All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Read online

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY

  Loop Group

  Folly and Glory

  By Sorrow’s River

  The Wandering Hill

  Sin Killer

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads: Driving America’s Greatest Highways

  Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

  Duane’s Depressed

  Crazy Horse

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  For Marcia

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or

  are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales

  or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1972 by Larry McMurtry

  Copyright renewed © 2000 by Larry McMurtry

  All rights reserved, including the right of

  reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-36753

  ISBN 0-671-21160-9

  0-684-85382-5 (Pbk)

  eISBN 978-1-4391-2833-6

  PREFACE

  I wrote this novel very rapidly; in a sense, I exhaled it. Another way to put it is that Moving On, written just previously, expelled it, as a kind of afterbirth.

  Moving On was a long effort, twenty-five hundred pages in manuscript, at least in the initial draft. As I approached the end I felt tired but also exhilarated; some energy remained beneath the fatigue, and a momentum that I didn’t want to lose. Indeed, within the fatigue itself there was a kind of high.

  Moving On, of course, could not be prolonged just because I was high and still eager to write. Its final sentence duly arrived, and that was that; but the sense of momentum remained. I felt that if I just had another novel to write I could probably race through it before my energies subsided and I sank into creative sleep.

  Danny Deck was the perfect point-of-view character for a novelist in such a situation. He wasn’t me, but there was no large gap between his sensibility and my own; I became comfortable with his voice at once and liked his quirks and his mainly sad appreciation of the absurd.

  Better yet, his dilemma was one most artists face and struggle with at some point, usually as inconclusively as Danny himself does: whether art can be persuaded to allow its artists a little of normal life and common happiness and yet permit them to create.

  Danny’s bleak conclusion is that art won’t be persuaded—not really; not “normal” life, as exemplified for him by Emma Horton and her solidly normal kitchen.

  That sort of mundane happiness, he recognizes, he’s probably just not going to have. This recognition is the more wrenching because Danny’s just written one slight book and is far from convinced that the level of art he’s likely to produce will be worth the loss. What if, torn forever from the warmth of Emma’s kitchen, he only writes bad books, or, at best, minor books?

  Though young, Danny has already read a lot, and is realist enough to realize that most writers, whatever they give up and however hard they strive, are still only able to be minor. Is the sacrifice of common happiness worth it if one is only going to be minor? That’s one of the animating questions the book asks. Is Danny correct in his judgment that it is art that’s distancing him from happiness? That’s another.

  These dilemmas are intensified for him by his loss not only of the warm, normal Emma but the not so warm, but brilliant, stimulating, unignorable artist-woman, Jill Peel, a girl as fascinating to him as she is elusive.

  In the end Danny comes to believe that he can expect nothing of life except pages and words; this stirs in him a kind of fury against art, as well as personal despair, and he attempts to drown his hated second novel in the Rio Grande.

  The lady-or-the-tiger ending, with Danny standing dejected in the middle of the Rio Grande, not dead but not eager to live, has irked many readers. On the whole, Danny Deck has been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life. I am constantly being asked whether he’s dead or alive, and, if alive, whether he will ever reappear.

  For the benefit of those hopeful readers, I can now assert that Danny lives. It’s been sixteen years since I last laid eyes on him, but he’s phoned in several times lately and seems determined to come back and speak his middle-aged mind on a variety of subjects; his many old friends can expect to be seeing him shortly in a novel called My Girlfriend’s Boyfriends.

  —Larry McMurtry

  1989

  All My Friends

  Are Going to Be

  Strangers

  1

  I THINK I fell in love with Sally while she was eating breakfast, the first morning we were together. Either I did it then or I did it a little earlier the same morning, watching her stretch. I had gone up to Austin to waste time and eat Mexican food and ended up getting invited to a party at a professor’s house. He was a dapper little English sociologist with a great lust for students—he referred to girls as fuckists, a term I had never heard. Several times during the evening he came over to me and pointed at a girl and said, “There’s a great little fuckist for you, my boy.”

  Later on in the evening I think he made a pass at me, but I could have been wrong. He was very tipsy and it could have been just drunken friendliness. His name was Godwin Lloyd-Jons. Sally had been his fuckist for several months, but at the time I didn’t realize that. I got drunk enough that driving back to Houston didn’t seem like a good idea, so I spent the night on Godwin’s living room floor, alongside several other young drunks.

  Sometime during the night Sally and Godwin had a big fight—I have a vague memory of hearing doors banging. He kicked her all the way out to the street, but she had no money at all so she walked around the block until she figured Godwin had had time to pass out and then came in and got a sheet and pillow and spent the night on the floor, next to me. I hadn’t even seen her at the party—I think she was upstairs getting ready for the fight. When I woke up she was right there beside me, yawning and stretching. Sunlight filled the living room, but we were the only two people awake. “Let’s go eat breakfast,” I said immediately, before somebody else could wake up and ask her. I had never seen such a beautiful long-bodied g
irl in my life. My immediate thought was how wonderful it would be to wake up beside her every morning and watch her stretch. Her face looked soft. She was a little surprised by my invitation and looked me over for about two seconds before she accepted. I stood up and reached out my hand to her, thinking she might let me help her up. She looked at me for another two seconds and didn’t take my hand. She got up by herself and stretched again. As we were walking down the shady sidewalk she finally let me take her hand. She also smoothed my hair, which was extremely uncombed. We both felt shy because we were holding hands, and I felt even shyer because Sally was three inches taller than me. All I knew was that I had suddenly found someone new that I liked, and it was a deep enjoyment. She was wearing a loose blue dress.

  We walked all the way to Guadalupe Street and ate a huge breakfast in a little cafe—ham and eggs and toast and most of the grape jelly they had. Sally was very quiet, but I talked constantly. I was trying to conceal, at least for an hour or two, that I already didn’t want to leave her. As we were walking back to Godwin’s we both got a little nervous. Neither of us knew what we were going to do. All I knew was that I wanted to prolong knowing her. I stopped talking and we walked along silently, holding hands. A block or two from Godwin’s we came to where my green Chevy was parked, and we stopped and sat on the fender for a while. I kissed her twice, but she was too preoccupied with her problems to be really interested in kissing. “I have to decide if I’m going to go back to him,” she said. “If I don’t I guess I have to go to my parents, in Lake Charles.”

  “Why’d he kick you out?”

  Sally looked annoyed. “He wanted me to give him a blow job,” she said. “I didn’t feel like it. Then he said I was frigid.”

  “Let me drive you to Lake Charles,” I said. “I’ve never been in Louisiana.”

  She looked at me for several seconds. She looked so vulnerable that I felt I had to try very hard to be trustworthy. “Okay,” she said. We kissed again and she was more interested. I felt very shy. Then an old lady and a basset came walking along and we got off the car and went on to Godwin’s. He was sitting on the front steps, wearing red Bermuda shorts and no shirt. He was rubbing some kind of salve onto his chest, and he didn’t look very dapper.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” he said to Sally. “Awful pain. I was looking for you in the garden and a bee stung me. Never even saw the little bugger. I’m all swollen. First bee sting of my life.”

  Sally looked remote. “Danny’s going to take me to Lake Charles,” she said. “I just want to get my dresses and my radio.”

  She walked up the steps and into the house. Godwin put the lid on the bottle of salve he was using. “This bloody stuff doesn’t work,” he said.

  “Wet baking soda’s supposed to be good,” I said.

  Godwin sighed. “I love her and you’re taking her away,” he said. “Not ethical. You were my guest—now you’re robbing me. No ethical code advocates robbing one’s host.”

  I was embarrassed. I hadn’t expected him to say he loved her.

  “You have some grace,” he said. “You know it’s wrong, what you’re doing. Go away before she comes out and I shall always respect you.”

  “I don’t think she loves you,” I said.

  “A fact that alters nothing,” Godwin said. “I love her. Please leave. You’re obviously a promising young man. I’ve heard you’re the best young writer in the state. A theft of this nature will only drag you down. Go away and write. I need Sally.”

  I felt very defensive. “You don’t treat her well,” I said.

  It made him furious. “Oh, bugger you!” he said. “Pretentious young bastard. How could you write? What do you know? I don’t treat her well, as it happens, but it’s fucking none of your business. I love her, however I treat her. Losing her will cost me a bloody whole year of pain. Bugger you! You’ll treat her too bloody well and make her miserable too. Fucking little thief! Please. Don’t do it. Go away before she comes out.”

  “Look,” I said. “She doesn’t want to stay here. If I don’t steal her somebody else will.”

  The temper went out of him. “You admit it’s a crime, but you’re still going to do it,” he said. “There’s no salvation for you. Only a bloody writer would be that unscrupulous.”

  “I’ve only published two stories,” I said. “What does my being a writer have to do with it?”

  “I do not propose to explain it,” he said. “My bee sting hurts. Take Sally then. You shan’t have her long. Robbery breeds robbery. Somebody will take her from you as easily as you’re taking her from me. I might have held her, given a bloody break or two, but you’ll make her fucking unhold-able forever. Then I suppose you’ll go away and write about it.”

  “Do you dislike all writers?”

  “Every bloody one,” he said. “They ought to be imprisoned. They’re all thieves.”

  “I didn’t plan this,” I said.

  That made him mad again. “Oh, fuck off, for God’s sake,” he said. “Who cares what you didn’t plan?”

  Sally came out then. She had her clothes in a blue suitcase and carried a radio under one arm. She sat them down on the steps a minute, to readjust her hold. Godwin took a can of beer from between his ankles and sipped it.

  “Love, don’t leave me,” he said. “He’s utterly bloody wrong for you. I know I was a brute last night, but I was really quite drunk. Can’t I be forgiven? I’m only that awful when I’m drunk.”

  “I forgive you,” Sally said. “That wasn’t even it. I just don’t want to stay.”

  “What was it?” Godwin asked.

  “Geoffrey told me he went to bed with you,” Sally said. “He said you wanted him to move in and stay in the room next to mine. I guess I’m just too simple a girl for that.”

  “Oh, bugger!” Godwin said, leaping to his feet. He grabbed Sally’s radio and threw it all the way out into the middle of the street—it busted to smithereens when it hit the pavement. He kicked her suitcase down the steps but I caught it and it wasn’t hurt. Sally ran down where I was. Godwin was purple in the face he was so mad.

  “Get out of here!” he yelled. “Go have a simple straight-A fuck somewhere, that’s what you need. You goddamn well don’t need an odd fucker like me in your life!”

  “I just said I was simple,” Sally said.

  “And so you are, my dear,” he yelled. “A simple, stupid, frigid young bitch! God spare me from your kind! God spare me! I’d rather fuck turtles, if turtles can be fucked, than to touch you again! Get away from my house. I’m sorry I ever knew you.” He was trembling like he was about to collapse.

  “You shut up!” Sally said. “What’s so bad about being simple?”

  “I’m not simple,” Godwin said. “God spare me from simple little American beauties like you. Your simpleness is the bloody most destructive force on the fucking planet! I hope I never meet anyone under forty again.”

  Then he sat down on the steps and began to sob. We didn’t know what to say. Finally I picked up Sally’s suitcase and we walked away, leaving the busted radio in the street. Before we got half a block Godwin began to follow us, waving his beer can and crying for Sally to come back. He followed us all the way to my car and stood on the sidewalk crying. His chest was white with salve and his tears were making it messy.

  “Love, don’t leave me,” he said. “Geoffrey meant nothing to me. I would never have let him move in. You know I love you most dearly.”

  Sally looked exasperated. “Oh, Godwin, go wash off your bee sting,” she said.

  It switched him once more from tears to anger. He flung his beer can at us but it missed the car and landed in the street. It was almost empty anyway. Godwin suddenly rushed at the car and began to shove it, trying as hard as he could to turn it over.

  “Cunt!” he yelled. “Selfish young cunt! Cunt! Cunt!”

  He was really yelling and the Chevy was really rocking. Sally scooted over next to me.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

>   Just as I was about to start the car Godwin quit shoving and rushed around to the front end. Suddenly he disappeared from view. He was obviously doing something in front of the car, but we couldn’t see what.

  “What now?” I asked. Sally looked disgusted. I left my motor running and got out to look. Godwin had his arms wrapped around the front bumper and his feet braced against the car in front of me. He looked grimly determined.

  “You shan’t take her,” he said. “I shall hang on till death. You’ll have to crush me.”

  I checked the rear and saw I could back out with no trouble. Godwin’s jaw was set and his feet still braced. He had a death grip on the bumper.

  “Look,” I said. “We really are leaving. It’s just inevitable.”

  “I’ve challenged the inevitable before and beaten it,” he said. “We have nothing to discuss.”

  I got in next to Sally. “We can back out,” I said. “How long do you think he’ll hang on?”

  “Not long,” she said. “He’s not very stubborn.”

  I backed out quite slowly and without speeding up much eased backward down the street. It was a wide, quiet residential street near the university. Sally was right. After I had backed past two houses Godwin appeared in front of us, sitting in the road.

  “See,” she said.

  I drove up beside him, but kept far enough away that he couldn’t rush us. He stood up just as I pulled beside him and actually grinned at me. Somehow he had become composed and dapper again.

  “Well, fun and games,” he said. “It’s not worth the skin off my ass. You’re bloody gutsy. I could have scared most kids off. Merry fucking and may you rot in hell.”

  He bent and looked in the window at Sally. “Bye, love,” he said, his voice dropping. He thrust his head in, past me, and kissed her cheek.

  “Bye, Godwin,” she said. “You better not let Geoffrey in or you’ll really be screwed.”

  Godwin shrugged, as if it were a matter of no moment. He smiled a dapper smile, but only with his mouth. His eyes were wet. He strolled to the sidewalk and we drove on, past the university, out 19th Street, out of Austin. It was mid-July and the highway shimmered with heat.