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“Okay then,” Maureen said. “Just take off. I dint take you to raise, did I? I aint got all goddam day.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he grinned.

“Next!” Maureen bawled, as he closed the door.

He was still grinning when Mrs Kipfer opened the door for him gracefully sweetly, and he managed easily now by just grinning at her and not saying a word.

Thats what you got to remember: its nobody’s fault, its the system, he told himself. What did you expect on Payday? A brass band to meet you? A motorcycle escort? She was just busy, thats all. Would you expect to go in a department store and talk to your girlfriend behind her counter while the customers beat each other to death with nylon hose all around you when the big sale was on?

“Thats all it is,” he told the stairway. “She’s got to earn her living. According to the system. Aint she?”

Thats all it is, he told himself.

But the hard tight sour knot of indigestible outrage in his belly did not dissolve.

I guess she’s right then. You got to wash it out with liquor. You got to be drunk enough to be sentimental, before you can believe different. No matter how many times you spiel it. No wonder theres so goddam many alcoholics in this goddam country. In this goddam Twentieth Century.

What a name. Lorene. The perfect whore’s name: romantic, very high-toned, and very feminine. Lorene the fair, Lorene the square, Lorene the lily maid of Hotel Street. How could you ever of thought that was a lovely, woman’s name? he thought biliously.

Well, he would go up to the corner to Wu Fat’s, thats where. He would go in the downstairs bar and he would drink this thirteen-fifty up and then see how we feel. We’ll feel like hell, thats how. All right then, after that he would catch a Kalakaua bus out to Waikiki where Maggio said he was going to be with his queer friend Hal, this Payday night, because it had already taken all his money to pay his debts, and we will look them up. We will drink some more off of them. Hell, if he got drunk enough he might even be able to pick himself up one himself. He had tried everything else. He might as well shoot an angle on this azimuth.

Chapter 25

HE DID NOT have to go to Waikiki to find Maggio. Maggio was sitting at the bar of the cocktail lounge of Wu Fat’s Restaurant, when he walked in, and Prew stood in the doorway of the Payday pandemonium, wanting suddenly to laugh wildly like a condemned man getting a reprieve, feeling the warmth that Maureen’s whiskey could not give him beginning to spread through him now, as he watched the little Wop perched high above the press on the withers of a bar stool like a winning jockey in a crowded paddock smiling benignly down from his precarious perch at the screaming mob, and arguing with the barman in Italian.

“Halo, lunsman!” Angelo bawled at him, waving his arm. “Hey, here I am! Over here! This is me!”

Prew worked his way slowly over to the stool, feeling himself begin to grin.

“Can you breathe?” Angelo said.

“No.”

“Climb up on my shoulders. You can see everything from up here, and still breathe too. Aint this wonderful?”

“I thought you was headed for Waikiki tonight.”

“I am. This here is ony preparation. Would you like a little preparation, lunsman?”

“I could do with a little preparation,” Prew panted, still elbowing in towards the bar.

“Hey, pizon,” Angelo called to the barman. “Bring this other pizon some preparation. This pizon is a personal friend of mine. This pizon badly needs preparation.”

The sweatily grinning barman nodded happily and moved away.

“This pizon fought with Garibaldi, too,” Angelo howled after him. “He is use to ony the best of service.

“I got him trained,” he said to Prew. “Me and that pizon both fought for Garibaldi. I’m tellin him about the beautiful statue of Garibaldi the Americans put up in Washington Square.”

“Where’d you get all the goddam money? If I remember, when I hit you up this afternoon you was supposed to be flat broke.”

“I was. Honest I was. I happen to