The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.