Waiting by Philip Salom

She said to him once: come-on Tommy, I’ll give you a blowjob. His body shook like malaria as it retreated.
    Tom the born-again. Tall, long-lank Tom. Stooping, sancti­monious, in his long grey hair and bearded like Jesus, Tom, wearing glasses and being too unexpectedly a bloody know-all for a down-and-out world. No sex. He is cheery though. Not just about Jesus, which would be bad enough. No, he is a cheery expert on every­thing, staring right past your face or over the top of your head as Big does, so alike in this, all grinning joviality, talking and some­times shouting as the expert on everything, roses even. It wears you out, this kind of cheery. There must be something serious behind it.
    He is thin to Big’s thick, lacking Big’s charm in skirts, and handbags, and erudition of a more scientific kind. Tom is more a hat and T-shirt all-year-round man; he is the ears on the street, he can tell you the history, who lived where and the buried bodies stuff, but even he likes to do the small goss too. Amost feminine in this, if not in couture. He leans into a story. His skin too is feminine, he is glabrous on arms and legs and he is roly-poly on the face. Oddly enough, his face shines like silk with shaven and shaven-again cleanliness-close-to-Godliness in discrete areas above his unshaven Jesus-ness.
    Especially when he tells them yet-again how he is a born-again. Yes, and that he used to… he is quite precise about this and will happily repeat it, too happily perhaps… he used to bugger boys. Drink himself into the gutter and pull the pants down of any lad he could get his hands on – and with his long arms he had quite a reach.
    It made him a real threat in the Scouts and boys clubs, years ago when they had such things, and then, THEN, he was dragged along to an evangelical football-ground shindig with the great Billy Graham, shiny-skinned son of Jesus, and he heard the Old and New Testament.
    He heard the Trumpet.
    No joking no joshing, no he heard the big fanfare of his sins and the even bigger volleys of Jesus. No one in his past life could believe it when he stood up and walked in his lucid daze down to the yankee dramatist for God and gave up his booze and the soft bottoms of boys for the Almighty. Ah yes the Everlasting.
    Never touched either of his indulgences again. Now he is pure-of-heart but a bloody know-all and a smiling but unfunny nuisance and a smug as all get-out Jesus-freak. He is without double-thought, he is not one to laugh at a joke unless he knows it is a joke, and what he knows is more usually the goss and the gladness.
    There is a little blue For Sale sign on the house next door. It can’t be helped, when Sammy or Tourie start yelling, or when some of the dreary drunks shout and fight or when crack-heads kick doors, or someone comes into the building without a name or visa and moves out backwards as the Sheriff advances down the corridor towards and then through them. Neighbours don’t stay long.
    This particular neighbour is two parts retired. Having cursed the halfwayhousers as ruffians and drunks and the like, on another day he’s as friendly as fat, talking about their pomegranate tree, and the grey-water possibilities with Tom. Tom knows a lot from Jesus but the neighbours are more forthcoming.
    How’s it going Tom? the man from next door asks, staring retirement in the eye and Tom in the stoop. Tom is on about bloody police tardiness and the drug dealer sleeping at the back of the house, junkies arriving all night shouting and shaking. Not a good morning for Tom.
    With little choice once Tom has begun, the neighbour knows to interrupt, telling Tom they have, himself and Mrs etc, for several months now been imagining a small comfortable house nearer the water and further from neighbours. Country town with river or lake or ocean close to the skin, in the morning a seawind bracing and noisy in the ears, in the cold seasons a buffeting wind against