James Aloysius Aquinas

Coalmen Milquetoast sat in a child’s plastic swimming pool with an umbrella, a can of sterna and three gimlets, one with gin and bitters, one with rum and cola and the other with absinth and Jamaican spruce beer. He was sunning, so he said to whomever queried, as it was midwinter and his skin was sallow, white and crumbly. ‘Have you read Aquinas?’ he trumpeted, for no other reason than he felt so inclined, recumbent and besotted on the trinity and spruce beer as he was. One man, on onlooker with a crook and palsied eye, asked, ‘have you ever been to Jamaica, dear sir?’ Coalmen Milquetoast replied, begrudgingly, ‘have you ever read Aquinas, dear sir?’ A fat woman walking a dog on a bejewelled leash, a gift from a cake-maker who worked on and oil derrick, stopped and inquired, ‘dear sir, have you ever read Jacqueline Suzanne?’ The onlooker with the crook and palsied eye, interrupting Coalmen Milquetoast who was fiddling with a loose spar on his umbrella, replied, ‘have you ever been to Jamaica, Madame?’ The sky fell in atop they’re heads, all three, and the dog who was busy sniffing and scratching and peeing, a sign from God, or Aquinas or the Beriberi Spruce Beer company, the very same one that Jacqueline Suzanne visited while on vacation in Jamaica with the cake-maker, the fat woman’s dog and Coalmen Milquetoast’s copy of the Summa Theologica.

Bioscopy of the rectos: surgeon’s gel and scotching, Rebus suckling Romulus, nipple-rings and inking; a colonoscopy of anus and cuckold. Foxtrot calliope, a ring-around-the-posy, seal fat, bleb and oil of castor, for those hard to reach spots, beneath armpit and gland-cove, scoured clean with mason’s trowel and lye. I had a bream last night, he said, Abramis brama with salt cod and capers, not the sort of thing you’d want to eat on an umpteen’s stomach, all that jujubery and blackstrap mole-asses, a whales-worth of eel’s tongue and flesh-eyes, not for the faint of art or nervosa. He said, ‘have you read Aquinas, you blubbery fools? Mine was swiped by some menace with a dog’s collar and a thief’s shim, Summa con Gentiles, too, wrapped in wax-clothe and chutney, sad day it is, when Aquino’s tome isn’t safe and round’.