Little Casino (8 page)

I
N THE STRANGELY UNBALANCED YET PER
fect mechanics of the dream world, he’s stroking the girl’s breasts through the smooth material of a blouse or dress, while she licks a Charlotte Russe which he holds rather carelessly. Then he’s inside of her, but with no appreciable change in their positions, and he is mildly surprised to find that she’s Ruth, after all. Her young breasts fall easily out of her creamy-white, frothy slip. He smiles at her serious face, which seems to be receding into the suddenly dim room, and he realizes that she doesn’t know who he is. She’s sweet and kind, though, and her mouth is wet and cool and sweet, filled, as it is, with whipped cream. He decides that he’s probably going to have an orgasm in a bed that he seems to be lying in, and as he begins to ejaculate, she waves and walks down 14th Street, toward S. Klein’s. He wakes up, more or less, and begins to substitute for her face the face of somebody else, he begins, that is, to arrange the dream. Slowly, it is compromised and
written,
that is, of course, faked.

In “The Dream-Work,” Freud says, quite clearly, that a dream is a picture puzzle, a rebus, and that the dream contents’ hieroglyphics, or symbols, must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It is, then, incorrect to read the symbols as to their values as pictures. A rebus, that is, may not be judged as an artistic composition.

It has been smugly fashionable and acceptable for some years now to denigrate Freud as a kind of bourgeois homophobic misogynistic charlatan, wholly insensitive to the needs of This, and wholly dishonest in his writings on That. Many of those who so denigrate him have advanced degrees from excellent universities, at which latter they also teach, drive, for, doubtlessly, some intellectual reason, expensive cars, have friends with whom they—you’ll pardon the expression—“play tennis”—and care not a whit for conventional thought. They are, for the most part, a credit to American education. At last count, they numbered 47,109. They dress very badly and read third-rate fiction.

In the thirties and early forties in New York, there was a Charlotte Russe “season,” during which period (it was, I believe, in late spring) Charlotte Russe purveyors rented empty stores to sell their delectable confection. They remained for, perhaps, two or three weeks, then they would disappear until the following year. A mysterious hieroglyphic, or symbol. For, perhaps, the Depression.

The dreamer sometimes says, with little attention paid to accuracy, “My dreams are getting better all the time.”

[“Creamy-white, frothy slip” is, if you’ll permit me, somewhat tired, yet I see how it “rhymes” with the Charlotte Russe motif.

“Uh-huh.”]

Poor banished children of Eve

T
HE OLD MAN LIGHTS A CIGARETTE AND
walks into the elevator and right out its rear wall into the 69th Street ferry waiting room. He’s not the man he thinks he is, though, but Buddy Mazzolini, The Boy Bus Driver, who was, at one time, the drunken cop who shot the dog on the corner outside Flynn’s Bar and Grill. Somebody across the street tells him to go fuck his mother and his face turns bright blue and then black and he disappears. He drives down Ocean Parkway. Others stare at the photographs that the bus driver displays because it is quite clear that they think that these heartbreaking images will substitute for or ameliorate their ignorance. They wish the world to be kind to them, to pardon them their sins, their tattered pasts. Look at the lost people in the pictures! Look! Young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful; young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful; young, smiling, foolish, and hopeful. Sweet Mother of God!

Ghosts.

Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us; and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Shoes rain of the cops

T
HE OLD MAN ABRUPTLY SITS DOWN ON A
kitchen chair in the sunlight glaring through the window. He yields, gratefully, to the painful nausea that is attacking him and throws up black blood on his shoes and the shiny linoleum of the floor. Well, this is probably serious, he thinks. When his daughter comes into the kitchen, her face shocked pale and tight with disgust and fear, he smiles through his dirty lips, grotesquely, he knows, and prepares to tell her not to worry, she just probably has to probably call the doctor. He suspects that he, indeed, looks grotesque, smiling, but thinks that a somber face will only frighten her the more. He has the words now, and speaks them: “unspectacular explosion him, to be made smoking next, to name to name
before.”
His daughter clutches one of her hands with the other, and says oh Jesus Mary and Joseph Poppa, oh Jesus Mary and Joseph. Her father waves a hand nonchalantly and adds, “overpass Luckies shoes rain of the cops, like into a gawm ticket.” He pitches off the chair and lands on the floor, his face in the slick of bloody vomit. You, you, you and that goddamned rotgut whiskey, she shouts at him. She kneels and touches his hair. She was a very beautiful girl once.

To call upon Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to assist one in time of trouble was a common enough habit among many Irish Catholics in New York in the early years of the century. It may be still, but that seems doubtful.

Linoleum is now rarely used as kitchen flooring, and has, for that matter, the look of poverty, so much so that even the poor are averse to it. Oddly, its aura of poverty increases with its newness. And yet, it is not quite so louche as oilcloth, which is the absolute and incontrovertible sign of indigence, and which not even the vapid dictates of junk decoration can rescue.

That terrible events should occur on sunny, warm, and pleasant days seems a sour irony, and may well account for the quiet madness and despair, the frenzy and sudden violence, that are virtually inseparable from life in California.

Beauty is but a flowre,

Which wrinckles will devoure,

Tumbles book pencil blare,

Chow mein equities, hair…

Presidential Greetings

U
TOPIAN GAMBLING SYSTEMS DEPEND ON
the idea of the investment of a little money so as to make a lot of money. Such schemes are, uncharitably speaking, self-constructed cons. Of course, there are schemes that call for the investment of a lot of money to make more money, which systems work more often. These are not true, or, if you will, honest schemes, but are patterned on the loathsome practices of bankers, stockbrokers, commodities traders, venture capitalists, and other money pimps, devotees of the sure thing. Gambling, of whatever kind, is sometimes used as a metaphor for life, but that’s not my fault, and it is certainly not the fault of gamblers, who never think metaphorically: a dollar is a dollar, a flush a flush, a boat race is always a boat race. Likewise, a chump is, first and foremost, a chump.

Fat Harry would take the young man to a diner on President Street and either pull out a fat sheaf of bills from a napkin that the waiter placed on the table, or put a fat sheaf of bills into a napkin, and place this at the edge of the table. In the latter case, when the waiter returned to the table with water and menus, he would pick up the cash-thick napkin, remark that it was dirty, and remove it in favor of a different napkin. When Fat Harry won, he would remark that it was a nice day, a hell of a day, and if he lost, he’d note, somberly, that the horseplayer had not been fucking born who could fucking beat the fucking nags. As he and the young man left, Fat Harry would toss a copy of the
Daily Mirror
on the counter, in whose racing pages he had marked his selections for the day. He disdained to play the horses touted by the comic strip,
Joe and Asbestos,
because of what he thought of as its ignoble practice of regularly recommending bets to place or show. This struck Harry as bush, and he would bet place and show only as part of an across-the-board wager. “You have got to have faith in the horse,” Harry would say. He also told the youth that Ken Kling, the creator of the strip, was a millionaire who had
never
put a nickel on a horse. The lesson was clear.