Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man (3 page)

And what’s deadlier than watching someone weave?

“Maybe some other time would be better,” I said.

“Actually, we
could
ball. Not balling during your period is just a hangup, you know. You probably wouldn’t want to go down on me, but—”

“It’s not that,” I said, truthlessly. “I’m uptight myself. I think the vibrations would be bad.”

Jennie is one of those young female persons who will accept any explanation that has the word
vibrations
in it. She agreed that we would make it another time, and I picked up the phone again and tried to think of somebody to call. Or someplace to go. Or something to do. And managed to think of none of these things.

I came very close to calling you, Lisa, as a matter of fact. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn’t want to hear your voice. I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds. I had some things to tell you, but I didn’t want you talking back to me while I tried to get it all out.

So I decided to write a poem, and set the typewriter upon the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into it, and spent a long time looking at it. Which made it as close as I had come to writing a poem in about a year and a half.

And then I thought, well, I can’t send Lisa a check, and I’d better tell her as much before her father sends his bloodhounds after me. Does the old bastard still raise bloodhounds? I’m sure he does.

So I started to write you a letter, and I seem to have gotten carried away. Ridiculous, isn’t it? All of this just to tell you that there’s no check in the envelope, when you found that out before you read a word.

Christ, Lisa, I’ve written twenty goddamn pages of this. I can’t believe it. This stupid letter is the first thing I’ve written in a year and a half. It is already longer than either of the two attempts I made at writing novels, and probably more cogent than either in the bargain.

All those months at
Ronald Rabbit’s
, with a desk and a chair and a typewriter and nothing but solitude, and I never wrote a fucking word. And here I am beating this typewriter to a pulp, the words just rolling straight from my brain through my fingers and onto the page. Pages. Page after page after page.

Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. We did have some good times, damnit. We truly did. And I think it’s nice we haven’t let the fact that we sort of hate each other keep us from loving each other a little.

Ah, Lisa. Here’s your letter, and I’m sorry there’s no check to go with it, but there isn’t, and God knows when there will be. You don’t have to answer this letter. You don’t even have to keep it. I have a carbon. I just never did get out of the habit of keeping carbons of things, and when I first put the sheet of paper in the typewriter I hoped it would turn out to be a poem. But maybe this is better. The world has enough poems, and maybe it needs more prose.

Anyway, I’ve solved a problem. When I started this I didn’t know what to do, and now I do. I’m going to tuck this into an envelope and go downstairs and mail it, and then I’m going over to the Kettle to get drunk.

You may be hearing more from me, Lisa.

With love (but without $850),

Larry

2

74 Bleecker St.

New York 10012

June 15

Mr. Stephen Joel Adel

c/o American Express

Monterrey, Mexico

Dear Steve:

Let me tell you in front, old pal, that I think you’re a total rat bastard and an unprincipled son of a bitch who ought to be tied up and horsewhipped.

Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, I thought I’d write and tell you and Fran how I’ve spent the past couple of days. As she may have told you, Fran was considerate enough to leave a note, and it seems only civil of me to respond to it. I originally thought of writing to Fran instead of to you, since it was Fran and not you who left the note for me. But I rolled this sheet of paper into the typewriter and stared at it and, instead of typing “Dear Fran,” I typed what you see above. This sort of thing has been happening lately. I started to write a poem Friday afternoon, and what came out was a letter to Lisa. You remember Lisa.

Why didn’t you ever take
Lisa
to Mexico, you son of a bitch? Christ, I would have paid your plane fare.

Anyway, the point is that I’ve decided not to fight my typewriter. Whatever it wants to do is fine by me. I spent a year and a half deep in writer’s block, and now that I think about it I can’t avoid the suspicion that it happened because I would sit down at the typewriter with certain preconceptions that kept getting in the way. I would decide to write a certain poem, and that poem just wouldn’t happen on the page, and as a result I didn’t write anything for a long time, until I decided to shortcut the whole operation by not sitting down at the fucking typewriter in the first place.

You picked a good day to take yourself and Fran out of my life. I got home early that afternoon because they canned me at
Ronald Rabbit’s
. They finally figured out that I was a captain without a ship, and instead of finding another ship for me they cut me adrift and let me swim. You’d love the story, but I’ve already written it all to Lisa and I don’t want to go through it again. It wasn’t that much fun to live through, let alone to write about. If you ever have an affair with Lisa (after all, there are only three hundred people in the world, and sooner or later they all sleep with each other), maybe you can get her to show you the letter. Or if you ever meet Clay Finch, he’ll give you his side of it.

I got home from
Ronald Rabbit’s
with my cottontail between my legs, and found that you had hied yourself south with my wife and my fifteen hundred dollars. I know it’s ungallant as all hell for me to say this, and you may not want to show this part of the letter to Fran, assuming you want to show her any of it, but of the two, I rather miss the fifteen hundred more. I had a use for it, what with a drawer full of bills and alimony to pay and no money coming in. I had a use for Fran, but we must face facts. If one takes a walk down the street, one has a much better chance of picking up a woman than of picking up fifteen hundred dollars.

An even harder thing to pick up this late in life is a best friend. Much as my first impulse was to hate you, I’ve decided it would be silly to throw off a fifteen-year friendship over something like this. At the moment you’re near the top of my shit list. There’s no getting around that. But I know that you have a sense of honor, and sooner or later you’ll send back the fifteen hundred and all will be forgiven. If, on the other hand, you keep the fifteen hundred and return Fran, I swear I’ll hunt you down and cut your fucking throat for you.

Jesus, I hope this letter gets to you. I don’t suppose you were expecting mail, but if I know you, you’ll check with American Express in every town you hit, whether anyone knows you’re going to be there or not. And Fran is just about as compulsive that way. I think I’ll put something on the envelope about forwarding it to Cuernavaca if you don’t call for it in two or three weeks. Fran said (well,
wrote
, actually) that you wanted to go to Cuernavaca to photograph the ruins.

I didn’t know there were ruins in Cuernavaca. For that matter, I didn’t know you had this big thing for photographing ruins. If you wanted ruins to photograph, old buddy, you didn’t have to go all the way to Cuerna-fucking-vaca to take pictures of them. You could have come over to Bleecker Street and worked your shutter to the bone.

In fact, precisely that notion was going through my mind when I finished the letter to Lisa. I put a lot of stamps on it and mailed it, and then I went over to the Kettle of Fish and behaved as though they were going to reintroduce Prohibition on the morrow. I drank Irish whiskey for a while, and then I drank some India Pale Ale. Do you remember the time we got totally wiped out on India Pale Ale at the Riviera, and we wound up taking this cab full of conventioneers to Harlem and pimping for them? Of course you remember, how could you forget, how could anybody forget?

Ah, those were the days, Steverino ….

I didn’t get totally wiped out this time, however. I kept on drinking, gradually slowing the pace and letting myself get wrapped up by first the jukebox and then some old thoughts. I’d planned on devoting the major portion of the evening to self-pity. In fact I was looking forward to it. But self-pity is like cops and cabs and women—it’s never there when you want it. I would try to tell myself how classically desperate my situation was, how absolutely everything had gone wrong at once, even to Jennifer having her period.

I know that you know about Jennifer, but I don’t know whether or not you told Fran. I was wondering about that as I sloshed down the India Pale Ale, as it happens, and I tried to put myself in your position. If I were fucking the wife of my best friend, I asked myself, and if I happened to know that said best friend had an occasional piece on the side, would I tell the best friend’s wife about it? I could see one good reason to do so. It could lessen her guilt, after all. I mean, cheating on a cheater is just turnabout, which we all know is fair play.

But on second thought, I decided that if I were fucking my best friend’s wife, the last thing I would want to do is cut down the guilt. I mean, man, without the guilt, what would be left of your relationship? You can both feel guilty about how you’re giving the shaft to old Laurence with a U, Clarke with an E. Your mutual guilt holds you together, no? The day you begin to exorcise my ghost, the day there’s just the two of you in that bed without my ectoplasmic presence to keep you company, that’s the day you two will begin to fall apart.

I’m a sneaky son of a bitch, aren’t I?

Ah, well. If you haven’t told Fran about Jennifer, you might as well tell her now. I’m glad I told you, Steve, and I’m also glad I never introduced you to Jennifer or you might have taken them both along to old Me-hee-co. Who steals a man’s wife steals trash, but he who steals a mistress—

Speaking of trash, I have a thing to tell you, Steve, and I don’t know how to do it without violating the bounds of good taste. The thing is, even without self-pity, I did find myself thinking a lot about my relationship with Fran. Naturally I was seeing it in a new light now. For something like three months she had been having an affair with you, and I was just now learning about it.

(Incidentally, where did you screw? Our apartment or your loft? It’s hard for me to believe that you spent all that much time together. Fran didn’t have too many unexplained absences. Oh, well. If you ever reply to this letter, you might let me know how you worked out the mechanics of the affair. I find myself oddly, even dispassionately, interested in that sort of thing. God knows why.)

What I realized in the Kettle, though, was that although I never suspected anything at the time, anything at all, I could in retrospect almost put a date on the beginning of your affair with Fran.

It must have started just about the time she wouldn’t swallow.

Oh, hell. There’s no way to be tasteful about this. And I could not mention it at all, but the typewriter tells me it wants to discuss it, and I already explained about giving this typewriter its head.

And that’s what this anecdote is about, anyway. The giving of head.

Well, I don’t suppose I have to tell you that Fran gives sensational head, Steve. You probably think the girl is a born cocksucker. Actually, I can say with a certain amount of pride that I taught her virtually everything she knows in that department. When I first meet your mistress, Steveroo, she was a far cry from the Oral Vacuum Cleaner she is today. Oh, she was willing enough to play the flute, you understand, but she kept hitting the wrong notes. But a willing pupil, God knows, who ultimately earned the title Miss Million Dollar Mouth. As a matter of fact, it was her skill in this area which moved me to propose marriage, and at the actual moment when I popped the question (among other things) she was physically incapable of answering, her parents having schooled her not to talk with her mouth full.

Good taste does seem to have gone by the boards, doesn’t it?

But one evening in March, probably a day or two after you two commenced your playlet of star-crossed lovers, Fran and I went to bed, and stroked and petted in the usual fashion, and then I crouched on hands and knees and paid oral homage to the little man in the boat. (We had gradually weeded
soixante-neuf
out of our repertoire, on the theory that it was better to concentrate on one thing at a time.)

Fran had herself a nice hearty orgasm. I’m sure she didn’t try to tell you that she and I stopped balling in the course of her affair with you, but it’s possible she fed you some shit about not having orgasms with me, or faking them. I wouldn’t blame her for that lie, and neither should you, Steve. Just a white lie, after all. And I don’t imagine you would have been stupid enough to believe it, anyway. You know what Fran’s like when she comes. All those delicious contractions, and the subtle taste of egg white. She could no more fake that than Vesuvius could counterfeit an eruption.

When the lava stopped flowing, I flopped on my back like a beached whale and let her return the favor. No point in describing all that. No doubt you’re as familiar as I am with the ministration of those lips and that tongue.

Ah, I shall not entirely cease to miss you, Fran—

But to the point. She did her work well, as always, and I got where I was going, and then she inexplicably began gagging and coughing and ran to the toilet, where she relayed my gift to her to the New York sewer system. The toilet flushed and she returned with a vaguely troubled look in her eyes, muttering something about something having gone down the wrong way.

I don’t think we screwed any less frequently after that, Steve. She never pleaded a headache when I was in the mood, and as a matter of fact, she occasionally initiated things. But she stopped swallowing. I wish there were a couther way to say it, but there isn’t. She stopped swallowing.

Funny how there are levels to intimacy, isn’t it? An echo of adolescent dating behavior, when there were things one could do on a first date and other things one could do on a third date and still other things one could do only when one was truly in love. We all of us have different levels, different cutoff places. Some women with a far lower threshold than our Fran would find it impossible to sleep with two men at the same time. Others would find it possible to engage in the act, but could only achieve orgasm with one of the two partners. Others might manage intercourse with both lover and husband, while withholding fellatory delights from the latter. But this adorable girl has yet another set of standards. Her lips were never sealed, just her esophagus.