He had a back office in his older brother’s
      advertising agency and understood the human asshole.
He turned his father’s small inheritance over and over
      on hemorrhoid ads between three-hour lunches
at the Plaza every day and cocktails at five-thirty
      with different dressy women waiting in our front office.
We joked that he fucked them up the ass to make more customers
      and were nauseated by him because he picked his ears
with the lead end of his lead pencil as he argued and argued
      hemorrhoid copy with us on nauseating Mad. Ave. mornings.
Why argue? It must have been for executive power-feelings
      because the copy never changed. Every week, the poor
bleeding assholes bought the shit. When my mind
      began to get fucked and go as black as his inner ears
I quit as broke as I began, remembering his prophecy:
      that the last working television set in the world
would be showing a hemorrhoid ad for ANUSALL
      at Armageddon, that it would have been written
by him, that he would be watching it at 6:00 P.M.
      in the bomb-cellar lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel
with a blonde’s ass in one hand and a scotch in the other,
      and that he would die happy, with his old man’s
money intact and his asshole too, unlike us prat-boys.