I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I lifted her from the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of my cock. I thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began to carry on. She must have had four or five orgasms like that in the air, before I put her feet down on the ground. I took it out without spilling a drop and made her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off into a corner and her bag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out. I note this because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental note to pocket a few coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few hours since I had said to Maxie in the bath house that I would like to take a look at his sister’s quim, and here it was now smack, up against me, sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another. If she had been fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that’s a cinch. And I myself was never in such a fine cool collected scientific frame of mind as now lying on the floor of the vestibule right under Maxie’s nose, pumping it into the private, sacred, and extraordinary quim of his sister Rita. I could have held it in indefinitely – it was incredible how detached I was and yet thoroughly aware of every quiver and jolt she made. But somebody had to pay for making me walk around in the rain grubbing a dime. Somebody had to pay for the ecstasy produced by the germination of all those unwritten books inside me.
Somebody had to verify the authenticity of this private, concealed cunt which had been plaguing me for weeks and months. Who better qualified than I? I thought so hard and fast between orgasms that my cock must have grown another inch or two. Finally I decided to make an end of it by turning her over and back-scuttling her. She balked a bit at first, but when she felt the thing slipping out of her she nearly went crazy. “Oh yes, oh yes, do it, do it!” she gibbered, and with that I really got excited, I had hardly slipped it into her when I felt it coming, one of those long agonizing spurts from the tip of the spinal column. I shoved it in so deep that I felt as if something had given way. We fell over, exhausted, the both of us, and panted like dogs. At the same time, however, I had the presence of mind to feel around for a few coins. Not that it was necessary, because she had already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up for the carfare which I was lacking in Far Rockaway. Even then, by Jesus, it Wasn’t finished. Soon I felt her groping about, first with her hands, then with her mouth. I had still a sort of semi hard-on. She got it into her mouth and she began to caress it with her tongue. I saw stars. The next thing I knew her feet were around my neck and my tongue up her twat. And then I had to get over her again and shove it in, up to the hilt. She squirmed around like an eel, so help me God. And then she began to come again, long, drawn-out, agonizing orgasms, with a whimpering and gibbering that was hallucinating. Finally I had to pull it out and tell her to stop. What a quim! And I had only asked to take a look at it!
Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I had lost as a child. Though I had never a very dear picture of Odessa the aura of it was like the little neighbourhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from which I had been torn away too soon. I get a very definite feeling of it every time I see an Italian painting without perspective: if it is a picture of a funeral procession, for example, it is exactly the sort of experience which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy. If it is a picture of the open street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting on the street and not above it and away from it. Everything that happens is known immediately by everybody, just as among primitive people. Murder is in the air, chance rules.
Just as in the Italian primitives this perspective is lacking, so in the little old neighbourhood from which I was uprooted as a child there were these parallel vertical planes on which everything took place and through which, from layer to layer, everything was communicated, as if by osmosis. The frontiers were sharp, dearly defined, but they were not impassable. I lived then, as a boy, dose to the boundary between the north and the south side. I was just a little bit over on the north side, just a few steps from a broad thoroughfare called North Second Street, which was for me the real boundary line between the north and the south side. The actual boundary was Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant nothing to me, except that it was already beginning to be filled with Jews.
No, North Second Street was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds. I was living, therefore, between two boundaries, the one real, the other imaginary – as I have lived all my life. There was a little street, just a block long which lay between Grand Street and North Second Street, called Fillmore Place. This little street was obliquely opposite the house my grandfather owned and in which we lived. It was the most enchanting street I have ever seen in all my life. It was the ideal street – for a boy, a lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In fact this was just the sort of street it was, containing just such representatives of the human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together harmoniously and inharmoniously, but together, a solid corporation, a dose-knit human spore which could not disintegrate unless the street itself disintegrated.
So it seemed, at least. Until the Williamsburg Bridge was opened, whereupon there followed the invasion of the Jews from Delancey Street, New York. This brought about the disintegration of our little world, of the little street called Fillmore Place, which like the name itself was a street of value, of dignity, of light, of surprises. The Jews came, as I say, and like moths they began to eat into the fabric of our lives until there was nothing left by this moth-like presence which they brought with them everywhere. Soon the street began to smell bad, soon the real people moved away, soon the houses began to deteriorate and even the stoops fell away, like the paint. Soon the street looked like a dirty mouth with all the prominent teeth missing, with ugly charred stumps gaping here and there, the lips rotting, the palate gone. Soon the garbage was knee deep in the gutter and the fire escapes filled with bloated bedding, with cockroaches, with dried blood. Soon the Kosher sign appeared on the shop windows and there was poultry everywhere and lax and sour pickles and enormous loaves of bread. Soon there were baby-carriages in every areaway and on the stoops and in the little yards and before the shop fronts. And with the change the English language also disappeared; one heard nothing but Yiddish, nothing but this sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which God and rotten vegetables sound alike and mean alike.
We were among the first families to move away, following the invasion. Two or three times a year I came back to the old neighbourhood, for a birthday or for Christmas or Thanksgiving. With each visit I marked the loss of something I had loved and cherished. It was like a bad dream. It got worse and worse. The house in which my relatives still lived was like an old fortress going to ruin; they were stranded in one of the wings of the fortress, maintaining a forlorn, island life, beginning themselves to look sheepish, hunted, degraded. They even began to make distinctions between their Jewish neighbours, finding some of them quite human, quite decent, dean, kind, sympathetic, charitable, etc. etc. To me it was heartrending. I could have taken a machine gun and mowed the whole neighbourhood down, Jew and
