236
PARTISAN REVIEW
I am about to penetrate her beautiful ass.
Hm. Problem.
"I
am about to penetrate her beautiful ass"
sounds right, but it's too fashionable, too easy, too easy to write
that. It's too easy to write and talk about such things today.
It
raises other problems as well. Look, if
I
talk about such things,
write about such things, one problem is that people will say, uh–
huh, Mailer, Philip Roth, who else? Lenny Bruce, and
I
don't
want to "be associated with these people particularly, in fact, not
at all. Lenny Bruce, my 'god!
I
never liked that sour dirty
underwear smell of his work. Then too what will people think?
What will people think about
me?
That I'm a pervert and worse,
that I'm a pervert trying to write fashionable prose.
I
don't know
what the answer is to these problems. I'll just have to
go
on. O.K.
I'm about to penetrate her beautiful ass. Just then the door–
bell. It was 8 am. I'd gone to sleep at 6 am. It's my habit to be
awake all night and sleep all day. Or most of the day. I tell my
friends that I work at night. Sometimes that's true. For the
most part it is true. I do work at night. I don't always work.
There are nights that pass without any work at al l. Last night
was such a night. I watched TV, I ate, I ate too much, I drank.
Scotch. Too much, I always drink too much. But I didn't
work. As I say, I went to bed at 6 am.
(and here's another sentence that's a problem.)
The last thing I remember was jerking off making believe that
I am a priest raping a young girl. It didn't work.
Again the ghost of Lenny Bruce-or is it Roth?
Or
both? And
what will my mother think if she reads this? What will my
friends think? And people
I
don't even know, what are they
going to think? Here
I
am, at my age-I'm suddenly coy about
telling you my age. Perhaps I'll tell you later. In any case, it's an
advanced age. O.K. I'll tell you. I'm past fifty. I'm not only past
fifty, I'm fifty-four. Well .
..
Several questions might be asked. Why a priest? Why a rapist?
And why didn 't it work? There's a simple explanation for the
