Close Your Eyes and Think of Dublin - Excerpt

When March arrives I take a trip, go to New York, buy myself a shotgun and a loft. Drop the nail in the soup. Rebuild Dante's inferno, stoke the fire where the bums keep warm. Don't mind me, bums, I tell them, I'm just one of those educated fellas second oldest after Harvard having a real whirl. (They had a certain reticence, were taut about the mouth and lips; they oppressed you with their knowledge. They were meticulous in expression.) A procession marches by - urban blacks in jack-up jive - flapping their sashes of one-upmanship; yo; immigrant families swoon and the Grand Marshall yips. Some majorette in nude pantyhose flips her baton to the passing cars and it is me.

(If I do it in daylight in daddy's garage some shithead coroner will screw up the autopsy and claim I died of natural causes.)

I have left the room/ where scientists come and go/ pithing Michealangelo

Remembering, sir, the one drop of epinephrine that kept that frog alive.