These were days when my heart was volcanic (said Poe)
As the scoriae rivers that roll-
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek,
In the ultimate climes of the Pole-
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek,
In the realms of the Boreal Pole. *
Now Jimmy was very happy although for a moment he thought that he had betrayed someone and he fell in love with Kelly, whose beautiful black face did not look like a man's except outside the bar (bars are dim for a reason), and Jimmy fell in love with Cecily because he was sweet to Jimmy and promised that he would make Jimmy up, but Regina, who was now the barmaid, was so lovely that he wanted to kiss her black face, and she kissed his hand; however, fat Puerto Rican Phyllis the heroin bitch, who might really have been a woman, came and sat between Jimmy and Regina and squeezed their dicks and put her heavy muscular arms around them both and gave them her breasts to squeeze and picked Jimmy's pocket. The light was very red and warm; the girls were beautiful, and everything was beautiful until later when the girls got anxious and started demanding their tips.
* "Ulalume" (1847).
Nicole
The next thing Jimmy knew, he was on the street and it was dark and he was whore-hunting. He saw women dancing on the sidewalk; he was sure that they offered both acute and obtuse triangles; but they would not go to his hotel and he did not want to go to theirs because he did not like to feel trapped at the same time that he felt dizzy. —How fine the moonlight was, though! It made him retch. —He saw a whore leaning against the side of a reflective building, waggling her skinny knees although her high heels and her butt did not move and her head was cocked against her shoulder so that she could watch men out of the corner of her stupid little eyes. She said doll you want a date? and Jimmy said thank you for the offer but tell you the truth I'm looking for my friend Gloria you know the one with the big tits?—Oh that's just an excuse! sneered the whore, at which Jimmy cocked his head very wisely and said I never excuse myself except when I burp. Do you ever burp? Gloria doesn't.—Oh Christ, said the whore, who was as slender and unwholesome looking as a snake, and she stalked around the corner, heels clacking angrily.—Next he had several offers from a pimp who said he knew Jimmy would be satisfied, so Jimmy looked as dumb as he could and said wow pal sounds like a good one and you'll never believe this but I left all my money back at my hotel.—Don'tcha even have twenty on ya? said the pimp.— Jimmy said don't I wish but God's truth is I got one hundred two hundred dollars back home in fact I got lots of money in fact I think I may even be a millionaire, so bring her by pal I only live two hours away from here what do you say?—When the pimp heard that, he didn't even bother to answer. He crossed the street, shaking his head, and Jimmy stood leaning up against a wall and laughing inside himself with snotty little gurgles like a botde of Scotch pouring down the toilet. Finally he found a whore who would go with him. He looked around to make sure that the pimp wasn't watching and showed her forty dollars. Her name was Nicole, and she looked rather more than young, twenty-five maybe and strung-out, but not sharp and hard like a piece of broken glass, only used up like a dirty eraser, so he figured she would be OK with her lank hair curling around her ears and her ear-rings of white plastic pearls, so he said Well come on and Nicole looked at him tiredly with her skin stretched dry and tight across her forehead and Jimmy said Nicole your blue eyeliner's smeared you should fix it if you want to stay beautiful and Nicole rubbed her forehead and said she had a headache. He said well come on baby come with me then you can buy yourself a painkiller.
I don't usually go to the man's place, Nicole said. You promise you won't hurt me?
I promise, Jimmy said. If I wanted to hurt you, he explained to her very logically, you couldn't get away from me anyway.
That's not true, said Nicole. I could kill you easy.
Well see, said Jimmy grandly, you have nothing to worry about. You can kill me easy, so why be nervous?
He took her up the street and she kept asking how far it was. Three more blocks, said Jimmy. The light glowed in her hair.
The first thing she asked to do was use the bathroom. He heard her shit. I suppose she must be nervous, he said to himself. Jimmy had once been a reader, so he knew how in Auschwitz or Treblinka there was a ramp leading up to the gas chambers called the Road to Heaven where all the women had to wait naked and squatting while the men were finished being gassed (they went first because they did not need to have their hair cut off for the submarine crews), and while the sheared women waited they usually emptied their bowels and the guards laughed and laughed like hooded pimps in an alley and now history repeated itself as Jimmy stood nipping on a fresh beer and waiting for Nicole to complete the preparations for her little ordeal. Well, he said to himself, I can't help it if she's nervous. She's got a job to do.
Silently he said Gloria, are you still there? Gloria?
When Nicole came into the kitchen she was naked except for her red shirt.—You want a half-and-half? she said.
Sure, Jimmy said.
Will you take care of me first? she said smiling; her face glowed, she seemed so sweet like Gloria.
Sure I will, he said, what do you want me to do? (He thought she meant for him to jerk her off or otherwise affect her. He sometimes liked to fool himself.)
Will you pay me first? Nicole said patiently.
Oh fine, Jimmy said. He got the forty dollars out of his wallet and gave it to her.
Then Nicole sat down on the chair in the kitchen and took his penis in her hand and he saw how her arms were discolored everywhere with abscesses and needle tracks and he leaned forward a little so that Nicole could put his penis into her mouth and she began to suck at it smoothly, rapidly and Jimmy looked down at the top of her head and wondered if her eyes were open or closed and then he looked at the wall and watched a cockroach crawling down between the gas pipe and the sink, and he listened to the noises that her lips made sucking his penis, and he listened to the loud ticking of her cheap plastic watch. Jimmy was not thinking about anything in particular, but his penis began to get hard right away. As soon as it was entirely stiff like some dead thing, she took it out of her mouth and rolled a rubber onto it with her lined and grimy hands.—Now take your shirt off, Jimmy said.—He stepped back from her and dropped his clothes to the floor. Nicole sat wearily on the chair, rubbing her forehead. When she pulled her shirt over her head he saw that she had a cast on her left wrist. Her breasts were big and sad like owls' eyes.
You want my coat for a pillow? said Jimmy.
Nicole shook her head.
All right then, he said, get down on the floor.
The kitchen floor was black with dirt. Nicole lay down on it and raised her legs to make her cunt so nice and tight for him, and Jimmy stood over her watching the groping of those legs, which were speckled with boils and lesions, until her left ankle came to rest on the chair that she had sat on, while the sole of her right foot had to be content with bracing itself against Jimmy's refrigerator. Her breasts lay limp on her belly, as round as the faces or polished brass pendulums of clocks. Jimmy stood enjoying her for another moment, liking the way she looked as she lay there between the refrigerator and the wall, brown-skinned and almost pretty, with a white plastic cross between her tits.
Are you Catholic? he said.
Yes, Nicole said.
Jimmy strode around naked except for his socks, inspecting her cunt like an emperor. This was the best part. Nicole gazed up at him and pulled the lips of her slit taut and up to show him the ragged pear of pinkness inside, and her cunt-lips glistened under the kitchen lights with the brightness of metal foil.—Your pussy is just like a flower*, Jimmy complimented her; all the same he did not want to get his face too close to it. He got down on his knees; he leaned his weight on his arms as if he were doing push-ups (for Jimmy was always a gendeman who would not hurt a woman with his weight); then he stuck his penis into her.
She had told him that he was her first date of the night, but her cunt seemed to be full of something viscous like come or corn syrup.
* "I still remember the effect I produced on a small group of Gala tribesmen massed around a man in black clothes," wrote Vittorio Mussolini. "I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining."
Maybe it was just the lubricant she used. Anyhow, it stank. She had great black spots on her thighs that might have been moles or more probably the subcutaneous hemorrhages of Kaposi's syndrome as Jimmy well knew from his profoundly intellectual studies. Every time he thrust into her she grunted. He could not tell whether this was because he hurt her or because she did it to excite him and so get it over with faster. He did not feel that she hated him and her body was trying to expel him; more probably she just endured him and trusted to the frictionlessness of the corn syrup or whatever it was to protect her from being hurt by his thrusts (in direct proportion as his sensation was diminished), but the corn syrup did not much work anymore to soothe that red raw-rubbed meat between her legs, so Nicole just tried not to think about what was happening and grunted at Jimmy's every painful thrust and bit her lips whenever he grazed an ovary. She gripped his balls tightly all the time so that the rubber wouldn't slip; she dug her fingernails into his balls, either by mistake or to make him come. But after thirty seconds Jimmy knew that he wasn't going to be able to come. Maybe if she'd just sucked him off he could have done it, but what with the rubber and the stuff in her cunt he couldn't feel much. Jimmy fucked and fucked until he got bored and then told her that he was done. —Call me, he said politely.—Later his prick started to itch, and he worried about disease.
The harvest
I wonder if she gave me something, he said to himself. He could not stop thinking about it. He got a black pimple on his penis, and his balls ached.— But I used a rubber! he said in despair. Of course, she did suck me before she put it on.
The next day he said to himself, I definitely have something.
The lecture
At the clinic all the chairs faced the same direction, as if the venereally contaminated were an expectant movie audience instead of what they were. The chairs were bolted to the floor. Jimmy sat scratching his greyish chin-stubble and reading the notices on the walls and wondering if he could duck into the bathroom for just a minute to drink a beer because the place dispirited him, but he decided that that would not be a good idea and anyway he did not have a beer with him. Finally they called his number, and a woman led him into a little room with a desk and a stool.
What are you here for? said the woman.
I had sex with a prostitute on Friday night and I think she gave me something, Jimmy said.
When did you say you had sex with the prostitute? the woman said.
Friday night.
That would be the 26th, she said, looking at the wall calendar.—All right, let's see a driver's license.
Let's see your penis, said the doctor sternly.
Jimmy pointed out to the doctor the black pimple, but the doctor laughed and ripped it off his penis with a gloved hand so that his penis bled.—That's only a zit, said the doctor. But I tell you, anyone who'd go to a prostitute ought to have his head examined. I think you're all right. Follow the yellow line; they'll give you a blood test for syphilis.
Gloria
The next day Jimmy breakfasted on aspirin and ice cream. He felt pretty down. Well James he said to himself it's time to turn over a new leaf and really work at thinking about Gloria and remember how she appeared to me and ask of her that she give me her love and never again go for diseased imitations like that draggly old Nicole bitch who had nothing in common with Gloria and cheated me anyhow by never moving underneath me so I might as well have been fucking a pork chop and I know in my heart that that's something that Gloria would never have done, bless her heart. And Jimmy remembered how sadly Nicole had sat naked in his kitchen chair, with her hands beneath her sagging ass, and her head slumped back against the wall. Her mouth curved downward in her face, and her cunt-lips hung loosely apart like wilting lettuce.—But he also knew that every bit of it was his fault. Once he was on top of Nicole he had let his mind wander; he had not been thinking about Gloria. And the other whore had been right: he had just been using Gloria as an excuse—which come to think of it was like taking her name in vain. And what had he been doing in the Black Rose playing around with Regina and Cess? He admitted that he hadn't been taking Gloria very seriously. But Gloria is all I have, he said. OK then he said from now until the whole Tenderloin falls down in the next earthquake I'm going to hold onto Gloria and well I guess I'm repeating myself but I do usually think about her.
Gloria
The truth is that Jimmy tried never to stop thinking of Gloria. Even when he bent women over as they spread the cheeks of their buttocks apart so that he could fuck them up their assholes which bulged like the ends of sausage-casings, he was thinking of Gloria.
Gloria
OK he said all those whores out there are for me but they also each have something to give to Gloria if I can just find out what that is and help Gloria along like a splash of light on the ocean and everything moving and rocking and shining in the sun so God help me now because Gloria is the great sea those whore-fish swim in; God help me to give up food so I can spend more of my SSI checks on whores and find what I need to find and God let Gloria grow right with me because I sure don't want to die alone.
4
The Black Rose
It was loud the next night and the bargirls were beautiful and the bottles were redly back-lit. There were often three bottles of a kind, with the one in use having a tube and stopper like a laboratory flask, so Jimmy felt that he was in a loud laboratory of happiness, where the right combination of reagents would yield gold. Getting warmed up was what he called it. Starting now and for the rest of his life he was going to work at seeing Gloria and remembering her, and in this special place he became more and more certain that he could do it as long as he did not get ahead of himself and forfeit his desire through rashness or thoughtlessness. — Outside, a woman eating pizza said howdy, but he didn't like her. He went back in and had a beer and a beer. In his mind he saw a newspaper headline:
Whores for Gloria Page 2