Purina Checkerboard slacks

Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)

Tom Waits

there's a blur drizzle down the plateglass as a neon swizzle stick stirrin up the sultry night air and a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon rollin' maverick across an obsidian sky as the busses go groanin' and wheezin', down on the corner I'm freezin'; on a restless boulevard at a midnight road I'm across town from EASY STREET with the tight knots of moviegoers and out of towners on the stroll and the buildings towering high above lit like dominoes or black dice all the used car salesmen dressed up in Purina Checkerboard slacks and Foster Grant wrap-around, pacing in front of EARL SCHLEIB $39.95 merchandise like barkers at a shootin' gallery they throw out kind of a Texas Guinan routine "Hello sucker, we like your money just as well as anybody else's here" or they give you the P.T. Barnum bit "There's a sucker born every minute you just happened to be comin' along at the right time" come over here now you know... all the harlequin sailors are on the stroll in a search of "LIKE NEW," "NEW PAINT," decent factory air and AM-FM dreams and the piss yellow gypsy cabs stacked up in the taxi zones waitin' like pinball machines to be ticking off a joy ride to a magical place waitin' in line like "truckers welcome" diners with dirt lots full of Peterbilts, Kenworths, Jimmy's and the like, and they're hiballin' with bankrupt brakes, over driven under paid, over fed, a day late and a dollar short but Christ I got my lips around a bottle and my foot on the throttle and I'm standin' on the corner standin' on the corner like a "just in town" jasper, on a street corner with a gasper lookin' for some kind of Cheshire billboard grin stroking a goateed chin, and using parking meters as walking sticks on the inebriated stroll with my eyelids propped open at half mast but you know... over at Chubb's Pool Hall and Snooker it was a nickle after two, yea it was a nickle after two and in the cobalt steel blue dream smoke, it was the radio that groaned out the hit parade and the chalk squeaked, the floorboards creaked and an Olympia sign winked through a torn yellow shade, old Jack Chance himself leanin' up against a Wurlitzer and eyeballin' out a 5 ball combination shot impossible you say? ...hard to believe?, perhaps out of the realm of possibility? naaaa he be stretchin' out long tawny fingers out across a cool green felt with a provocative golden gate and a full table railshot that's no sweat and I leaned up against my bannister and wandered over to the Wurlitzer and I punched A-2 I was lookin' for something like Wine, Wine, Wine by the Night Caps starring Chuck E. Weiss or High Blood Pressure by George (cryin' in the streets) Perkins - no dice "that's life," that's what all the people say ridin' high in April, seriously shot down in May, but I know I'm gonna change that tune when I'm standing underneath a buttery moon that's all melted off to one side It was just about that time that the sun came crawlin' yellow out of a manhole at the foot of 23rd Street and a dracula moon in a black disguise was making its way back to its pre-paid room at the St. Moritz Hotel (scat) and the El train came tumbling across the trestles and it sounded like the ghost of Gene Krupa with an overhead cam and glasspacks and the whispering brushes of wet radials on a wet pavement and there's a traffic jam session on Belmont tonight and the rhapsody of the pending evening, I leaned up against my bannister and I've been looking for some kind of an emotional investment with romantic dividends kind of a physical negociation is underway as I attempt to consolidate all my missed weekly payments, into one-low-monthly payment through the nose with romantic residuals and leg akimbo but the chances are more than likely I'll probably be held over for another smashed weekend