Monday, March 26, 2012

3529. SEDLAK

SEDLAK (1967)
(Restaurant Onion Batter)
I knew him as Sedge and so did the
rest. Long face of 10th Street, constable
of Dog Horace, roomer in Elvery's brownstone.
All of this very nice. Times for a job were few.
That old boat, back then, was still in the harbor,
perched at the pier near the end of Canal, or close;
slightly listing and ever leaking oil, it stayed in place.
-
'High School of Maritime Arts' or some such
ridiculous nomenclature it wore. Perhaps in its
way it was meant to signify by symbol a larger and
much broader world (of which) Sedlak never knew.
-
Nor I, for that matter. We somehow both thrived on the
incidental manner of all this meaning. We sometimes
had a breakfast together, there, in some leaky
stateroom of our own imagining  -  coffee in cups,
some stinking roll of a restaurant onion batter.
-
Yes, well, that restaurant was quite nearby  -  a
truckman's dinner really, for coffee and slop, for
truckers and dockhands, haulers and stevedores,
vagrants and bums and hookers too. We'd gotten
to know them all, altogether in that steamy pall,
restaurant onion batter. We sometimes went there,
but found more fun on the listing boat, before and
after hours, when, by stealth, it was ours alone.
 

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