My god, what’s happened to him? It stinks like old cheese in here. Like feet soaked in cheese… There’s garbage everywhere – in plastic bags, tumbling out of three different trash cans… 

“Did you go out and buy more trash cans, to avoid having to take the garbage down?”

“No!” He says emphatically. “I found that one down in the alley.”

“This is better?”

“Seemed fated.”

“And the third?”

“Was just sitting in the stairwell.”

He doesn’t even shy away from eye contact. Just peels and eats a banana. 

“So you just stole some other tenant’s trash can?”

He shrugs, pushes fruit against his gums, preparing for speech. 

“Technically I’m not a tenant.”

“What?”

“You said another tenant. Implying – ”

“Yes, I see your point.” 

And really, I can. Though I still have reservations. Perhaps a guest needn’t have such a strict code… Perhaps he is a guest of the building and not of the apartment, and therefore entitled to certain indulgences… On the other hand – and the morality of taking trash cans aside – the state of the place is worrying, at a minimum. So I shift gears and ask about the smell. He looks shocked, as if my objection had never crossed his mind. He raises his eyebrow at me while casually peeling a second banana. 

“What smell?” 

He really doesn’t seem to notice. He’s desensitized himself to it, I guess. Or maybe he’s having me on. Or maybe… just maybe… he’s advanced beyond noticing. 

He throws the limp skin into one of his trashcans and peels another, standing in the warm glow of the open fridge. 

“Want some milk?”

Do I want milk? I’m more interested in the fact that he’s eating another banana. A third banana… Is he having cramps? Preparing for a marathon? 

“What?”

“Milk. Do you want some? I don’t have a glass…” He looks around, as if expecting to see a clean glass somewhere in the wreckage of the kitchen. “But I have another half-gallon here. Unopened. It’s all yours!”

“No I… I’m fine, thanks.”

I look around and see all the empty half gallons of milk – or nearly empty anyway. Sitting on the top of piles so trash. No lid. Just open containers, with little bits of curdled milk inside. 

“That’s the smell! It’s the milk. The old milk!”

“Smell?”

I shake my head, turn my palms up, as if to insist. He’s housesitting, for god’s sake. And he’s basically destroying these people’s apartment. Unwashed – his monstrous odor already permeates the main room – he sits wrapped in a filthy Afghan, eating yet another banana. The place will need fumigation, repainting. The plants are wilting. 

“When are they coming back?”

“About a month.”

It will take him about that long to clean it. 

Granted they’re yuppie snowbirds, and they’ve made the mistake of trusting him… So my stupefaction has little to do with a craving for justice. My disgust is more immediate. It’s actually arguable that it’s an artefact of concern for him. Concern for a man who just wiped his sticky hands onto the edge of the couch – who’s currently blowing his nose into the front of his t-shirt. 

He swigs from his already half empty half-gallon of milk, resting the bottom on the back of his wrist, like some moonshiner of old maneuvering a jug… 

“Want to go for a walk?”

He shrugs, guzzles more milk, wipes away the runoff with his other wrist. I watch as the drips settle onto the Afghan, and as he slops a cup’s worth into a soiled coffee mug, stirring in Ovaltine with a spoon so crusted over it’s almost doubled in size. He lifts the brown sludge to his mouth, submerging the far edge of his untrimmed mustache as he begins to speak again. 

“Just a walk? Or are we going in somewhere?”

There seems to be an almost mystical significance to that “in.” 

“Why?”

He shrugs again, hopes I’ll fill in the blank myself. Then, finally, “I’d have to take a shower.”

“Why don’t you do that. Just in case.”

 

This was the great genius of our program – the jewel in the crown of the University of Chicago’s graduate philosophy program. And this was after getting a master’s degree in mathematics. He’d read Plato in Greek and tutor me in German while meanwhile teaching undergraduate classes on Modern Philosophy. He was so far ahead of me, so far ahead of us all… I expected to come here and see him sitting attentively before a stack of Nietzsche, scribbling his notes, working on his essays. 

And now, looking around, I don’t see a single serious book. He’s been here for months. And there’s nothing. He’s got a few old pulp novels stacked on the dining room table. There’s a book about poker. That’s it. 

No, not quite all. He’s got a stack of TV guides, too. He’s got piles of orange peels, and banana peels on paper towels – brown now and drying out… He’s got yet more empty milk containers sitting at the edge of the dining room table… Empty packets of Ovaltine, jars of Nestle’s Quick, half-eaten sticks of jerky, empty bags of potato chips, and a few dirty magazines. I try to reconstruct his days from the rubble. 

There are stains of every size, shape and color on the tablecloth, which looks to be some kind of handmade and probably antique pattern woven with care by someone’s grandmother. I see babushkas, needlepoint, pierogi… And then him sloshing chocolate milk over the edges of his mug, like some five-year-old menace hopped up on sugar and caffeine. I watch in my mind’s eye as he demolishes the relics and memorabilia of three generations. And now I notice crusty cloth napkins, unwashed silverware with flecks of brown and some sinister darker remnants… And next to these soiled instruments, plastic cutlery spilling out of a now empty paper box. It looks to have gotten soaked; it bends and sags like a cardboard box left in an alley.  

He emerges from the bathroom looking stunned. He’s dripping like a beaver fresh from his labors. He goes into the bedroom, comes out with the same clothes he was wearing before the shower. 

“Where are you working? The bedroom?”

“Working?”  

“Your dissertation?”

He stares blankly, like a man waiting out some awful and unexpected barrage of noise. 

“You finished it already?”

He shakes his head.

“Taking a break?”

“Look… forget about the dissertation… it… Just forget about it.”

“What do you mean, forget about it?”

He walks out of the room. I hear him opening drawers, the thump of shoes being thrown across a rug, a few frustrated grunts. I decide to drop it for now. 

 

So we go out, into the night, frozen Chicago, with crusts of brown snow from the last storm still lining the curbs, ice everywhere, and the silence – winter silence – broken only by the occasional car horn, or the shuffling rattle of the El going by half a mile to the west. And he keeps his own stubborn silence, scratching his face and fidgeting with his gloves, but otherwise retaining a kind of immobility, as if he’s slipping on ice down the street toward the lights of Halstead. 

But even before we get there the music is audible – awful, electronic noise, blaring out of the doorways of clubs, which are surrounded by men smoking, talking, flirting… 

“It’s like they’re waiting their turn at some kind of audition.”

 “Or maybe they’ve already gotten the part!” He grins and blows his nose into his sweatshirt, continues. “The whole scene is some badly staged Dantean one act – just the tableaux going nowhere, with nowhere to go… an endless, stunted repetition…” 

“As opposed to the direction of children, exhaustion, desperation, disappointment?”

“These are the options, yes.”

“Or we behave like homosexuals with women?”

“I’ve always preferred this option.” 

They’re wearing t-shirts and sleeveless tees in the twenty-degree weather, pastel shorts, all of them drenched in cologne, with every hair in place… We pass a few guys groping each other in a doorway, another pair getting blown in an alley. 

“They’ve really chosen their hell.”

“And we’ve chosen ours.” 

“Yeah, but this here is nothing. There’s always something going on in these alleys. Last week, with that brutal wind chill, I saw two guys with their shirts pulled back over their heads, just going at it against a parked car, in that lot by the Denny’s. Wind blowing, snow coming down… Naked chests, pants down around their ankles….”

“I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything that much.”

Getting free of Halstead by way of an untenanted alley, we head north, aimlessly crossing and recrossing the neighborhood. Avoiding groups, we turn and re-turn until we’ve made some kind of strange figure-eight across the edge of the yuppie frontier. Eventually we cross it and penetrate our natural territory – the half-ghetto edge of Uptown, frozen and remote, vacant, neglected, silent. 

But no matter where we turn the wind seems to be blowing straight in our face, and the temperature is dropping. We wander toward the old cemetery, taking refuge against the high walls. Inside, a few kids are passing a bottle, lighting cigarettes. They yell some vague obscenities at us, which cheers me. My unhappy Martin, even, acknowledges them with a nod before we start walking again. 

The cemetery is still filled with snow, and the branches of the trees are gleaming in the orange streetlights – black icicles vibrating in the half-dark, the two of us shivering as we walk up the slight hill to Clark Street, as if by magnet drifting toward our old bar… I haven’t been there in years – since I moved, since I began losing touch with Martin… Martin and his strange predicament… his milk and bananas… his tv guide and Ovaltine… Martin retreating into his cave, with his garbage cans and his Afghan.

But I think I understand what he’s dealing with. There are so many things to not want to know – so many things it would be better to unsee, or at the very least to forget. Even drinking probably isn’t enough. You’d have to become incapable of noticing. Maybe that’s what he’s going for: watch TV, read pulp novels, play poker… Stop training your mind to pick up patterns and connections beyond the simple probabilities of the cards. Make those a surrogate. Just vegetate. It’s winter, you can wrap yourself up in your Afghan and take pleasure in your own stink. Unwashed, lazy, almost comatose, except for the occasional walk to the grocery store… It all makes a certain kind of sense to me – especially as I grow tired and cold and start focusing on my hunger and thirst. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just do this automatically? To so tire yourself out every day that you can’t think? Or to refuse every action that would energize you in the first place, so that there’s no energy to burn off… 

But god, that stink! When I walked into the apartment… Like the innards of a garbage truck in July! Is that really the trade-off? To become oblivious to everything that sucked the life out of you in the first place you have to become oblivious to yourself as well? And everything that once made you tolerable to be around? My god, it was like a complete abdication of everything that distinguishes the human from the hyena. To become bestial… Maybe that’s the price… 

I turn to him just in time to see him blow a long jet of snot from his nostril, which, as he tries to remove from his cheek, gets transferred to his fraying mitten. He shakes it ineffectually, as if merely for show, then crams it back into his coat pocket. The other side will have to wait. 

So we move on through the night until we come to the bar. I get him drinking, we eat… we’re cracking jokes, watching the other people. I flirt with a waitress – he builds a castle with his leftover French fries, using mayonnaise for mortar… And the door keeps swinging open, blowing fresh cold air into our booth. I almost forget about the state of his apartment, his clothes, the Afghan… I guzzle beer and feel lighter than I have in weeks. But this too is an escape. Which means maybe I shouldn’t judge him so harshly – or even be surprised about the milk-mold fortress, the garbage piles, the snot on the couch. Looked at honestly, it’s understandable enough… 

It’s an artform, this not knowing. For one who used to know. He’s reclaimed his stupidity – it was after all rightfully his, a kind of birthright… Like an egg in the species’ nest. But, no – that’s backwards. Knowing is like the egg, and he’s thrown it out of his nest! But the problem is, the bird keeps laying… To stay stupid when you aren’t you have to keep throwing the eggs away. It’s like bailing a leaky boat – the water just keeps flowing in, and you wind up spending all of your energy bailing. But unlike the boat, you can just choose to accept the deluge and fall back against the gunwale, exhausted but relieved. I think his fear was exactly that he would drown, that he would be completely overwhelmed by what he knew. Which means the best metaphor would really just be a bird afraid of the sky, afraid to breathe air, afraid to flap its wings. But the irony is that this is how you die – denying your normal function. 

My head must be getting foggy from all the beer – I can’t even pick a simple metaphor. Of course it’s not really like any of those things. It’s exactly what it seems to be: you went out seeking the truth and it poisoned your life. Every agile mind agrees on this: from Ecclesiastes to Nietzsche. 

Putting down my beer I catch his eye and say, “The preacher says, in much wisdom is much grief… and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” 

“Is this your way of bringing up my dissertation?”

“I guess it is… No good?”

“It’s not terrible… Alright, what do you want to know?”

“So you really just sit around all day eating bananas and watching tv?”

“Pretty much.” 

“Why?”

“I’ve just lost my taste for it. I don’t want to know any more. What’s the point? What’s Eliot say? That humankind cannot bear very much reality? I’ve decided to take Eliot seriously. Ok? Aren’t I human?” 

“What’s Nietzsche say, though? The strength of a person’s spirit would be measured by how much truth he could tolerate… to what extent he needs to have it diluted or disguised…” 

“Nietzsche!” He looks sourly at me, moves his palm as if he’s pulling some ugly knickknack off a shelf… 

“Since when do you wave away Nietzsche?”

“That old invalid? Look, he’s right about some things… but…”

“But?”

“But… the affirmative side… it’s…”

“It’s what?”

“It’s… I don’t know… an invalid’s strange dream of health.”

“So what are you?”

He thinks about it. I don’t want to misrepresent him. He really considers the question before answering. There’s really nothing flippant about Martin. Finally he lets me have it: “I’m just a sick man. Sick unto death. Sick – and tired of dreaming. I’m a sick man reconciled to his illness.” 

And now I take a minute of my own. 

“Yeah that sounds good. I was almost fooled at first!”

“But?”

“Well…” And here I choose my words carefully – he’s staring at me, weighing every gesture, every sound. “If you were really reconciled to it… why wouldn’t you keep going with your work? Say what you want to say about it? No – you’re not reconciled to anything. That’s the problem. You’re trying to flee what you’ve already learned. But there’s nowhere to go.” 

But he’s ready for this. He’s probably already considered every possible response to his self-justification before ever saying it out loud. 

“There are plenty of places to go. I retreat. I go into my inborn cave – like a turtle into his shell, or some primitive crawling into the rocks… for shelter…”

“Regression.”  

“No. there’s a time for retreat, for safety – ”

“For repression.”  

“Potato, potahto…”

“No, it’s a real distinction.” 

“It all comes down to this: there’s such a thing as too much knowledge. I don’t want to know why people do the things they do… and I definitely don’t want to know why I do what I do…”

“But it’s not a choice.” 

“Isn’t it?”

“No. You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned.”

“No, once you see it you can’t unsee it.” He says it with such defeat, such despair… Just as the waitress grabs and desecrates his plate, wrenching it from the table so that the French fry hut collapses, the victim of a tiny Lisbon earthquake… 

“What good does it do me to know that my understanding of my own actions is mostly just a post hoc rationalization of an instinctual drive? Or that most of what we call politics is just theater? How does it help me to comprehend that the truth is too terrible for most people to grasp – and too dangerous to discuss? To know that most discourse is just variously iterated obfuscations seeking to hide the inhuman biological truth? That even the word inhuman is a misunderstanding…” 

I sip my beer. I palm a few nuts and slap them into my mouth like a nonchalant squirrel.  

“So you think philosophy ruined your life?”

He raises an eyebrow at me, hinting yes – then scowls, as if thinking it through again. 

“Yes,” he finally decides. And then more emphatically, “yes,” as if in the enunciation itself he hopes to find confirmation. But before I can attack, he changes his tune: “Well… no… I think being born ruined my life.”

Through my laughter I remind him that we’re all born. 

“Yes, but if I had to be born, at least I should never have discovered philosophy.” 

 “You’d prefer illusion? You really mean that?” 

“I met a guy the other day on the El. Some cybersecurity guy coming back from the airport… From some businesses trip. Seems to make decent money, thinks what he does is important… I want these illusions!”

“But you can’t choose!”

“Not now. Now it’s too late!”

“Maybe.”

“And what’s worse – I still have to make a living. I have to eat and drink and pay the rent… I need a place to shit and complain.” 

“Well that’s why you should teach.”

“You want me to teach? Look who I’d be teaching! You were there… Those fucking brats. They’re absolute imbeciles. Always running off to the H.R. ladies to squeal together and gnash their teeth over some imagined insult… Always whining about how much reading you assign, telling you about their problems in teary monologues.”  

“Sure.”

“They grab you after class. They buttonhole you in the corridor or ambush you at your office door… it’s always father dead or dying, mother dying or dead… grandparents resuscitated and killed off once a semester! They catch every conceivable illness… they suffer irreparable loss, trauma… they fall down dark holes, miss their flights… they break limbs, slip on ice, overdose on drugs, have their hearts broken – and they’re not ashamed to tell you about it! They collapse suddenly from changes in air pressure, worry that their lymph nodes are inflamed, that their feet might have to be amputated… they’re hypoglycemic, hypomanic, schizoaffective… they fill your ears with manifold diagnoses, strange and contradictory symptomologies… they belch and fart their bullshit into your ears and wait for a sympathetic response… 

“And all of it so they can beg for an extension! As if another week give or take will make them any less a moron.”

“Sure.”

“They expect you to believe this bullshit.”

“Maybe it’s worse than that: maybe it’s just a symbolic gesture… the telling of the tale.”

“Some of them aren’t even bright enough to come up with an excuse – however idiotic and implausible. I had one tell me that she couldn’t come to class because she had a headache. Which would have been bad enough. But then she added ‘and also I have a midterm in another class I have to study for.’ I mean… right, that’s how it works. You have to study for more than one class.”

“I know all of this. I have to do it, too. But what else are you going to do? Get a job?”

“All this I could maybe take. But then they bring in the political bullshit. ‘Why are we reading so many men? What about the female perspective? Why are they all white?’ The never-ending question begging, the maudlin interrogation… You just want to assign Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen and never say another word again. You want to get an actual whip and go out with some nobility! ‘I’ll show you pedagogy! I’ll show you why you’re not reading women!’ That’s what I’d say. If I had any balls. I’d be at the tanner’s right now, testing his wares for adequate snap!” 

“This is a nice image. But it’s just a pleasant dream.” 

“And worse than the ones who actually believe in the pollical bullshit are the ones who pretend to just so they can use it to manipulate you. The second class ends they’re off with their sorority, drinking and flirting with football players who say things that would probably make me blush… and for them they just smile coyly. They go wax their little cunts the second class is over – preparing for their boyfriends. For them they just lean their heads back and push their tits out. Sure. For them… But in class they’re offended by Cicero! They’re real blue stockings during the day. But only during the day… 

“I could have been a mechanic. I could have managed a shoe store… I could have been a cab driver. I might have painted houses, or cleared scrub brush in the forest… If I applied myself maybe a gynecologist… But no, I wanted the life of the mind. I wanted to understand…

“And now I’m stuck in a room with 20 or 30 spoiled morons wearing pajamas and slippers. They’ve got cartoon characters on their backpacks. They want to be taken seriously and they can’t even dress themselves! They can barely write coherent sentences, but they expect you to be impressed by their utterly inane and utterly predictable political screeds. Half the time they can’t even summarize the summary they read online. And they expect passing grades!”

But I have to reiterate that this is nothing new. He knew this going in. “We used to sit next to our generation’s version of this. You can’t say you’re surprised…” But he just goes on, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“You can’t teach them. Of all people not them. You’d be better off teaching in a penal colony. In a prison… At least there, if someone wants to rebel, they’ll snap your fucking neck. At least there, they won’t whine about headaches and the lack of the female perspective! And you can teach them concrete skills. Help the enterprising dealers to read through Machiavelli! Improve their craft! See the results of your pedagogy!”

He sits there shaking his head. He’s spent now. But all the ranting has obviously cheered him up. We had a little purge. A catharsis. We drank a few beers and vomited up some of the anxiety and misery of life. Not much, in the grand scheme of things. There’s altogether too much. But we cleared a little spot so that the next infusion won’t choke us. 

And I don’t dare argue the point in any case. After all, maybe he’s not cut out to be a teacher in this low time. Maybe I’m not either. Maybe we’ll both end up doing different things. Maybe I’ll become a janitor and he a window washer. Maybe we’ll open an ice cream store together – or a dog grooming service. It’s even possible we’ll learn something in the fraud trade, whether high or low. But then I think of another alternative he’ll likely enjoy discussing. And so, with a grin, I start to weave my own tale. 

“Well… it’s possible my friend Merklin has it all figured out. He’s been in the psych ward so many times they gave him social security. Twenty-one hundred a month. Plus now he’s got a part-time job taking care of the mentally retarded.” 

He snorts. 

“Well, he had one. And yeah, I didn’t understand it either. I guess they’re desperate for anyone willing to do it. Or they think like cures like…” 

“Well… what was he expected to do exactly?”

“You feed em, walk em in the park… Help em blow their nose, I guess.”  

He looks at me thoughtfully, signals to the waitress that we’ll need another round. 

“He even told me that Otis understands his persecution and so on. Otis is the guy he’s taking care of. Fifty-eight and barely able to tie his shoes.”

“I thought they had Velcro.”

“That’s a problematic assumption…” 

“Forgive me. But anyway, what’s the persecution?”

“Just typical schizophrenic persecution complex. Haven’t I told you?” 

“Yeah, I vaguely remember… some kind of laser, right?”

“Pretty much. Except it’s a radiation gun, I think. And they’re after him because he worked for the government tracking pedophiles – but a different administration, hostile to the goals of the current faction.”

“Right, sure. This one is harboring the pedophiles. Yes?”

I take a large pull at my beer, after first sucking down a lovely warming shot of cheap bourbon. I think I even smile vaguely at the waitress, even though she’s not particularly appealing. I’m feeling good. My worry over his banana-dank cave has subsided. So what if it smells? So what if he’s turned to TV guide and compulsive masturbation? Let him take a break from his studies. Let him get fat on Ovaltine. Maybe this is part of tending our own garden… He’ll get through it. He brightened up the second he started telling me why he couldn’t bear philosophy – but the rejection of philosophy is itself a kind of higher thinking in any case. Because he had to state his reasons. And he did so brilliantly. It was hilarious, absurd, insightful – and he knows it. Maybe he’ll become a poet instead. Maybe he’ll sing the absurd and the monstrous like Swift, one of our shared heroes. I’m tempted to push him back into our longstanding argument over the supremacy of philosophy or poetry… but I don’t want to break the narrative. I pick up Merklin’s saga where I left it. 

“So he’s got Otis convinced they’re both spied on. He’s been telling him the ins and outs of various conspiracies, quizzing him on dates and places. Everything from the formation of the Jesuits to 9/11 and through to Epstein. He’s got him memorizing faces, running through flashcards. They’re identifying bad actors, marking up doorways like it’s Passover… They’re taking evasive action in Merklin’s Camry… blowing through red lights, avoiding cameras… He’s got the poor guy writing down license plates and descriptions of agents – they’re probably mailmen, joggers…” 

He looks at me thoughtfully – or maybe he’s just glazed over. 

“You keeping up?”

“I’m still amazed they let him work with retards. Hasn’t he been on anti-psychotics for like a decade? How many times has he been in the psych ward? Hasn’t he been in jail?” 

“Twice in jail, yes. But they’re hard up. This is the 21st century, pal. And anyway, last time he was in jail they stuck him in the hole for compulsive masturbation. He was dehydrated; he’d gone white as a ghost… They almost had to give him an IV.”

He squints, rubs his temples. “Maybe it’s a smart idea, honestly. Except that now he’s got the guy believing the same psychotic fantasy?”

“He did. Until a few weeks ago.” 

“What happened?”

“He became convinced they were lasering him – excuse me… radiating him – through the wall of his apartment. Started staying up all night trying to catch them at it. Wasn’t washing, wasn’t even speaking in coherent sentences. Hid in the bushes, set up cameras…”

“So the psychosis was too obvious to keep the job?” 

“No, they didn’t fire him. He was on the verge of a promotion! Because meanwhile Otis was calmer than he’d ever been. Just spent his time watching videos about Pizzagate and washing Merklin’s car. He was drinking milk and doing pull-ups in the fresh air. Eating 15 eggs a day, megadosing creatine… 

“But in the end Merklin fled, abandoned Otis. Got increasingly manic… drove all the way to Idaho, stayed in hotels until he ran out of money – he was sending me videos of himself yelling at people who he thought were ‘in on it.’ Then he happened to drive by a federal building – of course he doesn’t think it was a coincidence.”

“Maybe it wasn’t.” We each raise an eyebrow. 

 “All I know for sure about this stretch is what he told his brother. But anyway he looked up and actually saw Feds. We know this because he took selfies in front of the building with a few of them milling around in the background, eating their lunches, socializing, smoking… Apparently this couldn’t have been a coincidence… So he had to leave the area. Drove on to the coast, photographing churches and police stations along the way. He made videos in front of auto parts stores, claiming they were waystations along a route he’d discovered for human trafficking… He tagged Catholic organizations on twitter, elected representatives, accused senators of diddling.”

“Sometimes you can’t spit without hitting a cat.” 

“Sure. And he built up quite a following on social media doing this. Even got invited to speak at some kind of conference. But travel isn’t cheap, and eventually he ran out of money and needed a place to stay. So he went he went to a psych ward and announced that he, quote, ‘had a plan to murder the archbishop.’” 

There’s a long pause while laughter turns to coughing and back to laughter. Finally he takes up the thread. 

“Maybe that’s the solution… go to a psych ward and threaten to kill the archbishop. Take a long rest, get social security, live a quiet life.”

“Tend our own gardens.”

“Exactly.”

“Watch TV, drink Ovaltine, nap away the days.”

 

In the end we drink until closing. Along the way I vomit a touch in the men’s room, then have a nice beer to rinse out the taste. My banana chomping friend still holds his liquor like a sailor, and even manages to get the waitress’s phone number, though he smells like something that spent a week inside of a bear – or a great fish, maybe. Tending his own garden agrees with him. 

Meanwhile they’re getting ready for karaoke. Three Koreans in Elvis costumes strut in and scope out the room. They’re wired, greased up – pristine. One combs his slicked-back, Brylcreemed, shining, thick head of hair, wipes his comb on his jeans, and stows it in the pocket like he’s done it a thousand times. The female hitches up her bell bottoms and wipes a delicate line of sweat from her forehead. They’ve got a leather bag which they begin to unpack. They’ve got their own microphone, dark glasses, a hula necklace… They’ve got rhinestone belts, a velvet cape… They’ve got scarves of all kinds and colors… The female wraps one around her neck and ties it while Brylcreem takes out a large plastic bag and removes from within it a bottle of chocolate milk and a sandwich – I think it’s peanut butter and banana.