COKE BUGS

The Sailor’s grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup-mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffe in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor’s level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the TIme of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How may coffes in an hour?)
A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken linnes of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy’s Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy’s neck in a slow, searching movement.
The boy stirred and scratched the black of his neck:
“Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?”
” Coke bugs, kid,” Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. “I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew his cop in Chi dniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So her got nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, ‘What you think you are doing?’ and her say, ‘ Get away or I shoot