"It's going to the right person," I replied.
I gave the lady a twenty and we drove back. Filbert was gone.
"Don't you want to come in for a while?" Tammie asked.
"No, I've got to go."
She was able to carry the typer in without help. It was a portable.
72
I drank for the next week. I drank night and day and wrote 25 or 30 mournful poems about lost love.
It was Friday night when the phone rang. It was Mercedes. "I got married," she said, "to Little Jack. You met him at the party that night you read in Venice. He's a nice guy and he's got money. We're moving to the Valley."
"All right, Mercedes, luck with it all."
"But I miss drinking and talking with you. Suppose I come over tonight?"
"All right."
She was there in 15 minutes, rolling joints and drinking my beer.
"Little Jack is a nice guy. We're happy together."
I sucked at my beer.
"I don't want to fuck," she said, "I'm tired of abortions, I'm really tired of abortions…"
"We'll figure something out."
"I just want to smoke and talk and drink."
"That's not enough for me."
"All you guys want to do is fuck."
"I like it."
"Well, I can't fuck, I don't want to fuck."
"Relax."
We sat on the couch. We didn't kiss. Mercedes was not a good conversationalist. She wasn't interesting. But she had her legs and her ass and her hair and her youth. I'd met some interesting women, God knows, but Mercedes just wasn't high on the list.
The beer flowed and the joints went around. Mercedes still had the same job with the Hollywood Institute of Human Relationships. She was having trouble with her car. Little Jack had a short fat dick. She was reading Grapefruit by Yoko Ono. She was tired of abortions. The Valley was nice but she missed Venice. She missed riding her bicycle along the boardwalk.
I don't know how long we talked, or she talked, but much, much later she said she was too drunk to drive home.
"Take off your clothes and go to bed," I told her.
"But no fucking," she said.
"I won't touch your cunt."
She undressed and went to bed. I undressed and went into the bathroom. She watched me coming out with a jar of Vaseline.
"What are you going to do?"
"Just take it easy, baby, take it easy."
I rubbed the Vaseline on my cock. Then I turned out the light and got into bed.
"Turn your back," I said.
I reached one arm under her and played with one breast and reached over the top and played with the other breast. It felt good with my face in her hair. I stiffened and slipped it into her ass. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her ass toward me, hard, sliding it in. "Oooooohh," she said.
I began working. I dug it in deeper. The cheeks of her ass were big and soft. As I slammed away I began to sweat. Then I rolled her on her stomach and sunk it in deeper. It was getting tighter. I nudged into the end of her colon and she screamed.
"Shut up! Goddamn you!"
She was very tight. I slipped it even further in. Her grip was unbelievable. As I rammed it in I suddenly got a stitch in my side, a terrible burning pain, but I continued. I was slicing her in half, right up the backbone. I roared like a madman and came.
Then I lay there on top of her. The pain in my side was murder. She was crying.
"Goddamn it," I asked her, "what's the matter? I didn't touch your cunt."
I rolled off.
In the morning Mercedes said very little, got dressed and left for her job.
Well, I thought, there goes another one.
73
My drinking slowed down the next week. I went to the racetrack to get fresh air and sunshine and plenty of walking. At night I drank, wondering why I was still alive, how the scheme worked. I thought about Katherine, about Lydia, about Tammie. I didn't feel very good.
That Friday night the phone rang. It was Mercedes.
"Hank, I'd like to come by. But just for talk and beer and joints. Nothing else."
"Come by if you want to."
Mercedes was there in a half hour. To my surprise she looked very good to me. I'd never seen a mini-skirt as short as hers and her legs looked fine. I kissed her happily. She broke away.
"I couldn't walk for two days after that last one. Don't rip my butt again."
"All right, honest injun, I won't."
It was about the same. We sat on the couch with the radio on, talked, drank beer, smoked. I kissed her again and again. I couldn't stop. She acted like she wanted it, yet she insisted that she couldn't. Little Jack loved her, love meant a lot in this world.
"It sure does," I said.
"You don't love me."
"You're a married woman."
"I don't love Little Jack, but I care for him very much and he loves me."
"It sounds fine."
"Have you ever been in love?"
"Four times."
"What happened? Where are they tonight?"
"One is dead. The other three are with other men."
We talked a long time that night and smoked any number of joints. Around 2 am Mercedes said, "I'm too high to drive home. I'd total the car."
"Take your clothes off and go to bed."
"All right, but I've got an idea."
"Like what?"
"I want to watch you beat that thing off! I want to watch it squirt!"
"All right, that's fair enough. It's a deal."
Mercedes undressed and went to bed. I undressed and stood at the side of the bed. "Sit up so you can see better."
Mercedes sat on the edge of the bed. I spit on my palm and began to rub my cock.
"Oh," Mercedes said, "It's growing!"
"Uh huh…"
"It's getting big!"
"Uh huh…"
"Oh, it's all purple with big veins! It throbs! It's ugly!"
"Yeh."
As I kept beating my cock I moved it near her face. She watched it. Just as I was about to come I stopped.
"Oh," she said.
"Look, I've got a better idea…"
"What?"
"You beat it off."
"All right."
She started in. "Am I doing it right?"
"A little harder. And spit on your palm. And rub almost all of it, most of it, just not up near the head."
"All right… Oh, God, look at it… I want to see it squirt juice!"
"Keep going, Mercedes! OH, MY GOD!"
I was just about to come. I pulled her hand away from my cock.
"Oh, damn you!" Mercedes said.
She bent forward and got it in her mouth. She began sucking and bobbing, running her tongue along the length of my cock as she sucked it.
"Oh, you bitch!"
Then she pulled her mouth off my cock.
"Go ahead! Go ahead! Finish me off!"
"No!"
"Well, goddamn it then!"
I pushed her over backwards on the bed and leaped on her. I kissed her viciously and drove my cock in. I worked violently, pumping and pumping. I moaned and then came. I pumped it into her, feeling it enter, feeling it steam into her.
74
I had to fly to Illinois to give a reading at the University. I hated readings, but they helped with the rent and maybe they helped sell books. They got me out of east Hollywood, they got me up in the air with the businessmen and the stewardesses and the iced drinks and little napkins and the peanuts to kill the breath.
I was to be met by the poet, William Keesing, who I had been corresponding with since 1966. I had first seen his work in the pages of Bull, edited by Doug Fazzick, one of the first mimeo mags and probably the leader in the mimeo revolution. None of us were literary in the proper sense: Fazzick worked in a rubber plant, Keesing was an ex-Marine out of Korea who had done time and was supported by his wife, Cecelia. I was working 11 hours a night as a postal clerk. That was also the time when Marvin arrived on the scene with his strange poems about demons. Marvin Woodman was the best damned demon-writer in America. Maybe in Spain and Peru too. I was into writing letters at the time. I wrote 4 and 5 page letters to everybody, coloring the envelopes and pages wildly with crayons. That's when I began writing William Keesing, ex-Marine, ex-con, drug addict (he was mostly into codeine).