Plotty: переводы

→The next morning, I rise early and dress in the dark, slipping out of the house before my parents can wake up and ask questions. A fifteen-minute walk later I’m aboard the Long Island Rail Road, just another head in the morning cattle drive to New York City. I find a seat next to an asshole in a suit reading the Journal. The car bounces gently as the train rumbles past row after row of working-class houses. I’m trying to decide if “working class” is an oxymoron when a frosted blonde in a work skirt sashays past me. While my time with Daphne taught me, among other things, that I wasn’t the biggest fetishist when it came to sex, there’s something about the combination of stockings and running shoes that does it for me. I spend the next thirty minutes wondering if there’s a railway equivalent of the Mile High Club. On reaching the station, the cattle rise to their feet, driven toward the exits by instinct and caffeine. I drift along for the ride, floating on a wave of group dynamics toward Seventh Avenue.

→“A quarter ounce. And don’t let him dick you with the stems and seeds. Dead weight, that shit.”

→“Get it in while you can. It’ll all be gone soon enough.”

→The stories reinforce Uncle Marvin’s view of New York City, a fucked-up place to be sure. But they don’t describe the city I’m seeing from the back of the limo.

→“A quarter?”

→“You go see my guy. Here …” He produces a bankroll the size of a baby’s fist from his front pocket, peels off six twenties, and presses them into my hand. “That’ll buy a quarter.”

→“Wait a minute…. When you go into the city, you can pick me up some more.” He raises the joint by way of explanation.

→“Well, that should make it much easier for me to find an apartment.”

→“The city?” His eyes narrow. “Everybody I know is leaving. City’s a goddamn cesspool.”

→He offers me a toke, which I decline. “I’m kind of going through a scotch and cigarettes phase right now,” I tell him.

→“I thought we were supposed to ‘Just say no’?”

→“Not advice,” he says, exhaling through clenched teeth, “that would ever come from me.”

→“I’ve smoked marijuana before,” I reply, recognizing that I’m in serious danger of being outcooled by a ball-less old man dressed like Serpico.

→“That doesn’t smell much like a cigarette,” I say.

→“You know damn fucking well that’s the traditional living arrangement in Italy. It’s not like the consumerist hell we live in here. Family values actually mean something.”

→Most people smoke pot to mellow out. Danny is not one of those people. The man is what my parents might call a “dynamo,” and the weed only stokes those fires.

→It gives me something to do while I lie awake at night trying to remember why I thought living in this place would be better than home.

→In a couple of weeks I might have enough saved up for a social life. But for now it’s hot dogs and slices and nights spent alone.

→She welcomes my calls, having finally broken things off with Glenn, but the steady background marimba and the charges exacted by New York Telephone keep us from rambling.

→I even call my mother once, but her maternal curiosity about my job forces me into increasingly elaborate lies, and her questions about my social life leave me even more depressed.