Chapter 6 "After the Hotel Closes" - I leave when the hotel closes - where do I go?

The old Japanese director Akira Kurosawa once made a flat and flat movie, which was based on the old Kaka’s story of King Lear. The title of the movie is "Chaos". The old movie fans who are sharp and flashing like the Seven Samurai and Spider's Nest were lost for a while, but I personally read a report in which Akira Kurosawa himself talked about his true ambition to make this movie, " What I really wanted to photograph was the black volcanic soil at the foot of Mount Fuji." The black volcanic soil of Mount Fuji.That beautiful volcano that has long been extinguished and inactive, but today the Japanese still believe that seeing it will bring good luck for a whole year; those erupted with a sense of destruction in the past, but now cool down to be suitable for crops and the growth of human civilization The black fertile ground of the movie——To be honest, I am very, very moved by an old director who is so obsessed with it, and I am completely relieved of the incomplete success of "Lan" in terms of film achievements.

If you tell the truth, people will not necessarily believe it; if you are sincere, there is no guarantee that what you write and shoot will be a good novel or movie. Capturing one's true aspirations is actually a luxury.There may not be several times in a lifetime, so it is worth a try knowing that you may fail. Why are you talking about this? Because of this, I believe, just like Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" aimed at the black volcanic soil of Mt. Waiting for the hotel. Slightly different from "Ran", this novel is one of Bullock's most peak works so far, and even a considerable number of detective writers and reasoning fans directly believe that this is Bullock's best novel .

The story consists of three cases: 1. The Morrissey Bar, illegally operating on Fifty-first Street, run by the Morrissey Brothers, who supported the IRA.One night, tens of thousands of dollars were robbed by two armed and masked guys. Scudder was there when the robbery happened (he was still drinking at the time), and the Morrissey brothers offered a $10,000 reward for finding out who the robbers were. 2. Miss Kitten's Bar, legally open, near the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, run by Skipper Diver and John Cassabine, who were blackmailed for $50,000 for having their ledger stolen, So Scudder was hired for $2,500 to take care of the matter.

3. This time it was not the bar itself, but a regular customer named Tommy Delores. His house was invaded by robbers, his things were emptied, and his wife was also killed. The police successfully caught the robbers, but The robber bit him back and murdered his wife, so he offered 1,500 dollars to Scudder to clear his grievances. Three cases, three lines, plus the gaudy Polly's, McGowan's with a shaking bartender, Martin's with a big color TV to watch baseball, and O'Neill's name combining "bar" and "salon" Erbalong, and the Armstrong bar that Scudder frequented, etc., are entangled into a tough memory rope, which pulls the passing streamer and preserves time.

The Japanese say that a hotel is a place to protect memories. This reminds me of a passage, also produced in New York, the Big Apple city, by Bob Lemon, the head coach of the New York Yankees baseball team in the late 1970s: "I never bring the game home, I always keep it In a bar."—I personally think that this is really better than simply "forgotten", or more accurate and sophisticated.Throughout life, we will inevitably encounter certain heavy things that are not suitable for carrying to bed (for baseball coaches, the ball is lost), and you have to find a way to forget it quickly before you go to bed. However, One of the eternal woes of being human is that memory/forgetting cannot come and go as soon as we are called, so we have to settle for the next best thing and find a place to put them away.

As time rushes forward, these memories that are not easy to take home accumulate more and more, so that after gradually filling up these hotels, the hotel becomes a symbol of memory itself and a beacon in the long river of time; Still moving forward, in the end, even the hotel can't wait to close, so we can't help but feel that a certain period of our life seems to be closing with the closing. People are very strange, bad days, bad things, once it really waves goodbye to you, there will be (even more) the gorgeous sunset and sunset at that moment—— That's why I assert that Bullock wrote this book as Xiang Zhuang's sword dance, and the detective story is an account to the general public. What he wants to commemorate by cheating on public affairs is actually those days and those hotels.

Hotels are places where memories are guarded.The second half of the Japanese sentence is: The bartender is the last person to pour out their thoughts. I forgot where I read such a story, I can’t even remember if it was a fairy tale, a fable, or the real customs of any nation, but I only vaguely remember that when people have something on their minds, they should find a big tree and dig a tree. Hole, said heartily to the tree hole, and then sealed the hole with soil after speaking. People's private thoughts can be roughly divided into two types according to who they are suitable to confide in: one kind only tells their closest people, and the list may include parents, close friends, husbands, wives, and lovers; Must be strangers. ——In the former case, what you want may be sympathy, consolation, or even enlightenment and discussion. In the latter case, what you want is just to say, and it will be much better when you finish speaking.

Both of these have been going on for a long time in human history, not from today. The only difference is the identity of the so-called stranger: the big tree that has dug a hole certainly belongs to the category of this stranger, but it is a little unusual, and there are three kinds that I personally think of: priests, psychiatrists and bartenders. Those who have something to say can use these three according to their personal preference or convenience. They can be single-selected or multiple-selected, but there are still some differences. From a personal positioning point of view.When looking for a pastor or priest, you have to be prepared to admit that you are a sinner; when looking for a psychologist, you are a patient (the scientific name is a psychosis, the common name is not so good, it is called a neuropathy); if you refuse to show weakness and admit nothing, then you Better ask the bartender.

From a cost point of view.The price of finding priests and priests varies, but generally speaking, religious salvation is quite heavy. You believe that there is a pair of eyes that can see everything on a higher place watching you without blinking. If you donate too little, you will feel restless and sick Add illness; find a psychiatrist, the price is a little expensive; therefore, the bartender may be the cheapest of them, and you can live within your means. From the perspective of the long-term relationship.When looking for a pastor or priest, you must be prepared to be "continuously cared for". Even if you no longer go to church, he may come to your door and ask you to continue to repent, admit your mistakes, or even convert. If you are not careful, you will live forever or even forever; It won't take so long, but usually he will ask for a treatment session, and you will still get a call if you don't go; only find the bartender, and each relationship between you is done once, and there is no need to make an appointment for the next one-as long as you bear it when the hotel opens again tomorrow. Can live.

Cheap, releasable, and without self-deprecation, the bartender becomes the simplest and most unadorned object of confidance to strangers.In addition, he has practiced for a long time, and in the middle of the night, when people are often the weakest and most helpless. At that time, it is not easy to wake up the pastor and priest who is chosen by God but still has to sleep. The hotel is still open, still in a dimly lit place. The last person to confide in, the so-called "last", shouldn't that be the meaning? Danny boy is a character full of symbolic interest in the Scudder detective series.

This person is an information collection center, an elegant black British man living in New York (probably named after that beautiful and touching Scottish ballad), and more interestingly, this person is albino and cannot adapt to ordinary light. He goes out at night and uses various taverns as haunts—naturally, he is also one of the drinking population, but he drinks vodka.There is such a scene in: He holds up a glass of Russian vodka to see how the light shines through it. "Purity. Brightness. Precision." "The best vodka is like the blade, the sharp scalpel in the hands of a skilled surgeon, guaranteed to cut cleanly." This is as if Zhu Tianxin said about diamonds in the novel "Breakfast at Tiffany's": "The best diamonds do not contain any color. A completely colorless diamond is like a prism, allowing light to penetrate and turn into a rainbow.—— Giving a woman a perfectly colorless diamond is like giving her a pure heart - so says De Beers." Just like what Zhu Tianxin said, it will make you want to own a colorless diamond. What Danny Boy said, it will also make you want to try that sharp glass of colorless vodka. However, it makes me feel more What I feel and think more about is another passage in the book: Danny boy can't get used to bright lights, and he's always wished there was a special switch in the world that would allow him to turn down the light as he wanted.Scudder's impression of this passage was, "Whiskey has this function, it can dim the light, reduce the volume, and round the edges and corners."In this way, there are quite a few people with albinism who cannot adapt to the bright light of the real world. To some extent, I personally seem to be among them. However, we have to face the reality that these hotels that are still open late at night will eventually close and close - just like Holden's silly question in Salinger's famous novel "The Catcher in the Rye": "After the pond in the park freezes, those Where is the wild duck going?" What time do hotels in New York open?In the book, Scudder tells us that the legal ones can only be opened until four o'clock in the morning according to the regulations, but it doesn't matter, the legal ones are closed, and we can still go to the illegal ones, where there is no time limit. Is there really no time limit?Impossible, when the morning sun rises and the birds in the city seem to wake up together, it is time for people to stagger out of the hotel and walk home - in the book, Scudder quotes the song "The Last Call" The song tells us a possible response: "So we finish this last glass/To everyone's joy and sorrow/I hope this glass of wine is strong/It can last until the hotel opens tomorrow." Ask further, if there is such a day tomorrow, the hotel will not open again? ——The last chapter of the image, that is, ten years after the three criminal cases, the Greek bar became a Korean fruit stand, Polly's bar became an elegant fifty-seven restaurant, McGowan's bar became a steakhouse, Miss Kitty's bar has become a gay club. Some of the people who used to run bars and hang out in bars have disappeared, some died of emergencies, some live in San Francisco on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, and some are even married... There is a useful, heroic and fluent saying: It’s okay, I’ll leave as soon as the hotel closes—— Can we politely ask a not-so-polite thing?I would like to ask: where to go? Yes, where did Nora go?Where does the wild duck go when the pond is frozen? I guess Scudder's answer is still the song in the book, "My heart was broken that day / But it will be repaired tomorrow / If I was born drunk / I might forget all sorrows". I just remembered a personal matter related to Zhang Dachun, another famous Taiwanese novelist. A few years ago, I ordered a song about hotels on a whim in KTV, called "Those were the days", and I sang along. The student is also a young and first-class novelist Luo Yijun said that "no one in the novel is sad at all". Forty-year-old Zhang Dachun didn't know what came to his mind (I didn't ask because of politeness), and suddenly burst into tears, and began to translate the lyrics word by word. For my girlfriend who can actually understand English subtitles. Not long after, I saw these lyrics were put into the ending of Zhang Dachun's "Nobody Writes to the Colonel":