In a corner beside the ticket booth the hostesses were collected. Bright and fresh they were, as if they had just stepped out of the tub. All beautifully coiffed, beautifully frocked. Waiting to be bought and, if luck would have it, wined and dined. Waiting for the right guy to come along, that jaded millionaire who in a moment of forgetfulness might propose marriage.
Standing at the rail I surveyed them coolly. If it were the Yoshiwara now … If when you glanced their way they would undress, make a few obscene gestures, call to you in a raucous voice. But the Itchigumi follows a different program. It suggests that you very kindly and sincerely pick the flower of your choice, lead her to the center of the floor, bill and coo, nibble and gobble, wiggle and woggle, buy more tickets, take girl have drink, speak correctly, come again next week, choose ‘nother pretty flower, thank you kindly, good-night.
The music stops for a few moments and the dancers melt like snow-flakes. A girl in a pale yellow dress is gliding back to the slave booth. She looks Cuban. Rather short, well built, and with a mouth that’s insatiable.
I wait a moment to give her a chance to dry off, as it were, then approach. She looks eighteen and fresh from the jungle. Ebony and ivory. Her greeting is warm and natural—no ready-made smile, no cash register business. She’s new at the game, I find, and she is a Cuban. (How wonderful!) In short, she doesn’t mind too much being pawed over, chewed to bits, etcetera; she’s still mixing pleasure with business.
Pushed to the center of the floor, wedged in, we remain there moving like caterpillars, the censor fast asleep, the lights very low, the music creeping like a paid whore from chromosome to chromosome. The orgasm arrives and she pulls away for fear her dress will be stained.
Back at the barricade I’m trembling like a leaf. All I can smell now is cunt, cunt, cunt. No use dancing any more this afternoon. Must come again next Saturday. Why not?
And that’s exactly what I do do. On the third Saturday I run into a newcomer at the slave booth. She has a marvelous body, and her face, chipped here and there like an ancient statue, excites me. She has a trifle more intelligence than the others, which is no detriment, and she’s not hungry for money. That is simply extraordinary.
When she’s not working I take her to a movie or to a cheap dance hall in some other neighborhood. Makes no difference to her where we go. Just bring a little booze along, that’s all. Not that she wants to go blotto, no … it makes things smoother, she thinks. She’s a country girl from up-State.
Never any tension in her presence. Laughs easily, enjoys everything. When I take her home—she lives in a boarding house—we have to stand in the hallway and make as best we can. A nerve-racking business, what with the boarders coming and going all night long.
Sometimes, on leaving her, I ask myself how come I never hitched up with this sort, the easy going type, instead of the difficult ones? This gal hasn’t an ounce of ambition; nothing bothers her, nothing worries her. She doesn’t even worry about getting caught, as the saying goes. (Probably skillful with the darning needle.)
It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that the reason I’m immune is because I’d be bored stiff in no time.
Anyway, there’s little danger of my linking up with her in solid fashion. I’m a boarder myself, one not above pilfering change from the landlady’s purse.
I said she had a marvelous physique, this fly by night. It’s true. She was full and supple, limber, smooth as a seal. When I ran my hands over her buttocks it was enough to make me forget all my problems, Nietzsche, Stirner, Bakunin as well. As for her mug, if it wasn’t exactly beautiful, it was attractive and arresting. Perhaps her nose was a trifle long, a trifle thick, but it suited her personality, suited that laughing cunt of hers, is what I mean. But the moment I began to make comparison between her body and Mona’s I knew it was useless to go into it. Whatever flesh and blood qualities she had, this one, they remained flesh and blood. There was nothing more to her than what you could see and touch, hear and smell. With Mona it was another story entirely. Any portion of her body served to inflame me. Her personality was as much in her left teat, so to speak, as in her little right toe. The flesh spoke from every quarter, every angle. Strangely, hers was not a perfect body either. But it was melodious and provocative. Her body echoed her moods. She had no need to flaunt it or fling it about; she had only to inhabit it, to be it.
There was also this about Mona’s body—it was constantly changing. How well I remember those days when we lived with the doctor and his family in the Bronx, when we always took a shower together, soaped one another, hugged one another, fucked as best we could—under the shower—while the cockroaches streamed up and down the walls like armies in full rout. Her body then, though I loved it, was out of line. The flesh drooped from her waist like folds, the breasts hung loose, the buttocks were too flat, too boyish. Yet that same body, draped in a stiff poker dot Swiss dress, had all the charm and allure of a soubrette’s. The neck was full, a columnar neck, I always called it, and it suited the rich, dark, vibrant voice which issued from it. As the months and years went by this body went through all manner of changes. At times it grew taut, slender, drum-like. Almost too taut, too slender. And then it would change again, each change registering her inner transformation, her fluctuations, her moods, longings and frustrations. But always it remained provocative—fully alive, responsive, tingling, pulsing with love, tenderness, passion. Each day it seemed to speak a new language.
What power then could the body of another exert? At the most only a feeble, transitory one. I had found the body, no other was necessary. No other would ever fully satisfy me. No, the laughing kind was not for me. One penetrated that sort of body like a knife going through cardboard. What I craved was the elusive. (The elusive basilisk, is how I put it to myself.) The elusive and the insatiable at the same time. A body like Mona’s own, which, the more one possessed it the more one became possessed. A body which could bring with it all the woes of Egypt—and its wonders, its marvels.
I tried another dance hall. Everything was perfect—music, lights, girls, even the ventilators. But never did I feel more loneliness, more desolation. In desperation I danced with one after another, all responsive, yielding, ductile, malleable, all gracious, lovely, satiny and dusky, but a despair had come over me, a weight which crushed me. As the afternoon wore on a feeling of nausea seized me. The music particularly revolted me. How many thousand times had I heard these pale, feeble, utterly idiotic tunes with their sickening words of endearment! The offspring of pimps and narks who had never known the pangs of love. Embryonic, I kept repeating to myself. The music of embryos made for embryos. The sloth calling to its mate in five feet of sewer water; the weasel weeping for his lost one and drowning in his own pipi. Romance, of the copulation of the violet and the stink-wort. I love you! Written on fine, silky toilet paper stroked by a thousand super-fine combs. Rhymes invented by mangy pederasts; lyrics by Albumen and his mates. Pfui!
Fleeing the place I thought of the African records I once owned, thought of the blood beat, steady and incessant, which animated their music. Only the steady, recurring, pounding rhythm of sex—but how refreshing, how pure, how innocent!
I was in such a state that I felt like pulling out my cock, right in the middle of Broadway, and jerking off. Imagine a sex maniac pulling out his prick—on a Saturday afternoon!—in full view of the Automat!
Fuming and raging, I strolled over to Central Park and flung myself on the grass. Money gone, what was there to do? The dance mania … I was still thinkin’ on it. Still climbing that steep flight of steps to the ticket booth where the hairy Greek sat and grabbed the money. (Yes, she’ll be here soon; why don’t you dance with one of the other girls?) Often she didn’t show up at all. In a corner, on a dais, the colored musicians working like fury, sweating, panting, wheezing; grinding it out hour after hour with scarcely a let up. No fun in it for them, not for the girls either, even though they did wet their pants occasionally. One had to be screwy to patronize such a dive.
Giving way to a feeling of delicious drowsiness, I was on the point of closing
