Drip, tick, tick, drip, tick, drip, drip.
Of course: the ceiling again. This'll be the third time I've complained, but God knows that lazy sonuvabitch landlord would never help his most reliable tenant. He just sits on his overstuffed easy chair, gut growing fatter by the day, listening to his goddamn radio like he cared what was going on across the pond. I don't care much for radios- It's always just another trench terror, one more detective story, more screaming derbies.
I've been called a "hermit" before...y'know, one of those soddy little crabs who eats and crawls back into his shell until the next necessity causes him to creep out again. I guess it fits, and I don't mind: I go to the factory to make war machines, I come home and sleep. I wake the next day to do the same thing. Tiresome, maybe, but there's comfort in routine. I don't waste all my money at the pictures, I don't pass off my sanity at the bar, I don't have to ration my time to snake a woman into bed with me.
So I live in my shithole flat and think. I read sometimes, sure, and I smoke and I sleep, and now I'm even writing. But when you don't have a telephone, a radio, or even so much as a foyer, you usually stare at your ceiling and remember things.
When I was still a happy young sod, I never understood why anyone would waste their time thinking. Things happen, and you know they happen, and I just figured you left them up on the shelf and only recalled when you needed to. I could lie and say I need to recall now to fight off boredom. But why replay a happy time again and again to only feel that stale sense of happy with the tail of "it's over now, it's gone"? Hell if I know...I'm a crazy old bastard without even half a right mind, only enough sense to recall things.
I think about growing up in Chicago and playing baseball in the street. We'd always curse and spit at the shiny black Ts that drove through our game. We acted like a shoddy gang of bandits with our stick-guns and vocal explosions. We'd play poker in the alleys, betting pennies we could scrape up here and there, rocks if it had been a bad week for our folks. When it got too cold to thumb through the cards, we'd bet on which one of us bastards would crawl across the frozen pond in the middle of the park. God knows how none of us ever got killed, the way we carried on like some sort a' band of heroes.
Then, as we grew, we'd trade cops and robbers for newsboy jobs. That was when the real poker started- nickels and dimes replaced pennies and rocks, and we felt like high-rollers in the pool halls. We'd go to shoot pool, too, sometimes, which is where we discovered the fairer sex- The tramps that hung around the tables, whispering and slinking along like they would feed us the apples out of Eden, with blood-red lips sucking dry the words we'd try to say. We were young boys of 12 and 13, they were glamorous women of 17 and 18. A few of us still could talk one of them into going out back, where we'd neck behind dumpsters, hiking skirts up to places we boys never thought were there.
A year or so more passed, and we grew tired with the hasbeen sluts of the pool halls- call it love if you're honest, lust if you're a cynic, we wanted to take out girls of our own age, win them prizes at the carnivals and share two-strawed sodas. My friends and I would stake out the dance halls looking for a nice girl to twirl around for a while, anyone to protect and care for. Anyone to kiss, panting, in the doorways. Anyone to waste our time with.