Senti Renato

Fired from his job and dumped by his new Italian girlfriend Alessandra, a Boston-area computer programmer discovers his troubles are not yet over. A car accident involving his neighbor's mailbox starts a chain of events that threaten to obliterate his bank account, and the job search seems to drag on forever. To dull the pain, he starts in seriously on the sauce, and before long is sharing his living quarters with goblins and other creatures of dubious reality. One night he decides, with so many things going wrong in his life, God must be playing with his head. Armed with a brainful of vodka and a busted car muffler, he sets off to find Him...and actually succeeds. From a straight-backed chair before an immense, leather-trimmed, Italianate bureau, the jobless Job watches in fascination as Il Grando Capo employs a deck of cards and an empty wastebasket to illustrate how probabilities are worked out up in the Realm. When he awakens from his divine rendezvous, he finds himself barefoot on the wharf, his hair up in curlers and a sawed-open handcuff bracelet on each wrist, his pockets empty except for a Boston subway token. Back home, in the bathtub where he used to take bubblebaths with Alessandra, his mind begins to come back into focus again, and he realizes that though nothing has really changed, things are better now, somehow.