Diary of a Drug Fiend

The Wings of the Oof-Bird 99 And then, the deuce! The head waiter brought me his card. He had scribbled on it in pencil: ‘‘ Don’t forget me when you need me.” Of all the damned silly impertinence! Absolutely gratuitous insufferable insolence! Who was going to need Mr. Gawd Almighty King Lamus? I should have handed out some pretty hot repartee if the creature hadn’t sneaked off. Well, it wasn’t worth while. He didn’t count any more than the grounds in the coffee. But the incident stuck in my mind. It kept on irritating me all the afternoon. People like that ought to be kicked out once and for all. Why, hang it, the man was all kinds of a scoundrel. Every one said so. Why did he want to butt in? Nobody asked him to meddle. I said something of the sort to Lou, and she told him off very wittily. “You've saidit, Cockie,” she cried. ‘‘ He’s a meddler, and his nature is to be rotten before he’s ripe.” I remembered something of.the sort in Shakespeare. That was the best of Lou; she was brilliantly clever, but she never forced it down one’s throat. At the same time, as I said, the man stuck in my gizzard. It annoyed me so much that we took a lot more cocaine to get the taste out of our mouths. But the irritation remained, though it took another form. The bourgeois atmosphere of Paris got on my nerves. Well, there was no need to stay in the beastly place. The thing to do was to hunt up old Feccles and pay him the cash, and get to some place like Capri where one isn’t always being bothered by details. I was flooded by a crazy desire to see Lou swim in the Blue Grotto, to watch the phosphorescent flames flash from her luminous body. We told the chauffeur to stop at Feccles’s hotel, and that was where we hit a gigantic snag.