Read Little Casino for Free Online Page B

Depression.
    The dreamer sometimes says, with little attention paid to accuracy, “My dreams are getting better all the time.”
    [“Creamy-white, frothy slip” is, if you’ll permit me, somewhat tired, yet I see how it “rhymes” with the Charlotte Russe motif.
    “Uh-huh.”]

Poor banished children of Eve

    T HE OLD MAN LIGHTS A CIGARETTE AND walks into the elevator and right out its rear wall into the 69th Street ferry waiting room. He’s not the man he thinks he is, though, but Buddy Mazzolini, The Boy Bus Driver, who was, at one time, the drunken cop who shot the dog on the corner outside Flynn’s Bar and Grill. Somebody across the street tells him to go fuck his mother and his face turns bright blue and then black and he disappears. He drives down Ocean Parkway. Others stare at the photographs that the bus driver displays because it is quite clear that they think that these heartbreaking images will substitute for or ameliorate their ignorance. They wish the world to be kind to them, to pardon them their sins, their tattered pasts. Look at the lost people in the pictures! Look! Young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful; young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful; young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful. Sweet Mother of God!

    Ghosts.
    Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us; and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Shoes rain of the cops

    T HE OLD MAN ABRUPTLY SITS DOWN ON A kitchen chair in the sunlight glaring through the window. He yields, gratefully, to the painful nausea that is attacking him and throws up black blood on his shoes and the shiny linoleum of the floor. Well, this is probably serious, he thinks. When his daughter comes into the kitchen, her face shocked pale and tight with disgust and fear, he smiles through his dirty lips, grotesquely, he knows, and prepares to tell her not to worry, she just probably has to probably call the doctor. He suspects that he, indeed, looks grotesque, smiling, but thinks that a somber face will only frighten her the more. He has the words now, and speaks them: “unspectacular explosion him, to be made smoking next, to name to name before.” His daughter clutches one of her hands with the other, and says oh Jesus Mary and Joseph Poppa, oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. Her father waves a hand nonchalantly and adds, “overpass Luckies shoes rain of the cops, like into a gawm ticket.” He pitches off the chair and lands on the floor, his face in the slick of bloody vomit. You, you, you and that goddamned rotgut whiskey, she shouts at him. She kneels and touches his hair. She was a very beautiful girl once.

    To call upon Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to assist one in time of trouble was a common enough habit among many Irish Catholics in New York in the early years of the century. It may be still, but that seems doubtful.
    Linoleum is now rarely used as kitchen flooring, and has, for that matter, the look of poverty, so much so that even the poor are averse to it. Oddly, its aura of poverty increases with its newness. And yet, it is not quite so louche as oilcloth, which is the absolute and incontrovertible sign of indigence, and which not even the vapid dictates of junk decoration can rescue.
    That terrible events should occur on sunny, warm, and pleasant days seems a sour irony, and may well account for the quiet madness and despair, the frenzy and sudden violence, that are virtually inseparable from life in California.
    Beauty is but a flowre,
    Which wrinckles will devoure,
    Tumbles book pencil blare,
    Chow mein equities, hair…

Presidential Greetings

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