Jimmy Cogswell was a wild young businessman, slicked-back hair and a kind of slab-shaped tombstone-like head, the whole thing slicked-back not just the hair the whole thing, the little face looking out, nose forward . . . (you get the picture)  . . . very cool among the multitudes, sunglasses and a smooth hip suit, chewing gum and looking at his watch, bullshitting about the stock market, leaning back against a car and jingling the change in his pocket.
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In a way he was like Tom Cruise, his idol, but unlike Cruise he saw the true deadly grit of the whole dumb scene, the crazy bullshit of it all. He was getting bored.
But he would gamble with the kids in the alley on his break. A whole tribe of weird kids in the alley with names like Rattlesnake and Superfreak, and they hang out back there in the alley playing cards and rolling dice, nine or ten years old, these very hardened, streetwise kids, saying things like "Fuck a duck" and "Not til the fat lady sings. Go ahead, businessman." That was his favorite part.
He would go out there and after a little while those moments meant at least as much as the job itself--his funny relationship with the tribe of feral kids in the alley who kept on gambling and supporting themselves and inhabited their own strange otherworld of Huck Finn alleys. They were almost his friends.
Then he'd go back inside to the busy important world of crucial decisions and split-second timing and try to make a profit in the business world again.
He kept going back and forth. He was wearing a necktie. Jimmy Cogswell. He wanted to be Tom Cruise and stand there in the rain-slick alley, motorcycle helmet cradled in his hands, hand on hip dramatically pointing at some monster approaching with gnashing teeth--in his mind he was the wild Tom Cruise of Himself, or Conan O'Brien or something (sometimes he would wiggle his haircut)Â but everyone saw him as just some ridiculous businessman darting around in a brown tweed suit. "God DAMN it!" he screamed in private moments, preoccupied with this. But mostly everything was cool.
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