Now tell me, go ahead and tell me, since when does anybody have to apologize for a thing like that? Plus which, if you say it's not a story I'm telling you, then if that's what you say, then isn't it you're saying it's a thing which in real life happened that I am telling you? So in this event, so then maybe it's you who should be the person who's saying you're sorry — shooting your mouth off making trouble for the truth.
Or what about when Schmulevitz gets home and says to Mrs. Schmulevitz, sweetheart, sweetheart, let's you and me go make a night of it, let's you and me, the two of us, go get on our Richard Tucker and go out downtown on the town and paint the town red tonight. So Schmulevitz says to Mrs. Schmulevitz like crazy people, like lunatics, we'll eat, we'll drink, we'll dance until we drop and maybe not until dawn would we even begin to get home because listen, listen, I went and heard the doctor say to me just two minutes ago, the man says to me Mr. Schmulevitz, he says to me, I can write you a guarantee you got maybe until suppertime but more than this it's iffier and iffier and probably by sunup tomorrow it's bye-bye. Whereupon Mrs. Schmulevitz says to Schmulevitz, she says to him yeah, sure, it's fine for you, get cockeyed, go knock yourself out, go run around all night like a nut, but may I please with your permission beg to remind you just exactly who it is who is going to have to shlepp herself up out of bed in the morning?
Enough.
That's enough for you.
You don't deserve my brilliant stories.
It's killing me, a broken heart, and you, you mobster, you are the last person who is getting himself exonerated just because you hate Jews or just because you hate jokes or anyway because you hate seriousness, seriousness, gravitas.
Here, you want gravitas?
I'll give you gravitas!
The big novel I just read, the manuscript?
Fourteen hundred fourteen pages long! Can you believe it, fourteen hundred pages long? Yet even with this lucky number, yet even with the lucky number, the joke-meister, the joke-meister, from laughter, from laughter, from genius, for Christ's sake — first he lived and then he died.
BRRR
YOU KNOW LIKE A READER? Make believe you're like this reader. And you, you know, you're, you're as a consequence, you're turning these pages. Like you've been turning and turning like all of these pages when they all of a sudden go suddenly go all blank on you. You know what I mean? Like suddenly you come to a page that all of a sudden goes suddenly all blank on you. Except it's like there is no actual all-blank page anywhere there in front of you, is there? — seeing as how there is always going to be like a little something everywhere, even if it is only like a clavus that is, or a nevus or a noma or the trace of where a nevus or a noma was.
Or take a turbercle, take a papule, take a wheal.
You ever hear of a wheal?
One hears there's even bullas.
(That's a plural, buddy.)
These things can come drifting down out from up in the illeum and thereupon succeed in getting themselves lodged in some teensy crevice cleaving to the weft of your paper. Ask the writer who's been, life-wise, dependency-wise, bound up in the theory of health-giving irrigations. I refer your attention to the American enema, only him, silly case, the dope comes home with the rigamarole of the opposing gender. Yet his voice seems to call — print confects a beckoning — from across a vastation of postulated un-inkings — hey, back here, it says, out back here, I am back out here, it says, can you hear me from out back here, it says, because I sure could do with a hand back here back in the toilet back here — except, whoa, except don't come by way of the room with the sock rug in it, keep clear of the room with the sock rug in it, come instead through the room which has got like this carpet in it, only be a pal, please, and please take off your shoes.
Hypothesized reader comes as counseled.
Gets off footwear off, comes across floor covering, comes to backroom facility wherein writer — pocket-sized, battery-powered, brand-named radio gripped in thumb and fingers that also grip flow cock through which rubber tube makes its way from raging red bulging red douche bag (hooked, not for a lot longer, it looks to him who looks, onto, you choose, towel rack or towel bar) that makes its raging way down to plastic nozzle — has composed himself — writer, that is; would-be hi-colonicist, that absolutely is — in the usual really ridick-looking posture.
Did you look any of them up yet?
Clavus and so forth?
Reader says, "Uh, anything left out — another mass, another form of abnormal growth?"
Writer says, "Hey, jeez, thanks, jeez — pretty white of you coming all of the way back to me here in the back."