#On going home joan didion pdf full#

Deadeye says she has been sleeping for 24 hours. The room is overheated and the girl on the floor is sick. вЂњThe man you talked to,вЂќ he says, or вЂњthat man I was referring to earlier.вЂќ The man is a cop. Deadeye and I have a mutual acquaintance, but he does not mention his name in front of the others. One of the girls introduces me to the friend on the couch, who extends one arm but does not get up because he is naked.

Somebody else is asleep on the living-room couch, and a girl is sleeping on the floor beneath a poster of Allen Ginsberg, and there are a couple of girls in pajamas making instant coffee.

It is three oвЂ™clock and Deadeye is in bed. вЂњI hear New YorkвЂ™s a bummer,вЂќ he says.Дeadeye never showed up that day, and somebody says maybe I can find him at his place. I ask if he has found a ride to New York. вЂњMy motherвЂ™s in Chula Vista.вЂќДЄ few days later I see him in Golden Gate Park. I show him a sign on the wall offering a ride to Chicago. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, he doesnвЂ™t remember what number, and now heвЂ™ll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. He tells me heвЂ™s been shooting crystal, which I pretty much know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. вЂњI been out of my mind for three days,вЂќ he says.

#On going home joan didion pdf full#

I am looking for somebody called Deadeye (all single names in this story are fictitious full names are real), and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye out for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, 16, 17, comes in and sits on the floor beside me. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves вЂњhippies.вЂќ When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile and made a few friends.

San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. ДЄnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Things fall apart the center cannot hold