And with that he was led out to the parking lot to a squad car, driven to the bus stop, and dumped off. He had never taken a bus in America, didn’t know how, didn’t know when one was coming, and when he could no longer stand the cold, he gulped down a couple more codeine tablets with a slug of vodka and surveyed the landscape before him. Hammermeister realized he was the only Caucasian in the neighborhood, and he began to feel conspicuous. A couple of thugs, also brown bagging, joined him at the bus shelter. One carried a ghetto blaster. Clarence “Frogman” Henry was singing, “I’m a lonely frog, I ain’t got no home.” Hammermeister watched as the man inserted a rock in a crack pipe and took a hit off of it before passing it to his companion.

Moving from the shelter of the Plexiglas bus stop, Hammermeister dropped his head down against yet another Nanook of the North sleet storm. A mere pedestrian in the heart of the Motor City, new citizen John Harold Hammermeister caught the shoe-leather express back to his apartment.

Mouses

RODENTS INFILTRATED​ MY place at the first hard frost of the fall. I had a minor premonition that this would happen, and then, lo, it happened. For a couple of days it was in the back of my mind, in the twilight area where minor worries flourish—no big alarm bell rang, because most of the stuff you worry about never comes to pass. But then came the evidence, the irrefutable fact that not only did said perpetrators (previously unknown to me) claw and chew through a box of Wheat Thins, they defecated at the scene of the crime, leaving sizable pellets behind. Apparently “Don’t shit where you eat” isn’t in the rodent codebook. Hygiene is not a big concern with them. At first, I was in a state of denial. My place is sealed as tight as a drum. How could they get in? Also, I was thinking, I don’t need this now. I really do not need this. I was facing problems at work. There were rumors of a cutback at the plant. In spite of my seniority—I’ve been an engineer for ten years—I knew I was high on the shit list. I’m a convenient target. Why? Because I’m very short in stature. Five feet nothing. And I have a slight spinal deformity—a hump. No matter what goes wrong at that hellhole, I get blamed. “Anson, the midget, did it.” A computer goes down, blueprints get lost, milk sours in the lunchroom refrigerator: “The midget did it!”