tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 88

"it had come to this"

by Horace P. Sternwall 

edited by Dan Leo*  

illustrations by roy dismas and rhoda penmarq

*Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin Literature, Assistant Table Tennis Coach, Olney Community College; editor of Say Hello to All the Gang: the Prison Letters of Horace P. Sternwall; Olney Community College Press; made possible in part by a generous grant from the Reliable Floor Covering Company of Philadelphia PA: “Our Name Says It All!”




And so it had come to this.

Landon (unfortunately nicknamed “Rooster”) Crow waited with Alice “Sniffy” Smith in a booth at the back of Bob’s Bowery Bar, waiting for “the two Bills” (Grey and Leighton) to return from God knows where with an ounce of marijuana, an ounce which Rooster and Sniffy hoped to parlay into a twenty-five thousand dollar profit.



Rooster sipped his tepid flat Rheingold beer, then he stubbed out his Philip Morris, and quickly lit another one, not so much because he wanted a cigarette, but because this bar smelled like the interior of the most vile men’s room in the world. If it smelled like this in the barroom, what could it possibly smell like in the bar’s actual men’s room?


(Kindly click here to read the entire sordid chapter.)