91.
   Something inside of me snapped. “I’m fucking sick of hearing every God damned hallucination in this freak show trash my country! Would any of you clowns be happier under Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Me and my fellow morons invented the light bulb, photography, recorded sound, the telephone and took a couple of jaunts on the fucking moon in case you forgot! Name me another country that has -”

   Pat grabbed my leg. Nanette grabbed another. Claudia kissed me. “And there’s your music!”, she gasped. “You have given the world the Blues, and Bluegrass and Jazz and Rock and Roll!”
   “And Tennessee Williams!”, exclaimed Pat. “And Eugene O’Neal and William Faulkner and E. E. Cummings and James Baldwin and Hunter Thompson!”
   “And Marsden Hartley!”, continued Nanette. “And William Merritt Chase and Milton Avery and Georgia O’Keefe and Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock, and - gumbo!”
   I was suddenly free of my anger. My rant was stopped in mid-sentence. I smiled. “All I’ve had to drink in this perverted interlude is wine and a brandy and coke.”
   “Say no more!”, ordered Claudia breathlessly. “What will you have?”

   “You have a bar in this dump?”, I growled. “Scotch.”
   “On the rocks, of course.”, purred Claudia as she handed me a miracle in a balloon floating a thousand feet over a jungle.