What We Love: And Apparently So Does Kate Moss...Geek Love

This is one of those random books that I picked up at the $1 bin outside the Strand bookstore.  There are few novels that stay loyal to you, haunts you and makes you feel that finding that book was a happenstance.  Just read it, but it's not for everybody, which to me is what makes a story all the better. 

Excerpt: 
Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, “Forty-one!”, meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil’s confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, “What! What!” into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.
I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.
Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves the door open to the hallway.
Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image around the dots. When i come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.
Being called “Manager” explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.