All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel by Larry McMurtry Page B

wouldn’t count as a scholar, any more than I counted as a novelist. I was just an apprentice, and might not ever get to be a journeyman, much less a master.
    For the first few weeks I was no match for the cold gray weight of San Francisco. On the few days when the sun shone I could see how the city might be beautiful, as beautiful as everyone else seemed to think it was, but despite those days and despite what everyone else thought, I couldn’t really feel it as beautiful. It made me too chilly, and let me sit home too much.
    Also, since I wasn’t in school, I had no real way to make friends. I was too pinched by the newness of things just to go out on the street and seize people and make them my friends. I got by on ping-pong and my parka and Wu and Market Street. On Market Street there were numerous three-feature movie houses. They were full of winos and thugs and snoring bums and they stank horribly and were overcrowded and overheated and usually showed terrible movies, but I didn’t care. They were there, and when I gaveup on my novel for the day I could drift down to Market Street and pick out a couple of movies and forget things for a while. I can watch any movie, and I averaged one or two a day all the time I was in San Francisco. The hot, smelly movie houses were my Houston surrogate. I never went to the art films that were always being shown—I only went to the third-rate movies on Market Street. I didn’t want to see films that reminded me about life—I wanted to see films that bore little relation to it: Italian spectacles, horror movies, comedies, anything unreal. I was escaping from reality for a couple of hours, and wanted the escape to be as pure and complete as possible. I could always have reality—it was all around me. It was much like fog. I wanted to see Steve Reeves, in bright Technicolor, wrestling elephants with his bare hands. In one movie I saw, Steve Reeves apparently killed an elephant by twisting its foreleg. He lifted the leg and twisted it, he grunted a few times, the elephant fell dead; a beautiful Roman matron, her bosom shaking, ran out of a villa and gave Steve Reeves a hug. That was the kind of thing I wanted to see.
    Wu was not a very good novelist, but he was a smart man. He knew that I was homesick and depressed and he tried, in his way, to help me. Sometimes, in the manner of Confucius, he gave me advice, but more often his approach was gently Socratic. I puzzled him even more than I puzzled myself, and he loved to try to figure me out.
    “You do not leave Texas for any reason,” he said one day. “So. If a man leaves a place for no reason, he is not needing any reasons to go back. Is this not true?”
    “I guess,” I said. We were sitting in his place, sipping Turkish coffee, which he loved. He had a parrot named Andrew, after Andrew Marvell, his favorite poet.
    “Then you are going back?”
    “No,” I said. “I have to stay here until I finish my novel.”
    “This is a matter of pride,” Wu said. “You are ashamed to go back to your friends. If you go back, then they are thinking you a coward. Is this true?”
    I had stopped trying to understand my own motives, and couldn’t really say if it was true or not. Wu always nodded when I spoke, no matter what I said.
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “You are knowing To His Coy Mistress’?” Wu asked. “Very great poem? Is this true?”
    We discussed “To His Coy Mistress” about every third day, so I merely nodded. It was Wu’s favorite poem. He could not get enough of talking about it. His asking if I had read it was merely a rhetorical opener.
    “Is not world enough and time,” Wu said patiently. “This is very clear. Nice times are so good to have. If there is no reason, you should be going to Texas and having nice times.”
    I agreed, but secretly. I wasn’t about to be coward enough to leave Texas and then go running right back. I was giving Wu a runaround. I hated Turkish coffee and much preferred drinking tea in