First, one of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard, courtesy the Smithsonian’s consistently fantastic history blog, Past Imperfect:  “The Man Who Wouldn’t Die.” It begins:

The plot was conceived over a round of drinks. One afternoon in July 1932, Francis Pasqua, Daniel Kriesberg and Tony Marino sat in Marino’s eponymous speakeasy and raised their glasses, sealing their complicity, figuring the job was already half-finished. How difficult could it be to push Michael Malloy to drink himself to death? Every morning the old man showed up at Marino’s place in the Bronx and requested “Another mornin’s morning, if ya don’t mind” in his muddled brogue; hours later he would pass out on the floor. For a while Marino had let Malloy drink on credit, but he no longer paid his tabs. “Business,” the saloonkeeper confided to Pasqua and Kriesberg, “is bad.”

Pasqua, 24, an undertaker by trade, eyed Malloy’s sloping figure, the glass of whiskey hoisted to his slack mouth. No one knew much about him—not even, it seemed, Malloy himself—other than that he had come from Ireland. He had no friends or family, no definitive date of birth (most guessed him to be about 60), no apparent trade or vocation beyond the occasional odd job sweeping alleys or collecting garbage, happy to be paid in alcohol instead of money. He was, wrote the Daily Mirror, just part of the “flotsam and jetsam in the swift current of underworld speakeasy life, those no-longer-responsible derelicts who stumble through the last days of their lives in a continual haze of ‘Bowery Smoke.’ ”

And it gets really, really good from there.  A must-read.

As for Molloy…the Ambiguities has been going through a sustained Beckett phase.  I myself have not read Beckett as yet.  But reading about Malloy at Past Imperfect made me think of the Ambiguities posts on Molloy (here and here).

Molloy is a drifter.  A vagrant.  A bum, okay?  And he’s maybe dead, or maybe it’s just that everyone treats him like he’s dead.