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PARTISAN REVIEW
learning to eat your sandwiches, ordering only coffee, to lounge
several hours in one place, to suck a maximum from each straw
and pull the marrow out of a cigarette. Spring and summer are
better than the cold seasons, but costlier. You want to buy cold
drinks, you take an extravagant boat ride.
Eventually it will be settled, but the space between eventually
and the present is long enough to stretch my legs in.
Here we are. What'll it be today, the library? museum? the
courthouse? a convention?
11:30 A.M.
The Gambler
What does it amount to? Close my eyes and pick, I may as
well.
It
turns out the same; mostly sour loss. System is nothing
and to try to dope them is just wasted.
It
isn't a matter you reach
into yourself for, bringing it up and showing it to the eyes, open
proof. The card is dark, always; the dice to the last roll. Even
horses. Even? Better say especially. I'm not fooled about it.
We're the ones at bottom who are least fooled.
So early in the day, before eating, the cigarette dizzies. Afoot
I would reel. My face stays stiff after shaving. It's a job to open
my mouth and swallow. The paper sticks to the lips, the smoke
silky when
it
waves in the mirror over the cut.glass and the grape·
fruit.
Today's cinch it seems is Philomel. Philomel to cop the flower
horse-shoe. The mud slipper, the way they run them. Or the jew–
elled hypo. That is if they do run them. It comes hoarse over the
wire. Wouldn't be bad to see them run off one of these days. Far
from the book in the tobacco shop, beyond the room where the
smooth billiards run. Well, I'll make it yet.
This early in the morning is when you feel it most. What sort
of life? An inadoor on a sad shaft. You can hear the showers down
the hall where the girls wheel the canvas carts. Wet towels fall in,
sheets on which the sleep hangs, the wax-wrapped bacon burning.
And yet, when I leave, shoes smart, pants smooth, hat over the eye,
tasting the first cigarette on the way down in the cage....
And what about him? The sucker scraping the griddle, turn·
ing the eggs, paddling the bread with wet butter. I couldn't put in
