“‘Ass’ is an intensifier,” Seaman Bodine now offers, “as in ‘mean ass,’ ‘stupid ass’—well, when something is very backwards, by analogy you’d say ‘backwards ass.’”

“But ‘ass backwards’ is ‘backwards ass’ backwards,” Säure objects.

“But gee that don’t make it mean forwards,” blinks Bodine with a sincere little break in his voice as if somebody’s just about to hit him—actually this is a bit of private fun for the spirited salt, it is a William Bendix imitation. Let the others do Cagney and Cary Grant, Bodine specializes in supporting roles, he can do a perfect Arthur Kennedy-as-Cagney’s-kid-brother, how about that? O-or Cary Grant’s faithful Indian water-bearer, Sam Jaffe. He is a white-hat in the navy of life, and that extends to vocal impressions of the fake film-lives of strangers.

Säure meantime is into something like this with instrumental soloists, or trying, teaching himself kind of by trial and error, currently ee-ee-aw-aw-ing his way through some hypothetical Joachim playing his own cadenza from the long-suppressed Rossini violin concerto (op. posth.), and in the process driving the household mad. One morning Trudi just goes stomping away into an 82nd Airborne mass jump over the conquered city, a million fleecy canopies in the sky, falling slow as white ash behind around the silhouette of her good-by stomp. “He’s driving me crazy.” “Hi Trudi, where you going?” “I just told you—crazy!” and don’t think this wretched old horny dopefiend doesn’t love her, because he does, and don’t think he isn’t praying, writing down his wishes carefully on cigarette papers, rolling up in them his finest sacramental kif and smoking them down to a blister on the lip, which is the dopefiend’s version of wishing on an evening star, hoping in his heart she’s just off on another stomp, please only a stomp, let it be over inside the day just one more time, he writes on each good-night’s reefer, that’s all, I won’t ask again, I’ll try not to, you know me, don’t judge me too hard, please… but how many more of these stomps can there be? One’s going to be the last. Still he keeps on ee-ee-aw-aw-ing with the Rossini, radiating his mean, lean, living-at-the-edge street-longevity, no he can’t seem to stop it, it’s an old man’s habit, he hates himself but it just comes on him, no matter what attention he brings to the problem, he can’t stop drifting back into the catchy cadenza… . Seaman Bodine understands, and is trying to help. To set up a useful interference, he has composed his own counter-cadenza, along the lines of those other pop tunes with classical names big around 1945 (“My Prelude to a Kiss,” “Tenement Symphony”)—every chance he gets, Bodine will croon it to the new weekly arrivals, Lalli just in from Lübeck, Sandra who’s run away from the Kleinbürgerstrasse, here’s vile Bodine with his guitar ambling pelvis-wiggling down the hallway after each naughty defector, each choice little sexcrime fantasy made flesh, singing and picking a moving rendition of:

MY DOPER’S CADENZA