“After a while, Booksnake began acting very strange. When a request for a book came down to the stacks, he would stare at the slip of paper and say, ‘Ask me something I don’t already know.’ Finally Booksnake’s mind locked on him. He not only wasn’t working with a full deck, but jokers were running wild in his head. The last time I saw Booksnake, he was in front of the Forty-Second Street Library gangster-slapping one of the lions until his hands looked like chopped liver. I think he’s out at Creedmoor now.

“Some people say all that attention went to his head. But that wasn’t it. What really happened was that everybody figured Booksnake had it all, so nobody ever gave him anything. That’s what did the job on him… So the moral of this story is: Never get branded as someone who’s got it all. If you do, you in trouble.”

“Is that true?”

“Well, if it isn’t it ought to be,” I said.

“You sound like you ain’t got it all.”

“Who does?” I said.

“Yeah, well, whatever I got I’m taking it out of here and seeing if one of these fine hammers wants any of it!”

“Yeah, bet!” the other dude agreed.

I was fucked up. The smoke had really gotten to me. I moved unsteadily to a room just off the kitchen. Seated were about five or six women, dressed in one continuous wraparound fabric that changed colors as it draped each different one. They seemed cut off from the festive mood in the rest of the apartment, forming a tableau staring at nothing in particular, while listening to a Gloria Lynne record that had just come on.

Trouble is a man

a man who loves me

no more, no more

“Sing the song, Gloria! Sing the song!” one said.

“If it only wasn’t so,” another chimed in.

Nothing good to say about him

Still I hate a day without him

“You chewin my cabbage now, girl!”

Trouble is a man

who’s for himself

and that’s all

“That’s a man’s menu all right—me, myself, and I!”

After all we planned

he didn’t mean it

Now I understand

I should have seen it

“Go on, Gloria! Sing the shoulda, woulda, coulda blues, girl!”

A man staggered into the room. The platform shoes elevating his heels like staircases were about to cause him to make a crash landing.

“I don’t know what you women talkin bout,” he said. “I’m Sir Rap a Lot and it’s time for me to get a shot at the limelight. I was born in the Dixie Peach but raised in the Big Apple. I’m still fruit but on a different tree. But now nobody can take a bite out a me, you dig. If looks could kill I’d be murder one! Shit! Don’t tell me nuthin!”

“Somebody should!” a woman said.