Quotes from Erika Schickel

What was a pretty, clever girl anyway? She gets called a "muse," but she was kindling.

My life had become so dichotomized and compartmentalized, so off the tracks that I barely understood it myself. I couldn't tell him that Spade was Jekyll and Hyde, two men trapped inside one six-foot-three roiling meat suit. Nothing about my life was suited for picnic talk.

We do to our children what was done to us.

Seriously, Dad…a peach pit?" "This subject is closed, Erika.

My game is the Goodwill and Big Lots!, but the compulsion is the same; I have often used thrift shopping as a distraction from life. I could easily have frittered our family's fortune away $20 at a time.

Spade gestured, and his pale wrist caught my eye. His fourth and fifth fingers stood delicately apart from the other three. It was a hand so faultless, so unaware of itself and almost innocent, I felt his mythos transform into pathos. Here was the lost boy himself. I felt my heart squeeze a bit. This is a dangerous dude, I reminded myself.

I remembered this guy. Spade was the sixty-year-old version of the boys I had found irresistible in high school: brilliant, misunderstood, full of shit, and deeply sexy in a way that only I could appreciate. I felt a low gyration start in my hips that I hadn't felt in years.

Possibility swelled inside of me like a sponge absorbing the moisture of the moment—the man, the feeling that an epic story had just been hatched. It replaced my own small meandering, domestic tale of disaffection and decay and set me loose on a tide of romance. It was a perfect storm, and Spade was the perfect pirate. Los Angeles, Fall 1988 I met my husband on my first day in Los Angeles.

Everyone in L.A. knew that Spade was a big-league, serial pussy hound. L.A. County was a veritable body dump of his exes.

Sex with Jonas was okay, but he was unsatisfied. According to him I was supposed to be having orgasms, but I had no idea what that was or how to do it. It didn't matter to me, I loved fucking and I just wanted to be close to him.

It was a perfect storm, and Spade was the perfect pirate.

Sadness was the dowry Jill had brought to her marriage with my father.

I stood with a hot dog in my hand, the sun blazing off my coppery-dyed hair, and I laughed nonchalantly, but it came out as a Phyllis Diller bray that abraded my own ears.

Spade loved money in the way only someone who grew up poor could. He understood its feckless ways and spent it joyfully. It was all a big goof to him and the more he spent the harder he had to work, which was how he liked it.