disc over and over again in my room at the Adolphus in Dallas, of a little film by actor Robert Duvall called Angelo, My Love. It was about the gypsies in New York. Angelo was a shrewd, black-eyed little kid about eight years old, really street wise and brilliant and beautiful, and it was his film, his and his family's, and Duvall let them make up a lot of their own dialogue. 1t was realer than real, their life in their own gypsy community. Outsiders in the middle of things, right in New York. But it was crazy for me to be sitting in a darkened hotel room in Dallas watching a film seven times, like the reality of it was exotic, watching this sharp little black-haired boy call up his preteen girl friend and bullshit her, or go into the dressing room of a child country-western singing star and flirt with her, this fearless and good-hearted little boy immersed in life up to his eyeballs.
What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it's that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth. Maybe even Mr. Straight at the Saint Pierre bar in San Francisco is some kind of an outsider -- the young lawyer who writes poetry -- and wouldn't have shocked out over coffee and croissants the next morning if I'd said: 'Guess what I do for a living? No, actually it's a vocation, it's very serious, it's ... my life.' Crazy. Drinking white wine and watching a movie about gypsies, and turning out the lights to look at nighttime Dallas, all those glittering towers rising like ladders to the clouds. I live in Outsider Heaven don't I? Where all your secret desires can be satisfied, and you are never alone and you are always safe. It's The Club where I've lived all my adult life. I just need to get back there, that's all.
And here we are circling over Eden again, and its almost time to have a very close look at those fresh slaves coming in. I wanted to see those slaves, see if this time there wasn't something new, something altogether extraordinary ... Ah, the old romance!
But every year the slaves are different, a little more clever, interesting, sophisticated. Every year as The Club gets more famous, as more and more new clubs like us open, the backgrounds of the incoming slaves get more diverse. And you never know what will be there, what new form that flesh and mystery can take. There had been a very important auction only days ago, one of the only three international auctions worth attending, and I knew we'd bought heavily, full two-year contracts on some thirty men and women, all of them ravishing, with excellent papers from some of the best houses in America and abroad. A slave doesn't get shown at one of those auctions unless he or she has had the prior training, unless every test has been passed. Now and then from other sources we get an unwilling or unstable slave, some young man or woman who, flirting with the leather paddles and straps, got swept up in things more or less accidentally.
And we liberate and pay off those slaves very fast. We don't like the losses. But it's not the slave's fault. Yet it's amazing how many of them show up a year later on the most expensive auction blocks. And if we snap them up again -- and we do if they're beautiful enough and strong enough -- they tell us later that ever since they were liberated they've been dreaming of The Club. But to continue, these mistakes don't happen at the big auctions. For two days prior to the sale, the slaves are worked before a board of examiners. They have to show perfect obedience, agility, and flexibility. And the papers are checked and rechecked. The slaves are rated for endurance, temperament, they're classified according to a series of physical standards, and you could, if you wanted, make a very satisfactory purchase from the extensive catalogue copy and photographs alone. Of course we do all this evaluating again for our own purposes and according to our own standards once the slaves come to us. But it means the merchandise at these auctions is first rate. And no slave reaches the auction preview room