September 24, 1978 - Journal Entry - East Village

The Red Sox are a game out of first with six games to go.

Few people in our scene care about sports, although Guadalcanal is a die-heard Yankees fan. They suck this year.

Last night I went to party with Grant at Stan's and ran into Vickie, a skinny blonde with a stutter. I have one too and we discussed our speech difficulties. I moved a little closer to hear her better and she stammered, "I-I-I'm asexual."

"Oh."

"My friend Jessie thinks asexuality is a disease." Vickie was wearing a tight white sweater and a half-inch of make-up

That's stupid." Vickie was a poetress. I loved her reading with distorted speech.

"I told him the same. I'm not that primitive." I couldn't tell Vickie that I'm attracted to androgynous women.

"You're the same as all men. You'd fuck a hole in a tree.

Vickie walked away to speak with her friends. None of them were asexual.

"No luck." Grant was always curious about my sex life. Queers were like that.

"We were just talking."

"T-t-t-talking?"

Don't make fun of our speech."

Sorry, I was joking."

It's not a joke."

So you got shoot down?"

"Yes."

"Then let's go to CBGBs."

Who was playing didn't matter. We all loved CBs and I had no problem with being shoot down, but when I left the party, Vickie broke from her friends and asked, "Can I go to CBGBs with you. I won't h-h-hang on you."

"No worries." Just because she was asexual didn't mean I couldn't be a gentleman.

"Thanks, my friends are assholes.

"Sure, but I have other places to go first."

On the way I stopped at One University Place, Mickey Ruskin's new restaurant next to Washington Square. The front bar was packed with arty assholes. The line for the new pinball game was long, so I told Vickie, "Let's go

"A greasy foreign meatball in a three-piece suit clutched her arm. He was drunk He was with friends. I had drunk heavy at the party and chopped on the guy's forearm, freeing Vickie. Grant tried to calm the situation, but the meatball poked my chest and said, "Don't get tough with me."

His accent might have been French. I had taken it in grammar school at Our Lady of the Fotthills. Grant motioned with his head for the door. Vickie was already on her way out. I should have left without a word, except I'm from the south Shore of Boston and said, "I don't have time to waste of fools like you."

"Fool? You call me a fool. Who are you?"

"Normally I would have japped him now, but I wasn't wearing my glasses and said, "This is America, not France. We don't need your type here."

"I'm not French. I am Spanish."

Mickie came over to us. Two bouncers backed him up and he and asked, "What's the problem here?"

"This foreigner is out of line, but we're leaving."

"Then leave." The three of us walked to CBGBs in silence. At least I was silent. Vickie vanished once I got us comped for entry. Her friends seemed the same as the ones left at the party, but they weren't the same, just not different from the others.

Kim Davis whispered in my ear, "You came here with Vickie here? You know what Alice thinks of that. She;'s worried about you getting a disease."

"Firstly Vickie's asexual."

"She is?" Kim's regard for the scrawny blonde climbed a few steps.

"Yes, and cool out, I'm only sleeping with Alice no matter what she thinks." It was a lie, but one she unlike Alice was willing to believe.

I ended up reading karen Crystal's palm.

"You suffer from incredible angst." Her marriage with Hilly had been over nine years, but they were still partners in the bar. Her only job in the place is to stop us from smoking weed. "What make you think you can smoke in here? This isn't no methadone clinic."

Onbviousy she had never been to the dressing home, which seconded for a shooting gallery. Me, I wasn't into skag. I liked my drink. " My love for Alice overcomes my lust, although she said to me this morning, "I'm so scared when you go out alone at night. I worry about you getting a disease.

Excerpt From FAMOUS FOR NEVER by Peter Nolan Smith

Late in the summer of 1978 an Upper East Side photographer asked me to write a photo-roman about a sadistic kidnapping. I cast my co-worker Klaus Sperber as the black leather villain. The Gothic singer was the daytime pastry chef at Serendipity 3. I was a busboy there and Anthony lived above the swishy ice cream shop of East 60th Street. Upon meeting Klaus at the Kiev Coffee Shop, the photographer was smitten by his ghostly face.

"You were made for film." Anthony started snapping pictures. We were waiting for our female lead. I didn't know her.

"My voice was made for the opera." The gaunt German loved to perform forgotten castrati role. "But I don't believe in movies. Too many frames showing the same thing when only one needs to show the true emotion."

"Like Gloria Swanson at the end of SUNSET BOULEVARD." I loved Billy Wilder films.

"I can always pretend to be her." Klaus grimaced with a stolen toothy smile and pursed his black-painted lips. He was a natural mimic. "Who is the leading man?"

"No one yet." Anthony's eye hadn't left the viewfinder.

"What about him?" Klaus pointed my direction.

"He’s a little brutish." Anthony swung the camera and focused the lens on my face.

"Like a caveman." Klaus snidely commented about my hard-boned features. "You know his name at Serendipity 3 was Bam Bam after some stupid American TV show THE FLINTSTONES."

"I'm not an actor." I trembled like LA in an earthquake.

"You don't have to act. All you have to do is pose." Anthony shifted his camera to the entrance, as the second coming of Veronica Lake entered the diner. Every man at the counter followed the click of the blonde's stiletto heels. Her knee-length black skirt was slit to a vee revealing her white upper thigh and her black polka-dot shirt was unbuttoned to a vanilla navel.

"This is Clover." Anthony invited her to sit down. "We met at Club 82.”

"I like dancing with transvestites. They don't hassle me like straight men." Clover pushed a sheet of blonde hair from her face. She wasn't wearing a bra. Anthony lifted his Leica. Clover dropped her head for the curtain of hair to cover half an eye. "Are you the hero?"

"Yes." There was no saying no.

"Good. I like my men rough." Her voice slurred this preference for sultry surrender. "My sponsor like it rough too."

"He's also the writer." Klaus said with a keen interest in his acting partner. He was into straight men.

"So what's the story?" The 19 year-old arched an eyebrow. "Something sexy I hope."

"It's about the three of us."

"And?"

"I haven't written a word," I confessed with a shrug.

"The story will write itself with you three in it." Anthony pressed the shutter button. The camera swiveled from Klaus to Clover to me. Its aperture clicked open and shut like a robot attempting to wake from a long recharge. "We can make it up as we go."

"Like life. Like Art." Klaus believed in keeping it simple and I built a story around his kidnapping Clover's character to finance an opera about the last castrati on Earth.

We huffed poppers for one scene. Clover stripped near-naked in another. Klaus cut my eyes blind in another. Bandages transformed me into a blind mummy. She lay on my bare flesh wearing nothing but a scent of another man.

"My sponsor had me when I was a little girl. He thinks I'm too old now. Nineteen isn't old, is it?"

"No." I was twenty-five. When I was fourteen, Clover had been eight. “You were lucky to get out of Texas."

"I never looked back." Clover could make it to the bright lights of Hollywood. Nothing was pretend with her.

Our shoots ran late, as we shoot scenes over the city. Tenement fires were our lighting. Sirens backed our sound. My girlfriend accused me of having an affair.

I wished that Alice were right, except Clover slept with men for money.

"I don't tell the oilman about them. He thinks he's the only one, but his friends pay me $1000 a night and I'm worth every penny."

A grand a night was out of my price range and I had to be satisfied with pretending that I was sleeping with her. Alice was not pleased with the illusion and neither was I.

Our last shoot was on 42nd Street.

After midnight Times Square was awash with wickedness. We posed on 42nd Street with the pimps, whores, and drug dealers. Clover looked the part of a rich man's mistress and I could pass for a detective in my pinstriped suit. The final scene was set in a XXX shop. The clerk would allow anything for $20. Anthony set up his tripod before the open doors of a porno booth. The voyeurs watched us for free. Clover wanted their quarters. Behind us the booth's 8mm loop repeated the ravishing of a young blonde by an older man.

When I imitated the on-screen action, Clover whispered, "On my fourteenth birthday the oilman raped me. He bought my parents a new house. He's been taking care of me ever since. You ever rape anyone?"

"No." Soldiers of the Sexual Revolution raped no one.

"Do you think you could? If it was me?" Five years as the oilman's mistress had introduced a special game to Clover and she teasingly shut the booth door. "If it was a game?"

"No." I snatched at her arm.

"Too bad. You'll never know what you're missing." She pushed open the door and the camera strobe caught our struggle.

THE CLOSET OF LOST THINGS by Peter Nolan Smith

The Nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills taught their students math, English, religion, history, geography, and a scattering of other basic subjects. Their educational technique depended heavily on harsh discipline. Left-handers were deemed possible satanists. The nun expected everyone to be right-handed. Any laggers were beaten into submission and laziness on small ts earned the offender to Palmer Penmanship a wrap on the knuckles.

The mysteries of adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division were boiled down to tables.

7 X 7 = 63 and 1 + 1 always equaled 2.

How didn't matter as long the charts were in our heads.

The flow of history was divided into dates important to the Holy Roman Church and America; 5 BC the Birth of Jesus Christ, 1215 the Magna Carta, 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, 1776 the American Declaration of Independence, 1914 the Start of the Great War, and the 2nd Vatican Council in 1961.

Questioning why the Birth of Jesus Christ came five years before Anno Domino or why Christmas was only four months later than the Immaculate Conception were grounds for a visit to the Principal, who corrected adolescence heresy with a yardstick and Sister Mary Eucharist ruled the nuns of her convent with the same iron hand.

The mysteries of faith were solved by the memorization of the Baltimore Catechism; God made the world, God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things, Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made in the image and likeness of God and God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven. God reigned over man with capital letters.

There was no detour from these tenets, until my 6th Grade teacher Sister Mary Osmond ignored the the strict curriculum of her mother superior. The ancient nun had taught in Egypt and entertained her pupils with tales of Africa.

"We lived by the Nile. After the harvest the children ran barefoot over the sharp stalks without slicing their feet."

Closing my eyes I envisioned her students gliding over the fields of razors. Sister Mary Osmond opened our minds and we followed her approach to worlds beyond Boston.

Sister Mary Eucharist hated her and warned, "Fear. That's how the Church rules the faithful. Fear."

Sister Mary Osmond offered the course of love and we reciprocated by scoring the highest test scores in the Diocese. Her knowledge flooded our senses and she had an answer for everything.

Not all of it was true.

One afternoon Connie Botari cried in the back of the class.

Sister Mary Eucharist would have ignored the silent sobs.

Sister Mary Osmond put down her chalk and approached Connie's desk.

"What's wrong?"

"I lost my headband." Connie had looked very cute this morning with it on her head, although not a pretty as Kyla Rota.

I wore glasses and sat in the front of the class. Neither girl knew that I lived and breathed on the same planet.

"Is that all?" Sister Mary Osmond tenderly touched the young girl's head. "Don't you worry about that and do you know why?"

"If you lose something than it wasn't yours to begin with."

"Who taught you that?"

"My mother," answered the thin brunette.

As had mine.

"And you pray to St. Anthony to help you find something."

"Yes, sister, he has the power to find things."

"And does anyone else know the prayer?"

"Yes, sister," answered the entire class and we recited as one, "St. Anthony, St. Anthony, Please help me. Something is lost and can't be found."

While I had rejected the belief in God after the drowning of my best friend, I had remained true to the powers of the saints, since most of them had pagan roots and St. Anthony of Padua had at one time lived in Morocco, which rendered his faith questionable in my eyes.

"Anyone find Connie's head band?"

We looked about the class and after a few seconds shook our heads, saying, "No, sister."

"But don't lose faith in St. Anthony, besides in heaven there is a closet with everything you ever lost waiting for you," Sister Mary Osmond explained to Connie,

"Really?" The cute brunette wiped away her sniff with a bare wriest.

"The closet has your name on it in gold letters. Nothing is truly gone, so you will enjoy seeing it again in heaven." Sister Mary Osmond gave Connie a handkerchief with her initials embroidered in a corner.

"You keep it. All possessions are transitory on this Earth. The only thing you need is a pure soul to get you in heaven and purity is the key to the closet with all lost things.

I was on the verge of pubescence. So many impure thoughts bounced in my brain, that I was certain of damnation to Hell, where Lucifer had a closet loaded with the things that I never wanted in the first place.

I lowered my head into my hands. My toy boat and teddy bear would remain trapped in their heavenly closet, but then I remembered what Sister Mary Osmond had said about lost things. They remained forever in your head and I smiled, because forever will be a long time in Hell without a teddy bear.

As I got older the number of lost things grew with my travels around the world. My possessions were scattered across two houses in Thailand, a mountaintop cabin north of Santa Cruz, two farms in upstate New York, my apartment in Fort Greene, and my sister's house outside of Boston.

Upon my return to the States from Thailand in 2008 I emptied my storage space in the East Village.

I was missing paintings, first editions, color slides as well as my cowboy boots and collection of nightclub memorabilia or at least that was what I thought until visiting a good friend out in Easthampton in the summer of 2009.

After dinner Billy announced, "I have several boxes of your stuff in my cellar."

"You do?"

"Yes, you left them here after you gave up your apartment to live in Thailand."

"That was in 2002." The rental management had offered $20,000 for my vacating the tiny apartment on East 10th Street. "Remember what you said?"

"No."

"You said that now I was just another guy from Boston who once lived in New York."

"Twenty-nine years in the city don't make you a native New Yorkers."

"If you say so, but I thought I put everything in storage."

"Wrong, boyo. We drove a truck out here."

"We did?"

"A van."

"Damn." I had no recollection of that ride.

"You want to go check on them?” Both of us were recovering from last evening remake of LEAVING LAS VEGAS.

"No, let's go for a swim in the ocean first."

"You boys be careful," his wife shouted from the pool. Sara came from the UK and liked her ocean calm. "Two people had drowned three weeks ago."

"We'll obey the buddy system." The Atlantic rarely forgave fools.

Amagansett Beach was ten minutes from Billy's house via the back roads. His I-pod played John Lennon's WORKING CLASS HERO, as we broke through the barricade of slow-moving SUVs and Porsche Reich sedans on Route 27. Billy was a local and locals knew the back roads.

At the beach a parking space opened up next to the reserved handicapped spot. Billy grabbed it before an up-island vacationer steered his Mercedes GL 405 between the white lines.

"Nice, huh?" Billy had a healthy disdain for the summer people, while recognizing his high-end real estate job survived on their largesse. He smiled to the irate driver of the luxury SUV and shrugged like he was sorry. It was a good act.

We walked onto the beach with towels over our shoulders.

Two men in their fifties wearing sun glasses.

Weekenders sunned on the wide strand. Coolers crowded the beach blankets. The miasma of sun tan tainted the sea air. Few people challenged the surf. A distant hurricane was churning giant waves along the offshore sand bars.

Few people were venturing farther than their knees into the sucking froth.

"No one's in the ocean."

"One surfer." Billy pointed to a single figure bobbing on the waves beyond the nasty shore break.

"I didn't come here to watch him."

"Me neither."

"Then it's straight into the water." Billy swam laps at Guerneys three times a week.

"The only thing to do." I ran into the sea and Billy followed close behind.

The cold current grabbed our bodies like the Atlantic wanted us to drag us to Iceland, but the danger of riptides had natural curative powers more important than a reunion with long-lost relics of the past.

We ducked under the close-outs and stroked through the sets of double waves to the calm of the outer break. I couldn't touch the bottom.

The lifeguard looked in our direction.

I waved that we were fine.

He nodded to say 'be careful'.

Billy and I rode a few waves. One crunched my body into the sandy bottom adn I tumbled in an eddy of foam. My head broke the surface. Billy was a few feet from me. We shared a glance and let the turbulent surge carry us to safety.

"I think I'm ready to look at those boxes now." I was out of breath and exhilarated by the swim.

"Me too."

We returned to Billy's house, listening to John Lennon's IMAGINE.

I had never been much of a Beatles fan, but these two songs revealed the genius of John, although Billy and I had to both ask, "Why Yoko?"

"Some things are not to be known."

Back at his house Billy, Sara, and I went downstairs. There were thirteen boxes. One was covered in mould. A small carpet had rotted in the damp. I opened the boxes one after another. There was no damage to the art work; cartoon series by Gaetano Liberatore, an oil painting from the Steaming Musselman Philippe Waty, two of Ellen Von Unwerth's first photo or a suede jacket in a plastic bag.

"It still fits after all those years."

"A little tight around the waist." Billy's wife said it in such a way that the truth didn't hurt. The English are a polite people.

The next box was loaded with slides and photos from my travels around the world. Bali, Tibet, Laos, Peru, France, Ireland, China, Thailand, plus a love letter from 1964.

I read it aloud.

"Sweet." Billy's wife was very sentimental. "Who was Connie Botari?"

"A girl from long ago."

I told them about the closet of lost things.

The third box was a set of Wedgwood china from Bowdoin College which had belonged to my Grandfather. He had graduated from the Maine College in 1912. I had served countless dinners on the plates at my old apartment on East 10th Street. The large serving bowl still bore the stains of a sauce. I guessed that it was pasta sauce.

The last box contained books; first editions of FRANNY AND ZOOEY, CATCHER IN THE RYE, MOONRAKER, and about twenty other classics. They would have been worth a fortune if signed or still in good condition.

"Thanks, Billy." He could have thrown these out years ago.

"Well, we still have to discuss the storage fees."

"Oh, Billy." His wife had a different sense of humor from the Irish. "You can't charge him anything."

"I was just kidding."

I wasn't so sure, since the Irish can be mean.

I told them about the closet of lost things.

"It was supposed to be in heaven, but there was one right here on Earth and it was in your basement."

"Proving there is heaven on earth." Billy O examined the copy of JUNKIE.

"And it's where we find the things we love."

Now if I could only find my lost teddy bear, my life would be complete, because I am a simple man awaiting the celestial Closet of Lostd Things.

September 25, 1978 - Journal Entry - East Village

Living in the shadow of the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory during the 1960s I was obsessed with the weather created by the long chain of hills south of the Neponset River. Snow filled the woods in the winter, spring rain flooded the streams running across the overgrown farmland the bogs buzzed with mosquitoes in the sweltering summer, and the trees black with New England colors through the autumn. Winter was winter. Cold, but Northern Europe was colder and I was surprised, when Clover said she was planning to leave New York for Poland. No one from our scene traveled to Communist countries and I asked, "Poland?"

"Krakow is supposed to be beautiful and cheap."

"I've never been farther east than Bar Harbor." I visualized a coal-stained medieval city

"I have never crossed the Atlantic." I thought about Paris, but I want a real place on the edge. I have more than enough money after selling the door Jean-Michel Basquiat painted for me. Will you be my big brother?"

Of course. Any Polish people give you a hard time, buy me a ticket and I'll save you."

"I wish my brother was tough, but he's the way he is and he's happy with that."

"He certainly does look happy." Brad was earning good money dancing in a jock strap at the Adonis Theater in Times Square. He was in love with one man while fucking scores of men every month.

His Mexican partner beat him regularly. Jose is a surfer stranded in New York and frequently quotes the Tradewinds hit - NEW YORK'S A LONELY TOWN. "I hate the surf in New York." Clover's packed bag rests by the doorless entrance to the apartment. She pulls me into the bathroom. We had only made out. We had never made love. She wanted me to violate her. I couldn't do that even as pretend.

"This is your last chance."

"Maybe I'll met you on the other side of the Iron Curtain."

Forget it." Clover was angry. "You have to leave. I have things to do."

I wanted to go with her, but whatever we were, we weren't anymore and she was headed to a country where wheat fields ran all the way to Siberia.

Clover vanished completely that year. I received two postcards; one from East Berlin another from Krakow. She seemed happy from her writing. I searched the Internet to find a trace of her, but Clover is gone forever.

The New Illiterati

The other day I exited from NYU hospital and stopped in their gift store. I was astounded to see that there wasn't a single book in the shop other than mini-coffee table picture books and reflected on the loss of several generations' ability to read anything other than a cellphone screen. I used to go through at least three books a week. I vacuumed my friends' collections without ever finishing Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN or Proust's

I buy the New York Times a couple of times a week

The Darkness Of An Empire

"El imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol." or 'the sun never set on your empire' was a remark attributed to a loyal courtier of the Holy Roman Empire Charles V. His possessions spanned the globe. Philip II gambled its power on the Spanish Armada. Filthy weather in the Channel thwarted his desire to conquer Britain and by the18th Century the English crowed the same sentiment as the hildagos.

"On her dominions the sun never sets; before his evening rays leave the spires of Quebec, his morning beams have shone three hours on Port Jackson, and while sinking from the waters of Lake Superior, his eye opens upon the Mouth of the Ganges."

At one point the tiffs and teabags dominated a quarter of the world's population. Maintenance sapped the Home Countries of capital and manpower. Sea to Sea to sea drained the vitality of the nation. Victorianism led to the noble massacres of Flanders and the Somme. WWII wiped out another generation and the Empire collapsed with the surrender of it's Crown Jewels to the niggers, wogs, and chinks. Winston Churchill was furious. He was English 100%. His mother was an American. Her beauty was international. As an historian Churchill understood the weight of time on power.

"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind." 1943.

Britain's remaining oversea possessions consists of Gibralter, the Falklands, Bermuda, St. Helena, Ascension, British Antarctica, the South Georgia Islands, Tristan de Cunha, the South Sandwich Islands, Akrotiri and Dhekelia, the Pitcairn Islands, British Indian Ocean Territory The British Virgin Islands, The Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat, and The Cayman Islands. Margaret Thatcher fought a long distance war against Argentina to reconquer the South Atlantic islands. The last ten years the UK has waged a war in the Middle East against Islamist militants. The cost of that campaign became clear year ago, when the British government sold the Bangkok Embassy and Thai workers leveled the buildings in less than a day.

London in Flames.

An empire is never dark whenever it is on fire.

GUNGA DIN by Rudyard Kipling

When I was a young boy, I loved the movie GUNGA DIN.

The hero was an outcast water-boy.

The lowest of the low in the ranks of the British Empire, but Rudyard Kipling recognized their worth to a man dying of thirst and wrote the following poem.

GUNGA DIN

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

You may talk o' gin and beer When you're quartered safe out 'ere, An’ you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it. Now in Injia's sunny clime, Where I used to spend my time Aservin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen, Of all them black-faced crew The finest man I knew Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din, He was "Din! Din! Din!" "You limpin' lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din!" "Hi! Slippy hitherao." "Water, get it! Panee lao." "You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din."

The uniform 'e wore Was nothin' much before, An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind, For a piece o' twisty rag An' a goatskin water-bag Was all the field-equipment 'e could find. When the sweatin' troop-train lay In a sidin' through the day, Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl, We shouted "Harry By!" Till our throats were bricky-dry, Then we wopped 'im cause 'e couldn't serve us all. It was "Din! Din! Din!" You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? "You put some juldee in it Or I'll marrow you this minute "If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!"

"E would dot an' carry one Till the longest day was done; An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear. If we charged or broke or cut, You could bet your bloomin' nut, 'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear. With 'is mussick on 'is back, 'E would skip with our attack, An' watch us till the bugles made 'Retire,' An' for all 'is dirty 'ide 'E was white, clear white, inside When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire! It was "Din! Din! Din!" With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green. When the cartridges ran out, You could hear the front-ranks shout, "Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!"

I shan't forgit the night When I dropped be'ind the fight With a bullet where my belt-plate should 'a' been. I was chokin' mad with thirst, An' the man that spied me first Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din. 'E lifted up my 'ead, An' he plugged me where I bled, An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water green. It was crawlin' and it stunk, But of all the drinks I've drunk, I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din. It was "Din! Din! Din!" "'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen; "'E's chawin' up the ground, 'An' 'e's kickin' all around: 'For Gawd's sake git the water, Gunga Din!'

'E carried me away To where a dooli lay, An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean. ’E put me safe inside, An' just before 'e died, "I 'ope you liked your drink," sez Gunga Din. So I'll meet 'im later on At the place where 'e is gone.” Where it's always double drill and no canteen. 'E'll be squattin' on the coals Givin' drink to poor damned souls, An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din! Yes, Din! Din! Din! You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! Though I've belted you and flayed you, By the livin' Gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!