"What she do when you threw up?"

"I got punished." Albert took the hot dog off the baked beans and broke off pieces to pop in his mouth.

"She don't fuckin' let up on you, does she?"

"What?"

"Nothin'. Eat up, I wanna play some pinball."

Albert left the beans and the corn muffin untouched. They went to a pinball arcade next to the movie house and walked down the lanes of machines amid a din of exploding torpedoes, screeching tires, ringing bells, whooping sirens and monotone groans from a robot cowboy.

"I wanna play this!" Albert stopped in front of a pinball machine with the legend HOOTENANNY—all the characters from "Hee-Haw" were painted on the scoreboard. Albert didn't do so hot. He kept flipping the flippers too late and was losing all his balls.

"Hold it, hold it. I got an idea." Stony slipped another dime in the machine. "You take that flipper and I'll take this one." He manned the left side of the machine and Albert took charge of the right flipper plus springing the balls into play. They played six games, each final score higher than the last. "We're regular fuckin' pinball wizards, huh?" Stony nudged his brother on the way out.

"Yeah!" Albert laughed. "Boing boing boing boing ding! ding!" He laughed again. "Hey, Stony, look!" Albert pointed in amazement to a row of red and white buttons hanging on a rack of gorilla masks, corny T-shirts and rubber chickens in the window of a novelty shop. On the sidewalk a small mechanical rubber porpoise was swimming in a pan of water and every few seconds spouting a thin schpritz. "Look a' that button!" He pointed to the first button in the row with ALBERT on it. "An' that one!" Albert pointed to a button marked TOMMY. "We can get two a them, one for you an' one for Daddy." Before they went inside Albert saw MARIA. "We can get one for everybody."

***

The movie was a real slam-bang smack-fooey with more methods of dealing death than Heinz had kinds. Pajamaed Chinks jumped forty-two feet in the air to rearrange each other's faces. Blood poured, spurted and dribbled from every human hole imaginable. Albert sat through the whole thing eating popcorn, his eyes as big as half dollars. Stony dug it too, nailed to his seat, sitting on his need to piss through the whole movie.

"I dug the part where Ting Ping pulled the guy's nose off." Albert extended two curled fingers, stuck them up an invisible opponent's nostrils and yanked.

The afternoon sunlight blinded Stony. He blinked, trying to get his bearings. "You want some Chinks?" They walked uptown on Broadway until they hit the Hunan Star.

"Hey, Stony." Albert peeked around the huge red menu. "You think they know..." He made a short karate chop in the air.

"Only the ones from New Jersey."

They sat next to a four-foot-high partition in the center of the restaurant. The partition was topped by a strip of heavy-duty plastic green shrubs. The far walls were covered with blowups of the Great Wall. Stony and Albert were the only customers. Chinese waiters scattered among the tables, silverware in hand, setting up. A tall skinny guy in a red jacket splotched with food and a six-inch-high shiny black pompadour asked for their order.