A young man named Jerome now sits in Hen’s geri chair. He’s tall, thin, and good-looking, from New York City. He’s got a crush on Dixie and won’t leave her alone. Dixie told him to zip his lip, but it only heightened his ardor. Pretty soon Dixie has a big crush on Jerome, and listening to their crazy infatuation talk was almost scary. They begin to sound like mental patients in their heated excitement. By that I mean they can be talking about normal everyday stuff and something insane will pop out like a jack-in-the-box. Pow!

Dixie started in with a story she read in the National Examiner about an ostrich that swam from Nelson Mandela’s prison island to Cape Town, South Africa.

“Why would an ostrich go to the trouble?” I said.

Dixie said, “I don’t know. To pull rickshaws or have chariot races. They got the legs for it.”

Jerome said, “An ostrich is no more than a giant chicken, too heavy to swim or fly. All they can do is the fifty-yard dash.”

Normal non-in-love people don’t talk at length about things no one else cares about, fighting over nothing. Mickey is the love of my life, but I have never broken into this sort of gibberish pining over him.

“Jerome, you are just an ignorant fool,” Dixie said. “All you do is lay over there acting gangster. You should go back to New York City and live in the ’hood again.”

“I was starting to like you, but now I have changed my mind,” Jerome said.

Dixie lay back in her chair. She said, “I’m right and you know it.”

I used a commonsense voice with levelheaded humor and said, “Let me get this straight, jobless ostrich braves howling winds, tenebrous currents in search of work, ha-ha—”

Jerome wheeled on me in a fury. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up? You aren’t funny. You think you are but you aren’t. I am not gonna lay here for four hours three times a week, twelve hours total not including the fucking goddamn Mickey Mouse of coming and going, only to get ha-ha’ed to death by you.”

Super Huge Hudson, a dialysis technician and martial artist, came thumping down the aisle on his size-fourteen feet. He pinched a muscle on Jerome’s neck, paralyzing him. “I don’t want to hear another word out of you, Jerome, ever again, so long as you live. Do you follow? I am back there at my desk trying to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I don’t want to hear another word come out of your filthy mouth.”

Jerome didn’t so much as say “Ouch,” but later I could hear him sniffling. What was he thinking about? This fresh humiliation? The rigors of dialysis?