WE SIT DOWN for a finance meeting and Carmela crunches the numbers with the swift ease of a kitty who sidelines as a seasonal accountant. She presents the results in tidy printouts. With the school garden program in the shitter the outlook is grim, and Paulie Walnuts operatically declares that the only remaining option is to send one of us out on the stroll. He quotes a recently-rejected Haitian presidential candidate: Closed legs don't get fed/Go out there and make my bread. I know him well enough to read his assumption of the pimp role as a ploy; he secretly hopes to be pressed into ho service.
Meeting adjourned, Carmela sets out searching for ways to economize. Her first stop is the coop for a little chat with Marianne, AKA the laziest layer of all time. Paulie and I set out debating two related questions:
1. Is it trickin if you got it?
2. Can you make a ho a housewife?
On both I find myself at odds with conventional rap wisdom. Paulie insists it ain't trickin if you got it, and swears he's not just saying that because he's got it. I counter that however much of the elusive It one may possess, trickin is trickin.
On the second question he's the conservative. When the law changes--and I always promise him it will--he does wish to settle down, perhaps adopt a kitten or two from Hopalong. So he worries his reputayshun. I say we should put on our heel boots and have some fun meantime, and promote my viewpoint by taking him out to Easy, where we pay neither cover nor drinks. He says it ain't trickin if you got it and sweats out his "Fancy" dance.
We're half dead the next day so we do lazy gardening and lie in the sun while Carmela calculates the possible salad savings implied by my fall planting. I observe that there are many types of grinding. Fall Writing Program must go on, broke or unbroke. And I could always go back to SAT tutoring. Paulie observes there are many types of whoring.
I managed to befriend a bank security guard, so maybe we'll heist it and flee in the Beemer with "Sweet Escape" playing and abscond to Senegal and raise goats. To which Paulie says stop being dramatic and unreasonable. Holy pots and kettles, right?
And we are practicing our French. I'll find Monsieur le Noix snoozing on the straw pile that bears his imprint, and he'll lift his lids languidly and say, Ne detestez pas le joueur; detestez le jeu. Then he likes me to ask: Soyant souteneur, c'est facile? And he answers, Hell yeah, c'est facile.
