American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis — Read

The Chinese dry cleaners I usually send my bloody clothes to delivered back to me yesterday a Soprani jacket, two white Brooks Brothers shirts and a tie from Agnes B. still covered with flecks of someone's blood. I have a lunch appointment at noon-in forty minutes-and beforehand I decide to stop by the cleaners and complain. In addition to the Soprani jacket, the shirts and tie, I bring along a bag of bloodstained sheets that also need cleaning. The Chinese dry cleaners is located twenty blocks up from my apartment on the West Side, almost by Columbia, and since I've never actually been there before the distance shocks me (previously my clothes were always picked up after a phone call from my apartment and then were delivered back within twenty-four hours). Because of this excursion I have no time for a morning workout, and since I overslept, owing to a late-night–predawn coke binge with Charles Griffin and Hilton Ashbury that started innocently enough at a magazine party none of us were invited to at M. K. and ended at my automated teller sometime around five, I've missed The Patty Winters Show which actually was a repeat of an interview with the President, so it doesn't really matter, I guess.

I'm tense, my hair is slicked back, Wayfarers on, my skull is aching, I have a cigar-unlit-clenched between my teeth, am wearing a black Armani suit, a white cotton Armani shirt and a silk tie, also by Armani. I look sharp but my stomach is doing flip-flops, my brain is churning. On my way into the Chinese cleaners I brush past a crying bum, an old man, forty or fifty, fat and grizzled, and just as I'm opening the door I notice, to top it off, that he's also blind and I step on his foot, which is actually a stump, causing him to drop his cup, scattering change all over the sidewalk. Did I do this on purpose? What do you think? Or did I do this accidentally?