"We all agreed Buck Compton would've been the best choice to run Easy if Winters had been able to get rid of Dike," Donnie narrates. "But to be honest, Buck wasn't the same soldier...since he got shot in Holland. He was more serious somehow." Yeah, because he got shot in the ass and then dumped on it. There's no justice. No one man could be that strapping, I guess, without being fated for a fall. Buck, perched in a foxhole with Heffron and Gonorrhea, can't believe Hoobler had a loaded Luger in his pants. I feel like I've written an awful lot today about the contents of Hoobler's pants. "Don't you two do something stupid like that, all right?" Buck demands. "You, Wild Bill, I've invested too much goddamn time shaping you into something useful." Gonorrhea laughs affectionately. Yeah, G-Spot, I love him too. "If you do something crazy, get yourself knocked out of this thing..." Buck warns. "I know, you'll kill me," interrupts a grinning Gonorrhea. "Even if you're dead, I'll still kill you," Compton finishes. His warning complete, Compton stares joy-free at his friends, then leaves to go spread a little gloom and doom wherever sunshine threatens to sparkle. Heffron watches his departure. "Crazy Joe McClosky," he says. Gonorrhea figures Babe has finally gone nuts. Heffron clarifies that Crazy Joe is a Philly denizen (both these men call that city their home) who hung out in front of Delancey's and stared at people silently. "Buck reminds me of him now," Heffron says. Gonorrhea, stunned, can't fathom Heffron's assertion that Buck is loony. Upset, Heffron backs off a bit, then changes his mind. "Come on, you've seen him!" he insists. "He's all wound up like spring!" Gonorrhea flatly states that his friend is fine. "It wasn't getting shot that got him," he says, quietly. "It was being in that hospital. I've been there, okay? It ain't pretty....You saw, once he was up moving around he was his old self again. I'm telling you, Buck Compton's fine." The Jinx Fairy plops down next to me and shows me her ass, which now has Buck Compton's name tattooed across it. But, since we're just getting started and she's clearly got time to kill, I pass her twenty bucks for a beer run.