"Oh yeah?" retorted the kingpin,  "well you better stay as far away as you can from us then, fucker!"

"No wait!", shouted Kim as she careened forth towards the commotion, those hefty eyes now even tumid from the tears shed; two decadent sapphires of who knows what could’ve been going on inside that mind. Maybe a nonage’s need to break away from that threadbare life and have no responsibilities - to tell everything to go fuck itself. Maybe it was because she was just like Thomas Henry Snyder.

And quondam Thomas Henry Snyder had a sprightly life; he had a band, a girlfriend, his motorcycle, his pruriency. His lust for life. Somewhere smack dab in the middle, he adjudicated it was time to be alone. He had his two "tonic friends", of days gone by, which he decided to keep, along with some Knob Creek. He had no pain. No ailment. No beauty to speak of. It just boiled down to a point where all of that was an annex of himself. Not "to" - "of", if we may make it clear. And now this girl wanted a part of it? It doesn’t take a savant to realize that Tom’s world is impervious, but he sure let his guard down. Why allow the girl to do what she did then? Why act like a jerk right after? Why being blundering to the whole absurdism of the situation?

Tom just walked away, as he heard Kim calling him back, but he decided not to care. It was just that kind of sphere he didn’t want to be involved with. Maybe he shouldn’t have treated Kim the way he did, but no matter how much he envisaged her in his mind, he knew that from all that there could be a good corollary. Or maybe...it was hard to feel anything, for Tom. He could be fooling himself. But those eyes were hard to forget. The lower lip, not as thin as he thought but fitly sized to squire the remainder of her face. And he did what he did.

Another lonely night, back to room 54. With a swig of KC, he downed seven Vicodins. Too late to play his guitar through his pocket amp. He then fared to put on his headphones and turn on his Mp3 player. Gerry Mulligan quartet with Chet Baker on, as he grooved to some of his favorite sounds. Get happy with the utter chaos.

"BRRRRRRRIIIINNNG" The old timey clock rang and it was unnoticed to Tom that he went from midnight to six A.M. still grooving to that music. Oh well, down to the cafeteria. He picked up his notebooks, stuffed them inside his backpack and went through the motions. Down there, the volition was to pick some black coffee and sit alone but that was not to be. He could feel her tang taking up the atmosphere and her cold warmth as her gaunt self sat down next to him.

"It’s okay about yesterday", she whispered in his year as he started noticing that eyes around the place were huddling to peek at the unlikely couple, "like, I don’t even know you - I mean, I know about you, but I don’t even know you. So can we, like, formally know ourselves? Hi, I’m Kimberlee Whelan."

He was petrified. He couldn’t look to his side. And he didn’t know why. "What the fuck", he thought, and shifted his gaze upon Kim’s face, taking a sip on his coffee and introducing himself. "I’m uhh... Thomas Henry Snyder" he quasi-whispered almost stammering. Then a headlong burst of hubris befell in himself and he turned up with a wry smile to Kim and said: "You don’t wanna give me more head for my downers now do you?"

Silence set in as the main player in the situation of discomfort. Tom kept sipping on his coffee, looked at her eyes and saw something he couldn’t quite disclose what it was. Reaching for the inner pocket of his jacket, he picked up his pillbox, opened it and put two valia on the table.

"Take it", he said, whisperingly. "Just to cool you down". Kim looked with suspicion and queried Tom: "What do you want?" "Nothing", answered Tom, as he stood up from the table and fumbled for his pack of Kools in his jacket. "I’m gonna have a smoke outside"