You Suck: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF

two companions jangled, wandering the wee hours on a nearly deserted Market Street, waiting for breakfast time to roll around.
    “Like crack with cinnamon,” said the Emperor. He was a great, boiler tank of a man, an ambling meat locomotive in a wool overcoat, his face a firebox of intensity, framed with a gray tempest of hair and beard such as are found only on gods and lunatics.
    Bummer, the smaller of the troops, a Boston terrier, snorted and tossed his head. He’d lapped up some of the rich coffee broth himself, and felt ready to tear ass out of any rodent or pastrami sandwich that might cross his path. Lazarus, normally the calmer of the two, a golden retriever, pranced and leapt at the Emperor’s side as if it might start raining ducks any minute-a recurring nightmare among retrievers.
    “Steady, gents,” the Emperor chided. “Lets us use this inopportune alertness to inspect a less frantic city than we find in the day, and determine where we might be of service.” The Emperor believed that the first duty of any leader was to serve the weakest of his people, and he made an effort to pay attention to the city around him, lest someone fall through the cracks and be lost. Clearly he was a loon. “Calm, good fellows,” he said.
    But calm was not coming. The smell of cat was tall in the air and the men were jacked on java. Lazarus barked once and bolted down the sidewalk, followed closely by his bug-eyed brother-in-arms, the two descending on a dark figure that lay curled up around a cardboard sign on the traffic island atBattery Street, beneath a massive bronze statue that depicted four muscular men working a metal press. It had always looked to the Emperor like four guys molesting a stapler.
    Bummer and Lazarus sniffed the man beneath the statue, sure that he had to have a cat concealed among his rags somewhere. When a cold nose hit a hand, the Emperor saw the man move, and breathed a sigh of relief. With a closer look, the Emperor recognized him as William with the Huge Cat. They knew each other to nod hello, but because of racial tensions between their respective canine and feline companions, the two had never become friends.
    The Emperor knelt on the man’s cardboard sign and jostled him. “William, wake up.” William groaned and an empty Johnny Walker Black bottle slid out of his overcoat.
    “Dead drunk, perhaps,” said the Emperor, “but fortunately, not dead.”
    Bummer whimpered. Where was the cat?
    The Emperor propped William up against the concrete base of the statue. William groaned. “He’s gone.
    Gone. Gone. Gone.”
    The Emperor picked up the empty scotch bottle and sniffed it. Yes, it had recently held scotch. “William, was this full?”
    William grabbed the cardboard sign off the sidewalk and propped it in his lap. “Gone,” he said. The sign read I AM POOR AND SOMEONE STOLE MY HUGE CAT.
    “My deepest sympathies,” said the Emperor. He was about to ask William how he had managed to procure a fifth of top-shelf scotch, when he heard a long, feline yowl echo down the street, and looked up to see a huge shaved cat, in a red sweater, heading their way. He managed to catch hold of Bummer and Lazarus’s collars before they darted after the cat, and dragged them away from William. The huge cat leapt into William’s lap and the two commenced a drunken reunion embrace that involved quantities of purring, baby talk, and drool, enough that the Emperor had to fight down a little nausea at the sight of it.
    Even the royal hounds had to look away, the two realizing instinctively that a maudlin and shaved, thirty-five-pound cat in a red sweater was clearly above their pay grade. There was just no doggy protocol for it, and presently they began to turn in circles on the sidewalk, as if looking for a good place to feign a nap.
    “William, I believe someone has shaved your cat,” said the Emperor.
    “That would be me,” said Tommy Flood as he came around the side of the traffic island, scaring