HAROLD BRODKEY
389
"I AM NOT AFRAID OF ANYTHING!"
"I asked my father once if he had a separate name for himself, a
private name, and he thought I meant his prick." Johnno calmed
down precipitously. "He answered me:
I call myself, fool or pal, I got a
tool, it's all handle, it's no rake, but
I
bet it's useful in a garden .
So I ex–
plained I meant a nickname for himself, his whole self-well, he, uh,
wouldn't answer me
honestly
and he was dying. I'd heard him call
himself
pal
but he wouldn't admit it. He teased, he evaded . People
really don't want you to know. Or maybe it's just me because I want
to know. I think I spend more time grubbing for answers to ques–
tions than anyone I know, a lot of time - really a hell of a lot. At least
you talk some. I would say it was one of the technical problems of
being alive for a man , how to get answers from another man ."
J ohnno said in an airy spattering voice, "You're just another
pretty bureaucrat."
He was getting too drunk for anything but drunken mono–
logues and for what the Greeks called
stichomythia,
a kind of short–
speeched give and take, more poetry and exclamation than sense,
tricky exclamations, dramatic talk that, like dream stuff, often
doesn't seem interesting in any other context than the dream.
"Bullshit."
"You
are Perfect Bullshit."
"Fuck off, Johnno."
"You are the
perfect
symptom of the decline of the west."
"My liking women is not an attack on you." I was disingenuous
- and I was boasting.
"It's boring of you to talk about women to me, you're a boring
liar about your so-called sex life with that big-tit bitch who is laughed
at for the whore she is -"
He panted with the half-urgency of the criminal real : love's
spectrum - he is someone verbal who wants an event to happen that
will be an acclaimed fact though it is an unreal- or merely political–
event.
His hand was on my upper thigh.
"Your teeth are yellow from too much smoking, you are proba–
bly having fag menopause-" His hand fluttered on me . I pushed it
off and he flickingly stroked my wrist while I was pulling my hand
back to my own lap. "Ora's not so whorish-"
She was, though, in a number of ways. And she was bitchy,
too. She dressed to attract attention and then she hated sexual atten–
tion and was lordly and openly bitchy about it. He made me - flick-
