Page "humor" Paragraph 249

Now, you no doubt regard the preceding as pap ; ;

you're tooling around full of gage in your hot rods, gorging yourselves on pizza and playing pinball in the taverns and generally behaving like Ubermenschen.

In that case, listen to what befell another wisenheimer who tangled with our joss.

A couple of years back, I occupied a Village apartment whose outer staircase contained the type of niche called a `` coffin turn ''.

In it was a stone Tibetan Buddha I had picked up in Bombay, and occasionally, to make merit, my wife and I garlanded it with flowers or laid a few pennies in its lap.

After a while, we became aware that the money was disappearing as fast as we replenished it.

Our suspicions eventually centered, by the process of elimination, on a grocer's boy, a thoroughly bad hat, who delivered cartons to the people overhead.

The more I probed into this young man's activities and character, the less savory I found him.

I learned, for example, that he made a practice of yapping at dogs he encountered and, in winter, of sprinkling salt on the icy pavement to scarify their feet.

His energy was prodigious ; ;

sometimes he would be up before dawn, clad as a garbage collector and hurling pails into areaways to exasperate us, and thereafter would hurry to the Bronx Zoo to grimace at the lions and press cigar butts against their paws.

Evenings, he was frequently to be seen at restaurants like Enrico & Paglieri's or Peter's Backyard drunkenly donning ladies' hats and singing `` O Sole Mio ''.

In short, and to borrow an arboreal phrase, slash timber.

Well, the odious little toad went along chivying animals and humans who couldn't retaliate, and in due course, as was inevitable, overreached himself.

One morning, we discovered not only that the pennies were missing from the idol but that a cigarette had been stubbed out in its lap.

`` Now he's bought it '', said my wife contentedly.

`` No divinity will hold still for that.

He's really asking for it ''.

And how right she was.

The next time we saw him, he was a changed person ; ;

he had aged thirty years, and his face, the color of tallow, was crisscrossed with wrinkles, as though it had been wrapped in chicken wire.

Some sort of nemesis was haunting his footsteps, he told us in a quavering voice -- either an ape specter or Abe Spector, a process-server, we couldn't determine which.

His eyes had the same dreadful rigid stare as Dr. Grimesby Roylott's when he was found before his open safe wearing the speckled band.

The grocery the youth worked for soon tired of his depressing effect on customers, most of whom were sufficiently neurotic without the threat of incubi, and let him go.

The beautiful, the satisfying part of his disintegration, however, was the masterly way the Buddha polished him off.