The Pit outside of Puma’s window had the advantage of being an awesome escape route. At the bottom we had discovered  a door comparable to those found on oubliettes, those dark, dank holes where they find corpses of Dungeons & Dragons players or religious relics. Beyond the door was an ante-chamber/basement, which by chance led right underneath Munchy’s, the echoes of Paki and Farsi expletives ringing through the dungeon. A recon of the  pit gave way to the discovery that the empty space on the ground floor was under construction... About two a.m. three figures crept back into the quiet space, the sounds of their feet bouncing off the walls, covered in sheetrock and bare light fixtures.
			“Hey, quiet,” Puma whispers, “I think I hear somethin'.”       Smoothie shot back a ‘Don’t screw with me’ look and retorted, “hey, we’re not leaving without something, something good.” Which he found at that moment, stooping down he snatched an object from the floor. “Lookit, its a bag of barley.” (Which as a side note, we had carried over into the next two apartments) The silence was disturbed by a scratching sound from one of the back rooms, the light from Puma’s Eveready flashlight dancing on the walls.       A few anxious moments were spent in silence until Smoothie started inching forward, Indian-style, not lifting his feet. Slowly he crept around the corner and all was still for a moment, til his head poked around and motioned to follow. There in wait lingering in the corner, begging to be released from the bonds of captivity and commerce, was the mother lode of all things plywood. At least twenty sheets lay there, as if laid out as a present. The next hour was spent hauling sheets out the back, after deciding whether or not the back door was rigged with alarms. We hauled up sheet after sheet, up the fire escape and consigned it to a crawl space over our front door. The evening was a triumph along the lines of Indiana Jones and the Pod of thieving Dudes.       All was lauded and celebrated with a joint on the roof, territory staked out long ago in the attempt to annex it as a new party-nation. The exhilaration of taking someone else's property left us with the warm glow of victory as we gazed off the roof, exploring the surrounding East Village like we were the new kings of schnoit (AKA The Shit), casually observing from our perch while disdainfully checking out the lowlife confined to the ground (Not to mention looking in every damn window, perchance to spy the ever elusive Naked Beaver Beast, our only civics minded charity: “Save The Beaver”)