Forty-Eight Twenty-Three Twenty-Second St. - The Fiery Furnaces

Now, as for my aunt

Who told on me

She was always wearing her turbans

Sailing back to Greece on the Normandy

Having dinner at the captain’s table

Sitting on the deck with 5 men surrounding her

With uncle Sam in the back row

Back at home, riding up the Taygetus on a donkey named David

With her soft leather boots dangling off to the side

So full of pride

So full of pride.

Profitis Elias, so high you can see us

4823 22nd St., standing there with cashmere overcoats

And those turbans with their Arabian silver

And ostrich and papagou feather hats

And not far down from our koumbaros Betinis

We’ve got a secret between us Betinis

In the back of the Hawthorne smoke shop

In the basement of the hat factory

The fedoras got glued together

But in that back basement…

In that back basement, a lot of things got sewn up!

A full compliment of grinchy Italians

Counting up on their stubby fingers, and smoking, I’m told

The least sophisticated cigars

The local lottery and so forth

Like anybody was going to get a nit out of that nut

Though what a lucky loser is our five thousand dollars a day

Friend and koumbaros Betinis

We’ve got a secret between us, Betinis

In the back of the Hawthorne smoke shop,

Haberdashery was the least of it

In the basement of the hat factory

The fedoras got glued together

But in that back basement…

In that back basement, a lot of things got sewn up

We’ve got a secret between us, Betinis.

Five thousand dollars a day

Five thousand dollars a day

Five thousand dollars a day

Five thousand dollars a day

In the basement of the hat factory

The fedoras got glued together

But in that back basement

In that back basement, a lot of things got sewn up!

We’ve got a secret between us, Betinis

Not that nobody knows, like nobody knows

About the white doves that flew out the cake at the brother’s wedding

In your hat factory, Betinis, they count up all the buffalo nickels

And silver certificates wrung from Lake Superior spirits

And prize fight foolery, and sluts speaking easy in the closets on 12th St.

And in exchange you put in your pants $ 5,000 a day

To stick under your bed for starters

But later in the laundry,

So you can feel free to chase your wife around the table

When you feel she looked at the apricot and boysenberry boy twice