Rhy-thm’s got me,

Oh baby dat swing, swing, swing!

Yeah de rhythm got me

Just a-thinkin’ that whole-wide-world-can-sing,

Well I never ever heard-it, sound-so-sweet,

Even down around the corner-on, Ba-sin Street,

As now dat de rhythm’s got me, chillun let’s

Swing, swing, swing,

Come on… chillun, let’s… swing!

Black faces, white tablecloth, gleaming very sharp knives lined up by the saucers… tobacco and “gage” smoke richly blended, eye-reddening and tart as wine, yowzah gwine smoke a little ob dis hyah sheeit gib de wrinkles in mah brain a process! straighten ’em all raht out, sho nuf!

PISCES: That was “sho nuf,” Slothrop?

Slothrop: Come on you guys… don’t make it too…

White college boys, hollering requests to the “combo” up on the stand. Eastern prep-school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain sphinctering of the lips so it comes out ehisshehwle … they reel, they roister. Aspidistras, giant philodendrons, green broad leaves and jungle palms go hanging into the dimness… two bartenders, a very fair West Indian, slight, with a mustache, and his running-mate black as a hand in an evening glove, are moving endlessly in front of the deep, the oceanic mirror that swallows most of the room into metal shadows… the hundred bottles hold their light only briefly before it flows away into the mirror… even when someone bends to light a cigarette, the flame reflects back in there only as dark, sunset orange. Slothrop can’t even see his own white face. A woman turns to look at him from a table. Her eyes tell him, in the instant, what he is. The mouth harp in his pocket reverts to brass inertia. A weight. A jive accessory. But he packs it everywhere he goes.

Upstairs in the men’s room at the Roseland Ballroom he swoons kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer, hamburgers, homefries, chef’s salad with French dressing, half a bottle of Moxie, after-dinner mints, a Clark bar, a pound of salted peanuts, and the cherry from some Radcliffe girl’s old-fashioned. With no warning, as tears stream out his eyes, PLOP goes the harp into the, aagghh, the loathsome toilet! Immediate little bubbles slide up its bright flanks, up brown wood surfaces, some varnished some lip-worn, these fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp’s descent toward stone-white cervix and into lower night… . Someday the U.S. Army will provide him with shirts whose pockets he can button. But in these prewar days he can rely only on the starch in his snow-white Arrow to hold the pocket stuck together enough to keep objects from… But no, no, fool, the harp has fallen, remember? the low reeds singing an instant on striking porcelain (it’s raining against a window somewhere, and outside on top of a sheet-metal vent on the roof: cold Boston rain) then quenched in the water streaked with the last bile-brown coils of his vomit. There’s no calling it back. Either he lets the harp go, his silver chances of song, or he has to follow.