in a crew-cut, college boy way, but his face had sagged
and formed lumps under the chin like melting paraffin.
He was getting heavy around the hips.
Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian, with a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises. He had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, rami and culture pearls.
He had attempted, variously and without success, to promote a Love Bird Two-in-a-Coffin Cemetery, to comer the condom market during the rubber shortage,
to run a mail order whore house, to issue penicillin as a patent medicine. He had followed disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the race tracks
of the U.S. His reverses in business were matched by the incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been stomped out by bestial American sailors
in Brooklyn. Vultures had eaten out an eve when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out in a Panama City park. He had been trapped between floors in an
elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained an attack of D.T.s while stowing away in a foot locker. Then there was the time he collapsed with
strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and
sewed up a five monkey in him, and he was gangfucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole the penicillin substituting Saniflush; and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot, sulphuric acid, and
the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who