MDDM: Chs 46-7 "Peach Bottom Ferry"

[Jane]

jbor wrote:
> 
> Sam wrote:
> 
> > "finding it impossible to look out into --that--" (452.3)
> 
> The pronoun reference goes back to "the Night Sky" I think - its "pitiless
> Clarity" (463.27) - but I agree that the word "*That*" is italicised in the
> text to load it with greater significance. I think the sky's consistent
> absence of signs of "God", and for Mason more particularly, any sign of
> Rebekah, is one aspect.

I was a barmaid at The Lost Angel. A dive  hole in the wall gin mill in
the Bronx. Well, just as I was about to quit...I was living up
stairs...even with gigs down at Paret's Prussian Heart Of Iron on the
weekends... I couldn't make the rent...well...the bar was under the El
(the over the street train) and as luck would have it one day the EL got
tired and started screaming. 

Now  ELs all come into this world screaming and this one  screamed
everyday of its life, that feral screaming in its shoes, the piercing
cries, the grinding jaws, the apocalyptic contortions of a spitting gimp
cracking cochleae, relieving itself with plosive farts,   halting
explosions echoing off brown bricks burning, the arching brows of welded
seams splitting in your skull chamber of horrors, the....Stop, 

"stand clear of the closing jaws...." 

   but now it was pure pandaemonium, like  Satan's horrid crew had
broken the adamantine chain's and escaped the penal fires of the last
hole in the ground (that's what the ground hogs call it). So, to make a
long story short here, my bar was full of drunken union labor for six
months while the EL was fitted with a new pair of lungs.  Well....and
what the boys called the job, the EL and machines and the hole in the
ground and the steel and lumber and cable and blood sweat piss and
tears, the  hungover mornings, the endless and bottomless paper coffee
cups and dead soldiers strewn from The Lost Angel to the Printers Devil
and up Gunhill and Down Gunhill carrying a drunken apprentice like some
Benny to be buried with the church key frozen to his bib and mud
dripping from his Red Wings, after the humping of shit, the tossing of
scat, the bending of pipe, the blue prints spread on the pool table
where biker babes spread, the hammers sleeping in their boxes, the Jacks
sleeping on the Johns, was THAT. When they got drunk they italicized
their speech, I sear to it. 

It was THAT. 
And the more technical the job became, or if it were bogged down, the
bosses meeting to make decisions, the more mathematical, the more
calculated and beyond the comprehension, interest, of the common
mechanic, the more they came to separate from it and drink and always
called the job THAT.