Little Casino (18 page)

Each of these linkages can be added to or changed. The mysteries of causes and effects are beyond understanding.

“Or not worth understanding, buddy.”

“Whore,” in the present context, may be read as “tramp” or “slut.” No professionalism is suggested by the use of the word. It may even be read as “mam’selle” by Frankie Laine fans, among whom, believe it or not, are a number of boring homosexuals, or “queers.”

This diversion, here indited for your pleasure, may ultimately be the cause of your divorce. Don’t ask me. It’s quite probable that had I not written this “chapter,” I would have written a different one. So much for the inevitability of art.

“What do you mean?”

Or the inevitability of anything else, for that matter. Save death.

“What do you mean? Death? Who’s Frankie Laine?”

Certain troops, discharged into civilian life from the bosom of the 2nd Armored Division, find that they are Nervous From The Service.

Georgene liked Frankie Laine and knew all the words to his “Mam’selle,” “Black and Blue,” “Mule Train,” and, perhaps unforgivably, “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” That was before she went to Barnard and met Gilbert C. Grove, a man who worshiped F.R. Leavis and E.M. Forster. Nothing to be done with Gilbert!

It may be of passing interest to note that the phrase, “queer studies,” if enunciated as an anapest, takes on a different meaning from the meaning projected when the phrase is enunciated as a dactyl.

Never trust a writer

S
HE CRIED AND SULKED WHEN EVERYBODY
was dressed and ready to leave for the park, and later in the day tried to push her half-brother in front of a bus, just a joke, well, she was laughing. She said that her mother’s lover and the lover before him and the lovers before him whom she could not quite recall had groped and fondled and stroked and fingered and raped her more times than she could count, aided and abetted by the silence of her mother. Her brother was a dope fiend, a speed freak, an alcoholic, a man who couldn’t keep a woman, even those skinny, dirty, hopeless schmecker drunk unemployables he got mixed up with. I’ll write soon, she always said, and send pictures of the family! And pictures of this and of that, the swell husband, the really great little house that she just loved in sunny and relaxed and laid-back and really beautiful Northern California, baking in the paralyzing heat of the Sacramento Valley, a heat that was the tangible counterpoint to the weirdness and barely concealed despair of that huge, hysterical state, crammed with maniacs wildly and grinningly unhappy, and hypnotized by regular explosions of blood in the ruthless sunshine, under the unsettling blue skies, when, of course, it wasn’t pouring rain for months on end. This really
great
weather! made her write even less frequently. She divorced her husband, the impossible dumbbell, after he had, on a number of occasions, suggested that maybe she could get a job? But how could she get a job, when the incredibly difficult pregnancy and ensuing stillbirth that had almost killed her, that had her on the very edge of death!, yes, she had been right on the edge of a death like nobody else’s death, a death as grim and terrible as, well, you know. Fifteen years earlier it had been a muggy, gray kind of day, when she cried and sulked and demanded to be begged and pleaded with and implored to please, please, oh
please
can we, let’s, please, can we go out to the park? Everybody is dressed and ready to go and it’s almost three o’clock, please? And after this intense look, like, into the very face of death, how could she get a job, considering her ensuing, insistent, recurring, and incurable ectopic pregnancies, her six dilation and curettage procedures by bloodthirsty butcher doctors who couldn’t even speak English, or was it seven?, her vaginal hemorrhages, bleeding hemorrhoids, back pains, endless infections of liver and kidneys and bladder and spine and what do you call it?, coccyx, and then the terrible discovery that her spinal infection was chronic and progressive. The dim son of a bitch machinist in the National Guard who got her pregnant after her husband had angrily departed, but not, oh no, not before he killed the dog and cat, uprooted the garden, tore the gorgeous black Naugahyde couch to shreds, and stole the best lamp with the mauve silk shade, the wedding present from her dearest mom, and did other things that she’d think of soon! This machinist, a guy who seemed like a really sweet man who had a nice little power boat, but also a bitch of a nagging shrew of a battleax of a wife, but he wouldn’t leave her, despite what he called “the fruit of their love” that lay in her womb an innocent, and despite her threats to
tell
the fucking cunt of a wife!, and then one day they had just goddamn moved away, and then the near-fatal recurring hemorrhages began, and the trauma of her history of sexual, physical, moral, mental, emotional, religious, and, uh, ethical abuses almost killed her, yes. And then there was the trauma of trying to live with the horrible memories of her ex-boss, the guinea bastard, her ex-boss, who had given her all the insulting, menial tasks in the air-conditioning store and repair shop, where she had gritted her teeth and got a job despite the rivers of blood that regularly gushed out of her generative organs and the spinal pain so bad that she wanted to scream right there at her tiny desk in real, actual agony. The traumatic recollection, too, was uppermost in her mind of him giving her that look that the Modern Living and Arts section of the newspaper called the “male gauge” or something like that, and the nightmarish horror of her shame at him saying that she looked very pretty in her new short skirt and him touching her on the forearm with a leer and another, even dirtier male gauge. She had to quit, and was thinking of suing, but a guy she met at a bar told her that her post-stress syndrome would be hard to prove after she told the guy that she’d gone out to dinner with the boss and did a few other things, too, maybe about oh, maybe twenty times. And anyway, how could she possibly sue and get involved with lawyers with her new pregnancy, when she could only get relief from her infected arthritic spinal column and kidneys by lying flat on the kitchen floor for hours, anything, anything to ease the agony of her corroding bones and ligaments and things. On top of that, she began to hemorrhage again a little bit and then came the blinding migraines and the brain-tumor fears. God knows why she didn’t lose the child, the poor little bastard love-child, nor why she didn’t die, the obstetrician said that in thirty-five years of experience hers was the most difficult birth that he’d ever seen. That rotten bum of a beer-swilling son of a bitch of a fake soldier and his bitch of a whore of a wife had nothing to do with her pulling through! Her mother’s house was the only place left to go now, since to go to work at some rotten minimum-wage job with her ovaries irritated and swollen and the new baby and his demands was out of the question, it was a place to take stock, right, even though her mother had looked the other way all during those years when she’d been as good as raped, and those, well, those, ah, episodes were most likely the cause of her infected kidneys, she’d read about things like that happening in the paper. The baby was so cute and pretty and a love, but let’s face it, a real pain in the
ass,
she couldn’t stand, that is, her nerves couldn’t stand the kid’s howling and the colic and the feedings and the dirty, stinking diapers, Jesus Christ, come on!, she just had to get out three or four times a week, anyway, for a few hours, and see some of her old friends and that big guy who used to be a Marine and who worked for the phone company. She wrote to a California girlfriend that the baby was adorable and as smart as a whip, and that her mother was helping her out a little bit once in a while, and soon she’d start interviewing for a job in her field, office management, that was her specialty, of course, or perhaps management and senior accounting, although she
was
a little rusty, her fathead of an ex-husband forbidding her to go to work no matter how many times she’d shown him the household budget figures and how much better off they’d be if only, oh well!, that’s water under the bridge, and, too, she had taken a long time to get over her sexual traumas of her childhood abuse and the guinea ex-boss’s rubbing up against her in the office and the sudden terrible hemorrhagic spinal infections with pus leakage, and the kid shitting and pissing and crying all day and all night, and then her dope-addict brother coming around to steal a few dollars from their mom while she was out, pretending to care about the baby, and nodding at the kitchen table the whole time. And it also looks as if I may be having my eleventh D and C, believe it or not, since I am in terrible abominal agony which is only relieved when I have a brief hemorrhage. OK. Pictures of the family on the way!

In the interests of fairness, it should be made clear that the depraved, departed husband of this suffering woman, according to records obtained, with considerable difficulty, some few years ago from HQ, III U.S. Army Corps, Fort Hood, Texas, was, upon his discharge from active duty, classified as NS-1, or, Nervous From The Service. This “nervous” state may well have contributed to his lack of understanding of his wife’s emotional needs and her feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. This is a common occurrence, according to Captain Laurence O’Banion, AMEDS, not fully understood even by the Army.

“One wonders how the author of this exercise in barely disguised misogyny would like it if he received an unwanted compliment on
his
short skirt.”

[The above paragraph is especially reprehensible, for it attempts to soften the misogyny of the chapter by the utilization of what is, essentially, an adolescent joke, and one that is, not so incidentally, wholly insensitive to the emotional needs and occasional feelings of inadequacy of cross-dressing males. It also, by calling attention to its message by the use of quotation marks, pretends that the putative writer of the message is different from the actual writer of the message, that is, Gilbert Sorrentino; and that the sentiments and beliefs expressed by Gilbert Sorrentino are not his own, but those of the putative writer. To compound these absurdities, we have the very paragraph that you are reading, a paragraph which labors to remove Gilbert Sorrentino from that which Gilbert Sorrentino has already expressed; to remove Gilbert Sorrentino from that which the putative writer has already expressed; and to remove Gilbert Sorrentino from the authorship of this very paragraph. The fact that this paragraph has made mention of its purpose makes any recognition or condemnation of an exteriorized misogyny (for which, it appears,
nobody
may be held responsible) in the chapter or its addenda, disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.]

MORAL:
Never Trust A Writer.

“I wear women’s clothes because, well, gee, they make me feel whole and complete and, well, fulfilled, and besides, they’re much more comfortable than trousers and belts and big heavy shoes, ties, and so on. And, heck, if slipping into these things gives me a really terrific, you know, erection, that’s just my body’s way of compensating for my occasional feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem and my mind’s way of expressing, through my body, my deepest emotional needs as a gender-problematic being, you know?”