I worked for Zeb off and on for a few years, mostly around Manhattan, and I saw gallons of Botox injected into acres of skin. The money was irregular but good, and I have to admit that the perks were exciting; only problem was, the ladies that Zeb had ministered to were not supposed to do a lot of jiggling for twenty-four hours, so things could be a little muted.

We got on okay at first. When I say okay, I mean I never had to ask more than five times for my money, and he never tried to hold back more than forty per cent. On one occasion I was forced to shake him by the collar, but that was as rough as it got. Nobody tried to rip him off either for the first year, which really pissed Zeb off; in his twisted mind, nobody ripping him off was tantamount to me ripping him off, as he was paying me for nothing. I tried explaining that I was a bit like a nuclear deterrent, but Zeb refused to see the sense in this, as it didn’t align with how he was thinking. It got so that he started to pick fights with people, daring them to screw with him, or rather with me. Mostly these people were confused housewives who had never heard verbal abuse before that wasn’t filtered through the TV, but every once in a while the household had its own security and I took a couple of unnecessary punches because Zeb felt the need to big himself up. It got so he took to strutting down Eighth Avenue like Tony Minero, tossing insults left and right. He barely noticed me, just took my presence for granted. One night I just stopped at the crosswalk and let him go ahead with his motherfucker this and get out of my way asshole that, until some college kid pounded him a good one in the side of the face. The kind of punch that makes everyone who sees it go damn.

We parted company soon after and I upped sticks for Cloisters, but after six months Zeb tracked me down and set up Kronski’s Kures in the mini-mall. For almost a year he claimed the relocation was on account of me being his only friend. But one night in O’Leary’s, he got so drunk that he forgot who I was and confided in who he thought I was, saying how some pusher’s girlfriend in Queen’s had a permanent droop on one side of her face on account of the cheap botulism he pumped into her forehead and he was hiding out here in the Styx with the big Mick until things cooled down. But then he started making good green here in Cloisters and decided to stay a while.