Champ Laughlin
from Unseen Character
(The setting is the Wingfield apartment. The rooms are illuminated by a single candle. There is a living room and dining room connected by a draped portiere. Outside of these rooms is a fire escape leading to an alley where a single garbage can stands. Near the photograph on the back wall is a typewriter keyboard chart and a Gregg shorthand diagram. The candle’s flame has melted part of a blown-up photograph. The corners are curled and there is a burnt mark across the forehead of the smiling man. CHAMP LAUGHLIN stands on the steps of the fire escape. He shakes his head with his eyes open wide.)
If I were you, Hadley, I would keep your money to yourself and don’t put another foot past this front porch. Just turn around and keep walking and never look back!
She told me I was her fourteenth gentleman caller for the day! And I don’t think she was lying! You know why?
Her mother told me that the girl has malaria! Malaria! Why on Earth would you be socializing with a group of men while you got something so debilitating as malaria!
Every boy or man who came by today was running out the door when they heard the word!
Is it contagious? Isn’t malaria contagious? I think it is, isn’t it? It’s like a parasite in the blood passed on to another person’s blood! I sure as heck don’t want me a woman who has got malaria and is so lah-dee-dah about passing it on to somebody else!
She could be giving every single person here today a real bad case of it! Why would you put so many people at risk with the full knowledge that the transference of the parasitic blood is probable?
I don’t get it. I tell you. I. Do. Not. Get. It.
I think she is not only sick in the blood, but possibly sick in the head as well. If she gives everyone here a case of malaria, that sounds criminal if you ask me.
She’s sitting there with her arms full of jonquils laughing and coughing and spitting. I swear there was one moment that she went into a fit of violent convulsions. And she has the nerve to tell me, “Don’t mind me, there’s just a chill in the air!” A chill in the air? My foot!
I was sitting there talking to her when she closed her eyes for more than three minutes. Not a single sound was coming from her mouth. Her chest wasn’t moving. Her lungs weren’t expanding. I’ve never heard of anybody going into a coma for just a couple of minutes. But if it’s possible, I saw it today.
Don’t go near her, Hadley, if you want my advice. Steer clear of the parasite! 
Unseen Character (part 2): Introduction and Menu
Review | My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams by William Jay Smith