Maximum Etc.

Don't Tell the Manager of the Whole Foods on the Bowery We Used to Sleep Where the Olive Bar is Now

B's thing, we all had one, was to be just ironic enough about what everyone knew everyone knew. He'd do this bit off The Simpsons where Homer goes I'm cold and there are wolves after me, he'd just do it, and expect everyone to get the reference and think that that was funny and the thing was that pretty much everyone would. There were quarters in his cup. They rattled when the train shook hard. He pocketed the singles and occasional fiver. When he was off duty he'd go to the punkest coffeehouses that'd still have him and scrawl 9/11 WAS A REICHSTAG on the bathroom walls. If you talked to him long enough it sort of got realistic until he trotted out the stuff about The Jews. Besides, he was sleeping with Kayla, who everyone knew had run away from some Upper West Side Silversteins when they tried to force her into therapy as a kind of exorcism for her defining traits: hardline anti-statist ethos and borderline personality disorder. Sometimes she'd insist on being called Aurora, which she thought meant fire, and maybe it did, but everyone thought it was a hippie bullshit name anyhow. Jesse said so to her face one time and she slapped him so hard his lip ring bled, then she stopped coming around the park to hang and would only turn up after B had spanged enough to pay for a deluxe nachos for the two of them. They'd scrape that paper plate down to the last scrim of cheese and stray kernel of ground beef, she'd buy a couple 40s from this deli at Houston and 2nd, then they'd saunter back to the squat like an old married couple. And we hated them because they were soft and we were tired of her and we wanted him back to ourselves and those were our days. But at night it was different. At night we were all still in the squat together, and the sound carried and so did everything. The mingle of their default stinks with their fucksweat made something so sour you pretty much had to believe in it, them, whatever, because it couldn't be ignored, even though, from the shitty vantage of my filthy corner, coming down and listening in, I tried.
----