Free Last Notes from Home by Frederick Exley

Pretending now that one of his empty plastic cups was the kettle into which this slop apparently went, Jimmy now wrapped the button in a used damp cocktail napkin, threw that in the cup, followed by the jade ring and the Kennedy half dollar. With great hyperbolic vigor he twirled his chubby hand round and round, indicating he was violently stirring these three items into the mixture of buttered kale, potatoes, and hot cream. He then explained—still salivating of course—that one piled one’s plate with a mountain of thump, with a spoon built a great volcanic indentation into the middle of this Aran Banner and kale Everest, and into this valley poured some lurverly hot melted butter.
    “One eats from the outside, Frederick. You take a forkful, dip it into the melted butter in the middle, and simply let it ooze rather gloriously down your throat. Ah, and to be sure, me lurve, there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.”
    Great and sudden wealth, according to Jimmy, would accrue to the one who got the coin in his mouth. The ring foretold an early and splendid marriage, and the button signaled to the recipient that he would walk in blessedness all his days, the button and ring being wrapped in paper so the “blessed soul” wouldn’t swallow them. Reaching again under the tray for my thigh, Jimmy now brought his spittle-covered lips almost up to mine—I thought the zany bastard was going to plant one full on—and with an air of great secretiveness whispered to me.
    “I was going to ask the colleen Glenn to join us, Frederick. But it’s impossible, don’t you see? I mean, supposing she got the button for single blessedness, living as she is in such seenful harlotry! Sacrilegious and all that, don’t you know, lurve?”
    Until we were a thousand-plus miles out over the Pacific, where Jimmy at last passed out completely and went into a deep heavy snore for the remainder of the flight to Honolulu, so that he would have neither chicken luau, manicotti, nor his glorious thump, his monologue was unceasing. As quickly as Ms. Glenn set up his vodkas, he’d down them, continue his lyrical and nonsensical spiel, throw his hairy head back into his seat, catnap and snore lightly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes, waken, furiously jab my elbow, and begin his rambling blarney all over again. No matter that I feigned reading magazines, that without turning up the sound I at one point put the earplugs in and feigned watching Jeremiah Johnson —the “Limey Robert Medford” had a lot of snow in his beard, throughout the flicker he kept looking higher and higher up some mountain or other, and at the climax—I think it was the climax—he single-handedly took on, mano a m a no, a whole shitload of redskins—no matter what I did, the fierce jab at the elbow invariably came.
    Whenever I tried to introduce more mundane subjects, hoping to bore him into silence so I could get back to memories of my brother, his replies to these timid overtures were, if possible, even nuttier than his nonstop monologue. When, for example, I asked him how he’d broken his leg, he told me that this tour he’d arranged for some of his “more deserving workers” (he’d tell me who they were soon enough) had begun in New York City. Upon their arrival, as was Jimmy’s duty and custom whenever he was in New York City, he had one day strolled up to the archdiocese on Madison Avenue and had passed some lurverly hours swapping yarns with his great and good friend, Terence Cardinal Cooke.
    “With whom?” I cried.
    “Terence Cardinal Cooke. My bosom brother in Jesus, Cookie.” O’Twoomey never batted an eye. “Jesus, Frederick, as a New York State Irishman you don’t even know who your own bleeding cardinal is?”
    Cookie indeed! I mean, really, what the hell could one say to this crazy bastard?
    Whatever, it was after passing some lurverly hours with “Cookie,” when Jimmy was leaving the cardinal’s quarters and crossing the piazza