Ramada Quotes

In recent years they had fallen in with a gabby, childless couple, older than they were, called the MacNatts. Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon. They had got my parents doing things like taking bus trips to factory outlets and playing a dice game called “bunko” and hanging around the piano bar at the Ramada Inn.

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about. They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three. There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters. They'll stop you at the river, he says. The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me? At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man. Who will? The United States Army. General Worth. They hell they will. Pray that they will. He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man? Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back. Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora. What's it to you, old man? The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be? How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.

The bookstore is owned by septuagenarian nudist Paul Winer, who has skin like burnished leather and wanders the aisles in nothing but a knit codpiece. When it’s cold, he dons a sweater. Paul can afford to keep his bookstore going because, technically, it isn’t a permanent structure, and that keeps the taxes down. It has no real walls—just a ramada roof above a concrete slab. Tarps span the space between them. Shipping containers and a trailer are annexes. Trailer Life magazine called it “the ultimate in Quartzsite architecture.” In an earlier career Paul toured as Sweet Pie, a nude boogie-woogie pianist known for his sing-along anthem “Fuck ’Em If They Can’t Take a Joke,” and he still performs spontaneously on a baby grand near the front of the shop, not far from a discreetly covered adult book section. There’s a Christian section, too, but it’s in the back and Paul usually has to help people find it. “They follow my bare ass to the Bible,” he declares.

Not surprisingly, when Barbie achieved superstar status, her houses became more ostentatious. Yet even Barbie's three-story town house, with its Tara-like pillars and ersatz wrought-iron birdcage elevator, is an outsider's interpretation of upper-class life. Authentic valuables are to Barbie's possessions what a pungent slab of gorgonzola is to "cheese food"; her furniture and artwork would not look out of place in a Ramada Inn. For all her implicit disposable income, her tastes remain doggedly middle- to lower-middle-class. As pictured in the catalogue, the town house also reflects Dynasty thinking. Both Ken and Barbie are absurdly overdressed—he in a parodic "tuxedo," she in a flouncy confection that barely fits into the elevator.

In honor of the occasion (May Day), I tack a scarlet bandanna to the ridgepole of the ramada, where my Chinese wind bells also hang, jangling in the breeze. The red flag flutters brightly over the bells – poetry and revolution before breakfast.

It is not exactly any of these things. It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolently “democratic,” flattened out, mediocre and “open” and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn. It is the architecture of “background music,” decorators, “good taste.

As they tramped in, Temo turned from the big stone barbecue with a long grilling fork in his hand. He froze at the sight of Dayna. Once more, it was as though the two of them were alone in the sunny ramada with its roof of woven grass and the light filtering through on their faces. No one else mattered. A short woman with her hair piled on her head hurried from behind the barbecue with a platter of tacos in her hand. “Temo, aren’t you going to introduce me to your new friends?” she asked with a smile. “Temo, what is wrong? Are you sick?” “No, Madre,” Temo muttered, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off Dayna. Dayna’s mother, Brenda Regis, picked that exact moment to stride in from the spa. “Howdy, everybody,” she crooned. “Hope you’re all hungry as coyotes.” She glanced at her daughter, who was still gazing at Temo with lovesick eyes. “Dayna, what’s the matter with you, honey?” She looked Dayna up and down, then her eyes went to Temo, and then to Temo’s mother. The two women stiffened. Say something, Sophie prayed silently to Dayna. Order Temo around in that bossy voice of yours. Quick, before your mother and his mother figure this out. But Dayna stood stunned, incapable of speech. Sophie gave Liv a nudge. “Follow my lead,” she whispered and then in a louder voice shouted, “Hey, is this a good time to break the piñata?” She dived forward to snatch the long fork from Temo’s hand. “Whee!” she shouted. “Fun! Come on, everybody. Let’s see what’s inside!” She poked at the paper horse. Liv grabbed a barbecue brush and bashed at it too. Cheyenne and Hailey joined in with shouts of glee. The paper horse flew to pieces, scattering small objects and cactus candy all over the picnic table. Some fell into the punch bowl with a splash. More landed in the salad plate. Laughter and confusion broke the spell of tension in the air as they all dived for the piñata’s. Dayna snapped out of her trance. “Look what I’ve got!” She held up a plastic whistle, then blew a shrill note. “Time to eat, everybody.” Temo turned back to the barbecue. The spell was broken, the danger past. His mother, Marita, gave him another frightened glance, but went on laying food on the table. Dayna’s mother picked a piece of candy out of her hair and said, “Well! We usually break the piñata after the meal, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

Como já não há Deus, como a imaginação está presa entre as paredes do que vive e do que se percepciona, como não há esperança, nem futuro, como todo presente é uma sombra do passado, e as nossas ações uma consequência que tentamos justificar através de conceitos do que nos moldamos a ser, como nada parece ter importância, subo ao cume de uma montanha, que vejo da minha janela, de onde proclamo aquilo que tem de ser dito. E lá do alto a minha voz é o vento que sinto nos cabelos, e o meu corpo as ramadas de uma árvore antiga, e tenho terra até os tornozelos.

Miklos said he's applied to be night clerk at a Ramada Inn near the beach. He said the waiting list was two pages long. 'But I got more experience than most.' 'You're not kidding,' Garcia said. 'Good luck with that job.' 'Thank you,' Miklos said. 'Good luck with your murder.