Good to see something new and weird on the crits from your good self, Wabbit.
It definitely doesn't feel like anything you've posted / published before (although perhaps we should have expected this from some of your 75-worder themes), which in one sense is great, but in another sense means that my (and possibly others') judgments are going to be coloured by TGP and its associated works.
I rather enjoyed it, as I expected I would. I have to echo the other comments, particularly TJ's. The language is peculiarly English. Most of it could be taking place in a pub in turn-of-the-century Old London Town. In fact, if you read it using English accents, most of it still works.
However, I think that going the whole hog with J Riff's 100& colloquialised spellings would be grating to read, and horrible to write. Somewhere in between there's probably a Cormac McCarthy-esque sweet spot. You could always try writing it in 1st to try and nail Al's voice. This might be a western cliché, but I always imagine my western (anti)heroes and heroines to be suitably laconic, like The Man With No Name and such. So maybe stripping Al's dialogue back to the bare bone might give it more of that hard-bitten, world-weary feel you're after. Dale feels like he might be more of a talker, however.
Funnily enough, just about the only criticism I had of TGP was that I didn't completely buy Otter's supposedly 21st-century patter. It seemed very slightly hackneyed, or stilted, to me. Perhaps your "upstairs" voices tend to be more believable than your "downstairs" voices?
One other observation, and it might or might be relevant because the excerpt is taken out of context (is it a short story? Or something else?), is that I didn't get a huge sense of place. Like I said, most of it could have been transposed to England. One great strength of TGP was the sense of place and location you gave the reader, but I didn't get that here, save for the odd mention of The Wasteland.
