"Falling in Love Again"

For perhaps the next thirty minutes Milford existed as a very small child does, or a very senile old man, or a dog or a cat, experiencing to the full each moment and then forgetting each moment in a moment's time, but suffice it to say that he began to exist in a more usual fashion when he became aware that he was staring at a surface of wood one inch from his eyes and that something was patting him on the back.

"I say, Milford, rise and shine, young chap," said a woman's voice.

Milford lifted his face away from the wood, which he saw was a table top, and he turned to see a beautiful dark-haired woman's face.

"Hello?"

"Drink this, you'll feel better," she said.

"Poor little guy, he's all tuckered out," said the big man with a beard.

"Stoned to the gills," said the smiling Negro man in the porkpie hat.

The woman was proffering a chipped floral teacup.

"Go ahead, drink it," she said.

Milford took the cup in both hands and sipped. The tea was hot, milky and sweet. He gulped, swallowed, gulped and swallowed, gulped and swallowed greedily again.

"There's a good lad," said the big man, and Milford remembered he was Walt Whitman, or at least claimed to be so.

"He's comin' round, he's young, ready to start up all over again," said the Negro man, what was his name? Pork Roll?

"Delicious, isn't it?" said the lady. "Would you like some more?"

"Yes, please," said Milford. 

The lady took the cup from Milford's fingers. What was her name? There was a blue and white floral teapot on the table, and she lifted it and poured a light brown steaming liquid into the cup.

"Milk and sugar, darling?"

"Yes, please," said Milford.

"Nothing like a nice cup of fresh-brewed tea," she said, adding a dollop of white liquid from a small pitcher into the cup, "and not that dreadful stuff that comes in bags. This is good strong Assam tea, fragrant, rich, and possessed of a certain resuscitative je ne sais quoi, and all I know is that it's just the thing when you have a drop too much partaken."

"I don't think it was a drop too much partaken, Miss Margaret," said the Negro man, and he brandished a fat cigarette, "it was one of these bad boys!"

"Shame on you, Jelly Roll," said the lady. She pointed to a little bowl with a tiny pair of metal tongs sticking out of it. "One lump or two, Milford? I put two in that last cup."

She had called him by his correct name! Milford felt suffused with a feeling that he knew to be none other than love, true love at last. 

"Take your time deciding, dear boy," she said.

"Two please," said Milford.

She tonged two cubes of something white from the bowl and into the cup, and then she took a spoon from the table top and stirred the mixture.

"It feels good to be taking care of a man," she said. "Even one so barely a man."

She handed the cup to Milford, and he took it again in both hands and drank.

"Thank you," he said, after a gulp and a long sigh. This would have been his twelve-thousandth-and-twenty-eighth sigh since dragging himself from his comfortable bed the previous morning which now seemed like another lifetime ago, but he may have lost count of his sighs during the previous half hour or was it an hour when he was more in the world of dreams than not.

He looked at her beautiful face.

"Oh, no," she said, "I know that look."

"Abject worship," said Mr. Whitman.

"Head over heels," said the Negro man, was it Egg Roll, or Jello? 

"The look of love," said the woman. "Are you in love with me, Milford?"

"Yes," said Milford, putting down the cup onto a saucer that was there. "And I would like to propose to you. If it's not impertinent of me."

"You poor boy," she said. 

"I feel somewhat ashamed even asking you to marry someone like me, without talent or gainful employment, and who still lives at home, but someday my mother must die, and when she does I should inherit our house on Bleecker Street, as well as all her money and stocks and savings bonds. Unless she disinherits me, as she has often threatened to, and leaves it all to the St. George's charitable society."

"Well, I hope she doesn't do that!" said the lady.

"So also I," said Milford. "However, I'm afraid I have something embarrassing to say."

"Even more embarrassing than what you've already said?"

"Yes."

"Then there's nothing to be done but just to get it out. Think of me as a female priest in a confessional who has heard it all, to the point not only of indifference but boredom."

"I feel so ashamed."

"Out with it."

"I can't remember your name," said Milford.

"I just said her name," said the Negro man.

"What was it?" said Milford.

"Miss Margaret," said the Negro man.

"Miss Margaret," said Milford, and he turned to the lady. "I love you, Miss Margaret."

"You'd better call me Miss Blackbourne, Milford, at least until we get to know each other better, and I'll tell you when."

"Miss Blackbourne," said Milford. "I love you."

"Now that's quite enough of that," she said. "That's Jelly Roll's cigarette talking, that's what that is."

"You want another toke, sonny?" said the Negro man, Jelly Roll, that was his name. He held out the fat cigarette. And suddenly Milford remembered smoking the cigarette while standing at the urinal, and his head turning into a universe of dreams slipping into oblivion as soon as they were dreamt.

Milford looked at the Negro man's cigarette, almost as big as a cigar, a tendril of thick smoke rising up from its tip. He started to reach for it, but then stopped his hand in mid-air.

"Go ahead, boy," said the man called Jelly Roll. "I got a whole pouch in my poke."

Milford lowered his hand, but reluctantly, because he wanted those fleeting dreams again.

"No, thank you, sir," said Milford.

"Call me Jelly Roll," said the man.

"Jelly Roll," said Milford.

"Ah," said Mr. Whitman, "this, this is what it's all about, is it not, friends?" He raised a large metal tankard. "Friends, stout and true, both black and white, male and female, united in good fellowship!"

"Oh, Walt, will you cool it?" said Miss Blackbourne, lighting a black cigarette with an ebony lighter. "You know what your trouble is? You've always got to talk about how great something is while it's happening. I'll bet you're the kind of guy has to talk nonstop while you're making the beast with two backs."

"Guilty as charged," said Mr. Whitman, with a smile through his beard, his moustaches dripping with foam. "God, you know me like a book, Margaret!"

"A very tedious book," said Miss Blackbourne.

"Boom!" said the man called Jelly Roll.

"Maybe I should go," murmured Milford.

"Nonsense!" said Mr. Whitman.

"We just getting started, Wilfrid," said Jelly Roll.

"It's Milford," said Milford, "and I'm sorry, but I have drunk alcohol, which I shouldn't have, because I am an alcoholic, and also I have smoked marijuana and hashish, and as well I have eaten the sacred mushrooms of the American Indians, and then I smoked that cigarette in the men's room –"

"My special blend," said Jelly Roll, "made up for me by a conjurer lady down in New Orleans by the name of Madame Marie, consisting of Bull Durham tobacco, Acapulco gold and Panama red, jimson weed, John the Conqueroo, ayahuasca, and laudanum."

"Yes, that," said Milford, "and I think it was that which really pushed me over the precipice, and so now I think I should find my way home."

"I thought you were in love with me," said Miss Blackbourne.

"Yes, I am," said Milford. "So do you think I should stay?"

"Listen, Milford," she said, "I'm going to tell you something very important." She took a drink from a highball glass, and then she looked into Milford's eyes. "You only get one crack at this game called life, my boy. So you can live your life like a scared little rat, or you can live it like a man. Now what do you want to do?"

"Live it like a man?" said Milford.

"Hear, hear!" cried Walt.

"My man," said Jelly Roll.

Miss Blackbourne nodded. She took a drag from her black cigarette.

"Good," she said. "Now do me the favor, Milford, and take all this talk about going home. Wrap it up in a ball. And then toss it over your shoulder."

Milford paused, and then, unwillingly, he found himself making the motions with his two hands of rolling a snowball, rolling it, packing it tight, and when it was hard and tight and round he tossed it over his shoulder.

"Hurrah!" cried Mr. Whitman.

"Bully for the boy!" cried Jelly Roll.

"Good lad," said Miss Blackbourne, and she took another drag from her black cigarette, and then slowly exhaled a great cloud of fragrant smoke in Milford's face, which he greedily inhaled as much of as he was able to, and he fell in love all over again. 

It occurred to him that this must have been the fourth or fifth or sixth time he had fallen in love during the past eighteen hours, which felt like eighteen months, but why stop now? It wasn't as if he had anything better to do with his time…

{Please go here to read the "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}