Everybody Loves You Read Online Free

mine.) In the spring of 1974, I got my first respectable job, on the staff of Opera News, and in late summer of that year I talked my way into my first book contract. I called my parents, a few friends. They were shocked and thrilled. Then I thought I’d tell my brother Jim. He wouldn’t be thrilled, but he wouldn’t be shocked either.
    In fact, he was silent, distracted, holding a shoe in his hand. I was about to ask him to try to remake contact with the planet earth when I heard a pathetic mewing from somewhere in his apartment.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked.
    â€œMice,” he said. “Mice are going on.”
    â€œMice squeak. I hear—”
    â€œLaid in a cat,” he explained, “to catch some mice here.”
    â€œLaid in?”
    â€œBorrowed it.”
    I decided not to pursue that one. Somewhere outside, probably, some poor slob was pacing the street calling out, “Felix! Felix!”
    â€œSomething wrong with it,” he went on. “The mice come out to play and that fucker doesn’t even notice.”
    â€œYou don’t seem very impressed with my news.”
    â€œMust be a cheese factory next door or something. Why should I be impressed? You always wanted to be a writer and you knew you were going to get there, so what the fuck? Tell me some news and maybe…”
    A mouse zipped out of the kitchen and disappeared behind the sofa as Jim heaved the shoe at it.
    â€œIt’s like an army of them,” he went on.
    â€œWhere’s the cat through all this? Hiding?”
    â€œI locked it in the bathroom yesterday to hunger it up so maybe then it’ll straighten out and eat mice.”
    â€œJesus!”
    â€œFucking coward cat. I’m not giving it any Puss ’n Boots Number Four or so when it isn’t pulling its weight here.”
    Someone hit the buzzer downstairs.
    â€œThat’s my man Dave coming around,” said Jim, buttoning him in. “Now that Johnny Boy’s tomcatting out on him, you know.”
    Whose story is it, who tells it, and what is the story about? Walking the three blocks to Jim’s, I had thought it would be my story, about my ambition. It wasn’t. But listen.
    *   *   *
    Dave and Johnny Boy. Okay, they’re hard to do. Because it wasn’t what they said to each other or whatever was in their eyes—easy to record—as it was the threatening clarity of their pauses. Their hesitations around each other. The way they would start to move toward each other, freeze, back off; and they would be smiling right then. It was all rather highly charged, needs the visuals. And there were those things you would hear about them, too—like “Johnny Boy’s tomcatting out on him.”
    So just listen.
    *   *   *
    Dave came in and got the cat out of Jim’s bathroom, first thing, and told Jim, “You got to aim your boy at a project.” He was in the kitchen opening a can of cat food. He petted the cat as it ate. “Don’t you need to train this baby?”
    â€œThe fucking cat and the fucking mice,” Jim muttered.
    â€œYou wait, my friend, and I’ll show you what it is.”
    â€œMice in my fucking house, you know.”
    Dave was about thirty-five then, a rangy, ham-handed, jocular, greying blond southerner who went through life in a blue T-shirt on top of a white T-shirt. Johnny Boy, his inseparable companion, was a trim, muscly guy in his early twenties. Like Jim, they were ironworkers, freelancing on construction sites in and around New York. Dave drove a motorcycle and Johnny Boy had a mustache. Dave took it cool and easy and Johnny Boy ran to the moody. Dave was the chief and Johnny Boy, grinning, did as he was told. It was Dave who had named him Johnny Boy, and this story, I learned on the day of the mice, is theirs.
    â€œNow watch,” said Dave, after the cat had fed, taking it over to where the mice were