Between walking and worrying I whittled the time, soon I was wailing. My only human contact this era was an exchange with a bus driver, “You better cool down mothafucka,” said verbatim when I questioned his tariff. It’s blurry. In the days walking standing still in the nights standing still walking, never considering, soupy self-inflicted suffering. Finally I uncloseted from incommunicado and called Drabber from the payphone at the back of the department store, the only earpiece clean of spiderweb. His stance on me at the time was at first coarse, then pointedly flippant, to fit me stiff into the bed I’d made and lain in. Through sobs I blurted my reasoning. In a final nix he clapped the handset with both fists, our dialogue still in overtime tie and tears. Kneeling down the wall weeping. Employee lounge mutterers looking on uninterestedly engrossed. One last night alone, mulling the GIANT through shard breach, the outlines of the gondolas from pegboard to base shelf, cramping boxtops and clammed canisters, charitable commodities unrequited by lights out. Occasional tops of heads. The madman from the bar in ultimate galumph. He peered for once up at me and our eyes met with nerve. He grinned. “Idle Hands!” he shouted. I knew there and then I’d bagged my last bushel this lottery pop. In desperation, in morning, so often one and the same, last night’s nightmares are today’s to-do list, I pawned my air mattress and wedding band, clawed on hands and kneecaps back to the vertical lettering, in winded gray rain. Long glom into arcade, clutching the bench, donkey clop to the wall urinals, a cheap ticket finally to the initials I’d originally intended to befriend.