Getgo, he joined the gang, he was one mean piece of fishknife, as we used to say in the Quarter. Shortly after he joined, he took up with Maggles Girl, who was not my kind of gash. A sloppy drunk with dirt beneath her fingernails. Six months Getgo was with us, driver on the Panbury heist, hotman for the Chelago bank job, and, his bread and butter (and ours) a handler for pure synth.
        Then we were raided.
        I heard the raiders coming up the stairs, and the stairs were wired, we had plastic explosive, enough to cave in the walls and kill the lot of them. So I went for the hellclapper button, but Getgo was there before me.
        "Keep back," said Getgo, drawing a gun.
        "You going to knuckle?" I said, disbelieving. "You wouldn't!"
        This, after all, was Getgo, my six-month buddy, my drinking shoulder, my risk sibling.
        "I'm a cop," said Getgo, in a clipped, highly-schooled voice nothing at all like his usual yarner drawl, and it was the accent which told me, yeah, he's not kidding, the impossible is true.
        On the way to Big Process, I was cuffed in the car next to Maggles Girl, and she was weeping, nambling like nobody, though because she was just on the fringes she got away with six months' probation, not sixty years like me. But she did get those six months, though. She was the real thing, street trash like me, born to peril.
        And these days she's Mrs Samburthon-Stythe, and (thanks to my clean nose privileges) I found her on the Internet this morning, the smiling patroness of the Haight Chambury flower arrangment competition, dressed in pink silk, and I bet she doesn't have dirt beneath her fingernails anymore.
        Getgo, you see, was legally Michael Jonathin Samburthon-Stythe, and he married his Maggles Girl, and that's the part I still can't chuther, like living with your stomach inside out or something like that. It's, like, life is just a script, and someone handed Maggles Girl a new one, and there she was, hair-freshened and deodorized. And I'm sitting staring at this concrete box thinking, where's my script, why doesn't someone give me one, what's happening?
        This reality made of stone and hers of twisty spaghetti, that gets me, and I don't cry, but if I was going to then I'd be crying now.