“Awfully good? We ought to have poured gasoline on them and set them on fire.”
“How horrible,” Honest Lil said.
“Listen, lady,” the dark boy said. “I am horrible.”
“Willie,” Henry said. “Do you want the key to Sin House and go over and see if everything is all right?”
“I do not,” the dark boy said. “I have a key to Sin House as you have evidently forgotten and I do not want to go over there and see if everything is all right. The only way everything is all right there is whenever you or I kick those cunts into the street.”
“But suppose we can’t get anything else?”
“We have got to get something else. Lillian, why don’t you get off that stool and onto that telephone. Forget that little dwarf. Get that gnome out of your mind, Henry. You keep on with things like that and you’ll be psycho. I know. I’ve been psycho.”
“You’re psycho now,” Thomas Hudson told him.
“Maybe I am, Tom. You should know. But I don’t fuck gnomes.” (He pronounced the word Guhnomays.) “If Henry has to have a guhnomay that’s his business. But I don’t believe he has to have one any more than he has to have one-armed women or one-legged women. Let him forget the goddam guhnomay and get Lillian there onto the telephone.”
“I’ll take any good girls we can get,” Henry said. “I hope you’re not mixed up, Willie?”
“We don’t want good girls,” Willie said. “You start on that, right away you’ll get psycho in a different way. Am I right, Tommy? Good girls is the most dangerous thing of all. Besides they will get you either on a contributing to delinquency or on a rape or attempted rape. Out with that good girls stuff. We want whores. Nice, clean, attractive, interesting, inexpensive whores. That can fuck. Lillian, what is keeping you away from that telephone?”
“One thing is that a man is using it and another is waiting by the cigar counter for him to finish,” Honest Lil said. “You’re a bad boy, Willie.”
“I’m a horrible boy,” Willie said. “I’m the worst goddam boy you’ll ever know. But I’d like us to get better organized than we are now.”
“We’re going to have a drink or so,” Henry said. “Then I’m sure Lillian will find someone that she knows. Won’t you, my beauty?”
“Of course,” Honest Lil said in Spanish. “Why couldn’t I? But I want to telephone from a telephone in a booth. Not from here. It isn’t proper to call from here and it isn’t fitting.”
“A delay,” Willie said. “All right. I accept it. Just another delay. Let’s drink then.”
“What the hell have you been doing?” Thomas Hudson asked.
“Tommy, I love you,” Willie said. “What the hell have you been doing yourself?”
“I had a few with Ignacio Natera Revello.”
“That sounds like an Italian cruiser,” Willie said. “Wasn’t there an Italian cruiser named that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It sounds like it, anyway.”
“Let me see the tabs,” Henry said. “How many were there, Tom?”
“Ignacio took them. I won them from him rolling.”
“How many were there really?” Henry asked.
“I think four.”
“What did you drink before that?”
“A Tom Collins coming in.”
“And at home?”
“Plenty.”
“You’re just a damned rummy,” Willie said. “Pedrico, three more double frozen daiquiris and whatever the lady wants.”
“Un highbalito con agua mineral,” Honest Lil said. “Tommy, come and sit with me at the other end of the bar. They don’t like me to sit at this end of the bar.”
“The hell with them,” Willie said. “Great friends like us that never see each other and then we can’t have a drink with you at this end of the bar. The hell with that.”
“I’m sure you’re all right here, beauty,” Henry said. Then he saw two planter friends of his farther down the bar and went to speak to them without waiting for his drink.
“He’s off now,” Willie said. “He’ll forget about the guhnomay now.”
“He’s very distrait,” Honest Lil said. “He’s awfully distrait.”
“It’s the life we lead,” Willie said. “Just the ceaseless pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Goddammit, we ought to pursue pleasure seriously.”