Oliver Benjamin
river.”
Roy was sure this was the most glib Hasidic Jew he had ever met.
“Actually, we’re having a party. You can come if you like.” He
handed the man a flyer and told him to bring his friends. Of course,
he knew they would never show up. Hasidic Jews rarely celebrated
secular occasions. The man thanked him and chummily jabbed him
in the arm, inviting him to keep up the good work.
“I think he’s been drinking a little too much of that mannastuff,”
Bennie said after he had left.
“Manna?” Roy wondered. Manna hadn’t been heard of since the
bible.
“That sweet Jewish wine. I got wasted on it once and barfed up
the fucking red sea.”
“Oh right. Maneshevitz,” Roy said, “Mannawas the drink that
rained down from heaven that kept the Jews alive in the desert for
forty years.”
“You shitting me? Wine rained down from heaven?”
“No. It wasn’t supposed to be alcoholic. Just some kind of sugar
water.”
“Too bad for them. Wine would have made their trip more fun.”
It was certainly making Colin and Partment’s trip more fun. They
were on the other side of town, chugging malt liquor under a freeway
overpass. After pasting up about half their flyers and sticking the rest
on car windshields in open-air parking lots they allowed themselves
the luxury of getting drunk, which was what Colin did best and what
Partment thought subversive enough to be interesting. Partment
thought everyone should have the right to do whatever they damn
well pleased any time they wanted to do it, and that government’s
lame attempts to govern the human spirit were the reason for the
major troubles in the world. Let the river flow.
Colin, stretched out beside him, had a similar worldview: the
world was a dried up decrepit place so you might as well get drunk.
Let the river flow.
But the river wasn’t flowing. The freeway overpass under which
they sat spanned the Los Angeles River, which was not so much a
river as a drainage system used during the brief rainy season. At the
moment it was dry as bone. There hadn’t been rain in many months.
Colin and Partment threw their bottles over the chain-link fence
and listened as the glass shattered down upon the concrete
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