Читать книгу Dreaming of Babylon - Richard Brautigan - Страница 15

Mustard

Still no bullets, and I was getting hungry. The nutrition from the stale doughnut I had cadged from my landlady was rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

I went into a little Italian delicatessen on Columbus Avenue and got a salami and Swiss cheese sandwich on a French roll with lots of mustard.

I like it that way: lots and lots of mustard.

It put a forty-five-cent dent in my seventy-five cents.

I was now a thirty-cent private detective.

The old Italian who made the sandwich for me was very interesting looking. Anyway, I made him look interesting because I started to think about Babylon, and I couldn’t afford to if I was going to earn some money from my first client since October 13, 1941.

Jesus, what a dry spell!

That had been a divorce case.

A three-hundred-pound husband wanted the goods on his three-hundred-pound wife. He thought that she was fooling around and she was: with a three-hundred-pound automobile mechanic. Some case. She used to go down to his garage every Wednesday afternoon and he’d fuck her over the hood of a car. I got some terrific photographs. That was before I had to pawn my camera. You should have seen the expression on their faces when I jumped out from behind a Buick and started snapping away. When he pulled out of her she rolled right over onto the floor and made a sound like an elevator falling on an elephant.

“Put a little more mustard on it,” I said.

“You sure likea the mustard,” the old Italian said. “You shoulda ordera plain mustard sandwich.” He laughed when he said that.

“Maybe your next customer won’t want any,” I said. “He might be a mustard hater. Can’t stand the stuff. Would sooner go to China.”

“I surea hope so,” he said. “I go outa business. No more sandwiches.”

The old Italian looked just like Rudolph Valentino if Rudolph Valentino had been an old Italian making sandwiches and complaining about people having too much mustard on their sandwiches.

What’s wrong with liking mustard?

I could like six-year-old girls.