Текст книги "Dhalgren"

Автор книги: Samuel R. Delany

Соавторы: Samuel R. Delany
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Текущая страница: 48 (всего у книги 60 страниц)

VII The Anathēmata: a plague journal

[WE DO NOT KNOW who typed this transcript, nor if every relevant entry was included, nor, indeed, the criteria for relevance. Previous publication of Brass Orchids possibly weighted the decision not to include their various drafts here. (The fate of the second collection we can only surmise.) Generous enough with alternate words, marks of omission and correction, the transcriber still leaves his accuracy in question: Nowhere in the transcript is there a formal key.]

it into her shoulder and tore /it/ out.

Dragon Lady let go all her breath in some way still not a scream. Nightmare danced back across the kitchen twisting his orchid, (jerking a little); as though/I think I think he was trying to under stand what he’d done. Dragon Lady threw herself at him, cutting for his face and kicking. (I kept thinking Thinking: There’s an art to these weapons I don’t begin to understand.)

He fought himself away, bleeding from the jaw and neck.

She flung herself again. I thought she was trying to was going to /would/ be impale[d].

Her white jeans were bloody to the knee. A good deal of the blood was his.

Copperhead, like a in delayed reaction, said, “Hey…” with a voice I’d never heard: he was scared to death.

Raven, Thruppence, and D-t hit the doorway [and] one another/ anothe[r], peering, over each one another’s shoulders. (Thinking: I used to break up Dollar’s scuffles, but I would no more get into this than chop off my thumb.)

Nightmare flailed backward out the screen door, II his forearm/ going/ making a cracked the on the jamb.

Horsing around in the yard with Nightmare, Raven, Filament, and Glass, tripped and scratched my calf on the edge of the steps. Later, Lanya came into the loft and saw me. “Hey,” she said. “You should put something on that. Don’t play with it that way. You’ve practically rubbed it raw. You don’t want it to get infected.”

Everybody poured after them—somebody knocked something off the sink. I heard a garbage bag fall and tear under someone’s boots. Two of the little boys (Woodard and Stevie) were holding hands and butting their shoulders against each other, Rose, the youngest (seven?), and brightest girl was right up there trying to see with everybody else. She went through the door with me.

Dragon [Lady] was snappinged her own bladed fist back and forth as though her arm were a whip. (Her elbow dripped. Nightmare spun away: gravel chattered against the bottom step. Drops splatted the ground.

The sky gleamed dull as zinc.

I looked up at the alley—thinking: You can’t /even/ see the end, when Thirteen came hurrying out of the mist. He stopped twenty feet away, Smokey and Lady of Spain behind collided with him.

Dragon Lady staggered, swayed—I thought she’d tripped.

But she shook her head, hard, gave a tiny cry, turned; and fled down up the street.

Smokey collided with Thirteen. Lady of Spain stepped back.

Nightmare stood, panting, both arms going wide and around, getting back his breath.

Among his chains, the optical one caught light. At first I thought it was lengthening…Broken, it slipped across his stomach and tinkled coiled made a tinkling/ puddle between his foot/ beside his boot / against his boot where the sole had pulled off the upper. Not seeing, he lurched away. The chain slipped half over the curb.

Thirteen caught his arm him, “You’re all right…?” and staggered with him.

Behind me the door creaked; two people had gone back in.

“You come on with me,” Thirteen said, “now you just come on.”

Back in the living room, California was looking at the wall by the door. He’d pulled all his hair in front of his shoulder and was sort of hanging on it. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Will you look at that. I mean, Jesus Christ. That’s where she splattered when she went through.” He started to touch one of the dime-sized spots, already dried brown dry, but shook his went back to hanging on his hair. “/I mean,/Jesus.”

Raven, Copperhead, and Cathedral came in frowning at the constellations of her blood, but kept on going

“You see the way she went at that motherfucker,” Pepper said somewhere out in the hall. “I thought she was gonna kill him. I wouldn’t blame her, man. I wouldn’t blame her one bit the way that motherfucker done. Did you see the way they were going after each other, man? I never seen anything like that before in my life. I really thought we was gonna have chopped meat for dinner the way he lit into her with those that orchid, man, I really thought…”

I went back [into] the kitchen.

Rose was looking out the screening, a brown fist up beside her face chin. I went up behind her and looked too. The other four children were outside.

Sammy was standing at the place where the curb cracked away into the street. With the toe of his sneaker, he touched the coil of Nightmare’s chain.

Stevie, who was sitting on the steps, stood up.

Sammy started to pick up the chain.

Stevie said, “Don’t you touch that, nigger!”

Marceline laughed, but I don’t think at that.

Sammy looked up and looked embarrassed, went to pick up a board lying out on the street, and played by himself.

I touched Rose on the shoulder and she jumped.

“Don’t you want to play with the other kids outside?”

She just blinked. (Somebody should do something about the black spade confusion of her hair—cut it short, I guess.) Then She went out and sat on the steps as far away from the others as she could get.

Only Stevie and Marceline are really friends. Woodard (who is sort of mustard colored, both his skin and his wooly top) merely hangs around them.

I feel sorry for them all.

Later that evening, I using a piece of pine plank for a writing board, I /went out to/ sitting on the steps /and/ was working on playing in my a poem. I had been there perhaps two hours when I noticed the chain /was/ had been removed gone.

I sat a few minutes more. Then I went inside.

Just after Denny went out this morning, Lanya brought back my notebook—this one. The first thing I did was look inside the front cover. “What about the new poems?” I asked.

“Since they’re all on loose sheets I decided I’d keep them in my desk drawer. If you want them…?”

“No,” I told her. “That8[’?]s probably better. They’d just fall out.”

“Did you see the article /in the Times/ about you and the children?” [s]he asked when we went out into the back yard.

“No,” I said.

So she told me.

It made me feel strange.

Once we went back /up/ into / into the loft/ to get something. She found a piece of paper down tween /between/ the wall and the mattress. “Are you finished with this one?”

I looked at it. “I guess so. It isn’t complete, really. But I’m not interested in it anymore.”

“I’ll just take it back to my place and keep it with the others,” and she put it in her [—?] shirt pocket; then she jumped down, cried out when [she?] landed, “Owwww!”

I thought she’d twisted her ankle.

But it wasn’t serious.

We went into the kitchen; she looked into the coffee pail on the stove and frowned at the mess.

D-t came in with a paper. “Hey, man, that’s something, huh?” He had it folded back to the article.

It was on page three.

“What I want to know,” Lanya said, looking through the living room door at Stevie and Woodard (Tarzan was trying to ride them across the floor like a horsie), “is what you’re going to do with them.”

I was leaning against I was leaning against the refrigerator door with my fingers hooked arounding at the rubber flange that goes around the inside of the door. “It doesn’t even mention George.” I was pullinged. “It makes it sound like I saved them all by myself. It was George’s Goddamn idea. I was just along—”

Rose walked in, banging the screen, and stared at Lanya on her way to the next room. Lanya smiled: Rose didn’t and kept walking. At the doorway she stopped, looked at Tarzan and the boys, sighed, turned around, went back—bang!—onto the front steps.

Sammy was playing in the middle of the street and did not look at her.

D-t moved the junk aside on the table (Marceline in the room with Tarzan was calling out, “Let me! Let me…! Come on, let me!”) and sat on the up-ended milk crate to read the article to us. The crate was so low the table top hit him just below the tit. /He read the part about: “…/during the holocaust, broke into a wooden frame house adjoining a grocery store already in flames and let out five youngsters trapped in the second floor rear bedroom. It is reported the bedroom door had been clumsily secured by the back of a chair beneath the door knob—”

“It wasn’t a chair,” I said. “Somebody had taken a fucking piano bench and turned it on its end. The God-damn music had fallen out all over the hall rug. Why doesn’t it mention George?”

“Sound [s?] like you had a reporter standing right there watching you,” D-t said.

I said “There wasn’t anybody,” I said. A piece of rubber pulled free, only I dropped it and couldn’t see where it had fallen between the refrigerator and the sink. “Just George.”

“The[n] how did they know to write about it?” Lanya asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “George actually got the door open. All I did was yank at the legs. The bench came open and all the music fell out. On the rug. The top of the bench was still jammed up in there.”

“Maybe George met a reporter later that evening,” Lanya said. “He could have told the papers, Kid.”

“‘…The children are reported to be safe, but we do not know…’”

“Of course it doesn’t sound like George to cut himself out.” Lanya sighed and made a funny movement with her hand, grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica. “Oh, Kid…”

Inside Tarzan neighed loudly and Woodard’s hiccuppy laugh shrilled above it, covered in turn by Marceline’s squeal.

“The real question—” Lanya looked up—“is what are you going to do with them. Are you going to keep them here[?]”

“You’re out of your fucking head—” I said.

D-t said, “The guys like them—”

“How many days was it?” I said. “How many days ago, Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other? Look!” I went to the living room door. “There’s blood all over the fucking God-damn wall—!”

Fist against his chin, Stevie was looking at me.

Tarzan had sat back on his heels and, conceitedly, wasn’t.

“Ride me!” Marceline said. “You rode Woodard before. Now you ride me!”

“Yeah,” Woodard said. “You ride her now.”

I stepped back into the kitchen.

“What are you going to do with them?”

I told her, “I don’t know.” Tarzan neighed again.

Three staples on the bottom of the

above page hold a creased rectangle

of newsprint. The end of the column

has either been ripped off or (the bottom

is torn on a second crease) handled

so frequently it had come away:

BRASS ORCHIDS

BLOOM BENEATH

A CLOUDED SKY

This handsome book, or rather booklet, has already become a Bellona commonplace, on night-tables by the reading lamp, in the back pockets of youngsters in the park, or tucked, along with the Times, under the arms of people going about the city. This reviewer only wonders how our anonymous author achieved such vivid visualizations with such simple language. Before subject matter so violent and so personal, yet so clearly and wittily voiced, few familiar with Bellona’s landscape will be able to avoid strong reactions, negative or positive. If the poet’s own emotions seem disjointed or strange, they are still expressed pointedly, incisively, and in an intensely human mode.

True anonymity in a situation such as we have here is, of course, impossible. Since the interview with the author we published a while back, many have simply held it an open secret that the cultivator of these brazen blooms is actual—

This morning I climbed out of the loft soon as I woke up. When I’d gone to bed, they’d been laid out neatly on Raven’s sleeping bag he’d opened up full for them by the couch:

Woodard was curled on his side a yard off the edge. Rose had two fingers threat through a tear in the plaid lining. A tuft of stuffing that had come /half/ out shook with her sleeping breath. Sammy, Marceline, and Stevie were banked against Copperhead’s back. who For some reason /he/ had gone to sleep on the floor beside them.

I got them the kids up noisily (when we were ready to leave, Copperhead had rolled the bag around himself, head out one end, boots out the other, and wedged under the couch; there was a tuft of stuffing caught on his beard) and took them to the school.

I pushed the door open and herded them inside. Lanya was doing something with the tape-recorder and looked up, more startled than I’d thought she’d be.

“Nobody else here, yet?” I asked.

“Christ, you surprised me.” She pushed the fast (forward? reverse?) button. Things clacked, crackled, and spun.

“I brought the kids.”

Rose went and immediately sat on a chair in the corner. Woodard wandered toward the table.

Marceline said to Stevie, “You cut that out,” only I wasn’t sure /at/ what [he’d done].

“The other kids will be in soon,” Lanya said.

I said: “Good. What you have to do is when the parents come for the kids in the afternoon, you have to farm these here out to them.”

Lanya stood up fully and faced me. “God damn!”

“I can’t keep them,” I said. “I told you that.”

She pulled her lips thin and looked angry.

I was surprised that I had been expecting her to be just that way about it.

“What am I going to do with—Yeah, I know what you said.”

Stevie said sharply: “You better keep your hands off that, nigger!”

Woodard turned off the from the tape recorder, holding a spool of tape gingerly, blinking apple green eyes below his brush of mustard wool. He smiled uncertainly.

Rose began to cry. The knuckles of her fist pressed together. Her chin bobbed, sobbing, and tears tracked from the inner and outer corners of both eyes.

Sammy, move/ standing by the far wall, moved/turned/ the toe of his sneaker over /on/ the floor and blinked.

The following letter is paperclipped

to the top and side of the page on

which the next entry begins. The envelope,

stuck beneath, has left its outline

on the stationery:

How absurd—

–to apologize for an uncommitted injury. But I shall not have been at your party tonight—if Lansang delivers this. There is nothing less sympathetic than the vulgar pleading extenuating circumstances for their vulgarity. There is nothing more distressing to a man who admires formal honesty than to discover he can only offer “personal reasons” as honest explanation for his breach of form.

But, for personal reasons, I will not have attended your party when you read this. I am distressed.

I have been rude.

And I have often imagined that to be the most terrible admission I might ever have to make.

Forgive me.

It is not much consolation that the powerful are most successful as patrons when least in evidence. I am concerned with what I presumptuously consider my City. I have always felt every society must have its art; and for that art to have ultimate use, it must be free of intimidation from the centers of power.

Therefore I have not read your poems. Nor will I.

Were I less gregarious, or Bellona more populous, I could be content to read them and never meet you. But I am a very social being, and Bellona is the social size it is.

We will meet.

And I eagerly await your second collection, whenever it should be ready. Its publication, hopefully, will be as expeditious as publication of your first.

My friend, I am fascinated by the mechanics of power. Who in his right mind would want the problems and responsibilities of the nation’s president? Lord, I would! I would! But one cannot be president with a Jewish grandmother. A millionaire family with connections at Harvard helps. A moderately wealthy one with strong emotional ties to Wooster (paint-thinner manufacturers in Cleveland) can be a downright nuisance.

Shall I twist the knife?

A degree in corporate law from Yale is one thing; one in patents from N.Y.U. (cum laude, 1960, and still two tries at the New York bar. Personal reasons again…? The pain!) is something else again.

I ramble.

More than likely I shall not be at the house for a while.

Until we do meet, I remain yours,

Sincerely,

Roger Calkins

RC;wd

too dark to see.

I heard Denny say: “He’s asleep.”

I opened one eye against my arm. The other stared With the other I could see the top of the doorway. Then her Then steps below / and somebody moving something to get by / were Lanya[’s]. I lay waiting for the circle of her hair to dawn at the loft’s edge.

“You aren’t sleeping.” She grinned and came on over. “I got all the kids stored away.”

“Good,” I said. “Why were you so pissed off at me when I brought them in that morning?”

“What?”

I raised my head out of my arm and asked again.

“Oh.” She turned around on the edge and slid her butt against my side. “I’m just lazy—almost, but not quite, as lazy as you. And I don’t like imposing on people.” She put her hand in the sleeve hole of my vest. “Besides, I thought you should have kept them.” Her fingers, cool, were touched the chain.

“You did?”

She nodded.

That upset me. “I really misunderstood you.”

“I know you did. I read what you wrote I said about it in the kitchen / about / when D-t brought in the article.”

“And that’s not what you said at all, huh?”

“What I said was: What are you going to do about them? What arrangements were you going to make about getting them over to the school, if any; getting a couple of changes of clothes for them; maybe a permanent mattress that was theirs—things like that.”

“You really think they’d be better off here?”

“Where you found them, somebody was trying to burn them alive. I could always pack them off with the Richards—”

“What about some of the black families of the kids you’ve got?”

“You have a very funny picture of this city,” she said. “There aren’t any black families here. Some of my kids hang around the George Harrison circus. Or whoever will put up with them. Some, as far as I can tell, are completely on their own.”

“Where did you park them?”

“With the commune, mostly.”

I lay back down. “They would have been better off here.”

“Mmm,” she agreed. “Rose went with a woman who’s been keeping three girls for a couple of weeks. Everybody was pretty nice about it.” Her fingers moved. “But you should have kept them.”

I rolled over on my back.

Her hand dragged around my stomach.

“I didn’t want them.”

“Maybe somebody else around here in the nest would have. Everybody liked them…I wanted them.”

“You don’t live here,” I said. “Except five days out of a week. And you’ve got them: in school.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Five days out of a week. But you have a point.” She took her hand away. “Tell me, how do you do it?”

I asked: “What?”

“How do you—well, I was just thinking about the article.”

“Have you heard people talking about my article?”

“…yours?” That her smile held less mocking than it might was how I knew she mocked.

“About me. You know what I mean.”

“Funny…” She drew her feet up cross-legged / wrinkling / on the blanket; “Last night at the bar people were talking about you—as usual. But they didn’t spend too much time on the kids’ rescue. It jars with your image, I think.”

I thought about that.

She explained: “It isn’t two-sided enough for you. It’s just straight heroics.”

I heard Denny come inot [into?] the room, move things under the loft looking for something and not find[ing?] it—Lanya glanced down—and leave[ing?].

“All the good gossip about you usually has that dualistic two-sided thing of being bad and good at once—do you worry about your image?” she asked, suddenly.

“Sure.”

“I’m surprised,” she said. “You never seem to purposely do anything about it.”

“That’s because it never has any relation to what I actually do do. My image is in other peoples’ heads. Keeping it interesting is there [their?] problem. I worry about it in the way I could worry about the reputation of my favorite baseball team. I don’t for one minute think of myself as a player.”

“Maybe so.” She picked up my hand and touched the / thickened thumb-knuckle I’d gnawed / raw/ red pink again. “I mean some day you’re going to wash your hands thoroughly and show up with a perfect manicure. And I’ll leave you forever. You really are schiz, you know?”

Which made me laugh. “I just it [?] the article had mentioned George. I don’t think it’s/I it’s leaving him out is—” I’d started to say fair—“good for my image.” Which made me laugh again.

So got up, stretched, put down my plank, went inside—and was suddenly bellowing and yelling and laughing, and everybody was pouring in to see what was going on: “Night run!” I told them. “We’re gonna make a night run!” Which we did—to the building with the stained glass windows (the lions of the city, a parti-colored flicker from our lights) with Lanya along, mouse quiet; and there was a funny almost-fight with three men on the street. But after they got as nasty as they dared, I guess it struck them how stpud [stupid?] they were being; a couple of times they got pushed into a wall, though.

At the nest, Denny filled up a bottle from the pail on the stove; I took it on the porch and wrote some more.

Lanya came to squat behind me, hands on my shoulders, cheek on my cheek. [“]You’re really up/going/ aren’t you? Maybe staying at my place wasn’t such a bad idea?”

“It was a good idea.”

She said, sweetly: “I was fucking pissed, you know, when Madame Brown told me you’d split. But when I got here and everybody said you were writing, it was okay.” She picked up the sheaf of blue paper. “I’m going to steal these away to read. I’ll bring them back in twenty minutes. All right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know I feel better about these than any I’ve written before. Not that that means anything.”

“Good enough to have a second collection?”

I grinned at her. “I think I’m even more anxious not to have one.”

She shook her head, kissed me, went away with them.

Wrote till I was finished; found her reading in the front room, dragged her off to the left loft where Denny was lying down already; we fucked on and off all night. Slept. Woke up before they did. Took all the pages I’d done out on the kitchen steps and in dawnlight almost too dim to read by, read them: made six more changes. Now they are finished. Copied them out (and it was full day) but found I still [wanted?] to go on writing. So turned back to one of the pages with space left near the end of the notebook (there are very few of them, and I have just started putting entries—like the beginning of this one—in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins) and wrote this, continuing it on a page I found free here near the beginning.

I recall/ and want/ this wanting:

Swinging up into the cab of a truck, miles north of Florida, and the driver asking how long you’ve been hitching, and the sunlight fills his lime-splattered lap and your rank jeans and he lets the radio play pop music for a while, for a while country; then twists the dial; your forearm burns on the outer edge of the door, your hair snaps and your cheek freezes, and the motion is spindled on the rush of music. So you sit, just breathing, to hear and to move through the red and green country, with the sun in the tree-tops a stutter of bright explosions.

The City suffers from the lack of it.

But most of us /have/ come here by way of it.

[Here the correction marks—except for one entry further on—stop. Did our transcriber tire of amateur scholarship? What he has given is more frustrating than helpful. And the sensitive reader will wish with us that he had annotated the final, rather than the first, few pages; there are half a dozen passages to come where even these attempts at variora might be preferable to the most informed supposition. As to the marks employed: indications of authorial deletions are self-evident; we can assume brackets mean editorial conjecture. The bracketed question mark, however, with or without additional word or suffix, seems totally arbitrary. After much debate, we can only suggest that words in virgules are probably interlinear additions; but even the quickest perusal reveals this accounts only for most cases. While he plies us with quaint descriptions of paperclips and staples, he fails to record date and letterhead material in the Calkins letter (perhaps there were none), nor does he mention whether any (or all) of the entries were typed or handwritten. Internal evidence (it is a spiral notebook, not a loose-leaf) suggests the latter. Corrections, however, such as balnk [blank?], That8[’?]s, and bendh [bench?] bray out for the former. Also, “Rose…a brown fist up beside her chin…” and, a few pages later, “Fist against his chin, Stevie…” suggest the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp descript for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second. The rubrics running page left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent “entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins”—that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) Considering the lacunae that pass without comment, our transcriber’s editorial adieu (“Here one page, possibly two, is missing.”) can only make us wonder what maddeningly special knowledge convinced him that, indeed, the ultimate and penultimate fragments once formed a breakless, breathless whole. Of course, we do not know under what pressure the transcript was made. Even if the description of conditions in the closing pages is only half true (and our transcriber were—say—the enthusiastic E. Forrest, working within the City), we can easily see his abandoning that tedious opening method to the simple necessity of completion; we must count ourselves lucky to have any document at all. For all we know, however, we have here a copy of a transcript made from the original hand-written notebook; or even a typescript made from a manuscript copy. Both mistakes or correction-marks might have come in (or fallen out) at any generation. Still, it tempers our trust of all he has done to note that on one page (!) he has committed all of the following:

“Sound [s?] like you had a reporter standing

“The[n] how did they know

grinding her palm on the grey[n]? formica. (That superfluous ‘n’ again suggests a typing, rather than a hand-written, error.)

Are you going to keep them here[?]”

He then has the pedantic gall to impose his solitary ‘sic’—Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other—for the mere lack of an upper-case ‘D’!]

We coagulate and dissolve around (not inside) the house, gathering on the front steps, dispersing for booze to the store with the busted plate-glass window two blocks away, convening again outside the kitchen door, drifting away—to reconnoiter in the yard (piling up the bottles), with maybe a stop in the front room which Lanya, when she comes around, says smells like a locker room—curious if she’s ever been in a locker room, or just picked up the phrase.

I can’t smell it.

This afternoon when I came out into the yard, Gladis (very black and very pregnant, she wears a basketball sized natural, sandals, and bright colored slacks) and her friend Risa (who I wished looked like something other than a chocolate cow) were there for the third day. The guys’ jokes are foul, their attitude maniacally protective.

Jack the Ripper: “Little girl, you must have been fucking a Goddamn elephant to get yourself a belly that big!” at which Denny, perched on the table’s edge, laughs the shrillest.

Gladis, under Spider’s arm, wriggles back against the tree where they sit.

The Ripper’s laughter stops for the wine jug, and continues when he drops it from his mouth to pass it to Thruppence and Raven, knee to knee on the bench below Denny (I propped the board with a cinder-block yesterday).

Gladis leers and says, “Fuck you—” She’s fifteen? Sixteen—?—“you big cocksucker!” with the inappropriateness with which women usually appropriate homosexual vocabulary or whites use “nigger” other than in rage.

Thruppence came back over the laughter with good-natured illogic: “You don’t get no belly like that sucking a cock!”

“Well, Jesus Christ,” Spider shouted, “well, Jesus Christ, if I’d ’a known that—” making much to get his fly open and free hand inside. Gladis squealed to her feet and lurched away.

I sat down on the steps next to Risa who closed her copy of Orchids, leaned on the faded knee of her jeans, and didn’t look at me.

Tarzan was going by with the wine jug and handed it to one of the other white guys (an occurrence notable enough to note); I reached way down till my knees were higher than my shoulders and snagged it up into my lap. “You like that?” I asked Risa.

When she looked up, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered her some wine. She made her first, scared smile (she looks a few years older than Gladis, anyway: eighteen? maybe twenty?) and drank. Inside the up-ended jug, wine splashed like a small, plum sea.

“Uh-oh,” from the Ripper. “What your girlfriend gonna say when she come around?”

“Fuck her,” I said.

“What’s his boyfriend gonna say?” Dollar asked from somewhere else.

I said: “Fuck him too.”

Denny leaned across the table to pull the other jug over.

Gladis, turning and turning in her loose green (they regard her as their personal catastrophe, an awesome delight; she looks as if she will foal now; claims, however, it’s months away), settled, giggling, again, beside Spider.

Then Spitt came in with Glass (some argument about where a building was) and we broke up from our backyard loafing and reconvened on the front steps. Standing beside Copperhead, I looked down the street. Thirteen was coming up:

“Hey!” called with the desperate good will of the seriously bored. “Any of you guys want to come on over? Hey, Kid, you ain’t even seen my new place. You want to come over and meet some of the guys there?” In this city, where nothing happens, it is worth your sanity to refuse anything new.