Page 70

By Jack Joseph Smith

and touched my fingers, when I would raise my hands a little bit from my lap. My head seemed in the center of tingling glasses tipping the disemblowed scent of whiskey over fat bellies on to reaching tongues, but pretty drinks I could also see glimmering in the illusive light of a false cut jewel and held between pink tissue paper skin clinging to one doubble, and four tripple knotted bones, that tryed to be so dainty as the blood kissed its way through the thick cream of she and she and she until it buldged thick in the veins below their over concious chins. Across the long room of velvet curtains and inlaid people would come a silence, that effected me the other way around, and I would be told to be still, when glasses were like the lonesome together sounds of crickets in this place of lost humans in their inter night. Ice was the bottomless sound of the empty soul, when he could reach no further into the glass, while the women could coldly put her iceless crutch down upon her painted doily and watch him struggle in his last suffering with the melting dilutements. I look away now from these unrecognizeable feelings and see the more powerful depth of the dark blue men who incavern themselves below the gaudy haze of midnight lips tightened in paint and fallen in inertia. I remember watching the men of the martini dimension, whose eyes would slip like a spider behind the thin crack of madness. They would brighten to me, and their eyes would pierce the insane laughter covering their brains and look at me as the only comfortable reality between the ice of the desolving spirit and the sweet taste of perfumed deception. The man would speak from the stage, his face black lined and pale between. The vanquished man, whose only color now was in the sounds of unrelated hands; I always watched the martini man staring blindly at the vanquished man, and

Original Scan

Page 70

AI Interpretation

GPT

Inside the nightclub the child watches whiskey, ice, painted women, velvet darkness, and stage performance turn adult pleasure into a lonely and exhausted spectacle.

The women and drinkers are rendered almost anatomically, as if glamour has already decayed into bulging veins, melting ice, and empty ritual. What holds the child's attention is less the entertainment itself than the stranded men beneath it, especially the ones whose eyes brighten with a cracked, desperate need.

Claude

The nightclub passage is the book's densest, most decadent prose, the child reading adult pleasure as decay: whiskey tipped 'over fat bellies on to reaching tongues', glamour rendered anatomically as blood that 'buldged thick in the veins below their over concious chins'. Ice becomes metaphysics - 'the bottomless sound of the empty soul' - while the woman 'coldly put her iceless crutch down' to 'watch him struggle in his last suffering with the melting dilutements'. The boy's real attention goes to the stranded men, 'the men of the martini dimension, whose eyes would slip like a spider behind the thin crack of madness', who fix on him 'as the only comfortable reality' between cold spirit and 'perfumed deception', and to the 'vanquished man' on the stage. Scan-backed spellings ('doubble', 'tripple', 'desolving', 'dilutements') are preserved.