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she can’t empty ashtrays or rewind the toilet paper roll so it doesn’t hang a tongue, and being
tightassed, her nature demands we go.
“All right, Beth, let’s say our goodbyes and take off. The Phantom Rectum strikes again.”
She slapped him and the stewardess’s eyes widened. But the smile remained frozen where it
had appeared.
He grabbed her wrist before she could do it again. “Garbanzo beans, baby,” he said, holding
her wrist tighter than necessary.
They went back to her apartment, and after sparring silently with kitchen cabinet doors
slammed and the television being tuned too loud, they got to her bed, and he tried to perpetuate the
metaphor by fucking her in the ass. He had her on elbows and knees before she realized what he was
doing; she struggled to turn over and he rode her bucking and tossing without a sound. And when it
was clear to him that she would never permit it, he grabbed her breast from underneath and
squeezed so hard she howled in pain. He dumped her on her back, rubbed himself between her legs
a dozen times, and came on her stomach.
Beth lay with her eyes closed and an arm thrown across her face. She wanted to cry, but
found she could not. Ray lay on her and said nothing. She wanted to rush to the bathroom and
shower, but he did not move, till long after his semen had dried on their bodies.
“Who did you date at college?” he asked.
“I didn’t date anyone very much.” Sullen.
“No heavy makeouts with wealthy lads from Williams and Dartmouth...no Amherst
intellectuals begging you to save them from creeping faggotry by permitting them to stick their
carrots in your sticky little slit?”
“Stop it!”
“Come on, baby, it couldn’t all have been knee socks and little round circle-pins. You don’t
expect me to believe you didn’t get a little mouthful of cock from time to time. It’s only, what?
about fifteen miles to Williamstown? I’m sure the Williams werewolves were down burning the
highway to your cunt on weekends; you can level with old Uncle Ray....”
“Why are you like this?!” She started to move, to get away from him, and he grabbed her by
the shoulder, forced her to lie down again. Then he rose up over her and said, “I’m like this because
I’m a New Yorker, baby. Because I live in this fucking city every day. Because I have to play patty-
cake with the ministers and other sanctified holy-joe assholes who want their goodness and lightness
tracts published by the Blessed Sacrament Publishing and Storm Window Company of 277 Park
Avenue, when what I really want to do is toss the stupid psalm-suckers out the thirty-seventh-floor
window and listen to them quote chapter-and-worse all the way down. Because I’ve lived in this
great big snapping dog of a city all my life and I’m mad as a mudfly, for chrissakes!”
She lay unable to move, breathing shallowly, filled with a sudden pity and affection for him.
His face was white and strained, and she knew he was saying things to her that only a bit too much
Almaden and exact timing would have let him say.
“What do you expect from me,” he said, his voice softer now, but no less intense, “do you
expect kindness and gentility and understanding and a hand on your hand when the smog burns your
eyes? I can’t do it, I haven’t got it. No one has it in this cesspool of a city. Look around you; what
do you think is happening here? They take rats and they put them in boxes and when there are too
many of them, some of the little fuckers go out of their minds and start gnawing the rest to death. It
ain’t no different here, baby! It’s rat time for everybody in this madhouse. You can’t expect to jam
as many people into this stone thing as we do, with buses and taxis and dogs shitting themselves
scrawny and noise night and day and no money and not enough places to live and no place to go to
have a decent think...you can’t do it without making the time right for some godforsaken other kind
of thing to be born! You can’t hate everyone around you, and kick every beggar and nigger and
mestizo shithead, you can’t have cabbies stealing from you and taking tips they don’t deserve, and
