Part II: A Phone Call from Nowhere. Collect.

"Well, how is it? How are you doing?"

Her sigh was so bitter that it was almost a tearless sob. "Not that good. I met a guy my second ... no, third ... night out here. Went to a party and got soooo fucked up"

"Drugs?" I asked.

"Drugs?" she mimicked viciously, "Of course it was drugs. Bad shit, full of dex or something ... I think I got raped."

She trailed off so badly that I had to ask, "What?"

"Raped!" she screamed, so loudly that the sound was distorted. "That's when some stupid Friday night jock plays hide the salami with you while your brains are somewhere behind you, dripping off the wall! Rape, do you know what rape is?"

"I know," I said.

"Bullshit, you know."

Part IV: Getting What You Need

"Okay," the reporter said, sitting down on the living room sofa, ignoring the bullet holes and the thin film of plaster dust from the wall. The police stood silently, guns drawn, behind a phalanx of police cruisers parked at angles out in the street. "We got a few. What do you want?"

"I want," I said carefully, "to be sixteen with a lot of decisions to make over again."

I saw the look in the reporter's eyes and said, "I know I can't. I'm not that crazy."

"You've been shot."

"Yeah."

"Is that what I think is?" He was pointing at the master fuse and the battery.

"Yes. The main fuse goes to all the rooms in the house. Also the garage."

"Where did you get the explosives?" his voice was amiable.

"Found it in my Christmas stocking."

He smiled brightly and then sobered. "Come on out. I'll see that your side gets told. I'll see ... "

"There is no side."

The reporter frowned. "What was that?"

"I have no side. That's why I'm doing this." I peered over the chair and saw a telephoto lens, mounted on a tripod that was sunk into the snow of the Quinns' lawn. "Go on now. Tell them to go away."

"Are you really going to pull the string?"

"I really don't know."

But the fucking you got was never worth the screwing you took.

The Stones still played on the turntable. I was glad I had picked it up the album; I was really starting to enjoy it. I'd have to recommend it to Charlie, but of course he was long dead, thanks to a growth of malignant cells in his brain no bigger than a walnut.

And I guess that's what it all came back to, didn't it?

I listened some more, and Mick was insisting that if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.

I grasped the red alligator clip in my hand. Let's see if I get what I need.

"Okay," I muttered, and jammed the red clip on the positive pole of the battery. I closed my eyes and my last thought was that the world was not exploding around me but inside me, and while the explosion was enormous, cataclysmic, it was not larger than, say, a good-sized walnut.

Everything went white.

Part III: Crestallen Street West

And here we are, folks.

The last stop on your tour is this wonderful replica of Crestallen Street West.

It's right here inside this giant bottle of Johnnie Walker, preserved for all time. That's right, madam, just duck your head as you walk into the neck. It'll widen out soon. And this is the home of the last living resident of Crestallen Street West. Look right in the window here just a second, I'll boost you up. That's him all right, sitting in front of the TV in his boxer shorts, having a drink and crying. Crying? Of course he's crying. What else would he be doing in Self-Pity Land? He cries all the time. On Mondays he just mists a little, because that's a slow night. The rest of the week he cries a lot more. On the weekend he goes into overdrive, and on Christmas we may float him right away. I admit he's a little disgusting, but nonetheless, he's one of Self-Pity Land's most popular inhabitants ...

I threw my drink at the television.

It missed by quite a bit. The glass hit the wall, fell to the floor, and shattered. I burst into tears again.

You're such a fucking mess it's beyond belief. You spoiled your whole life and you sit here joking about it. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

I was halfway to the telephone before I could stop myself. The night before, drunk and crying, I had called her and begged her to come back. I had begged until she began to cry and hung up.

I went to the kitchen, got the dustpan and the broom, and went back to the living room. I shut off the TV and swept up the glass. I took it into the kitchen, weaving slightly, and dumped it into the trash.

Part I: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 1973.

Crowded tenements stood shoulder to shoulder, so exhausted that it seemed that they would collapse if the buildings flanking them were taken away. A forest of TV antennas rose from the top of each one, standing against the sky. Bars, closed until eleven. A derelict car in the middle of a side street, tires gone, headlights gone, chrome gone, making it look like a bleached cow skeleton in the middle of Death Valley. Glass twinkled in the gutters. All the pawnshops and liquor stores had accordion grilles across their plate glass windows.

Halfway down the avenue, I found the coffee shop. There were only two customers, a young black kid in an oversized down jacket who seemed to be either dozing or nodding, and an old white boozer who was sipping coffee from a cracked white porcelain mug. His hands trembled helplessly each time the mug approached his mouth. The drunk's skin was yellow and when he looked up his eyes were rheumy, haunted with light, as if he were trapped inside a stinking prison.

The priest was sitting behind the counter at the rear, next to a two-burner hotplate. One Silex held hot water, the other black coffee. There was a sign on the wall, marked on white paper. It said:

PLEASE WAIT TO BE SERVED! All counter help are VOLUNTEERS. Please wait and remember GOD LOVES YOU!

The priest looked up from his newspaper. For a moment his eyes went that peculiar hazy shade of a man snapping his mental fingers, and then he remembered me: "How are you?"

"Good. Can I get a cup of coffee?"

"Sure can." He took one of the thick mugs off of the pyramid behind him and poured. "Milk?"

"Just black." I gave the priest a dollar and the gave me a quarter change. "I wanted to thank you for the other night, and I wanted to make a contribution."

"Nothing to thank me for."

"Yes there is."

"Anyway, here." I put a roll of bills on the counter. The roll was secured with a rubber band.

The priest frowned at it without touching it.

"Actually it's for this place," I said.

He unfastened the rubber band, holding the bills. He put the rubber band aside and counted slowly.

"This is five thousand dollars," he said.

"It is."

"Would you be offended if I asked you where ..."

"I got it? No. I wouldn't be offended. I cashed in my life insurance policy last month. I've been paying on a ten thousand-dollar policy for twelve years or so."

The old boozer began to hum. It was not a tune; just humming.

"I can't take this," he said finally.

"Why not?"

"I think you know. A man with his feet planted in this world does not give money away on a whim."

"This is not a whim"

"And cash money? A man who still has a use for money never wants to see it. He cashes checks, signs papers. Even playing penny-ante poker, he uses chips. It makes it symbolic. And in our society a man with no use for money hasn't much use for living"

"That's a pretty goddamned materialistic attitude for ... "

"A priest? I'm not a priest anymore. Taking in quarters and dimes and grimy dollars, that's part of my 'penance' if you'll pardon the word, but my penance doesn't include necrophilia. And that is exactly what I feel you are offering me. And that's why I have to say no."

"Penance for what?"

"That," said the priest with a sad smile. "is between me and God."

I remained silent, mulling it over.

"You ought to reconsider anything ... drastic" he said. "There are alternatives."

"Are you making fun of me?"

"No," he said. "Maybe somebody is making fun of us both."

I turned away from the ex-priest. The kid was still sleeping. The old man had put his cup down half empty on the table and was looking at it vacuously. He was still humming. On my way by, I stuffed the roll of bills into the old man's cup, splashing muddy coffee onto the table. I left, expecting the priest to follow me out and remonstrate, perhaps even try to save me. But the priest did not, perhaps expecting me to come back in and save myself.

Instead, I got into my car and drove away.