A Confederacy of Dunces: Chapters 8–11

“You sure got you good walls in this building, babe,” Mrs. Reilly said, unable to comprehend the gist of the argument on the other side of the wall.

The film I saw last night was especially grueling, a teenage beach musical. I almost collapsed during the singing sequence on surfboard.

Mr. Clyde said with such vehemence that Ignatius was able to see the purple veins swelling around the whitened scar on his nose.

He had heard the sad tale of vendor Reilly: the drunken mother, the damages that had to be paid, the threat of penury for both son and mother, the mother’s lascivious friends.

“You may send a map of my new route to the mental ward at Charity Hospital. The solicitous nuns and psychiatrists there can help me decipher it between shock treatments.”

Fortunately, I’ve written it all down, and at some time in the future, the more alert among the reading public will benefit from my account of that abysmal sojourn into the swamps to the inner station of the ultimate horror.

M. Minkoff has apparently responded to my missive with a rather frantic urgency.

I thought you might be interested in knowing that I’ve just read in Social Revulsion that Louisiana has the highest illiteracy rate in the U.S.

She was getting the act cheap, and she had to admit that the bird was very good, a skilled and professional performer who almost made up for the act’s human deficiencies.

Darlene cleared her throat and enunciated carefully, “There sure was plenty beaux at the bowl, honey, but I still got me honor.”

He went behind the bar to get a glass of water and contemplated means of sabotage that could finish Lana Lee forever.

The perverted (and I suspect quite dangerous) mind of Clyde has devised still another means of belittling my rather invincible being.

At first I thought that I might have found a surrogate father in the czar of sausage, the mogul of meat.

Now he has relegated me to working in the French Quarter, an area which houses every vice that man has ever conceived in his wildest aberrations, including, I would imagine, several modern variants made possible through the wonders of science.

Between the other vendors—totally beaten and ailing itinerants whose names are something like Buddy, Pal, Sport, Top, Buck, and Ace—and my customers, I am apparently trapped in a limbo of lost souls.

Nevertheless, I do hope that in my dotage, I will not have to rely upon hot dogs for sustenance.

However, when I studied myself in the mirror, I was forced to admit that I appeared rather fetching in a dramatic way.

We lunged about in the garage like two swashbucklers in an especially inept historical film for several moments, fork and cutlass clicking against each other madly.

I had backed into one of the carts, lost my always precarious balance, and had fallen down.

For my mother I sent a prayer flying to St. Zita of Lucca, who spent her life as a house servant and practiced many austerities, in the hope that she would aid my mother in fighting her alcoholism and nighttime roistering.

The average student is not interested in the history of Celtic Britain. For that matter, neither am I. That’s why, even if I do admit it myself, I always sense a sort of rapport in my classes.

In class she had insulted and challenged and vilified him at every turn, egging the Reilly monster to join in the attack.

Perhaps she had joined some fringe group of the far right wing that was making her belligerent and hostile.

The young man giggled and danced about in front of Ignatius to avoid the thrusts, his lithe movements making him a difficult target.

I shall warn them beforehand that they may expect to see and hear anything. They are all brilliant attorneys, pillars of the community, aristocratic Creole scholars whose knowledge of the more surreptitious forms of living is quite limited.

However, to save you the anxiety of awaiting this phalanx of legal luminaries to arrive at your spiderweb of an apartment, I shall consent to accepting a settlement now, if you wish.

Miss Annie had immediately started an inquisition about that as soon as it had appeared, screaming questions through her shutters.

As they walked along, Santa described to Mrs. Reilly the many sadnesses and tribulations that had comprised old lady Lopez’s dismal existence.

She stared blindly at the screen, on which she saw not Debbie Reynolds cavorting in color but rather Jean Harlow taking a bath in black and white.

The one whom we finally make Chief of Staff will want only to attend to his fashionable wardrobe, a wardrobe which, alternately, will permit him to be either Chief of Staff or debutante, as the desire strikes him.

The scheme is too breathtaking for the literal, liberal minx mind mired in a claustrophobic clutch of cliches.

The Crusade for Moorish Dignity, my brilliant first attack upon the problems of our times, would have been a rather grand and decisive coup had it not been for the basically bourgeois worldview of the rather simple people who were members of the vanguard.

This time, however, I shall be working with people who eschew the insipid philosophy of the middle class, people who are willing to assume controversial positions, to follow their cause, however unpopular it may be, however it may threaten the smugness of the middle class.

She said that she was going out to attend a Crowning of the May Queen at some church, but since it isn’t May, I tend to doubt her veracity.

Then he opened another drawer and fumbled through its contents with one hand while the other scratched at his armpit through his threadbare knitted shirt.

After many nights without sleep, we have given the original letter to our lawyer, who is instigating a libel suit for $500,000.

“What are these? Visual aids for civics or some other equally stultifying high school subject?”

He is a veritable will-o’-the-wisp, scurrying here and there in his never-ending search for marauders.

With her background and Boethian worldview, she would take a very stoic and fatalistic view of whatever sexual gaucheries and blunders he committed.

Let me assure you that I did not choose to collapse here before your gas chamber of a den. I did not return here of my own volition.