Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
Collected Prose

Collected Prose

Titel: Collected Prose Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Paul Auster
Vom Netzwerk:
journey and I was about to go home, I made a serious blunder. It must have been one or two in the morning by then. Somewhere off to my right, I heard Doc muttering to himself. “Any of you cats got a place to crash?” he said, and because he sounded so cool and nonchalant, so profoundly indifferent to the matters of this world, I didn’t think twice about it. “Sure,” I said, “you can sleep on my couch if you want to.” Needless to say, he accepted my invitation. Needless to say, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.
    It’s not that I didn’t like him, and it’s not that we didn’t get along. For the first couple of days, in fact, things went rather smoothly. Doc planted himself on the couch and rarely stirred, rarely even brought the soles of his feet into contact with the floor. Aside from an occasional trip to the bathroom, he did nothing but sit, eat pizza, smoke marijuana, and talk. I bought the pizza for him (with his money), and after telling him five or six times that I wasn’t interested in dope, he finally got the message and stopped offering it to me. The talk was incessant, however, the same repertoire of addled riffs he’d unfurled on the first night, but his arguments were more ample now, more fleshed out, more focused. Hours would go by, and his mouth never stopped moving. Even when I got up and left the room, he would go on talking, delivering his ideas to the wall, the ceiling, the light fixtures, and scarcely even notice that I was gone.
    There wouldn’t have been a problem if the place had been a little larger. The apartment had just two rooms and a kitchen, and since my bedroom was too small to hold anything but a bed, my work table was set up in the living room—which also happened to be where the couch was. With Doc permanently installed on the couch, it was all but impossible for me to get any work done. The spring semester was drawing to a close, and I had a number of term papers to write in order to complete my courses and graduate, but for the first two days I didn’t even bother to try. I figured that I had a little margin and therefore didn’t panic. Doc would be leaving soon, and once I had my desk back, I would be able to get down to work. By the morning of the third day, however, I realized that my houseguest had no intention of leaving. It wasn’t that he was overstaying his welcome on purpose; the thought of leaving simply hadn’t entered his head. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t have the heart to kick him out. I already felt too sorry for him, and I couldn’t find the courage to take such a drastic step.
    The next few days were exceedingly difficult. I did what I could to cope, to see if some minor adjustments could improve the situation. In the end, things might have panned out—I don’t know—but three or four days after I put Doc in the bedroom and took over the living room for myself, disaster struck. It happened on one of the most beautiful Sundays I can remember, and it was no one’s fault but my own. A friend called to invite me to play in an outdoor basketball game, and rather than leave Doc alone in the apartment, I took him along with me. Everything went well. I played in the game and he sat by the side of the court, listening to the radio and yakking to himself or my friends, depending on whether anyone was within range. As we were returning home that evening, however, someone spotted us on the street. “Aha,” this person said to me, “so that’s where he’s been hiding.” I had never particularly liked this person, and when I told him to keep Doc’s whereabouts under his hat, I realized that I might just as well have been talking to a lamppost. Sure enough, the buzzer of my apartment started ringing early the next morning. The campus celebrity had been found, and after his mysterious weeklong absence, H. L. Humes was more than happy to indulge his followers. All day long, groups of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds tramped into my apartment to sit on the floor and listen to Doc impart his skewed wisdom to them. He was the philosopher king, the metaphysical pasha, the bohemian holy man who saw through the lies their professors had taught them, and they couldn’t get enough of it.
    I was deeply pissed off. My apartment had been turned into a twenty-four-hour meeting hall, and much as I would have liked to hold Doc responsible for it, I knew that he wasn’t to blame. His acolytes had come of their own accord, without invitations

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher