Adios, Scheherazade

I’m talking about it, frankly, to try to reduce it of its significance. In case you haven’t discovered that for yourself, it might be handy to know. You can ultimately reduce anything of its significance, anything at all, absolutely anything, by simply talking about it.

Except this time. This baby won’t reduce. There’s only one thing to do that I can see.

What we do in the sex books in order to indicate the passage of time within a chapter, we put an asterisk in the middle of the next fine, like this:

* * *

I wish I could say I felt better, but I don’t. The fact of the matter is, I feel worse. It’s as though I’ve just admitted that Betsy and I aren’t married any more, we’re never going to be married in the future, it’s all over.

How do I feel about that?

I really don’t know.

All I know for sure, I just killed more than an hour since I put down that asterisk, it’s almost midnight, and when I came back here and sat down did I go back to Brock Stewart and Chapter 3 of Round of Lust, which I’ve decided is the title of the book if I ever write it? Did I?

You know I didn’t.

You know what I was just thinking about? The first time I got laid. That was a nice depressing experience, I should have thought of it before the asterisk.

Shall I tell you about it? All right, if you insist.

I was in high school, a senior, seventeen years old, and had been claiming loss of virginity for two years. One night a guy I knew asked me if I wanted to come along on a gang bang. I said how many guys, and he said just three. He said because it was his car he had first, and the other guy and I could choose up who was going to get sloppy seconds and disgusting thirds. I said okay, being cool and nonchalant because I was excited out of my mind at the prospect of really losing my cherry, and nine o’clock that night he came by for me in his father’s car, which I believe was a Rambler. The other guy was already in the car, and as we drove away we chose and I won, so I got sloppy seconds.

See that? I win, and I get sloppy seconds.

The girl we were on our way to pick up didn’t go to Albany High, which is where I went, but to a different high school which shall be nameless, and the story on her was she’d already been sent away twice, once to have a baby and once to be institutionalized for a while, and now she was back again and the same as ever.

Anyway, the story is she was the same as ever. I don’t know, I’d never seen her before in my life and I never saw her again after that night and I’m not entirely sure what her name was. Joyce, I think, but maybe not. Joyless Joyce. Maybe. Maybe not.

There was a street corner, and we were supposed to pick her up there, and she was actually there, one of the few times in my life when the next step has been where it was supposed to be. The only snag was, she had her little brother with her. She was sixteen, he was seven. When she got into the car with us, she explained her parents wouldn’t let her out any more unless she took her baby brother with her, the theory apparently being she couldn’t do too much fucking with a baby brother along to cramp her style.

All theories are false, that’s my theory.

We drove out to this huge vacant lot where baseball is played sometimes and carnivals used to set up in the summertime, O. C. Buck shows and outfits like that, and this guy drove the Rambler out over the lot and came to a stop where it was very dark, and we all got out and walked around, and the girl whispered to us the plan, which was that two of us were to keep the baby brother occupied while the third one was back in the car with big sister. Done.

So big sister and the guy whose car it was faded away, and the other guy and I started bright idiotic conversation with the baby brother. I remember it was a very starry night and I started trying to point out various constellations to him, the Big Dipper and this and that, and the kid seemed to take an interest and then again he didn’t. Maybe it was my own supersensitivity, but I felt as though the kid knew exactly what was going on, even though he was seven years old, and he felt sorry for us and didn’t want to embarrass us by tipping the fact that he was onto us, so he was craning his neck back and looking up at the sky just to humor me. That may be wrong, but that’s the impression I had.

After a while guy number 1 came back, and winked at me, and started talking to the kid about baseball, of which the kid knew nothing but the Albany Senators, and he started telling us how his father had taken him out to see the Albany Senators play a few times, and to be perfectly honest I would have preferred to stay there and listen to the kid, but pleasure called and so I drifted unobtrusively — I think — away, and went over to the car, and the windows were all steamed up.

You think I’m making that up? The windows were all steamed up, they were.