Slapstick Or Lonesome No More!

Slapstick or Lonesome No More!from the new novelChapter 1To whom it my concern:It is springtime. It is late afternoon.Smoke from a cooking fire on the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the Empire State Building on the Island of Death floats out over the ailanthus jungle which 34th Street has become.The pavement on the floor of the jungle is all crinkum-crankum--heaved this way and that by frost heaves and roots.There is a small clearing in the jungle. A blue-eyed, lantern-jawed old white man, who i...