Story 5 Summary

"Work"

The narrator describes a complicated, happy/violent, drug-influenced weekend he spent with his beautiful girlfriend at a Holiday Inn - and how, after one too many fights, he left the hotel, took a bus (leaving his girlfriend on the sidewalk), and took refuge at The Vine. There he encounters his buddy Wayne, who takes him along on an expedition to make some money. They go out to a housing development damaged by flooding and therefore abandoned, where they steal the wiring out of a house that Wayne says is his. The plan is to sell the copper in the wiring and gain some cash.

As they're pulling wiring out of the walls, Wayne and the narrator are distracted by the vision of a nude woman air-sailing behind a speedboat. On their way back home, Wayne detours to a farmhouse, where he has...