Rube flips in the end , running trough empty automats and subway stations,screaming : ‘ Come back kid!! Come back !!’ and follows his boy right into the East River , down through condoms and orange peels , mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete , and pistols pounded flat to avoid the proibing finger of prurient balistic experts .”  And the fruit is thinking : “What a character !! Wait till I tell the  boys in Clark’s about this one.  ” He’s a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould’s  seagull act .  So i put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some ” pod ” as he calls it, thinking .”I’ll catnip the jerk ” (Note : Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstruced.)  ” Well” I said , tapping my arm , ” duty calls. As one judge said to another : ‘ Be just and if you can’t be just , be arbitrary .’ ” I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis  and Old Bart , shabby and inconspicuous , drunking pound cake with his dirty fingers , shiny over the dirt . I had some uptown customers Bill took care of , and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times , spectral janitors ,grey as ashes,phantom porters sweeping out dusty halls with a slow old man’s hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn , retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels , Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria , stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with this old junky walk,