Friday, December 20, 2013
darted among fenders, leaped over bumpers, shot behind the wheel and
roared off ten feet and humped the car dead-stop; got out, ran clear
across the lot, moved five cars off the brick wall in twenty seconds;
raced back maniacally, leaped into the offending bottleneck car and
whirled it around the lot among zigzagged dead cars to a neat stop in an
unobtrusive corner. When usually I came to visit him at dusk there was
nothing to do. He stood in the shack counting tickets and rubbing his
belly. The radio was always on. “Man have you dug that mad Marty
Glickman announcing basketball
games---up-to-mid-court-bounce-fake-netshot (pause) swish, two points.
Absolutely the greatest announcer I ever heard.” He was reduced to
simple pleasures like these. He lived with Diane in a coldwater flat in
the East Seventies. When he came home at night he took off all his
clothes and put on a hip-length Chinese silk jacket and sat in his easy
chair to smoke a waterpipe loaded with tea. These were his coming-home
pleasures: together with a dirty deck of cards. “Lately I’ve been
concentrating on this deuce of diamonds, which depicted a tall mournful
fellow and a lascivious sad whore on a bed trying a position. “Go ahead
man, I’ve used it many times!” Diane his wife cooked in the kitchen and
looked in with a wry smile. Everything was all right with her. “Dig her?
Dig her man? That’s Diane. See, that’s all she does, she pokes her head
in the door and smiles. Oh I’ve talked with her and we’ve got everything
straightened out most beautifully. We’re going to go and live on a farm
in New Hampshire this summer---station wagon for me to cut back to NY
for kicks, nice big house and have a lot of kids in the next few years.
Ahem! Harrumph! Egad!” He leaped out of the chair and put on a Willie
Jackson record. This was exactly what he had been doing with Carolyn in
Frisco. Diane called up the second wife on the phone repeatedly and had
long talks with her. They even exchanged letters about Neal’s
eccentricity. Of course he had to send Carolyn part of his pay every
month for support or he’d wind up in jail. To make up lost money he
pulled tricks in the lot, a change artist of the
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