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fresh air,
strip down to my underwear, and do some deep knee bends, some pushups, even a
few bonus sit ups. You want to keep the body honed. Afterwards I dig around to
see if maybe I’ve missed the minibar. An optimistic nature, mine, despite all
evidence to the contrary. Well there’s not one, so I go back out to reception
to see if somebody can rustle me up something wet, only to find that Kafka has
arrived. He’s in heated conversation with the costume party, such that he
doesn’t see me standing there.
    So I do a
little drinking pantomime for the elephant woman. She smiles and starts to get up,
but then I get worried she’ll go to all that trouble for a glass of water or
something, so I do some more of the drinking motion and stumble around a bit
like a drunk, meaning to make myself clear. About this time Kafka notices me
flopping around, and I ask him if he thinks he could get me some bourbon.
    “I don’t
know,” he says. “Maybe she’s got some whiskey in the kitchen.”
    “If you could
just ask her to bring out the bottle. Save a trip, so to speak.” The last thing
I need is a cardiac arrest. Kafka gives her some instructions, and she goes
off. We watch her go, and man is it tense. When she’s finally clear Kafka
invites me to squeeze onto the couch beside him and offers me a cigarette,
which I decline. They’re little brown ones, and I realize that’s what I smelled
in my room. Sort of like a mixture of cinnamon and body odor.
    “Where’s
Twiggy?” I say.
    “Who?”
    “The blonde
with the ribcage.”
    He laughs a
little nervously. “Yes, I guess she is a bit like a twig,” he says. The big
woman brings out a bottle and some glasses, and I pour drinks for everybody.
    “Don’t tell me
you live here, Kafka,” I say. “Artist of your stature should be fitted out in
style.”
    “This is
Willie Lee,” he says to the others sitting close. “He’s interested in art. We
met him down around the galleries in Soho.”
    A kid Kafka’s
calling Max asks if I saw anything I liked.
    “Not unless
you like your redheads ornery,” I say. “Didn’t get to see many paintings on
account of her.”
    Max nods and
says: “I’m sure Kafka has told you about our mission.” Kafka smiles faintly and
stares at his combat boots. “ALF will turn the entire capitalistic hierarchy of
the art world on it’s head,” he says real smooth, making it sound like Eastern
religion.
    Which gets me
a lecture on ALF, which stands for the Art Liberation Front, apparently, although
I could think of a few less polite names beginning with those letters. ALF is
what these kids have in common, apart from Albania. It takes me half an hour of
having big vocabulary words shouted at me from all corners of the room in
questionable grammar to make any sense of it. What I finally get, more or less,
is that these kids are all artists of some form or another, and that their art
just is the first step in some kind of worldwide revolution to destroy what
they’re all calling the capitalist power structure.
    “Well, it’s
been nothing short of fascinating,” I say after a while, beginning to wish I’d
never met Kafka. Nobody’s paying me to spend the afternoon chatting with ALF,
and even if they wanted to, I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified. So I throw down
a twenty-dollar bill for the bottle, bid adieu to my new Albanian friends, and
head out to the streets where I can breathe again.

4
    On the corner
I find phone booths, but no phones. They’ve all been clipped away with bolt cutters.
I walk up to the next corner, where one still looks intact, and put in a
quarter, which fails to get me a dial tone, much less my quarter back. I reach
my finger up into the change slot and feel some plastic up in there, which I
pinch between two fingers and pull out till it becomes a plastic shopping bag
and quarters come raining out like a one-armed bandit, fifteen dollars’ worth
at least. Oldest trick in the book, and it does make you a little