Image by DML East Branch, used under the Creative Commons license.
The first thing when I got in the elevator, the elevator guy said to me, “Innarested in having a good time, fella? Or is it too late for you?”
“How do you mean,” I said. I didn’t know what he was driving at or anything.
“Innarested in a little tail t’night?”
“Me?” I said. Which was a very dumb answer, but it’s quite embarrassing when somebody comes right up and asks you a question like that.
“How old are you, chief?” the elevator guy said.
“Why?” I said. “Twenty-two”
“Uh huh. Well, how ‘bout it? Y’innarested? Five bucks a throw. Fifteen bucks the whole night.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Till noon. Five bucks a throw, fifteen bucks till noon.”
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All those women having jobs: hard to imagine, now, but thousands of them had jobs, millions. It was considered the normal thing. Now it’s like remembering paper money, when they still had that. My mother kept some of it, pasted into her scrapbook along with early photos. It was obsolete by then, you couldn’t buy anything with it. Pieces of paper, thickish, greasy to the touch, green colored, with pictures on each side, some old man in a wig and on the other side a pyramid with an eye above it. It said In God We Trust. My mother said people used to have signs beside their cash registers, for a joke: In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. That would be blasphemy now.
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On weekends, Heather and her two mommies are all together. They do lots of fun things. On sunny days they like to go to the park. On rainy days they stay inside and bake cookies. Heather likes to eat two gingersnaps and drink a big glass of milk.
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And George raised the gun and steadied it, and he brought the muzzle close to the back of Lenny’s head. The hand shook violently, but his face set and his hand steadied. He pulled the trigger. The crash of the shot rolled up the hills and rolled down again. Lennie jarred, and then settled slowly forward to the sand, and he lay without quivering.
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“Will Bigger Thomas rise and face the court?”
The room was full of noise and the judge rapped for quiet. With trembling legs, Bigger rose, feeling in the grip of a nightmare.
“Is there any statement you wish to make before sentence is passed upon you?”
He tried to open his mouth but could not. Even if he had the power of speech, he did not know what he could have said. He shook his head, his eyes blurring. The courtroom was profoundly quiet now. The judge wet his lips with his tongue and lifted a piece of paper that crackled loudly in the silence.
You guessed it, its Banned Books Week. The passages above are taken (in order) from The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), Heather Has Two Mommies (Lesléa Newman and Diana Souza), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), and Native Son (Richard Wright), all of which appear on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of the 1990s.
Contributed by Aaron Bowen
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