72
RAYMOND FEDERMAN
And as soon as a guy felt that it was coming, he would rush towards
the middle of the room where a large porcelain plate had been
placed on the floor on a little square carpet to unload, so that our
sperms would mix without any prejudice, and suddenly one of the
guys, a mad cat, high as you've never seen, picked up the plate and
drank the whole mixture, the whole soup, to the last drop, without
even stopping to take a breath of air, that's friendship for you I said
to myself, everybody applauded in the midst of wild cries, a friend
like that is hard to find, and he did appreciate our encouragements,
you could see that in his eyes, and also in the way he stood up straight,
but after this glorious, symbolic, and magnificent gesture I felt a
little guilty, because it occurred to me I should have been the one
to do that, after all I was the outsider here, in this noble gathering,
but no one mentioned anything, no one realized my embarrassment,
and so we all went back to work with even more fervor and more
enthusiasm than before, little butts of pot were being passed, from
lips to lips, and we would drag on them, slowly and deeply, let me
tell you, however, that we were not smoking that stuff in order to
take trips, no, or to escape, or to negate life, no ladies and gentlemen,
on the contrary, it was to affirm life, it was strictly to get excited, to
get it up, SEXUALLY, to solidify our hardor1s, and so after the
guys had stopped applauding the guy who had emptied the plate,
everybody went to work again, and it was a race to see who would
come the fastest and the most profusely, there was one guy who kept
score on a piece of paper in red ink, and each time a guy unloaded
in the plate everybody shouted at his success without any sign of
envy, I didn't do too badly, I ended up sixth on the grand total, in
sixth place that is, which is not bad, not bad at all, if you consider
that we were a good dozen that night, doing it individually or col–
lectively, in Ernie's pad,
then everybody began to
fall down on the floor to go to sleep, like angels, like babies rather,
and we slept like that, naked, until about five or six in the afternoon
and even later, and there were guys who slept while holding onto
other guys' legs or arms, or even holding onto each other's penis,
stretched next to each other, on the side, face to face, bodies some–
times folded, as in the fetal position, so that they could feel closer to
one another
