HAROLD BRODKEY
393
language for it is jocular or journalistic, extreme and yet weak,
dream-come-true or nightmare .
I was jealous that I was unable to live as these people did, that I
couldn't
do it psychically .
Johnno took my hand and kissed it. He was seated . I was
standing getting ready to leave , giddily, as Ijust said, I'd thought he
was busy, but now I sobered up, and was myself, a thin young man
while he then embraced my knees.
The way J ohnno hallucinated was different from the way I did
it. I was hallucinatory but logical and
civilized
self-consciously I
guess, as confusedly I detached myselffromJohnno's hug not know–
ing why I was so firm . But I tried to see or feel but I couldn't. I didn't
want to . I tried to see myself leaving-as Johnno saw me. That
seemed a vandalism. His size, his style, it was a vandalism for me to
attempt to fit into it with my load of sensations and beliefs and what–
have -you. I was teased in that a different embarrassment accom–
panied each flick of my hallucinatory imagination. I was embarrassed
for Johnno, for myself for hating him in
this
way-without enter–
twining hatred, fleshly and immediately - for my piously not hating
him .
I could imagine a scene in bed but it would have involved him
being
calmer-
that is to say, not Christ-haunted. Or mother-hunted.
I don't know. I was embarrassed that I didn't fit in. It was serious for
me that
these truths
about what I felt existed for the moment: it
amounted to, it came to a total that suggested inadequacy, a com–
plete inadequacy as
a man:
it took outward shape as a shrinking at
the groin . This is what in the end Johnno aroused in me , and most
people's sexual wildness did, an impotence. Maybe at the possible
complicity in what otherwise might occur.
I can't do it their way.
I wanted to . I half-wanted to, I mean. Maybe another time I
would be able to do it - and then I would do it (display myself,
behave sexually publicly, exist fully in this world, self-murder–
ingly- ).
"You always were a lousy cocksucker. You'd better go home ."
Johnno said that. I stood clear of his arms. He was smoking.
"So the party can start. I've never sucked cock ."
"You lie : you sucked mine-"
"No . I did not. I apologized to you for it."
Then he said, "You're too snobbish, you prick -"
You are a murderer in your way.
