Chapter One – One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Bananafish
A rose is a rose is arose from an anxious dream to find himself transformed into a monstrous creature driven and derided by vanity.
Call me Ishmael.
Call me Carpenter.
Call me Francis Tucket.
Why call me Naomi?
Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!
Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital. I am an invisible man. I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain. By the false azure in the windowpane; the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking one fish, two fish, red fish, bananafish.
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning, glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on, she would buy the flowers herself.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry ‘tis enough. A plague o’ both your houses. They have made worm meat of me. They don’t really look like white elephants.
I say, Peter, can you really fly buzz ⎯ when I died ⎯after all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden, beholden to nothing and nobody. A phony.” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you give a mouse a cookie.”
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by seeing a louse on a lady’s bonnet at church! All this happened, more or less.
