The morning was a quiet one, the heat of the summer baking the asphalt until a permanent fog of tar and exhaust coated everything. Puma was in the process of brewing a fresh batch of coffee, in the pot that was cracked, to go with the common breakfast-a #2 with cheese (the deli next door harbored all kinds of degenerates and freaks, but the one thing that kept us as customers was two eggs scrambled with a slice of preprocessed yellow cheese on a freshly made bun that was the epitome of cholesterol heaven) and packages of sugar cookies, three weeks old.      The only one in the room not nursing a hangover or currently in the throes of a California riser (the act of smoking a joint prior to anything else upon awakening), was the mouse sitting in the niche under the sink/counter in the kitchen.

The only reason the mouse was not intoxicated was because he was brain- damaged and saw the world in his own twisted little shades of perspective. Puma saw it first, motioned for silence (which wasn’t hard to get at the moment) grabbed a pot which he slipped over the mouse before the rodent even registered what had happened. He then transferred the critter to the 5 gallon aquarium that had previously harbored a pigeon with a broken wing that Puma “rescued” and then tormented.

Now one might think that the mouse would attempt every manner of escape possible. This mouse actually seemed content in the aquarium, as if he had somehow contracted the same mellow attitude infecting the rest of the house.      After close inspection of the new prisoner, Smoothie pointed out that the mouse looked like it had somehow been scalped. Indeed, the critter looked like a men’s hair club candidate. The top if its skull had been shaved clean by a close call with something, chemical mutation, or had escaped from an institution with dark agendas and sweaty pencil-necked-geeks. The peculiar thing about the mouse was its Marty Feldman eyes, focused on two separate realities. Well, the thing looked pathetically ill, if not on the verge of sheer collapse, unfortunately we had decided to consign the mutant freak to the Pit outside the kitchen window, dumping the decayed mouse carcass along with several pounds of blue gravel, filmed with algae. As we leaned out the window, Puma opened the tiny bathroom window and pokes his head out as we surveyed the damage.

“What’s down there?” I ask... So we lashed a rope to the cast-iron radiator and plumbed the depths below. Not much considering the trash strewn rubble we found below, the lightless, soot covered walls echoing Smoothie's voice, “Ya know, the pit outside Pumsters window is a lot cooler, it’s gotta secret doorway.”

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