Noir

by Christopher Moore

She had the kind of legs that kept her butt from resting on her shoes—a size-eight dame in a size-six dress and every mug in the joint was rooting for the two sizes to make a break for it as they watched her wiggle in the door and shimmy onto a barstool with her back to the door.

“But as the Buddha says, ‘A man who has not tasted five-spice aardvark has never tasted joy.’”

Mark Twain had put it, “Summer in Frisco makes a guy want to snatch a flounder up by the lapels and slap the damp off of him.” (One of Twain’s lesser-known quotes.)

If she is not a professional it is a safe bet that she is a very hardworking amateur.

It was the kind of kiss that he wanted to wake up to and keep refreshing periodically until he got one long last one, salty with tears, in his casket.

“What’s buzzin’, cousin?” said Moo Shoes, chipper as a squirrel munching coffee beans.

“Uncle Ho. Don’t say ‘Mao’ in front of him. In fact, you should call him ‘venerated elder.’” “He helps us with this lug, I’ll slap him on the ass and call him Debbie, he wants.”

They were locals, and knew what the author Jack London had said about Ocean Beach in 1902: “Holy fuck, you couldn’t get a match lit here to save your life.”

“Having a dame yank you off for cab fare is romance?” “I’m a poet at heart, Sammy.”

“There, there, sweetheart, Tilly is probably not dead in a trench.” “But you never know,” said Jimmy, like a little ray of sunshine.

“What?” said Jimmy. “Sometimes I enjoy being a girl, and sometimes I just enjoy a girl, and sometimes both. You gonna bust my balls about it?”

“Hey, you ever feel like you might just be the construct of an unyielding, all-seeing bureaucracy beyond our perception that is molding humanity to its own will and pleasure?”

I wanted to throw her across the seat and hammer her like Martin Luther on the church door,