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Helms opens up the pie, which looks good except for one small but large detail. There’s an egg in the
     middle of it. A beautiful big fat pizza, dripping with cheese and so much spinach, and there it is, smack dab in the middle—one
     close-but-no-cigar chicken!
    “What the fuck is THIS thing?”
    “It’s an egg… Wha’does’t look like from where you’re sitting?”
    “I mean… Yeah… It looks like a fucking egg, but what’s it doin’ in the middle of this pie?”
    “Is this ANOTHER thing I should’ve warned you about, Jimi?… Well… I’ll tell ya now. You’re in London and they put eggs on
     a lot of things.”
    The girls are laughing, finding humor in my small-time dilemma. I look down at the egg, all yokey and drippy, polluting my
     cheese. The cheap scotch gurgles in my stomach. More hash, it’ll take more hash before everything mixes up alright.
    “You just toss that egg over my way when you run into it. I’ll eat it.”
    “You’ll eat anything, ya fuckin’ vulture!”
    “I don’t like to waste food, Jimi.”
    “No, you’re a pig! That’s what it is! It’s got nothing to do with waste!”
    I bicker helplessly for another minute, taunted by the girls’ laughter. I can’t take it when girls laugh at me. I got no choice
     but to take a taste. Embryo on my nice pizza! Some things just shouldn’t BE in some places.
    The girls are playing gin rummy, and we join for a couple of games. I don’t know how to play, so the game slows down. Doobe’s
     trying to cheat and Sonja’s all over him. Off the face-up pile, over and over again he tries, and she never misses it. I don’t
     either but I don’t care. Doobe always cheats. It’s part of his game and I can respect that.
    “Bloody Helms! Put it back in the pile! You’re a damned cheat.”
    “I got it from the pile,” he says, mouth agape, “you’re all watching, what could I’ve done?”
    “You could’ve done just what you bloody did! Which is cheat!”
    Sonja’s sharp, too sharp to be happy, and the hash doesn’t slow her down a bit. I’m beginning tothink I love her. Could she be the answer? Could her foreign loins be the launching pad of my tranquillity? Maybe I need an-other
     woman? Her bored look, her strong calves, hips lost back in the fifties, all Marilyn-ish. She could be the answer. I start
     to fantasize about a life with Sonja, my head wrapped in her cynical thighs. Every once in awhile my dream is interrupted
     by the missus catching Helms in the act of cheating once again. He always argues his case before he replaces the misdrawn
     card. And then, he’s always good for one more shady move. I float over to Loren. Dark-skinned with teeth of pearl—what a combo.
     Sparkling pearls on a string running through cocoa skin and golden brown tresses. Hair pulled back to reveal a flawless face
     wrapped in a constant smile. What a pair of women I now live with! Sonja, blasé, knowing and indifferent, taught by life not
     to care, heart polluted by the sum total of her experience. Loren, laughing and smooth, nice enough to make me act like me.
     Didn’t I just meet these girls? Is it the hash or am I seeing?
    We play cards for about an hour, and then the girls go up to bed. Helms falls asleep watching the telly, which gives me a
     chance to sneak up to his room and make for the bed. I deserve it after my stint on the pea-green vinyl couch. I lay awake
     and think about my day. Being with Helms makes me think of Ray. I start to wonder what Ray thought about as he climbed to
     the top of that bottomless mountain pass in the Rockies to string himself upin a tree, waiting quietly to be found blue and lifeless and tragic the next day by people he called his friends in a note.
     Maybe I didn’t even know Ray anymore by the time Ray ended. Maybe the guy I hung with was long gone. A lot can happen in a
     year or two. A person changes, and then, I don’t know Ray anymore. I begin to think about the island, and then, of course,