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It was summer twilight in the city and out front of the quiet-clicking pool-hall three young Mexican-American men breathed the warm air and looked around at the world. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they said nothing at all, but watched the cars glide by like black panthers on the hot asphalt or saw trolleys loom up like thunderstorms, scatter lightning, and rumble away into silence. Hey, sighed Martinez, at last. He was the youngest, the most sweetly sad of the three. It's a swell night, huh? Swell. As he observed the world it moved very close and then drifted away and then came close again. People, brushing by, were suddenly across the street. Buildings five miles away suddenly leaned over him. But most of the time everything, people, cars, and buildings, stayed way out on the edge of the world and could not be touched. On this quiet warm summer evening, Martinez's face was cold. Nights like this you wish… lots of things. Wishing, said the second man, Villanazul, a man who shouted books out loud in his room, but spoke only in whispers on the street. Wishing is the useless pastime of the unemployed. Unemployed? cried Vamenos, the unshaven. Listen to him! We got no jobs, no money! So, said Martinez, we got no friends."
You can find this story in The Stories of Ray Bradbury.
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