Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me

De: Cullen Ramakrishna Herskovits

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me tells the story of a decrepit hotel, now defunct, called the Resplendent, in what was then called the Borscht Belt in upstate New York's Sullivan County and of the small army of menial workers made up of drifters, derelicts and students called "bimmies," who infested it in the summer of the first Woodstock Music Festival, 1969.

"Cullen Ramakrishna Herskovits has written a mean and vicious, sexed-up Catch 22 set in a Twilight Zone where Last Exit to Brooklyn meets the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and a Catcher in the Rye with a juvenile delinquent Holden Caulfield as its protagonist. This paradox of a novel somehow manages to strike visceral and existential paydirt on practically every page from cover to cover. You curse yourself for continuing to read this book, but you just can't help it."
-- Globe Literary Supplement

The New York Times called it, "The Sun Also Rises meets Last Exit to Brooklyn meets Catch 22 ... but Brooklyn Owes the Charmer Under Me goes beyond all easy comparisons ... stands out in a class by itself ... as a scathing indictment of an era, yet at the same time a euphoric adventure that nullifies all easy and superficial contradictions."

Excerpts:
Autumn had come early. Already the trees were beginning to burn; crackling like green cellophane in the cold, gunmetal-colored wind that beat against them like a blackjack, sending sparks raining on the wickerwork people driving past in newspaper cars. The trains screamed like caterpillars and shot long, sticky threads at planes passing overhead. And the days were growing short.

At his mountain retreat near Woodstock, High Guru Dharma Kundalini, Ninth Avatar of the Sacred Peristalsis, sat in deep meditation, levitating six feet off the floor, barely noticing the shaven-headed disciple bowing reverently below him.
"Yes Govinda?" he asked finally.
"Another package to be mailed, oh Wise and Holy Teacher?"
High Guru Dharma Kundalini beamed at his disciple. "There will be no more, my son," he answered softly, flashing on the vision he'd had in which the Great Cosmic Spirit had personally instructed him to send dogshit care packages to Leo Tarantula.
"The Big Kahuna's Will has been done."
The disciple kowtowed three times, rose and left the room on sandaled feet.
"Prickhead," The High Guru snickered to himself, and sank back into pondering timeless conundrums of divine revelation.

Kafka's revenge of stoned, cloned Gregor Samsas surged in an endless, mindless, pointless buglike army of inebriates. It was like an invasion of berserk mutant ants, a voracious swarm of insect humanoids, all hotwired into a single mass-mind and overrunning everything in its path. The Buckingham loomed ahead of them like a giant neon Chinese take-out carton sitting unguarded on the counter-top of creation and ripe for conquest...The State Troopers were there waiting behind a roadblock of copcars and police barricades, armed with riot shotguns and Mace..