Winker's World of Smashin' Things

East 167 Street, South Bronx 1973 - Camilo Jose Vergara

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Smashin' Things

O'Hare didn't have any souveniers. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe sabre,..Paul Lazzaro...had about a quart of diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so on. He had taken these from dead people in the cellars of Dresden. So it goes

An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth somewhere, had his souvenier in a canvas bag. The bag was resting on my insteps. He would peek into the bag every now and then, and he would roll his eyes and swivel his scrawny neck, trying to catch people looking covetously at his bag. And he would bounce the bag on my insteps.

I thought this bouncing was accidental. But I was mistaken. He had to show somebody what was in the bag, and he had decided he could trust me. He caught my eye, winked, opened the bag. There was a plaster model of the Eiffel Tower in there. It was painted gold. It had a clock in it.

"There's a smashin' thing," he said.

Slaughterhouse5 - Kurt Vonnegut

Winker's World of Smashin' Things

14.5.16

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