Sit and drink and sit and drink and sit.

If she doesn’t show up soon, I swear I’m going to wear this guy’s guts for suspenders. I’m going to take this place apart brick by brick. That’s not much of a boast. The bricks only have a passing relationship to each other anyway. The mortar looks like it was mixed from the stuff in funeral urns and mouthwash. The spiderwebs are structural, installed in the 17th century. The spiders have long since moved to a nicer place, like a sewer or the bottom of a shoe. Columbus’s dandruff is hanging in the stuff.

I grew up in the street and turned out as tough and smart as any hydrant, but around here I’m like a clockmaker. They come and go as they please, and setting a date or a time on something is like lighting candles in church. Might work; who knows? I like the churches here better, too. There’s guys on the walls eating people whole and stabbing them with pitchforks and cooking them in pots. I go in there when the monk’s off and sit among my own kind.

The waitress ain’t half bad –more like three-quarters — but all these dago women sure got some melons in their sacks. I swear they wear brassieres to hold them down, not up. They’d just as soon stab you as tell you to take out the garbage, but that’s half the fun in it, ain’t it? But sleeping with one eye on the door and one eye on the kitchen knives wears a man out after a while. I wish the Germans were still here so I could kill someone and not get yelled at.