Little Casino

Shoes rain of the cops

THE 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…