MEMPHIS: And don’t know how to spend it. Man living up over top of the funeral home—you’d think he’d have enough sense to buy him a house somewhere. He own every other building around here. Them that Hartzberger don’t own. I got lucky and got hold to this piece of building and West got mad. I got it right out from under his nose and he ain’t never forget that. All that property he own and had the nerve to get mad when I bought this. What make it so bad is he could have had it. He was talking to L.D. about buying the building from him. L.D. had his stroke and West figured he’d wait until he died and get it cheaper. I went over to the hospital to see him and we made the deal right there in the hospital about a week before he died. I got it for fifty-five hundred dollars. This is when I was walking around with four or five hundred dollars in my pocket every day. Used to carry a pistol and everything. Had me a .44. Had me one of them big .44s. Used to scare me to look at it. I give L.D. the fifty-five hundred in cash. I didn’t find out till after he died that he owed twelve hundred dollars in back taxes . . .  but I didn’t care. I had seen a way for me to take off my pistol. I got my deed and went right home . . .  took off my pistol and hung it up in the closet. West got mad when he found out L.D. sold me the building. He been trying to buy it from me ever since. He walked in the next day and offered me eight thousand dollars for it. That was a good price. But see . . .  he didn’t know it had come to mean more to me than that. I had found a way to live the rest of my life.

WOLF: When they gonna tear it down?

HOLLOWAY: You know how the city is. They been gonna tear this whole block down for the last twenty years.

MEMPHIS: They told me to be downtown Tuesday. They liable to wait another twenty years before they tear it down, but I’m supposed to be down there Tuesday and find out how much they gonna give me.

WOLF: What you gonna do when they tear it down?