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Show -184 City Library I borrowed Mailer and Malamud, Faulkner and Bellow. I've been a reader all my life, I liked to lie in my hammock, balance a sandwich on my belly, half-dreaming, another part of me engaged in my book, with the papery voices from the television to keep me company. It was a fish's life, I admit it, cool and collected. Better yet, a clam's life. But it suited me. My neighbor from down the hall, Hubert Fantom, a smalltime confidence-man who worked the blue-haired ladies of the upper East Side with games of skill and sentiment, came to look; he shook his head at my brown linoleum, the cracks in the plaster, the sink full of fried chicken boxes and plastic forks. "How can you stand to live like that?" Hubert was barely more than five feet tall, with prematurely gray hair and a face that was sharply triangular, very wide between the eyes but tapering quickly downward. While he talked he sometimes shadowboxed with himself; he hopped; he twitched; he seemed to give off a slight piercing hum like a misad-justed fluorescent light. "You're just two doors away from me," I said. "Is it any different down there?" "I've got if fixed up; a cleaning woman comes in. And how long am I going to stay? A week? Two weeks? In a month I'll be out of here. But you look like you're settling |