HARRY
Life holds fewer surprises for the man with a penchant for fantasy. While he may not have actually expected its less likely developments to come to pass, he’s probably imagined most of them, just as he’s imagined no end of developments which never happened. If you’ve already conceived of something, you can’t call it inconceivable.
Harry’s thought for the day.
A thought which derived from some musing just now on the question of just when I knew Priss and Rhoda were going to make it together, and when I knew I was going to make it with Rhoda, and when it came to me that we were all going to get rather more involved with each other than, say, your average two gals and a guy.
Did I know, as I coaxed that broken-down car down our winding forty-degree slope of a driveway, that even as I went down the driveway Prissy was preparing to go down on Rhoda? Did I know, as my train entered a tunnel, that other trains were spelunking in other tunnels? Did I know, as I gave Marcia Goldsmith a quickie while she bent accommodatingly over her kitchen table (upon which was strewn artwork for Chicken Little Was Right and last week’s copy of Screw, the cover showing a girl with three breasts) that to our north at that very moment Ehhh.
No, of course I didn’t know all this crap, dummie. But I did envision it. And wanted it to happen. That little living room scene of ours you recorded, Rhoda, was pretty intense. I remember it a little differently than you do, which is not astonishing, but I would say that you got the mood right. I knew before we kissed what kind of a reaction we were going to get from it, and I knew afterward that nothing on earth short of the death of one or the other of us was going to keep us from making it sooner or later. And even that might not do it, because I had a hard-on for you, kiddo, that not even death would necessarily dismiss.
I caught a fairly early train that night and sat on it feeling shamefully horny. This time a couple of rounds with Marcia Goldsmith (the second, after we’d put her kitchen table back together again, took place on her beaver coat, spread out on her kitchen floor. Note all this kitchen crap-no doubt you understand the age-old Jewish equation of food and sex. Would it surprise you, then, to know that I inserted in Marcia’s yummy gobble-bowl first a gob of cream cheese, and then a taste of $2.25-a-quarter-pound Nova Scotia salmon? Or to know that Marcia, herself a victim of the same ethnic hang-up, decided that it looked so good that she ate it herself? Oh, you’ve heard that one before, have you? Well, the old jokes are the best ones.)
What do you do when you interrupt a sentence with a parenthetical remark which gets utterly out of hand? What I do is start over again:
This time a couple of rounds with Marcia Goldsmith were the equivalent of a couple of buckets of water slurped over a raging forest fire. Marcia had drained my scrotum, but as I sat on the train thinking of you two lovelies my penis seemed unaware of this fact, as though the two organs weren’t speaking. The ausgeshtupped balls ached with depletion while the optimistic cock looked forward to new frontiers of depravity. So go figure it out.
When I walked in the door of that gingerbread chalet, kiddies, your old Uncle Harry damn well knew. There was nothing he could put his finger on (heh heh) but nevertheless he just plain knew. You both were playing it very cool, almost ignoring each other. There were no secret glances, nothing like that. I think it was an aura you both had of sexual fulfillment. You both looked radiant, and very goddamned well-slept-with. Either you’d spent the day balling each other or the fleet was in and between the two of you, you’d satisfied an entire battleship.
I chose to believe the former. We are nowheres near the bloody ocean.
I think I ought to carry on in a different tone, once again addressing my remarks to that mythical reader out there instead of gossiping and kaffee-klatching with you two dizzy broads.
But one thing first, one last peripheral remark. That night, you may recall, Priss, you and I simultaneously grabbed for each other the minute we crawled into the sack. And screwed each other’s eyes out. It was, you ought to remember, a particularly satisfying piece of ass all around. Now the reasons for this are not hard to figure out-each of us was excited over what you and Rhoda had gotten started with.
But you didn’t know that I knew, Miss Mayflower. So how did you classify it at the time? One of my duty fucks to reimburse you for adultery in New York? Or one of my therapeutic fucks because I had done without all day?
I awakened the next morning with an erection the approximate size and shape of the Chrysler Building. Priss was sleeping on her side, facing away from me, which is to say bottoming toward me. I looked at her bottom and waited for my erection to go away, which shows that even a hearty early riser is not too bright the instant he opens his eyes, because looking at Prissy’s heart-shaped behind doesn’t get rid of erections, it inspires them. I had a great urge to wake Sleeping Beauty with something better than a kiss.
But I was a good boy, and controlled myself. Healthily impulsive sex is one thing and waking an habitual late riser at four-thirty in the ayem is another thing entirely. I went and took a quick shower-not even a cold shower, dig that for self-control-and swallowed reconstituted orange juice and infertile eggs and instant coffee-don’t we eat real anything any more?-and swallowed more instant coffee and smoked a couple of real cigarettes and went Out Back.
I work much better if I don’t say word one to anyone from the moment I get out of bed until I stop for the day. Human contact rips out the circuits. If I had enough groovy people around me constantly, I’d never do any work at all. Conversely, if I lived on a mountaintop (a real mountaintop) with no one for company but the trees and the flowers, I would also kill myself, which is why the present work-and-life pattern is about the best compromise available.
That morning the work started well enough. First I got after some cartoons which had been approved in rough form, a few of them okays that had come in yesterday’s mail, the rest ones I had gotten from Peggy when I saw her. Turning a rough into a finished piece of work is just craftsmanship and demands less in the way of creative energy than doing the rough in the first place, which is why I normally leave such chores for the later hours of the morning, or even tackle them after lunch. But this time I had a lot of them and wanted to get them out of the way and get paid for them. Getting paid for them is ultimately the most rewarding part of the game. I like to see my work in print, but if I miss out on this now and then I don’t fall down on the floor and gnaw the carpet. But if I don’t get paid, that’s something else again. Then I go berserk.
So, I turned out a lot of roughs into smooths, so to speak, and then I did some new work, including a couple of my own ideas, a few things that gag-writers sent and that I liked well enough to try out, and a couple of tentative treatments of some of Marcia’s lines for My Shrink Says.
Somewhere between nine and ten I realized that I had been sitting in one position, utterly motionless, my mind quite blank, for a good ten minutes. (Or a bad ten minutes, if you prefer.) I decided that this was either incipient catatonia or I was blocking. I put my pen down and walked out of the shed and into the fresh air. The sun was out and the day beautiful enough for me to notice how beautiful it was, and I don’t ordinarily notice. I said good morning to a couple of birds. Don’t ask what kind. We have bird books all over the house, bought them when we moved in, and I can look at any picture in any of the books and tell you without hesitation what kind of bird it is. I can even tell the warblers apart that way. But once those fucking birds are out of the book and sitting on a tree limb ten yards away, they all become utterly unrecognizable to me. I divide them mentally into four classes. All small ones are sparrows, all medium ones are robins, and all big ones flying high overhead are hawks. That comes to three classes. I had another one in mind when I started this shtick. What? Oh. All of the ones that sing all night long are mockingbirds. That’s it.