Laszlo stood some five plump nine in his fragrant stocking feet. His hair was so blond it was almost invisible, wherefore he sported a translucent pussycat beard that gave his (let us call it pasty) face a patently absurd ambiguity, an almost aggressive absence of form. In the middle of this face, which might be ugly if anybody cared, sat two little eyes, wet blue, beady, red-rimmed, and porcine, surrounded by no visible lashes or brows.

“Laszlo,” I once said in a fit of divine inspiration, “is a blue-eyed maggot in drag.” No one ever disagreed.

(Laszlo was coming closer. His progress up the aisle was slow, because he stopped to manifest himself at every table on the way, but he was now only three and a half tables away and my stomach was beginning to turn.)

Laszlo was a poet, so to speak; a coffeehouse poet, of course, given to clambering up on stages and reciting his works at helpless audiences, hopefully for money. This was his claim to membership in coffeehouse society, and even though his poetry was generally incredibly bad or stolen or both, we honored his claim, without necessarily honoring Laszlo himself — a superhuman task not worth the effort.

(Now he was two tables off and clearly audible, alas. Mike’d noticed him and was trying to communicate with me by vague and frantic hand signals that I carefully ignored, preferring to sink into happy catatonia.)

The trouble with Laszlo, however, was none of this. The trouble was that Laszlo was a skunk, a nerd, a slimy loathsome thing whose major joy was to bring trouble and discomfort to everyone he encountered. For kicks he sold oregano to high-school kids from Queens. He stole from people poorer than himself as a matter of habit. He invented foul stories about innocent people and circulated them for a hobby. He once caught a social disease and spread it broadcast, especially among the naive and virginal, for upward of six weeks, until it got too uncomfortable even for him.

Laszlo was an incurable backstabber. In the Village society, where trust took the place of law, he could not be trusted. He was a wolf in black sheep’s clothing, a one-man plague. Even worse, he was a notorious drag.

The thing is, if Laszlo had been at all intelligent, or even kind of clever, or if he’d just had something like a sense of humor, we’d’ve pretty much ignored his faults and weaknesses. I myself was moderately fond of one or two worse characters who had the saving grace of being interesting. With such people, you take their flaws into account, more or less automatically doing whatever you must to protect yourself, and then enjoy these people as you’d enjoy anyone else. After all, no one’s perfect. But Laszlo, alas, was stupid, which simply could not be forgiven.

And now he was finishing off the table across the aisle (“Is it true your old lady’s hustling?” he was asking a hyperjealous drummer), and we, especially I, were next. Oi. Laszlo had a special fondness, so to speak, for me, mainly because I was pretty successful in a number of arts he pretended to practice. I’d published two small books of pretty good verse, and a few novels, and I used to write for the East Village Other until it sold out to the Establishment and went slick, and I was a mildly famous rock-n-rolly, and so on. In other words, I was popular in a world he wanted to rule. I was a number of things he’d’ve liked to’ve been, on his terms, which made me a natural target for him, and here he came.

“Good evening, Mister Anderson. How’s your commercial little world tonight? Have you heard the news?” He was dressed, as he’d been for the past six weeks, in tattered cavalier poet garb — rusty purple patched tights, formerly black shabby high-heeled, knee-high boots a size or so too large, a lace-front shirt nearly as dark as his boots after six weeks’ uninterrupted wear, a swallowtail coat that might’ve once been black but was mainly green by now, a battered three-cornered hat with a limp and dirty plastic feather sagging down from it, and an opera cape of indeterminate color badly patched in some other indeterminate color. Furthermore, he smelled.

“Ah yes,” I less than sneered, “it’s little George.” When he arrived in the Village, two years ago, he changed his name from George Harper to Laszlo Scott, and I never let him forget it. “I suspected you were around. Something in the air, if you know what I mean.” I never talked like this to anyone else.

“And there’s little Mike,” ignoring me. “Saw Maidy yesterday, baby, hangin’ out at Times Square. Dig?” Maidy Clark was Mike’s immediate ex-mistress, about whom he was going to be sensitive until the next one came along.

Mike stood up, clenched a fist, said, “Laszlo…!” and then remembered that we had designs on Master Scott and, shaking his head like a bear among bees, sat down again.

“What news, Georgie?” I was hoping to get it over with as quickly as could be.

“Well, baby, I just signed a contract. With Columbia, you dig? They want me to tape my own songs, baby, with a band.” He purred unwholesomely.

“Sure, man, sure. Just like Dylan, right? What happened to that contract you signed with Victor? Gonna do both? And how about that book you were doing for Viking?” Laszlo’s greatest personal weakness was that he could never remember to whom he’d told which lie. “So what else is new?” I hated to hear myself talking like that. I wanted to go away and take a bath.

Laszlo promptly changed the subject. “I s’pose you’ve heard about my Pills,” he sneered.

Mike’s ears came to a visible point.

“Well, I heard about some pills,” I confessed.

“Mine,” he exulted. “Reality Pills, you dig? An’ I’m the only connection, baby. Me. You want some?”

“What do you mean, you’re the only connection? Bullshit. Where’d you get ’em?”

“That’s my secret, baby.”

“Not for long, Georgie, not for long.”

“Long enough, baby. Want some?”

Mike was obviously memorizing all of this and ready to spend the rest of the night analyzing it. He took being a spy and/or detective seriously, the only way really to enjoy it. The rest of our group, for various reasons of their own, were listening almost as intently. Only Sean and Sativa were ignoring our discussion. They had other things to think about.

“You want some Reality Pills?” Laszlo repeated.

“I dunno,” grudgingly. “Maybe.”

“Sure, Captain Cool. Yeah, maybe. Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll have some more tomorrow, dig? If I see you, baby, I’ll give you a special deal, just for you, Andy, ’cause you’re sort of a poet, too.”

“I thought you were givin’ ’em away,” croaked Gary the Frog.

“Just creating a demand, Froggy. You know.” One very smug Laszlo.

“Yeah,” I said, cynicism dripping from my words so strong I was half afraid my teeth’d rot. “The first one’s always free, right? We know how it is, Georgie. But how do we know the next batch’ll work? You’ve got a great name for oregano, baby.”

It was next to impossible to predict what would offend Laszlo, but this seemed to. He drew his cloak around himself in a dramatic gesture that knocked two cups of coffee and a Coke off the table behind him, elevated his nose some fifteen degrees, and sniffed, “That’s your problem, baby. See you then.”

He huffed off aromatically to bug some other table. I took a deep breath. Sativa giggled. Gary the Frog started to say something, forgot what it was, and snapped his slack mouth shut with a liquid click. Mike was bursting to say something, but not till Laszlo was out of range.

“Michael,” I whispered loudly, “can you really believe that biped fungus is a Communist Plotter? And besides,” I’d been thinking about this for a while, “how could that damn thing be a Communist Plot if it couldn’t be tested secretly?”

Mike looked around cautiously. “Siberia,” he hushed.

“Siberia?”