1. The Customer (middle-aged, North American, reasonably well off, lost):

berliners are terrible tippers, no? today she bore her ten-thousandth tray of beer and coffee, still they settled the bill awfully precisely. straight-spined as ever, when her studies finish and home reclaims her i'm sure it is she who will be served. but where is home? some

equatorial city, packed traffic like a split gut alight with hot necklaces? i imagine the weight of the green floods mountain's dark body, cocoa-leaves consuming the breakfast of the earth. and the erogenous smoke. and the scent of the indigene for hire. did her childhood mingle with

music in festival streets where every third face greeted was a christ and the mud so fat it tingled with that secret vitamin the too-rich spice of ideological blood? was she touched, or buoyed as in a flood

at market by fingertips black as beans, jostled by the magistrate's mocha elbow in line to purchase manioc, molasses, shell-fish or plantain? i'm certain she wore white dresses for sundays, shining against the novelistic sky like an offering. is there any truth in my imagination? conversation would enlighten, but as yet i only have courage to

overtip

2. The Waitress (young, “foreign”, sure of herself):

how can i bear this cold country, the lunar stares they bare to curiosities? i, the sapid black of heliologic scarring, most of all suffer breathing the dark air of their language. did i immigrate to apply the mercy of my questionable beauty to the aesthetic wound of this city? or was i driven by premonitions of hunger or political violence or just escaping the luxurious green cancer of equatoriality; the too-real sun; the chaos of the market; the life-threatening excellence of nature's stupidity? (even the graves) (stay obscene with) (fertility). perhaps after all i came to improve myself through sacrifice, denied even the occasional relief of merely belonging. you, too, know

the weird lure of berlin, her native race of Beamtendeutschemenschen, hungering for (yet set against) everything in us un-german

3. A moment of Loudness (for Mailer):

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