Darker Than Amber Read Online Free

survey of the Islands a few years before statehood, a tax-structure prediction."

You can watch the Meyer Magic at work and not know how it's done. He has the size and pelt of the average Adirondack black bear. He can walk a beach, go into any bar, cross any playground, and acquire people the way blue serge picks up lint, and the new friends believe they have known him forever. Perhaps it is because he actually listens, and actually cares, and can make you feel as if his day would have been worthless, an absolute nothing, had he not had the miraculous good fortune of meeting you. He asks you the questions you want to be asked, so you can let go with the answers that take the tensions out of your inner gears and springs. It is not an artifice. He could have been one of the great con artists of all time. Or one of the great psychiatrists. Or the founder of a new religion. Meyerism.

Once upon a time when Lauderdale was the place where the college mob came in force, I came across Meyer sitting on the beach. He had a half circle of at least forty kids sitting, facing him. Their faces were alive with delight. Every few minutes there was a big yelp of their laughter. And they were the cold kids, the ones who look at and through all adults exactly the way adults stare at motel art without seeing it. And Meyer was, miraculously, part of that group. When I drifted closer, forty pairs of eyes froze me, and Meyer turned and winked, and I moved along. A kid was playing slow chords on a guitar. Between chords, Meyer would recite. Later I asked him what in the world he'd been doing. He said they were a wonderful bunch of kids. A lovely sense of the absurd. He had been inventing a parody of Ginsberg, entitled "Snarl," making it up as he went along, and he had also made up a monologue of a Barnyard girl trying to instill the concept of social significance into the mind of the white slaver who was flying her to Iraq, and he titled that one "The Two Dollar Misunderstanding." Then he had assigned parts to them and brought them into the act, setting the scene up as Richard Burton and Liz Taylor at a White House garden party in honor of culture.

And once I had seen a very reserved matron type, after talking earnestly in a corner with Meyer for three minutes, and without a drink in her, suddenly fall against his barrel chest and sob like a heartbroken child. He would not tell me just what it was that had broken her. His code forbids such revelations, and possibly that is one of his secrets too.

His comfortable little cabin cruiser, named the John Maynard Keynes, is tied up a seventy-foot walk from Slip F-18. In the sunset dusk he holds court, with wildly assorted people cluttering the cockpit deck, perching on the rails, sitting on the edge of the dock, legs swinging. And there are always the young popsies, sixteen to twenty, eyes soft with a special worship, content to be near him, the same way those of sterner breed clutter the hotel suites and the pits of the Grand Prix race drivers. Were he sensuously unscrupulous he could keep his bunk forever stocked with the exceptional tendernesses of the very young. But, instead, on an average of three times a year he takes unto himself one of that breed which he calls, with warmth rather than irony, the iron maidens. These are stern, mature, aggressive, handsome women who have made their mark in the world, and perhaps forfeited much in the process. Accomplished artists, concert musicians, heads of fashion houses and other competitive businesses, administrators, editors, women in government. He treats them fondly, but as though they are enchantingly foolish young girls, and goes off with his iron maiden of the moment for a few weeks, and when he brings them back, their mouths are soft, and their voices have lost that edge of command, and their eyes are filled with that unmistakable look of devotion. When I seemed curious, he suggested I read what Mark Twain had written about choosing a mistress. He said