To be a writer in America, you have to bleed. Eddie Iturbi, a young car-thief obsessed with the dark magic of Beat culture in a mythic San Francisco, sets off on a spaced-out crusade to connect with the Beat gods. En route Eddie links up with living legend Leo Franchetti, the last of the Beat poets. Leo sends Eddie to the Buzzard Cult, where a mysterious mentor reveals the writer's ritual of blood and words. Changed and invigorated and back in the City, Eddie falls in love with a snake dancer at the Feathered Serpent. She can’t save him from Scarred Wanda, jealous bad-girl of literature, whose goal is to destroy Eddie before Jack Kerouac relays all the magical secrets of the literary universe. Immortality is just a book away. Will Eddie live long enough to write it?
Genre: FICTION / Coming of AgeRankings--range from 3 to 6. good reviews.
Eddie Iturbi leaned against the side of the Chevy wagon, counting the pennies as he filled the tank—6.50 6.90 6.99 7.00 and there the pump shut down and Eddie drained the last drop from the hose. Then he checked the map spread out on the hood—Bakersfield to the City—three hundred miles. Two and a half gallons plus the quarter tank—if he drove 55 and didn’t get blown off the hiway when the semis rolled past he’d make it to Fresno.
He glanced up as a southbound black and silver Kenworth towing a double trailer hauled up at the end of the breezeway and the passenger side door opened and a girl slithered to the tarmac where her snakeskin boots splashed in a puddle of water. She slammed the door and tip-toed backwards like a toe-dancer to huddle under the wing of the Texaco sign. She had strawberru blond hair. She wore jeans and a silver and black jacket, Raider colors. She looked at Eddie. He looked at the map. The Kenworth squeezed into a break in traffic and ground back onto Hiway 99, slipping through the rain, its running lights blurs in the mist.
Eddie folded the map and went inside the station.
He surveyed the store—the candy bars, peanuts, beef jerky, popcorn. He eyed the hamburgers in the hot box. He opened the door, smelled cheese, smelled meat, smelled the hot hamburger buns and his mouth watered. He picked up a burger, walked to the counter, looked out the window to see the girl hunched forward, neck bent, a bird hunting worms. The red and white lights on the sign blinked on and off, off and on painting the girl in a crazy red misty halo. Eddie set the burger on the counter and he looked at the clerk—a pock-marked man with sunken cheeks and baggy eyes and thin lips that he parted with a flick of his tongue twice like a rattlesnake.
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Cristina López
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