Salami Jones

I don't know why. I'm fascinated with Salami Jones. He's a hardboiled detective, a yogi, and a fat rapper ground up and rolled up and smoked and hung up to cure. Salami Jones, he plays guitar like an old gentleman - wears a white suit and a black bow tie. He plays trombone in the funeral march. He's a whittler - he whittles robots out of old hammer shanks. He's never seen a Shakespeare play, but he's read them all, and the sonnets. He makes ice cream. Vanilla. Best vanilla ice cream YOU ever tasted. Everything he sits on turns to wood. And why shouldn't it? There's nothing in wood that's not in most other things we sit on.

Salami Jones - great grandson of the Emperor. Speaks only a private creole. Waiting for the rest of the world to learn it. "Not gonna happen," you might tell Salami Jones, but you'd be wasting your precious breath. Mistuh Salami Jones, he daid. Not really. He's just sleeping.

He snores, and a pingpong ball rises and falls above his puckered lips.