"Fritz Leiber - Gondolier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

pink and turquoise blueтАФyou may have seen them in a horror movie calledDelirium where a beautiful
crazy slim Mexican girl is chased round and round the deserted porticos by a car flashing its headlights
between the pillars.

And of course the Venice isn't Venice, Italy, but Venice, USAтАФVenice, CaliforniaтАФnow just another
district and postal address in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, but once a proud little beach side
city embodying the laughably charming if grotesque dream of creating Venice, Italy, scaled down but
complete with canals and arched bridges and porticos, on the shores of the Pacific.

Yet for all the childish innocence of its bizarre glamor, Venice developed an atmosphere, or became the
outpost of a sinister deep-rooted power, that did in Daloway. It is a place of dreams, not only the tinseled
ones, but also the darker sort such as tormented and terrified my friend at the end.

For a while toward the beginning of this century the movie folk and real estate agents and retired
farmers and the sailors from San Pedro went to spanking-new Venice to ride the gondolasтАФthey had
authentic ones poled by Italian types possibly hired from Central CastingтАФand eat exotic spaghetti and
gambol romantically a bit with their wide-hatted long-skirted lady friends who also wore daring bathing
suits with bare arms and rather short skirts and long black stockingsтАФand gamble too with piled big
yellow-backed green billsтАФand, with their caps turned front to rear, roar their wooden-spoked or wire-
wheeled open touring cars along the Speedway, which is now a cramped one-way street that changes
direction every block.

But then Redondo and Laguna and Malibu called away the film folk and the other people with fat
pocketbooks, but as if to compensate for that they struck oil in Venice and built wells almost
everywhere, yet despite this influx of money the gambling never regained its ├йclat, it became just bingo
for housewives, and the Los Angeles police fought that homely extramural vice for a weary decade, until
sprawling LA reached out a pseudopod one day and swallowed Venice up. Then the bingo stopped and
Venice became very crowded indeed with a beach home or a beach apartment or a beach shack on every
square yard that wasn't sidewalk or streetтАФor oil well!тАФand with establishments as disparate as Bible
Tabernacle and Colonic Irrigation Clinic and Mother Goldberg's Home for the Aged. It would have been
going too far to have called Venice a beach slum, but it was trending in that direction.


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 TheBlackGondolierandOtherStories


And then, much later, the beats came, the gutter geniuses, the holy barbarians, migrating south in
driblets from Big Sur and from North Beach in Frisco and from Disillusion, USA, everywhere, bringing
their ratty art galleries and meageravant garde bookstalls and their black-trousered insolent women and
their Zen and their guitars, including the one on which was strummed the Ballad of the Black Gondola.

And with the beats, but emphatically not of them, came the solitary oddballs and lone-wolf intellectuals
like Daloway.

I met Daloway at a check-out desk of the excellent Los Angeles downtown public library, where our two
stacks of books demonstrated so many shared interestsтАФworld history, geology, abnormal psychology,
and psychic phenomena were some of themтАФthat we paused outside to remark on it. This led to a
conversation, in which I got some first intimations of his astonishing mentality, and eventually to my
driving him home to save him a circuitous bus-trip, or, more likely, as I learned later, a weary hitch-hike.