The Man With the Golden Arm

He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...

If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I’d drive in the nails myself.

Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning til the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Til morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.

For way down there, in a shot glass's false bottom, everything was bound to turn out fine after all.

I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat," the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.

Heroin got the drive awright-but there’s not a tingle to a ton-you got to get M to get the tingle-tingle.