Answer with some bad noir prose

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

He liked a drink. He drank to the others, then drank to kill the pain, drank to forget her, and then drank some more. Before he knew it the sun was rising and he was in a place he never saw before in his life.

― Susan (Susan), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:35 (twenty years ago) link

He popped a Lungfish tape into the dash and found himself locked into a stone groove, because he was the Greek person ever that black people felt truly comfortable with.

Ha, ha, I love George P. Pelacanos, really, I do, he's just predictable and wrong about music sometimes. But he tries.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:42 (twenty years ago) link

Love? No such thing. People die, horribly, every day, and none of us care. You believe in love? Fine. Try living my life for 24 hours.

― Andrew Thames (Andrew Thames), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:45 (twenty years ago) link

He was temporarily blinded as she walked into the room. Was it the sun picking out a hazy of booze sodden dust that surrounded her like kosquitos, or was it just her. She was a vision in black, with a pair of suck me dry lips and hair which screamed two tins of lacquer and engineering worthy of Isembard Kingdom himself. At least she would be a vision if he had not been blinded. Or was he just blind drunk. He looked back at the bottle, poured another tot into the tumbler and felt the tot tumble down his ravaged throat.

― Pete (Pete), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:48 (twenty years ago) link

crap "the ONLY Greek person ever"

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:48 (twenty years ago) link

I pissed in the sink I had just used to wash my face. Maybe next time I'd try it the other way around.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:49 (twenty years ago) link

"Got a light, bud?"

He looked up from the crap game and that's when he saw her for the first time. Some women have it, some have it in spades. She had it in spades, hearts, diamonds - the whole damn deck.

― Lady Grinning Soul, Friday, 19 September 2003 13:50 (twenty years ago) link

"kiddo"

― smoky topaz (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:52 (twenty years ago) link

LGS, you rock.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:53 (twenty years ago) link

He was lying in the gutter, like any damn drunk on a Friday night. Then I noticed the red circle staining the asphalt, swelling out from the back of his head like a halo in an Italian painting. He was dead all right. I kicked him to make sure.

― Susan (Susan), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:56 (twenty years ago) link

So I looked at her-she was paying, after all- but God, the sight of what must've been a beauty sometime left me sick at the thought of time. Time, and what it does to us. Lucky I got some money, I can buy the girls at the bar drinks.

― Andrew Thames (Andrew Thames), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:58 (twenty years ago) link

The old man flicked his cigarette ash on the lobby's Persian rug, just enough to leave a thin black smear whenever the next lost soul in line walks over it on their way up to her room. He looked down on it's ornamental intricacies and noticed other stains and wondered how many of those were left by the other men before him.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Friday, 19 September 2003 13:58 (twenty years ago) link

"I said get outta here, punk!"

She gave me a look that could freeze an industrial furnace burning in the middle of Death Valley. I was tough. I could go nine, ten rounds with the meanest right hooks in town. But this dame was something else.

― Susan (Susan), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:03 (twenty years ago) link

I felt her sex against me in the night. It felt like a woman's sex. Just the way I like women's sexes to feel.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:08 (twenty years ago) link

just put your lips together and blow

― smoky topaz (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:17 (twenty years ago) link

After making a nasty raspberry sound and covering her in a fine cloud of spittle she gave me a few more tips on whistling technique.

― Pete (Pete), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:25 (twenty years ago) link

She creaked round in the chair, smudging her face into the gauzy smoke-light. A bruise like five plums crushed in a bag cradled her jaw. My heart sank like a shabby suitcase of housebricks in the Potomac. It was love and I wanted to puke.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:28 (twenty years ago) link

As the young tough grabbed my throat and lifted me off the ground, I knew he had me by the balls on this one.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:39 (twenty years ago) link

Louie the bartender started buffing a rack of wet glasses. "You spend enough time around here, sooner or later you see everything. The other day I saw a 4'10" nun -- in full habit -- slapping around Bulldog Mauser. Last night Blackout Otis was waving around $100 bills and buying everyone drinks -- you might wanna ask him how he got that sort of green. Mind you, I'm not saying that a man wearing an Uncle Sam outfit didn't rob Nick the Greek's betting shop, just that I haven't seen or heard anything about that." Louie had rubbed down the glasses during all of this, not missing a stroke.

― j.lu (j.lu), Friday, 19 September 2003 14:39 (twenty years ago) link

Yes, the sky was blue and the sun was shining, but somehow it only served to throw a grey pall over the day. The shadows were still there, though they may have been temporarily in hiding.

― Al Andalous, Friday, 19 September 2003 14:51 (twenty years ago) link

I had the farts. Not the good kind either.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:06 (twenty years ago) link

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me.

I guess God made Brent Cross on a wet Sunday.

― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:11 (twenty years ago) link

I've done a lot of lying in my time. I've lied to men who wear belts. I've lied to men who wear suspenders. But I'd never be so stupid as to lie to a man who wears both belt and suspenders.

― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:17 (twenty years ago) link

The phone rang.

― Alex K (Alex K), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:20 (twenty years ago) link

He was sore. He was hard. He was a real case. He had a face like a cement truck deep-fried in concrete. It rained.

― Chuck Tatum (Chuck Tatum), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:22 (twenty years ago) link

There was a tap at the door. It swung open. She looked just like Farah Fawcett.

― Alex K (Alex K), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:25 (twenty years ago) link

I hate major labels.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:29 (twenty years ago) link

There was no going back now. The clock ticked. Tick. His arm dropped to his side still gripping the smoking gun, an expression on his face that seemed to say "buddy, I know it looks like I’m tied to the bed wearing your wife’s underwear but believe me, it ain’t what you think." Tick. In front of him the body of his brother lay like a particularly unusually shaped and miscoloured Swiss cheese, a line of smouldering holes stitched across it’s torso. Tick. Sirens wailed in the distance. Tick. To hell with him anyway; the spontaneous and apparently motiveless murder of his brother committed solely to serve later plot developments in the story had made him late for his therapy session. Tick. He had to go or he would never get this damn twitch under control.

― Alex K (Alex K), Friday, 19 September 2003 15:38 (twenty years ago) link

He sat as his desk, the fan blowing on his head continuously. As he scanned over his pile of work, he was reminded of the bodies he'd seen the previous night--bodies fat & puffy in the afternoon sun, blazing down and turning the rotting flesh in a portulant, gaseous mass.

As he reloaded the page, he scanned the subject lines--each was a collection of words, words composed by those bored at work, bored in life, bored while doing the hunka-chunka. He scanned those lines and selecting the one he'd follow up, and began to type cautiously. tick tick tick went the keyboard, contrasting with the whirr whirr whirr of the fan.

― Kingfish (Kingfish), Friday, 19 September 2003 16:31 (twenty years ago) link

The sun was shining its ass off. He scratched his in recognition.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 19 September 2003 16:44 (twenty years ago) link

I was soaked. The rain had made the brim of my hat droop like the cigarette off the roast beef red lip of a bartender in a place with a neon sign that always had at least one letter burnt out, and that letter was usually an N or a T, hard-sounding letters that went to church every week and wore sensible shoes, shoes you wouldn't wear in weather like this.

― Prude (Prude), Friday, 19 September 2003 20:31 (twenty years ago) link

Sam Cleat learned long ago that there's no difference between the sixth and seventh glass of whiskey, so he never bothered counting past the fifth. So he never figured out that it was eleventh glass that always did him in.

― Chris P (Chris P), Friday, 19 September 2003 20:38 (twenty years ago) link

He was lonely. His loneliness was almost like a latent hunger now. It was late. The kind of hour when the only people you were likely to met on these miserable streets were those ready to punch or proposition you. He was cold. Cold like only the man who lives alone and relentlessly troops back to a stony bed after religiously dulling his introspection with the barroom thud of a blunt liquor bottle can understand. It was raining. It was like the clouds had seen too much of this Babylon and the quiet unceasing suffering that its dilapidated boroughs and decaying blocks bred, and on a louring night such as this, were powerless to stem the steady fall of divine tears that ran in a million miniature rivers off the grime that seemed to cover every surface, choking up drain covers and collecting in stagnating brown pools and streams that almost threatened to turn this ruined, dead, filthy city into a nightmarish, Boschean vision of Amsterdam. He waited. He waited like the second hand on wristwatch waits, in the unending desert before each second, in the uncharted space where men have failed to lay down a grid, where there are no maps for guidance through the void of decay, because like the second hand, he knew there was an end to waiting, that like all journey’s there is an ending, that the destination doesn’t disappear, even if it can take a lifetime to reach it, though you may loose sight of its spires on the road; the second hand knows where it is going, for between each second it can sense an ending, and in the spaces between the marks on the dial, the second hand waits for the fall of kings and the crumbling of empires, it waits because it knows there is an eternity in the possibility that blossoms with each passing second, and his eternity was here on these streets.

― Alex K (Alex K), Monday, 22 September 2003 11:36 (twenty years ago) link

Alex K., you win.

― Susan (Susan), Monday, 22 September 2003 12:08 (twenty years ago) link

He sat restlessly in his office. Again. He was always restless. Bills make a man restless. Unpaid bills make a man worry. But he wasn't thinking about bills this time. He was thinking about what she said. Was it true? Could it be true. He weighed up all the angles, and still couldn't figure it out. The broad turned his head like a airplane propeller and he didn't like it one bit. He was fighting against the truth though. He knew she was right, but he hated to admit it. He opened the drawer and poured a shot of sour, and threw it back. It didn't help any. She was till right, and it didn't matter how many shots he drank and how many luckies he smoked. It was the best thread evah...

― Dave B (daveb), Monday, 22 September 2003 12:17 (twenty years ago) link

The tile on his desk read: "Assistant Office Supplies Manager" but considering he'd been at the job with no pay raise or promotion for five years, it may as well have read "Stationary."

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Monday, 22 September 2003 17:33 (twenty years ago) link

she stood closer than a wet week in July

― isadora (isadora), Monday, 22 September 2003 20:13 (twenty years ago) link

"It's cold out," he said, and he said "I needa beer."
She looked him one with her black eyeliner drawn up like a harlequin mask. "We're out," she said with a mouth like rebar. Damn, I hate clowns, was his sudden thought.

― Heather (Heather), Monday, 22 September 2003 20:24 (twenty years ago) link

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.