GILBERT SORRENTINO
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but-a quartet, his suggestion that we-I'm sorry, I can't tell you my
shame . His request for an old boot was one thing, but ... not that I
am a prude, not at all, I've had my moiety of thrills and such . Tom can
tell you of the man, a famed translator of Lorca and college instructor
of note , also a poet in his own right, who liked to dress up in my
undies . He brought me an orange dress once that he called my Florida
dress it was soft buttersoft and fit my body to a t marvelous it was
actually it was called my Florida frock he had the most extraordinary
habit of painting a mustache on his face whenever he felt blue do you
like the way I'm talking on and on without any pauses or punctuation
it's my consciousness streaming. But enough! I'll be studgy, is that the
word? studgy Daisy again and let my consciousness stumble along as
usual. This poet in his own right first alerted me to the little things,
turned me, in his own perverted way, into a whole woman, if woman it
be! There were so many-little things that I became akin to. I loved the
way he put ketchup on his pork chops, his baggy pants, his dislike
of cats, how cute he was lost on the IND, the manly way he sipped his
tea. But it was not to be. He too wanted only the gross female , cared
more for my girdles, bras and nylons than he did for me. How Tom
laughed when I found my underwear drawer-empty! As empty as the
blind heart . . .
My mouth had flown, sometime before, open in horror, so that I
must have seemed the fool. But I could not "shake" that phrase,
"request for an old boot. " The unutterable reality of it was devasta–
ting! I was shocked far more than I had ever had the experience of
sensing before . Why? I must have muttered this imprecation aloud for
Daisy flashed a look of such tender affection on me that I blanched.
She stupidly twisted a paper napkin to shards before my eyes-fond
girl! The full horror of it struck me as a kidney strikes a clown between
the eyes at the circus . How many years it had been since I had laughed
at the circus! The glitter, the tinsel, the lights-and underneath the
broken heart. Often more than one!
It
was like life itself, or a football
game. A football game! And then the kindly, vapid, yet stern visage of
Tom came to mind-that he, a captain of finance, should have
collaborated in his wife ;s decadence . And dear Ned-to lust for a
boot? And what was that about his painted mustache? I reeled .
. . . all too much like, my life that is, became all too much like a
wild trip I once took cross-country with a man who had no buttocks and
