Status Updates From Manhattan Transfer

". . Why don’t you come up and eat with us?”

“I cant. Good luck Nevada.” The whisky warm in his stomach, tingling in his fingers, Jimmy Herf stepped out into seven o’clock Park Avenue, whirring with taxicabs, streaked with smells of gasoline and restaurants and twilight."

"Spring puckering our mouths, spring giving us gooseflesh grows gigantic out of the droning of sirens, crashes with enormous scaring din through the halted traffic, between attentive frozen tiptoe blocks."

"He groped his way in the dark to the door. Outside the arctic morning was growing gray with dawn. He hurried back to his room. He wanted to get into bed and be asleep before it was light."

"Ducking his head into the sleety wind he walked quickly east along Seventy second. At the subway entrance he bought a Tribune and hustled down the steps to the jammed sour smelling platform."

"He gritted his teeth. After this I got to have some luck. . . . I got to have some luck."

“Martin used to say: Everything would be so much better if suddenly a bell rang and everybody told everybody else honestly what they did about it, how they lived, how they loved. It’s hiding things makes them putrefy. By God it’s horrible. As if life wasn’t difficult enough without that.”

“I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bondholders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.”

"The sun’s moved to Jersey, the sun’s behind Hoboken."

“I’m going to eat a small steak and onions.”

“Not if you’re intending to spend the afternoon with me, Mr. Herf.”

“Oh all right. Ruth I lay my onions at your feet.”

"He grabbed his hat and ran out the door and down the six flights of white stone stairs past the brass buttons and chocolate livery of the elevator boy, out through the hall that had pink marble pillars in to Seventy-second Street. It was dark and blowy, full of ponderous advancing shadows and chasing footsteps."

"His aunt said something. He ran down the corridor to his own room, slammed the door and bolted it. He stood stiff and cold in the center of the room with his fists clenched. “I hate them. I hate them,” he shouted aloud. Then gulping a dry sob he turned out the light and slipped into bed between the shivery cold sheets."

“And there are lots of people coming over from abroad on that boat aren’t there daddy?”

“Look you can see . . . the decks are black with people.”

"Fool to jump two hours pay. In an optician’s window the clock was at twenty-five past two. He walked down Broadway, past Lincoln Square, across Columbus Circle, further downtown towards the center of things where it’d be more crowded."

“I want to get somewhere in the world, that’s what I mean. Europe’s rotten and stinking. In America a fellow can get ahead. Birth don’t matter, education don’t matter. It’s all getting ahead.”

Very disjointed

“Hey there yous how about settlin?” bawled the barkeep after him when he reached the door.

“Didn’t the other feller pay?”

“Like hell he did.”

“But he was t-t-treating me. . . .”

The barkeep laughed as he covered the money with a red lipper. “I guess that bloat believes in savin.”