Isn’t Life Peculiar

by novalark

Posted to Utterances on 2002-02-13 20:39:00

Parent message is 119754
I agree that is a great CD. Here’s a little Bill for ya..


” “Well,” I said, tapping my arm, “duty calls. As one judge said to another: ‘Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.’ ” I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt. I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, gray as ashes, phantom porters sweep in out dusty halls with a slow old man’s hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth. I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will hop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it. “Well, my boys will be like that one day,” I thought philosophically. “Isn’t life peculiar?” “

-WSB