Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho (Chapter Excerpt: "Dry Cleaners") lyrics

I glare at the Chinese woman once more and rush the hell out of there, dashing after a nonexistent cab, and then I slow down a block or two up past the cleaners and— suddenly I find myself eyeing a very pretty homeless girl sitting on the steps of a brownstone on Amsterdam, a Styrofoam coffee cup resting on the step below her feet, and as if guided by radar I move toward her, smiling, fishing around in my pocket for change. Her face seems too young and fresh and tan for a homeless person's; it makes her plight all the more heartbreaking. I examine her carefully in the seconds it takes to move from the edge of the sidewalk to the steps leading up to the brownstone where she sits, her head bowed down, staring dumbly into her empty lap. She looks up, unsmiling, after she notices me standing over her. My nastiness vanishes and, wanting to offer something kind, something simple, I lean in, still staring, eyes radiating sympathy into her blank, grave face, and dropping a dollar into the Styrofoam cup I say, “Good luck.” Her expression changes and because of this I notice the book—Sartre—in her lap and then the Columbia book bag by her side and finally the tan-colored coffee in the cup and my dollar bill floating in it and though this all happens in a matter of seconds it's played out in slow motion and she looks at me, then at the cup, and shouts, “Hey, what's your goddamn problem?” and frozen, hunched over the cup, cringing, I stutter, “I didn't… I didn't know it was… full,” and shaken, I walk away, hailing a taxi, and heading toward Hubert's in it I hallucinate the buildings into mountains, into volcanoes, the streets become jungles, the sky freezes into a backdrop, and before stepping out of the cab I have to cross my eyes in order to clear my vision. Lunch at Hubert's becomes a permanent hallucination in which I find myself dreaming while still awake.