He's stepping heavily, a humbled sort canting his course in random lines down Mission Street: a grave heat on.
It's the photographs again, their captured time fingered once too often and now spun to pique, never settling in the same dungeon twice-- and never mind what's taking hits in the abstruse deeps of his belly.
Baja drifts peevishly in him now, its memory jabbing at his nerve like a wayward crank inclined to correct strangers.
Pity him.
He craves the vacuous shoulder, does Pauly, a female he can treat like a stooge and pitch his tales of woe to. Pity him, and you'll have a helluva load on your hands. A helluva load.
In the last week alone he's seen a rage collect hard in the pith of him, lift a hundred pound desk over his scrawny, rummy-wan frame and swing down, smashing the f**er to kindling right in the middle of the street, the neighbors stopping their varied business to gape at what might come next.
Meanwhile, Hope's on the line from Seattle.
She's worried, she says, her voice itching with years of untenable kinship. My brother, she says, fashions himself after some kinda Tarantino cowboy! she says. Yeah, well, Pauly hates the phone. Ask anybody.
Countless blinks later, he says he wasn't quite sure.
Something just broke and washed over him, as though the body had suddenly addressed its own uncanny agenda.
So weighted-- and lately a man who falters on his heels and disa**embles altogether quite a bit-- Pauly picks himself up one hand, one knee, one foot at a time, stripped of the controlled bad-a** who waves away phantom help under the hazy line of street lamps burning coal-like and suspended through the boulevard.
That's quite a frame when he takes that critical left turn into the bar, where solace of the peopled din is soon lost once the quick glimpse of Her strikes.