“I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.”

“I have to admit, I wasn't close to my old man when he was alive. He was hardly ever home. But now that he was gone, and I was back in Pittsburgh, I thought about him all the time. I felt closer to the guy since he'd been buried than I ever did when he was walking around above ground. I realized how much I loved him.”

“I know it sounds lame, but I have to dig the way you think, and I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again.”

“This was, I sometimes thought, the last gift my father gave me. And the best: His death stood out as the supreme-o excuse for fucking up, for being a successful fuck-up.”

“The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn't tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.”

“I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop...this...fucking...feeling.”

“I would, if one-armned and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental...)”