Viol Viola da Gamba

One cold very cold February night the alms man slept beneath a blanket of old Reader’s Digest and Popular Mechanics, his head tucked underneath the cove of his arm, eyes wide as skillets the smell of burnt wick and Sterno picking at the insides of his nostrils. He made a soupy potage, boiling the Sterno into liquid-form with a lighter, patience and retrying. He learned how to make Whiskey from old LP’s with a saucepan and a blowtorch. He made a tasty Lysol punch in a cut-off plastic Ginger Ale bottle, releasing the alcohol through a pinprick made at the bottom of the canister. He had tutored himself in the alchemic arts, Sterno and Lysol, Listerine and old Monteverdi recordings (viol viola da gamba) an alchemist’s banquet of gut-rot and foul pottage.