The bartender went back to his other customers, and the trio raised their glasses. Jimmy's new found friends were teaching him how to make a toast. "Here's to heart trouble," Grundy said, "thank Grandfather I didn't get cancer!" "Tha's the boy. Drink her down.... Bottoms up...." Bowdler put his hand over his mouth. "Mus' 'pologize," he said, "reelize don't know you well enough to talk that way. Ve'y sorry, ole man." Comstock gagged again, but this time not from the drink, but as a conditioned reflex. At that moment he could again taste the soap his mother had used to wash out his mouth that time when he was but a lad of twenty-nine, and he had slipped and said something about the b....m of a well. The drink helped to wash out the long enduring soap taste. "Yeah," Grundy was saying. "I don't care how drunk a man gets, a gentleman never uses dirty words." "You're righ' ole pal, ole pal. I'm sorry...." Bowdler hung his head in shame. As though to change the subject he picked up his pornographic pictures and looked through them lovingly. At last, pausing over one that Thompson could see showed a man and woman in the last stages of reckless abandon, (they were holding hands) Bowdler said, "Y'know if I din' like gettin' drunk so much I'd be sorry I din't have tuberculosis so I could pose for feelthy pix like these." "Y'know," Grundy had his arm wrapped lovingly around Jimmy's neck by now and they were on their second set of corpse revivers, "y' know I've known fallen women who told me they were kina glad they had diabetes. Don't seem possible, does it?" "No." Jimmy's face was set sternly. "I cannot imagine snuch a ting. I mean I cannot magine uch a sting...." He rubbed his mouth. It felt a little strange. Bowdler ordered another round. Nearby a particularly abandoned looking woman who must have been in the last stages of coronary thrombosis if the amount of liquor she had imbibed was any indication, waved to Jimmy. He turned his head away quickly, hoping no one else had seen what the woman did. He was instantly sorry he had done so for suddenly the room swirled. When it stopped, he turned to Grundy and said, "Shay, how offen doesa room do that?" "Do what?" Grundy asked, his mouth slack. "How offen do they make it go roun' and roun' like that?" Evidently he had said something highly amusing for his new friends went off in gales of laughter. They had to whack each other on the back before they could make their giggles subside. Grundy said, finally, "If you think this room is movin' wait'll you see your bedroom move tomorrow morning!" Then he and Bowdler went off into helpless laughter again. * * * * *