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how nice that would look on my breast.”—“On your brown breastbone a dull gold beautiful it would be baby, go on with your amazing story.”—“So I immediately needed this brooch in spite of the time, 4 A.M . now, and I had that old coat and shoes and an old dress she gave me, I felt like a streetwalker but I felt no one could tell—I ran to Betty’s for the two bucks, woke her up—.” She demanded the money, she was coming out of death and money was just the means to get the shiny brooch (the silly means invented by inventors of barter and haggle and styles of who owns who, who owns what—). Then she was runningdown the street with her $2, going to the store long before it opened, going for coffee in the cafeteria, sitting at the table alone, digging the world at last, the gloomy hats, the glistening sidewalks, the signs announcing baked flounder, the reflections of rain in paneglass and in pillar mirror, the beauty of the food counters displaying cold spreads and mountains of crullers and the steam of the coffee urn.—“How warm the world is, all you gotta do is get little symbolic coins—they’ll let you in for all the warmth and food you want—you don’t have to strip your skin off and chew your bone in alleyways—these places were designed to house and comfort bag-and-bone people come to cry for consolation.”—She is sitting there staring at everyone, the usual sexfiends are afraid to stare back because the vibration from her eyes is wild, they sense some living danger in the apocalypse of her tense avid neck and trembling wiry hands.—“This ain’t no woman.”—“That crazy Indian she’ll kill somebody.”—Morning coming, Mardou hurrying gleeful and mind-swum, absorbed, to the store, to buy the brooch—standing then in a drugstore at the picture postcard swiveller for a solid two hours examining each one over and over again minutely because she only had ten cents left and could only buy two and those two must be perfect private talismans of the new important meaning, personal omen emblems—her avid lips slack to see the little corner meanings of the cable-car shadows, Chinatown, flower stalls, blue, the clerks wondering: “Two hours she’s been in here, no stockings on, dirty knees, looking at cards, some Third Street Wino’s wife run away, came to the big whiteman drugstore, never saw a shiny sheen postcard before—.” In the night before they would have seen her up Market Street in Foster’s with her last (again) dime and a glass of milk, crying into her milk, and men always looking at her, always trying to make her but now doing nothing because frightened, because she was like a child—and because: “Why didn’t Julien or Jack Steen or Walt Fitzpatrick give you a place to stay and leave youalone in the corner, or lend you a couple bucks?”—“But they didn’t care, they were frightened of me, they
really
didn’t want me around, they had like distant objectivity, watching me, asking
nasty
questions—a couple times Julien went into his head-against-mine act like you know ‘Whatsamatter, Mardou,’ and his routines like that and phony sympathy but he really just was curious to find out why I was flipping—none of them’d ever give me
money,
man.”—“Those guys really treated you bad, do you know that?”—“Yeah well they never treat anyone—like they never do anything—you take care of yourself, I’ll take care of me.”—“Existentialism.”—“But American worse cool existentialism and of junkies man, I hung around with them, it was for almost a year by then and I was getting, every time they turned on, a kind of a contact high.”—She’d sit with them, they’d go on the nod, in the dead silence she’d wait, sensing the slow snakelike waves of vibration struggling across the room, the eyelids falling, the heads nodding and jerking up again, someone mumbling some disagreeable complaint, “Ma-a-n, I’m drug by that son of a bitch MacDoud with all