- Seven Souls
- Bradley The Buyer
- Wisdom of the East
- The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk
- AJ
- Coke Bugs
- The Market
- Salt Chunk Mary
The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls, Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director, He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in. Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons. Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out . . . depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense- but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go beck to Heaven for another vessel.
The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead. Number four is Ba, the heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba. Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the western Lands. Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives. Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains. I first encountered this concept in Norman Mailer's, Ancient Evenings, and saw that it corresponded precisely with my own mythology, developed over a period of many years, since birth in fact. Ren, the Director, the Secret Name, is your life story, your destiny-in one word or one sentence, what was your life about? Nixon: Watergate. Billy the Kid: Quien es? And what is the Ren of the Director? Actors frantically packing in thousands of furnished rooms and theatrical hotels: "Don't bother with all that junk, John. The Director is on stage! And you know what that means in show biz: every man for himself." Sekem corresponds to my Technician: Lights. Action. Camera. ' "Look, boss, we don't got enough Sek to fry an elderly woman in a fleabag hotel fire. And you want a hurricane?" "Well, Joe, we'll just have to start faking it" "Fucking moguls don't even know what buttons to push or what happens when you push them. Sure; start faking it and leave the details to Joe." Look, from a real disaster you get a pig of Sek: sacrifice, tears, heartbreak, heroism and violent death. Always remember, one case of VD yields more Sek than a cancer ward. And you get the lowest acts of which humans are capable-remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame." With a Sek surplus you can underwrite the next one, but if the first one's a fake you can't underwrite a shithouse. Sekem is second man out: 'No power left in this set" He drinks a bicarbonate of soda and disappears in a belch. Lots of people don't have a Khu these days. No Khu would work for them. Mafioso Don: "Get offa me, Khu crumb! Worka for a living!" Ba, the Heart: that's sex. Always treacherous. Suck all the Sek out of a man. Many Bas, have poison juices. The Ka is about the only soul a man can trust. If you don't make it, he don't make it. But it is very difficult to contact your real Ka. Sekhu is the physical body, and the planet is mostly populated with walking Sekhus, just enough Sek to keep them moving. The Venusian invasion is a takeover of the souls. Ren is degraded by Hollywood down to John Wayne levels. Sekem works for the Company. The Khus are all transparent fakes. The Bas is rotten with AIDS. The Ka is paralyzed. Khaibit sits on yon like a nagging wife. Sekhu is poisoned with radiation and contaminants and cancer. There is intrigue among the souls, and treachery. No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls. And what about Mr. Eight-Ball, who has these souls? They don't exist without him, and he gets the dirty end of every stick. Eights of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your dirty rotten vampires: A hundred years ago there were rat-killing .dogs known as "Fancies." A man bet on his "Fancy," how many rata he would kill. The rats were confined in a circular arena too high for a rat to jump over. But they formed pyramids, so that the top rats could escape. Sekhu is bottom rat in the pyramid. Like the vital bottom integer in a serial, when that goes, the whole serial universe gone up in smoke. It never existed. Angelic boys who walk on water, sweet inhuman voices from a distant star. The Khu, sweet -bird of night, with luminous wings and a head of light, flies across the full moon . . . a born-again redneck raise's his shotgun. . . . "Stinkin' Khu!" The Egyptians recognized many degrees of immortality. The Ren and the Sekem and the Khu are relatively immortal, but still subject to injury. The other souls who survive physical death are much more precariously situated. Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If humans and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's 'nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.
Selling is more of a habit than using,' Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that's one you can't kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don't remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other ...
Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. 'It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty,' a cop says.
The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. 'I'll just set in my room,' he says. 'Fuck 'em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.
But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it.
'Oh all right,' the boy says. 'So what you want to make?'
'I just want to rub against you and get fixed.'
'Ugh ... Well all right ... But why cancha just get physical like a human?'
Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. 'Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,' he says. 'Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets well all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax ... I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe.'
'Well it's still an easy score.'
The boy signed resignedly; 'Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I've got a meet with him again tomorrow.'
The Buyer's habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharge every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It gets to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor:
'Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors -- and I hope for your sake they are no more than that -- so unspeakably distasteful that ... I mean Caesar's wife ... hrump ... that is, the Department must be above suspicion ... certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation.'
The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. 'No, Boss Man, no ... The Department is my very lifeline.'
He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth 'inna thervith.' 'Please Boss Man, I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose ...'
'Really, this is most distasteful! Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap.' He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. 'I must ask you to leave this office at once.'
'I'll do anything, Boss, anything.' His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. 'I'm still young, Boss, and I'm pretty strong when I get my blood up.'
The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser's wand. He flows forward ...
'No! No!' screams the D.S.
'Schlup ... schlup schlup.' An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.'s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace.
The Judge : 'Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh ... assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release.'
'That one should stand in an aquarium,' says the arresting officer.
The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthizes his victioms and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower -- the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.
"So we got like a holy man and some bitch reporter comes to interview him. He sits there chewing on his betel nut. After awhile, he says to one of his acolytes, 'Go down to the Sacred Well and bring me a dipper of paregoric. I'm going to make with the Wisdom of the East. And shake the lead out of your loincloth!'. So he drinks the P.G. and goes into a light trance, and makes cosmic contact - we call it going on the nod in the trade. The reporter says, 'Will there be war with Russia, Mahatma? Will Communism destroy the civilized world? Is the soul immortal? Does God exist?'
"The Mahatma opens his eyes and compresses his lips and spits two long, red streams of betel nut juice out through his nose holes. It runs down over his mouth and he licks it back in with a long, coated tongue and says 'How the fuck should I know?' The acolyte says 'You heard the man. Now cut. The Swami wants to be alone with his medications.' Come to think of it, that is the Wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says, 'How the fuck should I know.'
Benway: "Why not one all-purpose blob? Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.
"This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.
"This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?'
"'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.'
"After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.
"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in- curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.'
"After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontane- ous -- (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) -- except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk.
I was working for an outfit known as Islam Inc., financed by A. J., the notorious Merchant of Sex, who scandalized international society when he appeared at the Duc de Ventre's ball as a walking penis covered by huge condom emblazoned with the A. J. motto "They Shall Not Pass."
"Rather bad taste, old boy," said the Duke.
To which A. J. replied: "Up yours with Interzone K.Y." The reference is to the K.Y. scandal which was still in a larval state at that time. A. J.'s repartee often refers to future events. He is a master of the delayed squelch.
Salvador Hassan O'Leary, the After Birth Tycoon, is also involved. That is, one of his subsidiary companies has made unspecified contributions, and one of his sub- sidiary personalities is attached to the organization in an advisory capacity without in any way committing himself to, or associating himself with, the policies, aetions or objectives of Islam Inc. Mention should also be made of Clem and Jody, the Ergot Brothers, who decimated the Republic of Hassan with poison wheat, Autopsy Ahmed, and Hepatitis Hal, the fruit and vege- table broker.
A. J. once reserved a table a year in advance Chez Robert where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world. So baneful and derogatory is his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate.
So A. J. arrives with six Bolivian Indians who chew coca leaves between courses. And when Robert, in all his gourmet majesty, bears down on the table, A. J. looks up and yells: "Hey, Boy! Bring me some ketchup." (Alternative: A. J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine. )
Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a souffle drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat cleaver.... The Sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple.... He breaks off a bottle of Brut Cham- pagne... '26.... Pierre, the Head Waiter, snatches up a boning knife. All three chase A. J. through the res- taurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage.... Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor.... Cries of "Lynch him!" ring through the air. An elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandril, is fashioning a hangman's knot with a red velvet curtain cord.... Seeing himself cornered and in imminent danger of dismemberment at least, A.J. plays his trump card.... He throws back his head and lets out a hog call; and a hundred famished hogs he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant, slopping the haute cuisine. Like a great tree Robert falls to the fioor in a stroke where he is eaten by the hogs: "Poor bas- tards don't know enough to appreciate him," says A. J. Robert's brother Paul emerges from retirement in a local nut house and takes over the restaurant to dis- pense something he calls the "Transcendental Cuisine." ...Imperceptibly the quality of the food declines until he is serving literal garbage, the clients being too in- timidated by the reputation of Chex Robert to protest.
Sample Menu:
The Clear Camel Piss Soup with boiled Earth Worms
The Filet of Sun-Ripened Sting Ray basted with Eau de Cologne and garnished with nettles
The After-Birth Supreme de Boeuf, cooked in drained crank case oil, served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg yolks and crushed bed bugs
The Limburger Cheese sugar cured in diabetic orine doused in Canned Heat Flamboyant....
So the clients are quietly dying of botulism.... Then A. J. returns with an entourage of Arab refugees from the Middle East. He takes one mouthful and screams: "Garbage God damn it. Cook this wise citizen in his own swill!"
And so the legend of A. J. the laughable, lovable ec- centric grew and grew....
The Sailor's grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup -- mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor's level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)
A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy's Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy's neck in a slow, searching move- ment.
The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: "Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?"
"Coke bugs, kid," Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. "I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of cry- stals, blue crystals. So her go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, 'What you think you are doing? and her say, 'Get away or I shoot you! I got myself led good!' When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?"
Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug.
The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: "Your connection is broken, kid."
The boy shied. His street-boy face, torn with black scars of junk, retained a wild, broken innocence; shy animals peering out through grey arabesques of terror.
"I don't dig you, Jack."
The Sailor leapt into sharp, junky focus. He turned back his coat lapel, showing a brass hypo needle covered with mold and verdigris. "Retired for the good of the service.... Sit down and have a blueberry crumb pie on the expense account. Your monkey loves it.... Make his coat glossy."
The boy felt a touch on his arm across eight feet of morning lunch room. He was suddenly siphoned into the booth, landing with an inaudible shlup. He looked into the Sailor's eyes, a green universe stirred by cold black currents.
"You are agent, mister?"
"I prefer the word... vector." His sounding laughter vibrated through the boy's substance.
"You holding, man? I got the bread...."
"I don't want your money, Honey: I want your Time."
"I don't dig."
"You want fix? You want straight? You wanta, nooood?"
The Sailor cradled something pink and vibrated out of focus.
"Yeah."
"We'll take the Independent. Got their own special heat, don't carry guns only saps. I recall, me and the Fag fell once in Queen's Plaza. Stay away from Queen's Plaza, son... evil spot... fuzz haunted. Too many levels. Heat Hares out from the broom closet high on ammonia like burning lions... fall on poor old lush worker, scare her veins right down to the bone. Her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware! Look down, look down along that line before you travel there...."
The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.
Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodleoo... at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street....
The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Poly- nesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian -- races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed moun- tain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.
Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle... A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games, Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time. The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the toothpick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-colored faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunk heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect's unseeing calm.
Behind them, through open doors, tables and booths and bars, and kitchens and baths, copulating couples on rows of brass beds, crisscross of a thousand ham- mocks, junkies tying up for a shot, opium smokers, hashish smokers, people eating talking bathing back into a haze of smoke and steam.
Gaming tables where the games are played for in- credible stakes. From time to time a player leaps up with a despairing cry, having lost his youth to an old man or become Latah to his opponent. But there are higher stakes than youth or Latah, games where only two players in the world know what the stakes are.
All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod -- high mountain Mongols blink in smokey doorways -- houses of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and ham- mocks swinging over the void.
Expeditions leave for unknown places with unknown purposes. Strangers arrive on rafts of old packing crates tied together with rotten rope, they stagger in out of the jungle their eyes swollen shut from insect bites, they come down the mountain trails on cracked bleed- ing feet through the dusty windy outskirts of the city, where people defecate in rows along adobe walls and vultures fight over fish heads. They drop down into parks in patched parachutes,... They are escorted by a drunken cop to register in a vast public lavatory. The data taken down is put on pegs to be used as toilet paper.
Cooking smells of all countries hang over the City, a haze of opium, hashish, the resinous red smoke of Yage, smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals. High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes...
The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes.
In the City Market is the Meet Cafe. Followers of ob- solete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Har- maline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland para- noid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging un- speakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spec- tral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang- utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensi- tized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw mate- rials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, mala- dies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war.... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vi- brating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...
(Section describing The City and the Meet Cafe written in state of Yage intoxication... Yage, Ayua- huasca, Pilde, Nateema are Indian names for Banni- steria Caapi, a fast growing vine indigenous to the Amazon region. See discussion of Yage in Appendix.)
Notes from Yage state: Images fall slow and silent like snow.... Serenity... All defenses fall... every- thing is free to enter or to go out.... Fear is simply impossible.... A beautiful blue substance Hows into me.... I see an archaic grinning face like South Pacific mask.... The face is blue purple splotched with gold....
The room takes on aspect of Near East whorehouse with blue walls and red tasseled lamps.... I feel myself turning into a Negress, the black color silently invading my flesh.... Convulsions of lust... My legs take on a well rounded Polynesian substance.... Everything stirs with a writhing furtive life.... The room is Near East, Negro, South Pacific, in some familiar place I cannot locate.... Yage is space-time travel.... The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion.... The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Moun- tain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, In- dian, races as yet unconceived and unborn, passes through the body.... Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valley where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island,...
"Salt Chunk Mary" had all the "nos" and none of them ever meant "yes". She named a price heavy and cold as a cop's blackjack on a winter night and that was it. She didn't name another. Mary didn't like talk and she didn't like talkers. She received and did business in the kitchen. And she kept it in a sugar bowl. Nobody thought about that. Her cold grey eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay John Citizen come up with a load of 00 into your soft and tenders or Johnny Law just happens by. She sat there and heard. When you spread the gear out on her kitchen table she already knows where you sloped it. She looks at the gear and a price falls out heavy and cold and her mouth closes and stays shut. If she doesn't want to do business she just wraps the gear up and shoves it back across the table and that is that. Mary keeps a blue coffee pot and a pot of salt pork and beans always on the wood stove. When you fall in she gets up without a word and puts a mug of coffee and plate of salt chunk in front of you. You eat and then you talk business. Or maybe you take a room for a week to cool off. Room18 on the top floor I was sitting in the top room rose wall paper smoky sunset across the river. I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn't last.