Dear Gregg: The waitress has got psychic powers. She put me in touch with my dead mother at lunch.… I don’t want to talk about it. I nurture many dreams, but paramount is the hope that, someday, our camps have another skating party.
Mother called with her versions of Mickey Rooney’s galvanizing exhortations from Babes in Arms. Though, without the advantages of phone-a-vision, I was helpless to determine if she had gone as far as to affect Rooney’s two-story brilliantined pompadour.
Susan and Jill were so excited! They’d primped for weeks and the day had finally come! Is there anything more beautiful than a pair of girls consumed by romance! Jill stood in front of the mirror! Her underpants were a “yellow-pages” print! “Howard will flip!” Susan assured Jill! Susan was not to be outdone! She wore a diaphanous blouse! She was well-endowed and knew it! So did Jill! They were some luscious pair!
Across the street, Howard and Steve nervously gulped beer! Howard looked as if he’d stepped out of a training film! Steve seemed dissipated though! His hollow eye sockets distilled a purulent fluid! What turpitude had precipitated this dissolution?! What did Susan see in him?! Jill tended her own beeswax in this matter!
Jill couldn’t eat a thing! Susan fried eggs and sausage! The smell pervaded the small house! “What a silly stench!” Jill giggled! “I get hungry when I’m excited … and I’m starving!” Susan blushed! Jill sniffed at her armpits and shook her head, “You can’t smell anything in this room!” “Speaking of smells,” Susan said, “I hope their parts are pleasant!”
“Are you sure you don’t mind having Clare for the week?”
“No, no.”
“Because I could always get a professional baby-sitter … it would be a strange woman … but …”
“No no no, I’d love to have Clare. Where are you two going anyway?”
“Brussels.”
“Do you know where to stay?”
“Arthur Frommer recommends The Hotel Cecil, 13 Blvd. du Jardin Botanique corner of the Blvd. Adolphe Max directly on the Place Rogier.”
“That sounds like a nice place.”
“You sure you don’t mind staying with Clare? We could get a woman from an agency — she might turn out to be a mutilator or junkie or something — one of those women who puts the kid in the oven and tucks the turkey in … but if it’s less trouble …”
“No no no … it’s no bother.”
A gentlemen from the apartment complex is stockpiling torpedoes, X-ray specs, switchblade combs, flesh eating plants, exploding pens, black soap and sneezing powder. All morning he knocks boiled eggs into the garbage disposal with a facsimile of the tamping iron that shot through the head of Phineas P. Gage at Cavendish, Vermont, Sept. 14, 1848.
“Shouldn’t he be working?”
He should be, but someone at Oil of Olay Summer Camp taught him to maintain a constant vigilance. When he puts his records on, he thinks of her sucking his cock. He paints a phone booth on the wall and goes in it and calls her. Then he bugs her all afternoon. Eventually they marry. He finds work in the field of “auto salvage.” She bears a daughter. At twelve, the daughter’s body blossoms. She spends her afternoons smoking cigarettes and listening to records with her friends, exchanging a regicidal wink now and then with a girl who plays with her hair — the clouds becoming darker and darker blue — one girl repeats something she’d heard from an older friend about love-making being like watching a World War II movie with Red Buttons.
The clandestine organization (The Hardware Moguls) that was playing her for a chump taped her boyfriend’s conversation: “Oon WHIS-key kon SO-dah, por fah-VOR” (“Please mix me a drink of whiskey and soda”) and “PAH-rah me SO-loh, kon AH-wah natu-RAHL” (“I shall take mine straight, with plain water”). When they interrogated him in the A&P parking lot, he broke down:
“What in god’s name do you want from me — I told you — I have no … no journal — I’m a … bank clerk … an ordinary garden variety bank clerk.”
“Oh yeah? What’s an Individual Retirement Account?”
“An Individual Retirement Account is a personal tax-sheltered retirement plan. It was developed by Congress to bring to every American worker the opportunity to build a more secure future for himself and for his family.”
“Who can establish an account?”
“Retirement accounts are available to any wage-earner.”
“Can my spouse establish one?”
“Your working spouse may establish a separate account too, provided she is not currently a participant in an employer-sponsored plan.”
“Do I pay taxes on the income earned by my account?”
Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil wasn’t Typhoid Mary’s son and we never, never had a duel with shish kebab skewers over the same girl, but he did work his way through two years of UCLA as a make-up man’s assistant with the Mack Sennett crew, though something about that droopy-lidded, wheels-turning-in-the-head gaze of his reminds one of Brad Darrach’s description of Bobby Fischer, “Alone, uncounseled, jouncing to rock music in a borscht-belt hotel, Bobby had outgeneraled the mighty Soviet chess establishment.” Phil! Phil! Phil! Here’s Phil — holding a dish towel and pan as he listens to “Refillable Dispenser Raga” coming from the radio in a neighbor’s car … when suddenly Phil yells in the direction of a body hidden under the hood of the idling Chevy Nova, “Hey!.. etc……….” To try to alleviate nervous tension and insomnia, Phil submits himself to the Kneip treatment — a form of hydrotherapy that requires him to take cold baths.
A man and woman (who looks like Katherine Ross) sink down into the hot foliage in a film version of Harold Robbins’ The Adventurers.
The stag party goes on until breakfast and she’s beginning to feel hungry again. Well, the organist is high and he’s playing “Needles and Pins”. The bride’s name is Sirloin Stockade. Her real name is Bonnie from Phase I.
If a muscular Italian is pushing you higher and higher on a swing and you fall — high in an arc to the hard packed sand — the nuns will take care of you and you will have my baby. Don’t cry.
THE MONSTER
The Monster hates you because you melted her Conway Twitty 45s. But here we are again! You in your cardigan sweater with the letter you won in gymnastics. Hickory smoke from the barbeque curling towards the perfume of the bath. The Hatfields and McCoys downstairs at their annual conclave. The village chiropractor pedaling up our front path, the litter of dachshunds asleep in their box under the striped tent. But doesn’t it bother you that you weren’t enough of a fusspot to see that the lawn service people raked near the patio and got rid of those detestably allergenic puffballs?
It was a time of uncertain leisure, a time of faulty parachutes, of an uncertain public’s mandate for pyrotechnic child care, of the two-handed backhand with tons of topspin. And over the years the sun cooled as if it were a tablespoon of bisque that Yahweh was blowing on.
A macadam path lined with quackgrass and pokeweeds stretched down the hill towards P.S. 231 Harry Moore School and in the shadow of Togo Mountain, beneath a pastel sky, Amos the Weimaraner puppy, played by Jackie Cooper, felt like Pascal among his variety of books. Then the Monster came and offered him vichyssoise from a swollen can, but Amos balked and, dropping his bundles of text into a pasteboard portmanteau, loped … towards the Newark drive-in movie showing Kung Fu Zombies Drink Campari. And later, when the delivery man came to install the pad and shag carpet, the Monster (unable to get a job because of her weight) cozened the workmen, with untapped girlishness, into converting her storm windows to tinted insulating glass.