“Like flies on the same turd.”
Women“Like flies on the same turd.” is the narrator’s contemptuous shorthand for writers gathered in one room, an image that makes literary company seem less like community than a swarm clustered around something degraded. The phrase closes a judgment that they nullify one another, giving the criticism its most concentrated and deliberately abrasive form.
The Scene and Its Target
The phrase occurs when Dee Dee takes the narrator to one of her bars, a place she identifies as a hangout for scriptwriters and little-theatre people. He immediately dislikes the writers sitting around and acting clever and superior. He extends the complaint beyond the people in that room: for a writer, he says, knowing another writer is bad, and knowing several is worse. The line about flies is the punchline to this escalating dismissal.
Image and Meaning
The metaphor strips the writers of the distinction and sophistication they appear to claim. They become indistinguishable flies, while the shared object of their gathering is rendered as filth. Its ugliness is functional: the phrase refuses the flattering idea that writers naturally form a mutually sustaining community. Instead, the narrator sees proximity as a force that diminishes everyone involved, summed up in the preceding claim that they nullify each other.
The Narrator’s Counter-Fantasy
The insult is followed by a more private ambition. At the table, the narrator measures himself against the writers’ reported earnings: he is making $65 a week, while some of them make $1,000. He imagines that he will catch up and be recognized in fancy restaurants, even granted a special table near the kitchen. The contrast gives the phrase an edge of irony: he rejects the gathered writers’ company while imagining a future in which he himself receives public recognition. His imagined distinction is not a place at the center of the restaurant but a special seat by the kitchen, an image that keeps his ambition tethered to the scene’s comic, self-deprecating register.
