Carl

“Clean clothes. Gentle talk. Someone to wake up with. Maybe relationships would work if they were based on present-tense actions that never looked for a future beyond the next day.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“I was standing in front of Worden’s market. I looked across the street to Charlie’s bar. I was thinking about going in to see if there might be a mid-day drunk sitting on a barstool to talk with to help me feel like I was back on the honest side of life. Maybe one who would tell stories about working in the woods or highway crews. Someone I could swap some truths with. But perhaps what would have helped me the most would have been a drug dealer. Someone I could have secretly observed working his trade, watched how the exchange of palmed cash for little baggies of heroin transpired. Maybe that would have given me clues about how the more experienced criminals moved and breathed and managed to spend their non-sleeping hours without collapsing.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“But someone who has been busted broke, if they can take care of themselves from that point, they act different. They build their own fires.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“I used to study the night, the stars, while camping next to my car. I learned names from an old star chart that I carried along with my highway maps. Mintaka, in Orion’s Belt, the bright left eye of the Bull. Sirius. Vega. Trying for a direction beyond anywhere possible, I looked at distant points of bright light. I wished that I could find out where I was going by navigating by the light that had traveled forever.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder