstnads and bed-boxes and those flimsy little desks with bent green blotters that they provide for travelling salesmen - looking for a Gideon Bible, which I know will be there somewhere, and with any luck at all it will be a King James Version, and the Book of Revelation will be intact at the end.
If there is a God, I want to thank Him for the Gideons, whoever they are. I have dealth with some of His other messengers and found them utterly useless. But not the Gideons. They have saved me many times, when nobody else could do anything but mutter about calling Secutiry on my unless I turned out my lights and went to slepp like all the others....
HST
Paradise Valley