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By Root 14102 0

lifeblood and their hunger, and later on just before they went to Wu Fat’s they came back to the Black Cat and ordered two toasted limburger cheese sandwiches to go from the stupid Chinese sandwichman, saying they would be back and pick them up, then walked around the block once and by the time they got back the Black Cat was no longer very crowded, it was not even successful for the moment, it was empty and closed for the night with the iron latticework grill locked across the open front and there was not a soul to be seen in it, or for that matter to be seen in that block on that side of the street, and they shook hands happily (with this prospect still before them) and went for a drink to the nearest bar to celebrate the victory.

Before that, after the first drink there, they had worked their way down angling Hotel Street, stopping for a drink at the bars that appealed to them and watching the cherubfaced Oriental waitresses (able to watch now without anguish, with this prospect before them), the Chinese girls with their thin breastless side view and the startlingly curved front view, the Japanese girls with their stockiness of heavier breasts, shorter legs, and more voluptuous hips, but best of all the hapa-Portagee girls with their hot smoking, cat clawing sexiness, everywhere women, women, women, and them cockily feeling their load (that this prospect would take care of) and the liquor raising the thermometer of the blood higher and higher in the ears. They had not stopped at Wu Fat’s then on the first time around but passing it had gone in short bar hops clear down to the river where Hotel angles into King with Aala Park darkly mysterious across the bridge, and from there looking happily up King at the movie houses just letting out the second shows they had cut over to Beretania along the muckiness of River Street and worked their way back toward the Y, hatching the plot against the smug Black Cat happily while threading their way happily through the groups of sailors rolling along drunkenly arm in arm and the hissing-footed Filipinos padding femininely in twos and threes but never one alone in their padded zoot suits. And (happily, whole-earth-lovingly, now, because this prospect was before them) the one and two storey frame buildings crowding against the sidewalk anxiously offering their charms, the bars, and liquor stores, and restaurants, and shooting galleries, and photo shops; and inbetween each two or three storefronts (this prospect emphasizing their retiringness) the dark stairways leading upstairs to the women and their secret parts and gorgeous smells of sweated crotch, perfumed breasts, and the eternal Lysol; and always and eternally everywhere, pervading everything like Fate, the smells of rotting meat and dead wilted vegetables from the open fronted grocery stores with their folding lattice (like an old-fashioned wall phone you pulled out to use) drawn across and locked, keeping you out and not keeping in the smells that exquisitely sadly reminded us of the hangover tomorrow and then the next one after that and so on to the last final hangover the biggest most perpetual hangover of rotting meat stashed away on shelves and hairy wilted carrots dissected on the tables, smells that we will forever remember as the attar of Hawaii, that we will never smell again without remembering Hawaii, the Hawaii of our unrepentant unrepented youth, for the rest of our whole lives.

And after the Black Cat’s glorious fiasco then down Hotel once more, this time to Wu Fat’s to eat won ton soup upstairs and then come back down to the bar downstairs where a thin fine-drawn queer with an English accent had wanted to know with subtle flattery if they were civilian sailors adventuring from home and offered to buy a drink that Stark told him to save for someone who had no money for the whores and would be more appreciative, the queer making a sly womanish crack at him, Stark hitting him happily, the bartender escorting the dazed queer to the door because Stark was spending more money and then coming back and shaking hands and