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Authors: Gilbert Sorrentino

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary

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BOOK: Little Casino
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Turkeys that have been shot, however accurately, with .38 caliber slugs, are not edible. A man named Pasquale Colluccio demonstrated this fact to me when I was sixteen, and to my complete satisfaction.

In Brooklyn, in what many people have been taught by crack journalists to call “a more innocent time,” floating condoms were often called “Coney Island whitefish,” whereas condoms discarded on the ground after use were, quite simply, “scumbags,” semen being, of course, “scum.” Bodies torn apart by bullets fired into them at close range were often come upon in vacant lots in Bath Beach and Canarsie. “Hello! There’s Santo Throckmorton, the jewel thief!” The occasional newborn infant would be fished out, dead as Santo, from ashcans filled with clinkers and “scumbags,” or recovered from the ladies’ room in the Alpine, Stanley, Electra, Bay Ridge, Dyker, and Harbor.

An “ashcan” was the name given to a very large and powerful firecracker, responsible, each Fourth of July, for the loss of the fingers and eyes of many neighborhood youths. These occurrences might be placed under the heading of “Good Practice” for the good and righteous war that was just around the cozy little corner. We showed
them.

It is often forgotten that they also showed us.

Someone, after Hiroshima, was reported to have remarked, anent the scientists who had created the bomb: What did they
think
was going to happen when it exploded?

“Music? Music? Music?”

Lest it be forgotten

A
FTER AN HOUR OR SO OF TRYING TO GET
her brassiere off, or her skirt up, or both, he lies back, next to her, on the couch, thinking that maybe he’ll just go home, when she accidentally brushes, with the back of her hand, and through his slacks, his still-erect but by now leaden penis, and he realizes that he’s going to come. It’s like a joke. Let’s say, unequivocally, that it
is
a joke.

Some ten years later, the boy, now, of course, a man, very drunk but not so drunk as his wife, spreads her legs open as they lie, he is somewhat surprised to realize, on the living room carpeting. She is humming, over and over, the first bar of “Ruby, My Dear.” He cannot understand, for the life of him, and it’s not, let’s face it, much of a life, why he is unable to pull her panties any further down than her thighs. Can’t make a fucking thing
right
anymore, he says to her, but she pays him no mind, or, in any event, she does not reply. Then he puts his head on her naked belly and they both fall asleep.

And, lest it be forgotten, there is his first serious sexual experience, when a nurse or a nurse’s aide at Brooklyn Eye and Ear, where he lies after an operation, both eyes bandaged, feeds him his supper, tells him what she looks like, and, while spooning what may be tapioca pudding into his mouth, masturbates him under the covers with skill and dispatch. He thinks that he might faint with pleasure, but he stays marvelously conscious, even alert, listening to the rustle of what he imagines to be her crisp white uniform.

As she is leaving the room, she says, mysteriously, “There are a lot of nice guys in Jersey, too, but.”

One might, as an amusement, do worse than to think of adventures such as these enveloping forward-looking politicians, dim professors of civil engineering, and dreadful Christian fundamentalists. (Add or substitute your own favorites.)

It is the fashion to make fun of New Jersey, much as it is the fashion to denigrate Los Angeles and to praise the San Francisco Bay Area. “What weather!” they bubble, as the earth splits open amid vast fires, and the houses slide downhill, in cataracts of mud, onto the clogged and poisonous freeways.

Sexual experiences are rarely reported with candor, accuracy, or honesty, and these are no exceptions.

Why is this the case? It’s magic?

In 1968, CBS wanted Thelonious Monk to record an album of Beatles tunes. There sat the band’s songbook on his piano. To add, as the nice phrase has it, insult to injury, the company sent someone to Monk’s apartment to play through the book. In case Monk couldn’t read music.

Well, you needn’t, motherfucker.

Spring colors

A
PHOTOGRAPH OF DOLORES IN PROSPECT
Park. She is in a dusty-rose suit and has on a small white hat with a half-veil, white gloves, blush-tan nylons, and white high heels. Behind her are Mary and Liz. In another photograph we discover Dolores and Georgene, the latter in a pale-yellow suit with matching gloves and a flat straw hat, white heels. Annette is beside her, too, her face in half-profile, laughing, one hand holding down her light beige skirt, which the wind is lifting, slightly, above her knees. Their teeth seem remarkably white, their figures just beginning to take on womanly contours. It must be Easter Sunday, let us assume that it is Easter Sunday. On the back of a photograph of Dolores—yet another one, in which she poses dramatically against a lamppost—someone has written, in a labored, childish hand, “sweet young girl.”

Time. The photographs, somewhat carelessly and inadequately described here, are in black and white.

“Photographs, because they exclude everything except the split second in which they are snapped, always lie,” he once wrote. Time.

And the angels sing, but perhaps not always.

Dusty rose, pale yellow, and light beige were spring colors, worn exclusively by virgins. Don’t argue with me!

The fool

D
ONALD SMIRKS AND TELLS THE FOOL THAT
Liz told him, and that Mary, Liz’s best friend, told her, and that she, Mary, heard it from Georgene, who goes to Fontbonne Hall
with
Dolores, that she, Dolores, sometimes changes, after physical education class, into black lace underwear, garments that look, according to Georgene, like sin itself, garments that have been proscribed by the Pope, garments that the nuns have forbidden the girls even to think about, on pain of mortal sin.

The fool can no longer look at dark, tall, shy Dolores without having the urge to say or do something so idiotically reprehensible that the neighborhood will never forget it, even unto the tenth generation.

The fool can’t talk to Dolores without blushing.

The fool can’t think of Dolores without committing the terrible sin of self-abuse that will send him to hell soon after he loses his health and sanity and life. But Dolores will also be in hell, oh Jesus Christ, and naked, like everybody else. God must be out of his mind.

The fool thinks about talking to Donald concerning this vile tale, but Donald is a thickheaded lump of a boy, ravaged by acne, meanness, and varied budding pathologies, and would, the fool knows, probably snicker and grab at his crotch in overt insult to the dark goddess.

One day, when the fool sees Dolores skipping rope with Mary and Liz, the snowy whiteness of her slip glancing out, each time she skips, from under her navy-blue jumper, he realizes that he will probably collapse and die if he can’t stop thinking of Dolores standing, nervously blushing and trembling, in nothing but her black lace underwear, the specific configuration of which he cannot imagine. Just as well. A few minutes later, as the girls start for home and supper, Dolores approaches the fool and asks him if he’d like to keep her company on the following Thursday night when she baby-sits for the Ryans. He nods, from out of the darkness of erotic mania that has enshrouded him. That would be nice, he says, sure, he says, to the impossibly lovely and amazingly half-naked girl who is smiling at him. His hands at his side are, what are they? They are cauliflowers, much too big to put into his stupid pockets.

Mount St. Vincent’s Academy, St. Mary’s Academy, Cathedral Girls’, Bishop McDonnell Memorial. Each has at least one Dolores among their various student bodies. “Such is the way of Satan and his clever wiles, boys.”

There is no proscription, in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, against the wearing of black lace underwear. If such apparel should become the occasion of sin, however, well, you’re on your own.

Donald, you will not be surprised to know, was secretly in love with Dolores, of course. He often whispered her name as he punched himself in the mouth. What the hell happened to your face, Don?

BOOK: Little Casino
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