Night Fright to Deutschland
By Dean Borok

In this dream Havelock and Paulette were sitting in Smuckley's Bar on Second Avenue, having their usual fight. Every time she got drunk, she would accuse him of being high on drugs, which he always was — if you consider pot to be a drug, which he didn't. But this accusation drove him mad with rage. He was a Canadian, and pot was legal in Canada. Everybody from the Prime Minister on down smoked it, and he didn't feature being preached to by a moralistic American Republican twit about doing what was his absolute right.

Paulette knew this, and she wouldn't let herself get trapped in that reasoning, so she had invented another rationale which put her in the right: it wasn't the reefer she was enraged about, it was the other stuff, the secret stuff that he took on the side, the secret little pills he was always scoring in the bathrooms of bars from seedy-looking guys and secreting into his mouth when he thought she wasn't watching. She didn't know what these pills contained, but they were the things responsible for his mood swings and his frowning and becoming cross at her when she would recount to him the normal occurrences of her life in their conversations. She never considered the concept that he might think she was being a boring, spoiled reactionary overweening twit. It was the drugs.

"You're on something and I know it!"

"Every time you get sloshed on wine, I get turned into a drug addict! Why don't you go soak your head?"

"I'm going to tell Pops and he's going to fire you!"

"Tell Pops anything you want. He knows what an idiot you are!"

"I am not an idiot," she said, adopting an attitude of arch self-righteousness, "I'm a very intelligent woman!" Paulette had a gift for accepting the middle-brow clichés of the day as unassailable verities.

"There's a contradiction in terms!"

"I'm going to tell immigration and get you deported back to Canada, you drug addict!"

"That's your typical New Yorker for you. All you do is spend your time on your fucking cell phones calling the cops and ratting each other out. Go ahead, you'd be doing me a favor. I can't stand you, and I can't stand your fucking friends and I can't stand your fucking people!"