Nightmare Alley

What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world? Some guy that likes to tear the wings off flies?

His voice was like sandpaper.

Even through the curtain of alky the maggot in his mind kept burrowing.

Stan had been acting so screwy she was afraid he was living on Queer Street.

“I’m not interested in money, Mr. Grindle. You may be rich. Perhaps I am too-in a different way.”

I says to her, I says, ‘Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses?’

Now the loneliness grew inside him, like a cancer, like a worm of a thousand branches, running down his nerves, creeping under his scalp, tying two arms together and squeezing his brain in a noose, pushing into his loins and twisting them until they ached with need and not-having, with wanting and not-daring, with thrust into air, with hand-gripping futility-orgasm and swift-flooding shame, hostile in its own right, ashamed of shame.

Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check-?

Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough.

What could she do for him? What could anybody do for him? For anybody? They were all trapped, all running down the alley toward the light.