“What, you got Grapenuts for brains? You truly thought that would stop them? ‘Oh, gee whiz, we didn’t know that you fellas liked this tree. We’ll just go home and explain to the mayor in the morning.’ Sometimes you think like a goddamn Portagee!”

He was right about it being a futile cause. The two executioners had had the tree half-carved before the oinkers were finished interrogating us at the scene.

“It was the symbolism of the act,” I said weakly.

“Symbolism? Well symbolism this, Dildo. That was your last performance as a Rhode Island high school student. Huh, symbolism.”

The next day he handed me a brochure for a Protestant Episcopal prep school called Cornwall Academy. “Here,” he said, “read about your new home. If things go good, you’re gonna be moving in next week.” C.A. described itself as “an exemplary private educational institution founded in 1845 and located in Cornwall, Connecticut.” It had “opened its doors to meritorious young women in 1958” but employed one of the surest contraceptives known to man: the girls’ dorms were located six miles from the boys’. It was started by the Boston-born theologian Theodore Coolidge and was “designed to inculcate morals in the world’s future leaders.”

The old man pointed to “inculcate” and said, “Look at that, Dildo. Tell me they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

A dog’s asshole is cleaner than a human tongue. That’s what DeCenz said. It was January 17, 1974, the night before I was sent to Cornwall and he, Tommy the Wire, Mousy, and I were on the water tower getting stoned. (Drugs Delaney never trusted himself enough to climb the tower.)

“No way,” I said.

“I shit you not,” DeCenz said. “It’s a fact that it has less germs.”

“What about a rat’s ass?” the Wire asked.

“Don’t know,” said DeCenz. “Think it’s probably dirtier than a dog’s.”

“Yeah,” the Wire said, “but is it cleaner than your tongue?”

DeCenz didn’t know for sure.

“Did you read about the poor sucker who got charged with murder for pulling the plug on his brother who was in an iron lung?” Mousy asked.

“Insurance scam?” the Wire said.

“Nah. The guy’s in this iron lung, totally paralyzed; he can’t talk, he can’t breathe on his own, can’t even open his eyes. He’s got tubes around his cock, up his ass; the poor guy’s a mess. So his brother comes to see him one day, and he figures he’d be better off dead. You got to understand that this is his bro. He knew they were just torturing his mind by keeping him alive. So he pulled the plug.”

“And they charged him with murder?” I asked.