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They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit -- Kid, it was tasty.... "Recollect when I am traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi... We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigi- lante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder. "So I says: 'What's with you? You wig already?' "He just looks at me and says: 'Fill your hand stran- ger' and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker.... "Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like 'raise,' letting someone know you are in the same line? " 'Get her!' " 'Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!' " 'Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.' "The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in shoe stores) say: 'Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.' And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm. "The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Sator- day Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube 8flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!! Come back!l' 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 Hat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts." And the fruit is thinking: "What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark's about this one." He's a char- acter 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. |
