The same as in medical school, you can only save somebody so many times before you can't. It's the Peter Principle of Medi­cine.

These people sending money, they're paying for heroism in installments.

There's Moroccan food to choke on. There's Sicilian. Every night.

After I was born, my mom just stayed put in the States. Not in this house. She didn't live here until her last release, after the school bus theft charge. Auto theft and kidnapping. This isn't any house I remember from childhood, or this furniture. This is everything her parents sent from Italy. I guess. She could've won it on a game show for all I really know.

Just once, I asked her about her family, my grandparents back in Italy.

And she said, this I remember, she said:

"They don't know about you so don't make any trouble."

And if they don't know about her bastard child, it's a safe bet they don't know about her obscenity conviction, her attempted murder conviction, her reckless endangerment, her animal ha­rassment. It's a safe bet they're insane, too. Just look at their furni­ture. They're probably insane and dead.

I flip back and forth through the phone book.

The truth is it costs three thousand bucks a month to keep my mom in St. Anthony's Care Center. At St. Anthony's, fifty bucks gets you about one diaper change.

God only knows how many deaths I'll have to almost die to pay for a stomach tube.

The truth is, so far the big book of heroes has just over three hundred names recorded in it, and I still don't pull in three grand every month. Plus there's the waiter every night with a bill. Plus there's the tip. The damn overhead is killing me.

The same as any good pyramid scheme, you always have to be enrolling people at the bottom. The same as Social Security, it's a mass of good people all paying for somebody else. Nickel-and-diming these Good Samaritans is just my own personal social safety net.

"Ponzi scheme" isn't the right phrase, but it's the first that comes to mind.

The miserable truth is, every night I still have to pick through the telephone directory and find a good place to almost die.

What I'm running is the Victor Mancini Telethon.

It's no worse than the government. Only in the Victor Mancini welfare state, the people who foot the bill don't com­plain. They're proud. They actually brag about it to their friends.

It's a gifting scam with just me at the top and new members lined up to buy in by hugging me from behind. Bleeding these good generous people is.

Still, it's not like I'm spending the money on drugs and gam­bling. It's not like I even get to finish a meal anymore. Halfway through every main course, I have to go to work. Do my gagging and thrashing. Even then, some people never come across with any money. Some never seem to give it another thought. After long enough even the most generous people will stop sending a check.

The crying part, where I'm hugged in somebody's arms, gasp­ing and crying, that part just gets easier and easier. More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.

Not crossed out in the phone book, there's still fondue. There's Thai. Greek. Ethiopian. Cuban. There's still a thousand places I haven't gone to die.

To increase cash flow, you have to create two or three heroes every night. Some nights you have to hit three or four places be­fore you've had a full meal.

I'm a performance artist doing dinner theater, doing three shows a night. Ladies and gentlemen, may I have a volunteer from the audience.

"Thank you, but no thank you," I'd like to tell my dead rela­tives. "But I can build my own family."

Fish. Meat. Vegan. Tonight, like most nights, the easiest way is to just close your eyes.

Hold your finger over the open phone book.

Step right up and become a hero, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up and save a life.

Just let your hand drop, and let fate decide for you.

Chapter 13

Because of the heat, Denny strips off his coat, then his sweater. Without undoing the buttons, even the cuffs or the collar one, he pulls his shirt off over his head, inside out, so now his head and hands are bagged in red plaid flannel. The T-shirt underneath works up around his armpits while he's fighting the shirt off his head, and his bare stomach looks rashy and caved-in. Some long twisted hairs sprout around his little dot nipples. His nipples look cracked and sore.

"Dude," Denny says, still struggling inside his shirt. "Too many layers. Why's it got to be so hot in here?"

Because it's a kind of a hospital. It's a constant care residence.

Over his jeans and belt, you can see the dead elastic waist­band of his bad underpants. Orange rust stains show on the loose elastic. In front, a few coiled hairs poke out. There's yellowy sweat stains on, for real, his underarm skin.

The front desk girl is sitting right here, watching with her face all bunched up tight around her nose.

I try and tug his T-shirt back down, and there's for sure many colors of lint in his navel. At work in the locker room, I've seen Denny pull his pants off inside out with the underpants still on them the way I did when I was little.

And still with his head wrapped up in his shirt, Denny goes, "Dude, can you help me? There's a button somewheres I don't know about."

The front desk girl is giving me her look. She's got the tele­phone receiver halfway to her ear.

With most of his clothes on the floor next to him, Denny gets skinnier until he's down to just his sour T-shirt and his jeans with dirt on each knee. His tennis shoes are double-knotted with the knots and eye holes glued forever with dirt.

It's somewhere around a hundred degrees here because most of these people don't have any circulation, I tell him. It's a lot of old folks here.

It smells clean, which means you only smell chemicals, clean­ing stuff, or perfumes. You have to know the pine smell is cover­ing up shit somewhere. Lemon means somebody vomited. Roses are urine. After an afternoon at St. Anthony's, you never want to smell another rose the rest of your life.

The lobby has stuffed furniture and fake plants and flowers.

This decorator stuff will peter out after you get beyond the locked doors.

To the front desk girl, Denny says, "Will anybody mess with my junk if I just leave it here?" He means the pile of his old clothes. He says, "I'm Victor Mancini." He looks at me. "And I'm here to see my mom?"

To Denny, I go, "Dude, jeez, she doesn't have brain damage." To the desk girl, I say, "I'm Victor Mancini. I'm here all the time to see my mom, Ida Mancini. She's in Room 158."

The girl presses a phone button and says, "Paging Nurse Remington. Nurse Remington to the front desk, please." Her voice comes out huge through the ceiling.

You have to wonder if Nurse Remington is a real person.

You have to wonder if maybe this girl thinks Denny's just another aggressive chronic undresser.

Denny goes to kick his clothes under a stuffed chair.