in here!"
"Dude . . . . I've got like . . . a situation here, man. And like . . . I just
can't. Please. Do me a favor. I promise . . . I'll bake tomorrow night.
Please . . . feed . . . the . . . bitch."
"What's so important? What's so important you can't come in here?" I
asked, knowingly soliciting an untruth.
"Dude. They're trying to evict me from my apartment and like . . . I gotta
be here. I have to be here when my lawyer calls, man."
"They're always trying to evict you from your apartment, Adam," I said.
"So what else is new?"
"Yeah . . . yeah. But this time, it's serious," said Adam, slurring his
words slightly. "I gotta wait for my lawyer to call; otherwise I'm fucked,
you know?"
"What lawyers call at eight fucking thirty on a Friday night, Adam?"
"Well, he's not really a lawyer, per se. He's more like a guy who's like
helping me."
I could picture the scene on the other end of the phone: Adam Real-Last-
Name-Unknown, the psychotic bread baker, alone in his small, filthy
Upper West Side apartment, his eyes two different sizes after a thirty-
six-hour coke and liquor jag, white crust accumulated at the corners of
his mouth, a two-day growth of whiskers—standing there in a shirt and
no pants amongst the porno mags, the empty Chinese take-out
containers, as the Spice Channel flickers silently on the TV, throwing
blue light on a can of Dinty Moore beef stew by an unmade bed. He's
been snorting coke and smoking weed and drinking vodka from a half-
gallon jug of Wolfschmidt's or Fleischman's (if he's drinking a better