by Jack Womack
Susie North (Dryden), married a fellow worker at the 53rd Street Doubleday in 1980, having initially gained his attention by climbing the store’s spiral staircase, wearing a short dress, while he was stationed directly below. A year after their marriage she assured her husband that Thorazine was ‘sort of like Valium.’ After she left him, two years after that, he was sorting through her belongings when he found, secreted throughout their apartment, thirty-seven spiral-bound school notebooks. In each notebook she had written and rewritten, on every page, the same sexual fantasy: one involving herself, a 103 degree fever, a rectal thermometer, five jars of Fox’s U-Bet Syrup, a jumping rope in which seven granny knots had been tied, Sylvia Plath’s poem Elm, a baby-doll nightgown (peach) with open-crotched panties (mauve), a porthole in a luxury cabin on a cruise ship, Spanish extra virgin olive oil, and long-time Boston cult sensation Jonathan Richman. Years later, he found himself unable to think ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ without feeling heartfelt memories of his ex-wife.
E. Thatcher Dryden, Jr see Senior.
E. Thatcher Dryden III, see Junior.
ALICE is a gleam in the eye of a C+ + programmer who lives, in his car, in Menlo Park; and who has read Neuromancer far, far too many times.
Margot Lorenzo Padilla tires of explaining to her fellow sophomores at Hunter College that she is a physically challenged little person: not a dwarf, or a midget, or a freak; and that her name is neither Shorty, Tiny, Teeny, Peewee, Thumbelina, Tater Tot, El Loco Petito, or Fabulutmost Shrimpmeister. In chat rooms, in the evening, she is blonde, and five-foot six.
Enid O’Malley, twenty-one, lives with her mother in Ridge-wood, Queens, and has twenty-four different piercings (lip, underlip, left nostril, right nostril, four in left ear, seven in right ear, left eyebrow, right eyebrow, left nipple, right nipple, navel, hood of clitoris, left labia majora, right labia majora, tongue). Misses the Duchess Club, but remains popular with the ladies. She favours steel-toed boots and her favorite novel is Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo. She plans to switch her major from English to Business, in case.
Seamus O’Malley, a confirmed bachelor, walks yet never stops on Christopher Street. He avoids seeing his sister, Enid, whose lifestyle he frowns upon. He believes he would do reasonably well in the world of his favourite movie, The Road Warrior, and thinks he would look more like Mel Gibson if his eyes weren’t so beady and his ears so big, although he wouldn’t. In his workaday life he happily ascends the ranks at Big Apple Demolition, and has also developed a thriving sideline trade selling, on eBay stained glass, gold and copper fixtures, marble sinks and tubs, teak and mahogany woodwork, plaster mouldings rescued in situ, chandeliers, sconces, iron gates, lengths of tin cornice, stone gargoyles and grotesques and (when lucky) cast-iron storefront. Like most New Yorkers, though perhaps for different reasons, he never passes the Chrysler Building without heaving a sigh.
Jake, like Isabel, persists.
Walter Bullitt is a novelist whose seven books are generally considered to be science fiction (which may be so), and popularly believed to be written with the assistance of chemicals (perhaps self-generated). Deeply appreciated by a cult audience, most of whom he believes he personally knows. Five of his titles have been much read in Slovakia.
Eulalia Bax married Walter. They live happily in West Seattle, on S.W. Southern St., where Walter has easy access to the ferry to Vachon Island, and its mushrooms.
Lola Hart still thinks Titanic was the best movie she ever saw. Her girlfriend (who attends Nightingale, not Brearley, but these things can’t be helped) is more of a Kate than a Leo.