“I was wrist-cuffed to a lady movie reviewer who also signed the petition,“ Lemuel shouts over the noise he refuses to acknowledge as music. “I heard she spent three years in a Siberian gulag, sucking frozen sticks of milk over open fires at mealtimes.”
“How did you worm out of it?” hollers a fraternity brother wearing a tie and jacket and football helmet.
“Hey, how did you?” Rain, sipping wine, smiling whimsically, wants to know.
“Lem here signed the petition, the fuzz picked him up and took him in for questioning,” Dwayne, the E-Z Mart manager, recapitulates in a loud voice, “but they didn’t charge him. He had to have a wrinkle.”
“A wrinkle?”
“A gimmick,” Dwayne’s girlfriend, Shirley, explains.
“A stratagem,” Dwayne adds. “A ruse.”
Lemuel smiles sou
