"Robinson, Spider - Callahan's Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

That's it, I thought, I quit. I went as far as the bar, made a secOnd cup of coffee, and vowed- not to move another step until I had finished drinking this one. Zoey and Noah must have connected, and worked out for themselves the awkward business of him waiting in the bedroom while she waddled into the bathroom and refilled the stein for him. (No problem for a pregnant lady.) By the time she came out to find me, carrying my bathrobe, I was putting the finishing touches on the lyrics of a new song.
It goes like this:

God has a sense of humour, but it's often rather crude
What He thinks is a howler, you or I would say is rude
But cursing Him is not a real productive attitude
Just laugh-you might as well, my friend,
'cause either way you're screwed
I know: it sounds so simple, and it's so hard to do
To laugh when the joke's on you

God loved Mort Sahl, Belushi, Lenny Bruce-He likes it sick
Fields, Chaplin, Keaton. . . anyone in pain will do the trick
'Cause God's idea of slapstick is to slap you with a stick:
You might as well resign yourself to steppin on your dick
It always sounds so simple, but it's so hard to do
To laugh when the joke's on you

You can laugh at a total stranger
When it isn't your ass in danger
And your lover can be a riot
-if you learn how to giggle quiet
But if you want the right w giggle, that is what you gotta do
when the person steppin on that old banana peel is you

A chump and a banana peel: the core of every joke
But when it's you that steps on one, your laughter tends to choke
Try not to take it personal,just have another toke
as long as you ain't broken, what's the difference if you're broke?
I know: it sounds so simple, but it's so hard to do
To laugh when the jokes on you

It can be hard to force a smile, as you get along-in years
It isn't easy laughin at your deepest secret fears
But try to find your funny bone, arid have a couple beers:
If it don't come out in laughter, man, it's comM out in tears
I said it sounds so simple, but it's so hard to do
To laugh when the joke's on you

The barking vision did not return. Within ten minutes, Zoey and I had crawled back into bed, where we would enjoy a sound and undisturbed sleep, and nothing else awful or astonishing was to happen after that until well after sundown.
But-had we but known it-the ending of Mary's Place had already begun.


CHAPTER 2 TOO FAR, EDNA: WE WANDER AFOOT

That evening started Out to be a fairly typical night. At least, by the standards of the patrons of Mary's Place-and its proprietor and chief bartender: myself.
Not that the evening had been uneventful. By ten o'clock, just under thirty of us had put away about thirteen gallons of booze. . . though admittedly something over eleven gallons of that had gone directly from their various bottles and kegs to the throat of Naggeneen, our resident Irish cluricaune, without ever occupying the intervening space. (Like their cousins the leprechauns, and indeed like all the Daoine Sidh, cluricaunes have paranormal psi powers-in their case, the ability to teleport and absorb alcohol-and Naggeneen feels that pouring, lifting and sipping are shameful wastes of good drinking time.) On the bright side, he paid for every drop he drank, cash on the bar, in gold coin so pure it would take a toothmark. And, of course, he tended to be a very agreeable drunk, neither pugnacious nor pathetic, neither morose nor maniac, both merry and mannerly. I guess a few, hundred years of practice must count for something.
Thanks to our other resident Irish myth, Ernie Shea, the Lucky Duck-a half-breed pooka,. around whom the iron laws of probability tend to turn into extremely silly putty- we had even had a brief spell of weather indoors: at about nine o'clock one of the very few tornadoes in Long Island's history had suddenly sprung up out of nowhere and lifted the roof clear off the place, neat as you please, and scaled it away into the night like a Frisbee. The noise and suddenness of the roof's departure startled us a bit, naturally (Doc Webster, though, rising to the occasion as he so often does, glanced up nonchalantly and said, raising -his voice over the howling wind, "A Gable roof, I see-gone with the wind."), and there can't be many sights sillier than a roomful of people gaping up at rain falling on their faces . . . but fortunately it is not possible for any of us at Mary's Place to get wet when it rains (thanks to an alien cyborg friend of ours-I'll get to that later), and besides, by now we had all acquired a ъertain sense of just how the Duck's luck tends to run; we simply covered our drinks with our hands to prevent their dilution and waited it out. Sure enough, another roof came along in a few minutes. It wa~ a good enough fit, and apparently it arrived with all its nails bristling because it installed itself with a solidity that we could hear and feel was reliable. Indeed, it turned out to be slightly better than the roof I'd traded for it, in one respect: like its predecessor, ithad a built-in hatch kr rooftop access-but this hatch was better positioned, farther away from the bar, so that I would now be able to get a stairway up to it and allow my customers the option of doing their drinking under the stars. (I'd have to put a fence around the roof, too, of course.)
After that, well, let's see. . . once the floor had dried -sufficiently, Ralph Von Wau Wau the talking dog got out his latest sh6rt story and read it aloud to us, turning the pages
expertly with his muzzle and paws, and dropping, for the duration of the reading, that silly fake accent he usually puts-on. (Well, okay, I have to admit-a German shepherd speaking-in a German accent is kind of amusing.)