SUPERWORM
185
him to go fuck himself, and went into the house to make dinner. She
brought him his meals, which she left on paper plates outside the
garage door. After two days in the garage and one brief run around
the neighborhood to test the disguise, he dressed, slipped into the
house to shave and came out to meet the world, a transformed man,
in the black sedan, in the underwear, with his kinky head, or so he
thought, out to set things right, no longer by voting, or speaking, or
writing. But by the last resort: Leaping.
For after all what is a man to do? When everything is so fat.
And his Negro friends all have barbecue sets in their back yards.
And his Jewish friends all support the unions' foreign policies. When
all the good, kind, respectable people - the mothers, the priests, the
Chambers of Commerce, the Boy Scouts - when they all support
the Horror? When he is laughed at by students for trying to be with
it. And beaten by youth gangs for being only white. (But I'm black
inside,
he kept telling them while they beat him.) What indeed?
He come out in disguise and he park he black sedan and he
wait, layin' low in dere, he don' say
nothin'.
That's what a man do!
"Man," the pimpled boy announced, "wouldn't you like to smack
that smack?" He opens the center spread and holds it up so every–
one can admire a girl spread out on a zebra rug. She appears to
have been sprayed all over with orange paint and the crack of her ass
is darkly shadowed - deep enough to hide an army of raging
juveniles.
"That's why I'm taking up body building," the boy says. "There's
this guy comes into the weight room, a guy with eighteen-inch arms,
he told me he met this girl she confess to him that women can't
resist a man's got eighteen-inch arms. All they can do is try to stay
away from them because once they get too close to them it's curtains."
"Don't you believe it," Charlie the barber says. "Most of those
body builders are fairies."
Charlie's hand is plump.
It
reminds the professor-hero of a fat
frog. The short black hairs on the knuckles stand out stiffly in con–
trast to the softness of the skin.
"You shoulda seen what I saw," the boy continued. "There was
this guy in the locker room yesterday he was shaving his belly with
a Lady Schick."
The salesman's eyes open slowly and roll into focus . "Moral
