“I watch these kids.They don't seem entirely unhappy. A few times I've even circled the Free Clinic on foot, trying to catch a closer glimpse of these kids and their lives as they pop in and out of the clinic's Sputnik-era, gone-to-seed building--Lancaster's future trolls and Popeyes loitering out back having hushed paranoid conversations. And once I even went to have a look where they hang out in a big way, out in the delivery bay behind the now-closed Donut Hut, the delivery bay grotto out back with a floor spongy with pigeon shit, chewing gum, cigarette ashes, and throat oysters--dank and sunless. I went to visit this place once when all the druggies were away, having their druggy lives downtown doing their druggy things: yelling at parked cars and having conversations with amber lights. I visited this place and I was confused: confused and attracted. Who do these people think they are? How can they not care about the future or hot running water or clean sheets or cable TV? These people. And on the walls down at the delivery bay, do you know what they had written? Written in letters several hands high, letters built of IV needles attached to the cement with soiled bandages and wads of chewing gum? They had written the words WE LIKE IT.”

“Some people have a hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time. Not me I cant ever get the gum out of the wrapper!”

“This is how I know blood is meaningless family connections are a lot like old gum -you don't have to keep chewing. You can always spit it out and stick it under the table. You can walk away.”

“On Saturday mornings during deliveries, I'd practice picking out new words in Jane Eyre, sounding out the ones that needed sounding out—and I'm not lying, there were plenty. "'A new servitude! There is something in that,' I soliloquized." I mean, who talks like that? Do you know how long it takes to sound out a word like soliloquized? And even after you do, you have no idea what the stupid word means except that it probably just means "said," which is what stupid Charlotte Brontë should have said in the first place. When I delivered Mrs. Mason's groceries, she saw that I had Jane Eyre stuck under my arm. "Oh," she said, "that was my favorite novel in school." "It was?" I soliloquized.”

“A lot of people who find out about the things I do immediately figure I'm just a pathetic "druggie" with nothing to say that is worth hearing. They talk endless bull shit of "recovery!" They make it sound like some amazing discovery...don't they know I'm far too busy trying to recover me?”

“I think we may have started this conversation off on the wrong foot," Robert said finally. In fact, if the conversation had been animate, the merciful thing to do would have been to take it out behind the barn and shoot it.”