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By Root 22985 0

’s roar. “I see, I see,” I yawn, roaring, “this word vocalize, you mean you can say fuck but you still can’t do it!” Her answer is a blur in my brain of imperfectly registered sounds, many minutes in duration, out of what I am able to salvage only the impression that Leslie, now deep into something called orgone therapy, will in the coming days be seated in some sort of box, there to absorb patiently waves of energy from the ether that might allow her passage upward to the next plateau. Close to the brink of sleep, I yawn again and wordlessly wish her well. And then, mirabile ditcu, I drop off into slumberland even as she babbles on about the possibility of someday—someday! I dream a strange confounded dream in which intimations of bliss are transfused with lacerating pain. It could only be a few moments that I drowse. When I wake—blinking at Leslie in the full flight of her soliliquy—I realize I have been sitting ponderously on my hand, which I withdraw from underneath my ass. All five fingers are momentarily deformed and totally without sensation. This helps to explain my ineffably sad dream, where, hotly embracing Leslie once more on the couch, I managed at last to fondle one bare breast, which, however, felt like a soggy ball of dough beneath my hand, itself tightly imprisoned within the rim of a murderous brassiere made of wormwood and wire.

These many years later I am able to see how Leslie’s recalcitrance—indeed, her entire unassailable virginity—was a nice counterpoint to the larger narrative I have felt compelled to relate. God knows what might have happened had she really been the wanton and experienced playgirl she had impersonated; she was so ripely desirable that I don’t see how I could have failed to become her slave. This would certainly have tended to remove me from the earthy, ramshackle ambience of Yetta Zimmerman’s Pink Palace and thus doubtless from the sequence of events that were in the making and compose the main reason for this story. But the disparity between what Leslie had promised and what she delivered was so wounding to my spirit that I became physically ill. It was nothing really serious—nothing more than a severe bout of flu combined with a deep psychic despondency—but as I lay in bed for four or five days (tenderly taken care of by Nathan and Sophie, who brought me tomato soup and magazines) I was able to decide that I had come to a critical extremity in my life. This extremity took the form of the craggy rock of sex, upon which I had obviously though inexplicably foundered.

I knew I was presentable-looking, possessed a spacious and sympathetic intelligence, and had that Southern gift of gab which I was well aware could often cast a sugary (but not saccharine) necromantic charm. That despite all this bright dower and the considerable effort I had put forth in exploiting it, I was still unable to find a girl who would go to the dark gods with me, seemed now—as I lay abed feverish, poring over Life and smarting with the image of Leslie Lapidus chattering at me in the dawn’s defeated light—a morbid condition which, however painfully, I should regard as a stroke of dirty fate, as people accept any ghastly but finally bearable disability such as an intractable stammer or a harelip. I was simply not old sexy Stingo, and I had to be content with that fact. But in compensation, I reasoned, I had more exalted goals. After all, I was a writer, an artist, and it was a platitude by now that much of the world’s greatest art had been achieved by dedicated men who, husbanding their energies, had not allowed some misplaced notion of the primacy of the groin to subvert grander aims of beauty and truth. So onward, Stingo, I said to myself, rallying my flayed spirits, onward with your work. Putting lechery behind you, bend your passions to this ravishing vision that is in you, calling to be born. Such monkish exhortations allowed me sometime during the next week to rise from bed, feeling fresh and cleansed and relatively unhorny, and to boldly continue my grapple with the assorted faeries, demons, clods, clowns, sweethearts and tormented mothers and fathers who were beginning to throng the pages of my novel.