Nothing is true - Everything is permitted.

- Mr. Rogers

Everybody from the old neighborhood knew Little Vick. He used to play baseball in the vacant lot sometimes in the summer, or throw snowballs at cars with them in the winter, but most of his time was spent getting high. The neighborhood kids used to buy lids from him when they first started smoking weed and he sold them purple microdot and blotter acid, and a few years later, cocaine.

It's true, he was that most villified of creatures, the most hated of vile and evil criminals: a dope pusher. Though only a tender youth, he would have been imprisoned and his very existence might have been placed in the balance had he been apprehended plying his despicable trade.

Vick never got caught, though, and so he was able to remain a regular kid and never got brainwashed by the authorities into thinking he was evil. His friends never thought so, and when Friday night rolled around they would call up Vick to see what was going on. He would always have pot by the ounce, sometimes even when nobody else did, and if he didn't have that, he would have hash by the gram. He sold about anything that he could get a deal on, because he liked to get high - and if he could do it for free, plus make a few bucks, why not?

It had been a hectic week for Vick, and now, as the sun began to set on Friday, he was sitting in a booth at the French Lick Tavern, pouring salt into his second beer and waiting for the night's work to begin. He had several parties to attend that evening, and an appointment later at an after-hours tavern.

When he was only 17, Vick had an ID that put his age at 27, gave a perfect description of him, and was backed up by a gold Social Security card, the kind that are advertised in the tabloid papers. This was before drivers licences had pictures on them. Since he didn't look 27 (he in fact barely looked to be 17), Vick would always make a big deal out of being carded. He would act like it happened to him all the time and he was damned sick of it since he was 27 and couldn't help it that he looked so young. Most of the time the waitress would apologize, and tell her co-workers, "Don't card that guy, he's older than he looks, and he always leaves a good tip."

That never happened at the French Lick. Vick was a regular there. He stopped by nearly every night at some point, as close to closing as possible, and was usually able to sell whatever he had on him. Because there was always someone who wanted to prolong the feeling that seems to come on about a half hour before last call - the illusion of the limitless night, the hours between midnight and dawn where anything can still happen and the imagination runs wild and ventures to areas of the mind that it would never dare to visit in the harsh daylight of sobriety.

It was early now though, and the only people in the tavern besides Vick and Joey the Bartender were Handsome Johnny and his partner, Big Harl. Vick had known these two since they were all kids together. He still saw quite a bit of them as he made the rounds, and did a lot of business with Handsome Johnnny and his brother Hank, mostly weed, a few pounds at a time, or else cocaine by the ounce. Vick never liked to buy or have fronted to him too much at a time from any one person. He would do business with anyone he could get a good deal from, but he didn't like to owe too large an amount to one individual. That way, he reasoned, if something went wrong he could shuffle the money around and perhaps fix things with no one knowing anything, and maybe not even lose too much financially. He would always buy enough to get a price break for quantity, but he let the other guy store it for him, especially with fronts. Somebody who might give him a couple months to pay back $1500 if there was a problem might think it was neccesary to kill him over $5,000 or $10,000. By dealing with several different people and a variety of goods, Little Vick could be in debt for several thousand dollars at any given time, while managing to pay back his fronts at an incredible speed ( insuring more of the same), and still have a pocket full of spending cash, and plenty of dope to share.

"So, Vick, what's up bro?" asked Handsome Johnny "I haven't seen you since we ate all those Lobster Tails." Two weeks earlier, Vick had been home asleep when he was shaken awake by Johnny, who explained, "We need to use your car. There's a couple hundred pounds of lobster and it's all ready, but we can't move it." Johnny didn't have to tell Vick that they were going to be stealing the lobster. Nor did he have to explain how he had gotten into Vick's house in the middle of the night. They had known each other a long time so Vick knew that Johnny was a burglar. Anyway, Vick liked to eat lobster - a lot. When they got outside they were joined by Big Harl. They had driven to the parking lot of a seafood restaurant, where earlier Johnny had broken the glass and frame out of one of the side windows with a crowbar. Harl loaded the 50-pound cases of lobster tails into the car trunk as Johnny passed them out the window, then they drove off. They all went over to Harl's brother-in-law Vern's place and gorged themselves on lobster tails and cheap beer.

"That's right," said Vick. "That was a good time. Where you guys goin' now? There's a party at Dianne Pullman's place - I'll be there in about 2 hours."

"We got a job to do," said Johnny, "but that might work out about right. What's up after that?"

"Whitey Owen and those guys are over at his place playing poker, so I'll be there for a while. I'm going by Alice's after that, and I'll be at Bitch's place by two or two-thirty." replied Vick.

"OK, we'll catch you later," said Big Harl.

"Oh yeah," Johnny remembered at the last second on his way toward the door, "Hank will be back from Florida tomorrow or Sunday."

After they left, Vick had another beer, then went into the storeoom behind the bar and chopped himself a long line of cocaine on one of the wooden shelves. In a swift but careful movement, he snorted the cocaine into one nostril, then he chopped another smaller line and left it on the shelf.

"Something for you in there," he said to Joey the Bartender, who smiled in an exaggerated way, raised his eyebrows twice fast, and winked a thank you. On his way out, Vick stopped at the men's toilet. As he peed, he looked around at the graffiti and the flaking yellow paint, doing his best to ignore the rancid fumes rising from the fetid wood beneath his feet. Most of the graffiti was of the usual "Here I sit..." variety, but there were a couple of long political screeds written in a tiny scrawl. "Why would anybody hang around in here long enough to do that?" he thought, holding his breath. When he was finished, Vick went out the back door to his car.

Dianne's party was going strong by the time Vick arrived. Her parents had gone out of town and the fun had begun about 5 minutes later. Vick let everyone know he was there then went downstairs, where there was a pool table. He sold 3 or 4 ounces of pot, then reserved a spot on the pool table to play the winner of the second game following. After that, he took a small framed picture off the wall and dumped about a half gram of cocaine out on it. He counted the people in the room and cut the pile into 12 small lines. After snorting one himself, he offered a straw to the nearest person. "Anybody want a line?" he asked, smiling. Then he sat down and waited.

This never failed. In about 10 minutes he would sell at least one quarter gram of coke to around half the people he had turned on to the lines, some of whom wouldn't have considered doing so before they were high on it. "That's the problem with this shit," he thought to himself. "It destroys a person's faith in human nature." And it was true. He had seen people just fall apart in front of him, casting aside all dignity, with no hope of reclaiming it. Normally a very precious commodity, self-respect loses its value when used in exchange for cocaine&emdash;and all sales are final. Vick never mentioned these incidents to anyone. Keeping secrets was instinctive to him. But he never forgot them either, and he would invariably encounter people who wished that they could disappear rather than talk to him, or that he would disappear, perhaps.

Dianne was one of the people that Vick was thinking of. She was different around him these days, ever since the time she'd come by his apartment in the middle of the night and then stayed there for two days.

Vick had a lot of fun with Dianne, and she had truly enjoyed herself, so much that it scared her. Now, she was embarrassed to be around Vick, ashamed of how much she had wanted the cocaine, but also uneasy about the fun she had had in that apartment, and about how in one terrifying instant she had realized that she had wandered out to the edges of her deepest beliefs. She felt she was on the verge of a new and frightening way of being alive where, in order to proceed, she would be forced to abandon everything that had ever given her comfort. At this point she had looked over at Vick, who had been smiling back at her, and it seemed as if he was already on the other side of that line, waiting. She had made some excuse about forgetting that she had to be somewhere two hours ago, and brushed off his attempts to pin her down about when he would see her again by acting rushed and distracted, trying not to look him in the eye.

After Dianne had gone, Vick wondered what he had said or done to make her change so suddenly, but after awhile he figured it out. These realizations always made him a bit sad. He wondered if whores ever pretended that their tricks loved them. He thought about the women that he knew from the massage parlors and bars downtown, and decided not. It would be too dangerous for them to toy with that kind of fantasy. No, that would just be asking for it, he thought. Still, Vick couldn't help feeling a bond of some kind with everyone that he had ever had sex with, even when he never saw them again or when it was a trade for dope. The straight trades with the downtown girls were easier emotionally for Vick; he liked not having to pretend that something else was going on. Then he could relax more, and try to allow the women, whose very personalities were defined by their ability to detach their conscious mind from their physical experiences, to relax enough to be there with him, in that moment, and feel safe for even a few fleeting seconds. They liked Vick, and so they let him think that he could accomplish this, and on rare occasions it did happen that they were released from themselves, much to their surprise. No matter how much a deal might appear completely in the open, there always seems to be something else, some secret, hidden part. Vick hated it that things were different between himself and Dianne, that he knew her so well that she was afraid of him now. "What a world this is," Vick said aloud.

"You know it, buddy," said someone standing next to Vick, bringing him back to the present. Vick turned to see Dennis Sutton. Dennis had lived in the old neighborhood, but was about five years younger than Vick. It always amazed Vick to see the neighborhood kids grow up; he expected them to stay children somehow. Dennis was probably just old enough to have driven himself to the party.

"Hey Vick, you, uh, got half a gram?"

"You, uh, got cash?" Vick asked.

He expected Dennis to launch into an explanation about "I got a check comin', man...," or "Billy owes me $300…," but Dennis suprised him by pulling out a handfull of bills and laughing, " Shit yes, man, I got money." Vick took some bills out of Dennis' hand and pocketed them. He handed Dennis a bindle, saying, "Have fun."

Someone called to him from the pool table across the room "Hey Little Vick, you're up, man."

Alice was waiting for Vick when he got to her back yard. She lived with her parents in the old neighborhood. Vick had been friends with Alice since they were both little kids. They loved each other, but neither of them could admit it or believe that anyone could really care about them, so they never were able to get much satisfaction from the love they shared. They were both aware of it, but were unable to do much more than confuse each other whenever they tried to put words to their feelings. Vick would do anything for Alice, that was clear. That was why he had stopped by tonight, to help out. He carried a paper bag containing a padlock and a hinge, a screwdriver and some screws, a pint of Vodka and a quart of orange juice. Vick held the bag in his teeth, then climbed up the back of the house and through Alice's window, just the same as he had done since he was ten years old. Alice mixed them drinks while Vick got started attaching the lock to the inside of her bedroom door.

"I didn't think you were coming," said Alice.

"Sorry I was late, I tried to get here earlier, but I'm here now."

"It's okay," she replied, passing him the joint that she had just rolled and lit.

Vick finished his task and tested the lock. He shook the door by the handle, but it wouldn't open. "That should work," he said, sitting down next to her on the bed. He looked in her eyes for a minute without speaking, and when she looked down, he asked, "Are you gonna be all right?"

She forced a little laugh. "You know I will."

"Yeah, I guess I do." But Vick knew that nobody would be all right, that anybody who was waiting for a happy ending in this life was in for a rude suprise.

When Vick found out that Alice's father had been coming into her room at night "by accident," he had wanted to have someone kill him, or perhaps pick him up outside the bar where he spent each evening and drag him behind a car. Alice couldn't bear the thought of that and had calmed Vick down enough for him to think of this solution. Vick planned to stay there with her until her dad arrived, and threaten him a little, to be sure that he got the point. Vick mixed them both another drink and turned out the lights then settled in to wait. Then the phone rang. Alice answered. "Yeah, he's here&emdash;hold on." She covered the reciever with her hand and passed the phone to Vick. "I think it's Johnny McEvoy."

Vick took the phone. "Yeah?"

It was Johnny all right. "Hey man, you gotta come out here right away and pick us up. I can't talk now, just hurry up, our asses are on the line."

"Where are you?" asked Vick.

"At the Moosejaw, man. Hurry!

"It'll take me a little while to…" Vick began, but Johnnny had already hung up.

"I gotta go," he explianed to Alice. "I'll come back though, if you want."

"No, that's okay," she said. "Call me tommorrow."

"I will." he said." Then he kissed her on the forehead and left through the window the way he had arrived.

The Moosejaw was about ten miles out of town. There was a grain elevator across the street, and a few houses scattered around an intersection, but no real town to speak of. The bar was the only business and acted as post office, convienience store, and restaurant for the farms in the area. Vick looked around until he saw Handsome Johnny at a table in the back of the room. Big Harl was playing the pinball machine. Johnny had already seen Vick and motioned him over. He walked across the room, weaving between tables and past the juke box, where two or three drunken couples were lurching around to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Vick sat down at the table. Johnnny poured him a beer, and turned around to call Harl over but he was already on his way. They all sat there without saying anything while Vick downed the beer in three long droughts. Then Vick got a close look at the two of them. He hadn't seen it at first because of the darkness of the tavern, but they were both kind of dirty and beat up looking, their clothes were torn, and they smelled like gasoline.

"What the fuck happened to you guys?" he asked, "you been workin' pumpin' gas somewhere?"

"Oh shit, man, you wouldn't believe it," said Big Harl, "It was wild, totally apeshit."

"Give us a ride to my apartment," said Johnny, "we'll tell you about it."

They left the Moosejaw and drove through the countryside back toward the darkened city.

"Ok, man," Johnny began, "this dude, Mr. Lamp, wanted his motorhome stolen for the insurance money, so he could upgrade, and of course he had it loaded down with camping gear and fishing equipment and all kinds of valuable shit 'cause he's goin' on a big trip. But he stopped off at the mall for one last thing and goddamn if it didn't disappear as soon as he went inside." They all laughed.

"The keys were in it, and we took it out to Randolph Avon's farm and stripped it," added Harl.

"Yeah, except you stripped it too fucking good, and we couldn't drive it away."

"Hey, my truck's still out there, asshole,"

"You got nothin' to worry about. We got the plates and papers off it."

"What are you guys talking about? And why do you smell like gas?"

"We were gonna drive it out in the country and burn it after we got it stripped, but it wouldn't start. So we towed it with Harl's truck. We got about twelve miles or so and the truck breaks down."

"So while I'm under the hood grinding the points down, this son of a bitch is pourin' five gallons of gas all over the motorhome."

"You told me you could start it."

"Well it's a damn good thing you didn't light it, we would never have got away."

"What? Back up," said Vick.

"He couldn't start the truck, so we decided to leave it out there. Nothing else to do. And we took the registration and any paperwork we could find and about the time we got the last bolt off the licence plates, we saw the cop cars topping the hill about a mile away. Lucky for us they had their lights flashing."

"Shee-it, then what?" asked Vick.

"We ran like hell man, straight for the trees," Johnny continued. "You wouldn't believe how many cops there were! It was like a prison break in those woods man, flashlights everywhere, bullhorns, everything but fuckin' bloodhounds."

"If they'd seen what direction we went in the first place, we'd have been nailed."

"We were sitting in the tavern waiting for you, and we seen about five more go by. They must not have thought we could run so far so fast."

"I followed a cop out there," Vick told them. "I wondered what was going on."

They got to Handsome Johnny's place and Johnny got out. In the moonlight the frost coated everything outside with a dull finish, and the extreme cold gave the illusion of cleanliness to even the ancient red bricks that paved the streets. Next, Vick took Big Harl over to Harl's parents' place and dropped him off. Then he drove over to Bitch's Tavern where he was supposed to meet Carl Burke, to buy 500 hits of "Mr. Natural" blotter acid.

The official title on the liquor licence was "The Plantation" and the only sign out front was an old beer advertisement that someone had shotgunned, but everyone knew the place as Bitch's. The owner, "Bitch," never called anyone by name, but referred to every person he came into contact with as "bitch," so everyone called him that. Sometimes new customers would be suprised when they were asked, "What you drinkin' bitch?" but few were fool enough to take offense. Bitch, at 350 pounds, and looking every bit the part of the carnival bouncer that he had been for twenty years, didn't invite criticism. Plus Bitch's didn't get many new customers anyway. Vick noticed Carl's girlfriend Cathy's car in the parking lot, so he took the time to do some more cocaine, and made a small bindle as a gift for Bitch, then he went inside.

Across town, Alice was awakened by the doorknob being repeadedly turned, and the hinge and lock connecting, preventing the door from opening. She sat up and lit a cigarette, pretending that she couldn't hear the whispered curses through the door. After a final furious yet controlled shaking of the doorknob, Alice heard her father stumble away. She got up from bed and went to her window and looked out at the moon. She remembered news footage of astronauts bouncing across its surface, and imagined it as a warm dusty beach, free from gravity. Alice pictured herself there, all alone, far from the earth, unencumbered by the need to breathe, or eat, or wonder about the future, a hermit on the timeless moon. She looked down at the broken swing set rusting in her backyard, and thought of her childhood, which now seemed so long ago.

"There has to be something good coming," she thought, "some kind of change. Life can't just keep getting sadder as you get older, I won't believe it."

Back at Bitch's, Vick was sitting in one of the back booths with Carl and Cathy, listening to Carl's LSD enhanced theory on cats, and their need for sleep.

"The fucking reason, and it's so obvious when you think about it man, is that there are more cat bodies than cat consiousnesses. So, like when one cat here in town falls asleep, another cat, in China say, is wakin' up. And, check this out..." Carl took a drink of his beer, paused to let the magnitude of his next revelation to sink in, then went on. "You know why cats are so fucking weird? Think about it man. It ain't always the same cat! See, if the cat gets in trouble while it's sleepin', maybe it's usual mind can't come back right away. A dog is after it in Ireland, so the nearest cat mind has got to help out. Now you think it's your cat, but this fucking cat is from France, man, and he don't like you or your cheap-ass cat chow." Carl stopped to laugh along with Vick, while Cathy used her finger to draw a world network of cat consiousnesses with the spilled beer on the table top.

Carl and Cathy had met three years earlier. "We met in church," Carl was fond of saying, and it was true. They had met in church. Carl was hitch-hiking across country, and when he'd get short of cash, or stuck in some town, he would go to the nearest place of worship. There he would give the priest or minister a story about having joined the carnival and woke up one morning to find himself alone, abandoned without even recieving his hard-earned paycheck. Now, his only wish was to get back home and make something of himself, if only it wasn't too late. Sometimes he would be given money, sometimes a meal, but always a bus ticket to the nearest big city, "where I got some relatives that'll get me home." The bus ticket was all he ever asked for directly, even refusing money when first offered. "They want to help, but not one of 'em believes me at first, man. They all got tests and tricks, askin' questions to trip you up if you don't got your story straight, but once they think you're on the level, it's all worth it. Right Cath?"

Cathy was lost in thought, her doodle having been enlarged in her mind to become a pulsating web of coloured wires encircling a spinning globe. She said "Yeah, Fucking A." without looking up, then went back to her self-imposed task of tracing the yellow wire around the ball, as it became larger and more complex with each passing thought.

"Anyway man," Carl went on, " I was in Ohio, and I went to this big Catholic church on a Sunday morning and Cathy was the first person I saw. She was pregnant with Joker then, man, she was big too. I asked her where the priest was and she said she was lookin' for him herself. I got her story and then I knew what to do, it was just naturally perfect."

Carl told the priest a variation on his usual theme, wherein he and Cathy had run away to be together and how he'd lost his job and they wanted to go home to get married and raise the child among family and the church, but they had run out of money and didn't know what to do. When the priest offered them money from his pocket, Cathy said, "Father, in my family we put money into the collection plate. We can't take that." At that point the priest took them out in front of the congregation and told their bogus tale of woe and passed the plate for them.

"Now you kids take this money," said the priest, handing them nearly $500, "and make a life for yourselves."

"And we been livin' it up ever since." Carl concluded. "When she stood up there with a straight face in front of all those people, I said this is the girl for me."

Little Vick woke up at around 3 o'clock the next afternoon. He stood up too fast and felt the blood rush from his head, and heard what sounded like helicopters decending into a breaking wave as his knees buckled and he fell to the floor. He hadn't lost consiousness, but had come close, and he lay there on the dirty carpet for a while, as the sweat on his forehead turned cold, a sour metallic taste in his mouth. After 5 or 10 minutes, he stood up again, slowly this time, then went into his kitchen to make coffee. When that was done, he rolled himself a joint and sat back on his bed, smoking and drinking coffee.

Vick didn't usually eat anything for several hours after rising. There was something wrong with his stomach, he wasn't sure what. It wasn't so bad most of the time, except for the cramps that would come on without warning, and the occasional attack of heartburn. He always felt hungry later. "Just nerves," he told himself. "Don't worry about it, that might make it worse."

While Vick ignored his health, Harl was having a conversation with deputy Lubeck from the County Sheriff's office.

"It can't possibly be my truck," Harl was explaining. "It's been parked out at my friends fishing cabin for a month, and it doesn't run besides."

"Well sir, we're going to have to ask you to come down here and swear out a statement, and if it is in fact your truck that we have, you'll need to identify it."

"I can be down there in an hour or so," said Harl, "but I still don't think it could be my truck."

After Harl had hung up, he figured that they must have traced him by using the VIN number off the engine. "Oh well, nobody saw me. I even met Johnny at Avon's farm, so they can't have anything on me. Besides," he concluded, "if they had something, they would have come and got me instead of calling."

"Who was that, Harl?" asked his mother.

"Oh, that was a guy callin' about some demolition work. I'm going over to look at the site in a little while."

That evening, Vick was over at Handsome Johnny's brother Hank's apartment, helping to cut up and weigh two sixty-pound bales of weed into single pounds. They had covered the floor of one bedroom with newspaper. The room was empty except for one desk with a triple beam scale, and several boxes of one-gallon plastic bags. The weed had been made into bricks in a compactor and once each brick was unwrapped one room was nearly filled.

Hank had driven 1100 miles alone and was already asleep by the time Vick arrived. Johnny and Vick made a pitcher of iced tea, snorted some cocaine, and went to work separating the unsellable larger stems from the rest of the plant, then breaking the remainder into uniform pounds. Sometimes whole plants, including some roots and dirt, had been compacted, and unfolded into long, flat trees. Despite the dirt and discarded stems, the bales were always overwieght, and the tedium of the job was offset by finding the choicest tops in each bale.

They worked for several hours, and when they were finished, they put five of each of the plastic bags into paper grocery bags and stashed those in the bedroom closet. Then they smoked some joints.

"Let's call Reggie Hyde, he'll take five pounds," said Vick.

"Yeah, good idea. He's working right now, let's go over there."

Reggie was working at the Artistic Cinema downtown, a porno theatre with a five dollar all-night admission price, making it a haven for many of the area's derelicts, escaping the brutal winter weather. They had called ahead and Reggie was waiting downstairs to let Vick and Handsome Johnny inside.

"Hold it a second," said Johnny as they passed the restroom on the way to the stairs, "I gotta take a leak."

"No man, come upstairs, I got one up there," Reggie told him with a disgusted laugh. "You don't want to go in that one." They went upstairs to the projection room, and Vick unloaded the weed from his gym bag onto the card table while Reggie showed Johnny where the toilet was located.

"OK to burn up here?" asked Vick when Reggie returned.

"Fuck yes, who would care?" replied Reggie "This place is protected. No cop would come here without lettin' either Louie Marconi or Bobby Archangel know about a week in advance, so fire it up!"

Johnny had returned from the toilet and was looking out through the projectionist's view window at the screen below. "Jesus Christ!" exclaimed Johnny. "Check this out!"

Vick got up and looked through the glass at the celluloid image of a 50- or 60-year-old man, wearing pancake makeup, dressed in a black silk nightgown. The man was kneeling, his hands were handcuffed behind his back and he was licking the backside of an unbelievably fat woman who was nude except for a full head leather mask. Vick looked in amazement at the mountain of fleshy folds that was the woman and the hideously ugly old mock woman that was the man.

"That's nothing," Reggie laughed, "You should have seen the one last week. And you don't even want to think about the dirtbags that are down there blowin' each other while they watch this shit. Pass me that joint."

As they smoked the joint, Vick thought about Bobby Archangel. Bobby was a few years older than Johnny's brother Hank, who had met him in juvenile detention years ago. It seemed as if everybody from the neighborhood who was out on the streets was involved in some kind of criminal activity, but Bobby was like a real gangster. He had done some time downstate and had established a reputation as a real badass. By the time he was released, when he was 22, he was in solid with Louie Marconi and a whole bunch of other guys who's names weren't supposed to be mentioned in coversation except in code, such as "the skinny guy" "our friend in the east," or "the guy with the rabbits."

When Johnny and Vick were younger they sometimes worked for Bobby, and would hang around at his house and get high and drink. Once when they were about 14 they went to Bobby's to collect some money he owed them, and he had a bunch of people there. Some were nude, including three or four women.

"We're makin' home movies," Bobby explained, holding up an 8mm camera. "Hey, I got an idea. Instead of the money, how would you guys like to fuck these chicks?"

"Where? Right here?"

"Yeah, we'll film it. You guys can be stars."

"You film it, then you got to pay us too," said Johnny.

"You got a deal," Said Bobby, smiling. "Hey ladies, meet your new boyfriends."

The movie careers of Vick and Johnny began that day. (They made 10 films in one July week.) The camera had no sound capabilties, so they pantomimed the roles of paperboys coming to the door to collect from a woman who is having a tea party. The women abandon their tea to have their way with the paperboys. One film had the boys doing yard work for a lusty young housewife. Other epics included Johnny's "big sister" surprising Vick in the shower, and Vick's "big sister" catching Johnny masturbating and taking matters into her own hands.

"Hey Bogie, pass the fuckin' joint," said Johnny, exasperated.

"What? Oh, sorry man, I was spacin'," said Vick. He got up from the table and looked out at the screen to see the man in the nightgown being whipped by the fat woman with a cat o'nine tails.

Reggie laughed, "I can get you a date with that bitch in this movie. There's enough of her for five guys."

"That ain't even funny, Reggie," said Vick, who was now pacing around the room. The upstairs windows were so filthy that they may as well have been painted black, but Reggie or someone had wiped clean a circle that gave a view to the outside. Vick looked out at the sun coming up behind the army surplus store across the street. There were dark clouds moving in, but now they were ringed in gold and orange on a backgound of pink and violet.

Johnny collected for the weed and he and Vick went back downstairs and out into the rusty dawn light as Reggie changed reels on the projector.

Jeff Huch

International, Stan Russell, SKR International