Two Men (from Jesus Son by Denis Johnson ) has the best opening in all fiction in my very humble opinion.

The following is the first Paragraph :-

I met the first man as I was going home from a dance at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall. I was being taken out of the dance by my two good friends. I had forgotten my friends had come with me, but there they were. Once again I hated the two of them. The three of us had formed a group based on something erroneous, some basic misunderstanding that hadn’t yet come to light, and so we kept on in one another’s company, going to bars and having conversations. Generally one of these false coalitions died after a day or a day and a half, but this one had lasted more than a year. Later on one of them got hurt when we were burglarizing a pharmacy, and the other two of us dropped him bleeding at the back entrance of the hospital and he was arrested and all the bonds were dissolved. We bailed him out later, and still later all the charges against him were dropped, but we’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that.

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Q= If you guys have read the story, what do you think of the ending?

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BONUS =

“If it takes 2000 pages and 200 years. So be it.”

This was written on a note stuck on Johnson desk in his secluded writing office.

BONUS 2 = If you’re planning to read Two Men , Pair it with A Poetic for bullies by Stanley Elkin

Both are available online(search on google).