Cocktail Talk: The Crazy Kill
Part two of my re-reading and Cocktail Talk-ing from Chester Himes books continues (part 1 here) continues with a quote from the awesome book, The Crazy Kill. I talk about it more in the first Crazy Kill Cocktail Talk (see it when you look at all Chester Himes Cocktail Talks), but as a quick refresher, it starts at a wake where a man is found dead in a bread basket. And goes from there. Actually, I’m going to be put in two quotes, but the first one is really short – and so perfect if you know a bunch of bartenders. Like I do (luckily). The second is an overview of the wake, and is a dandy party quote (even if a wake isn’t, I suppose, always a party).
‘I ain’t interested in that whiskey jockey,’ Doll Baby said.
The table, sink, sidestands and most of the available floor space were strewn with empty and half-filled bottles – gin, whiskey and rum bottles, pop bottles, condiment bottles; pots, pans and platters of food, a dishpan containing leftover potato salad, deep iron pots with soggy pieces of friend chicken, fried fish, fried pork chops; baking pans with mashed and mangled biscuits, pie pans with single slices of runny pies; a washtub containing bits of ice floating about in trashy water; slices of cake and spongy white-bread sandwiches, half eaten, lying everywhere – on the table, sink and floor.
— Chester Himes, The Crazy Kill
