Oh, anyway. Grumpy old thoughts away! Shoo! Martini Number Four, comin’ up!

Jack’s a fine boy. Really I love Jack like Hogan and Tyrone, just like a son, my own son. I even love him like I don’t love my sons, ha-ha! (she croaks) but then I’m a wicked old babe, you know that. No hope for the likes of me… .

ON THE PHRASE “ASS BACKWARDS”

“Something I have never understood about your language, Yankee pig.” Säure has been calling him “Yankee pig” all day now, a hilarious joke he will not leave alone, often getting no further than “Yank—” before collapsing into some horrible twanging phthisic wheeze of a laugh, coughing up alarming ropy lungers of many colors and marbling effects—green, for example, old-statue green at leafy dusk.

“Sure,” replies Slothrop, “you wanna learn English, me teachee you English. Ask me anything, kraut.” It is exactly the kind of blanket offer that’s always getting Slothrop in trouble.

“Why do you speak of certain reversals—machinery connected wrong, for instance, as being ‘ass backwards’? I can’t understand that. Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying ‘ass forwards,’ if backwards is what you mean.”

“Uh,” sez Slothrop.

“This is only one of many American Mysteries,” Säure sighs, “I wish somebody could clear up for me. Not you, obviously.”

Säure got a lotta gall picking on other people’s language like this. One night, back when he was a second-story man, he had the incredible luck to break into the affluent home of Minne Khlaetsch, an astrologer of the Hamburg School, who was, congenitally it seems, unable to pronounce, even perceive, umlauts over vowels. That night she was just coming on to what would prove to be an overdose of Hieropon, when Säure, who back in those days was a curly-haired and good-looking kid, surprised her in her own bedroom with his hand around an ivory chess Läufer with a sarcastic smile on its face, and filled with good raw Peruvian cocaine still full of the Earth—“Don’t call for help,” advises Säure flashing his phony acid bottle, “or that pretty face goes flowing off of its bones like vanilla pudding.” But Minne calls his bluff, starts hollering for help to all the ladies of the same age in her building who feel that same motherly help-help-but-make-sure-there’s-time-for-him-to-rape-me ambivalence about nubile cat burglars. What she means to scream is “Hübsch Räuber! Hübsch Räuber!” which means “Cute-looking robber! Cute-looking robber!” But she can’t pronounce those umlauts. So it comes out “Hubschrauber! Hubschrauber!” which means “Helicopter! Helicopter!” well, it’s 1920-something, and nobody in earshot even knows what the word means, Liftscrewer, what’s that?—nobody except one finger-biting paranoid aerodynamics student in a tenement courtyard far away, who heard the scream late in Berlin night, over tramclashing, rifle shots in another quarter, a harmonica novice who has been trying to play “Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles” for the past four hours, over and over missing notes, fucking up the time, the breathing ü… berall… es… indie… ie… then longlong pause, oh come on asshole, you can find it—Welt sour, ach, immediately corrected… through all this to him comes the cry Hubschrauber, lift-screwer, a helix through cork air over wine of Earth falling bright, yes he knows exactly—and can this cry be a prophecy? a warning (the sky full of them, gray police in the hatchways with ray-guns cradled like codpieces beneath each whirling screw we see you from above there is nowhere to go it’s your last alley, your last stormcellar) to stay inside and not interfere? He stays inside and does not interfere. He goes on to become “Spörri” of Horst Achtfaden’s confession to the Schwarzkommando. But he didn’t go to see what Minne was hollering about that night. She would’ve OD’d except for her boy friend Wimpe, an up-and-coming IG salesman covering the Eastern Territory, who’d blown into town after unexpectedly dumping all of his Oneirine samples on a party of American tourists back in hilltop Transylvania looking for a new kind of thrills—it’s me Liebchen, didn’t expect to be back so—but then he saw the sprawled satin creature, read pupil-size and skin-tint, swiftly went to his leather case for stimulant and syringe. That and an ice-filled bathtub got her back O.K.