The Butterfly Kid/Quotes

I hate to see grown men petulantly slapping innocent plaid butterflies.

I was inconspicuously dressed, as is my wont; this time in early-eighteenth-century French costume: swallowtail red satin coat with gold brocade, white on white linen shirt with lace front and cuffs, knee-length gold satin breeches, anachronistic black patent leather high boots with silver buckles and high heels -- a fairly popular outfit that summer, but, I was learning, much too hot for the day and the job before me.

My mind very carefully boggled.

Human beings are just naturally violent animals, even the nonviolent ones. Hell, even the limp protesters who lie down in front of ammunition trucks and have to be hauled off the street like sacks of flour, all they’re doing is imposing their will on others, compelling other people to behave contrary to their own desires, which is the crystalline essence of violence.

Have you ever tried to talk a bunch of hippies into helping you save the world? Forget it. Next time I save the world, by Starky, I’m gonna do it solo. Easier that way, less work.

Mortal fear, mortal combat, victory, justice, and repentance: suddenly and all at once that day I had encountered concepts that I’d always thought were mythical, and they just weren’t what they’d been cracked up to be.

Laszlo was easier to understand than to believe. He throve on ridicule, an amazingly complex perversion. Not just any old ridicule, mind you: Laszlo was a connoisseur. He was perfectly willing to endure the esteem of young female tourists, on which he made his living, as long as Mike and I and other such Village aristocrats, all of whom he hated in proportion to his need for them, put him beautifully down. (Once, in an excess of something I'd rather not think about, Laszlo got a coffeehouse gig that involved his being beaten up by the manager after closing every night. He held that job for six months, until the manager got busted in New Jersey for aggravated assault and the coffeehouse closed down.)
Laszlo stood some five plump nine in his fragrant stocking feet. His hair was so blond it was almost invisible, wherefore he sported a translucent pussycat beard that gave his (let us call it pasty) face a patently absurd ambiguity, an almost aggressive absence of form. In the middle of this face, which might be ugly if anybody cared, sat two little eyes, wet blue, beady, red-rimmed, and porcine, surrounded by no visible lashes or brows.
"Laszlo," I once said in a fit of divine inspiration, "is a blue-eyed maggot in drag." No one ever disagreed.

There are problems associated with marching an orchestra in full throat through lower Manhattan after midnight that the average man can't possibly imagine, and I envy him. The police were no problem -- not after the leader produced, on irate demand, an appallingly official city permit to hold a parade through those streets at that hour playing music -- but the people who lived in the buildings we passed were difficult to cope with. They threw some of the strangest things, and I couldn't see just how they were being coped with. I was starting to develop some faith in the Reality Pill, though. It seemed to give good service.

Mike's acquaintances continued to worry me. "Michael," I inquired as we columned right onto Broadway, "your - friends - look very interesting."
"Yes." he beamed. "Aren't they great? I'm really very proud of them."
"I can see where you might be. Ah, what are they?"
"Gods, of course. A whole pantheon. It's a little pantheon, I'll grant you, but it has a certain fey charm of its own."
"Gods, eh?" They were still tossing graphic threats at each other and their fey charm was moderately difficult to see. Acquired taste, perhaps.