‘she’ all the while that we were drinking our dinner of rye whiskey… . .”
Ernest is at last obliged to pause for breath; then he begins aria da capo, and tells it all over again.
“Then when we got drunk, we found some cunt, and everything was all fixed up for us to lay her … only then what do you suppose happened, Alf? This guy decided that he can give his wife a Hell of a lot better screw than this frog who was fucking her, and he tells me he is going home to show her, And he doesn’t even invite me to go along! Jesus, wouldn’t you think, after he’d invited me to dinner and all, he’d at least do that much? But he just swallowed a couple of those peptonic pills they sell you at bars and goes off by himself… . That just goes to show you how a cunt can ruin a fine man…”
Somewhere on his way Ernest has picked up a batch of fancy photographs.
They’re on his bureau, and while I’m listening to his story for the third time I start to look them over. They’re really high-class stuff, with cunts that look like cunt instead of a bunch of aunties trying to be cute … . and right in the first half dozen … . there’s Anna. I let out a howl, and Ernest has to see what I’ve found …
he didn’t even know he had the things.
Well, it’s a small world, Ernest says, looking them over and finding a couple more of Anna … that must be why he bought them, because she was in the lot.
And Anna’s another bitch on horseback, he tells me. Do I think that Anna’s going to do me or anyone else of us any good? Anna’s not going to do anyone any good, least of all Anna.
When I leave I have the pictures of Anna in my pocket and a large part of Ernest’s quart of rye in my stomach. Ernest has taken another pint from his bureau and he’s still talking, calling for his dancing girls again. I walk down to the office, and, since there’s never anything for me to do there, write a couple of letters in order to make it look as though I were working for a half hour or so.
Then I sail out again to see what I can find.
Just as I’m going out to the street I bump into Arthur. He’s been looking for me, he says, and he’s so excited that he can hardly talk. Before he can tell me what it’s all about he has to have a drink, and he can’t even wait to cross the street to a place where I have credit … . we go into the bar next to the office, where my credit has been exhausted for almost a month.
It develops that our little friend Charlotte has been to call on Arthur. He wasn’t at home, but she left a note … . an invitation for both of us to drop in and see her. Arthur is shitting his pants over it, and he insists on reading the note aloud so that I’ll be certain not to miss the good parts.
“Imagine that little cunt coming up to my joint,” he stutters. “Jesus, I can’t imagine what they thought when the bell rang and she was standing there at the door… . They’ll think I’m nuts at my place. Look, read this part again … what does that mean if it isn’t an invitation to come around there and throw a fuck her way? Jesus, didn’t I tell you that she was a bitch? Didn’t I?” He gulps down his pernod and calls for another. “Look, Alf, how’s your nerve today? Do you have your nerve? My God, I haven’t got the guts to go there and face her alone … . but if you were there it would be all right…” He looks anxiously at me to see how I’m taking all this. “Listen, Alf, I’ll tell you what … . you can try her first. We’ll both go up there and you can screw her and then I’ll hop on … Christ, I didn’t have to let you know anything about this, you know … . I could have just gone up there and laid her myself. But that’s not my way Alf … . Only, did you ever hear of such a thing in your life? Who the fuck ever heard of a midget who was a bitch? Hell, I never ever thought about the sex life of a midget before… .”
I’m not at all sure that Arthur isn’t talking through his hat. He’s reading a lot more out of that note than was written into it, and the only thing that is definitely suggested is a drink. But I have faith in Arthur’s hunches, if not his reasoning, and the midget business is so crazy that it’s appealing. In short, we make the call… . .
Charlotte looks like a doll when she lets us in … but they don’t include all of what she has on a doll. If she’s surprised to see both of us she doesn’t show it …
. She’s so glad that we’ve come, she says … she didn’t know what to do with herself today. Then, just as we’ve settled ourselves into a couple of chairs, in comes a man-sized police dog who shows every intention of eating both Arthur and myself.
If we weren’t in such immediate danger of being devoured it would be funny to see the girl wrestling with that brute. She grabs him by the collar, and without half trying he lifts her off her feet and swings her around. But Charlotte bats him on the nose, tells him that his manners are deplorable, and he quiets down almost immediately. If he even so much as barked at her he’d knock her down, but he puts his tail between his legs and slinks out.
Charlotte says that she wants to shut him up, so she runs out after him, wiggling her tiny ass as efficiently as any full-sized woman. Arthur whispers to me … there’s no question about why she keeps an animal like that, is there? If she kept a toy bull or one of those nasty hairless Mexican things it would be just for a pet … but, Jesus, did I see the dong that son-of-a-bitch had?
After the second drink there’s no question about it… . . Charlotte’s catting to be fucked. There’s not a hell of a lot of difference between the way she acts and the way any other cunt would do it, either. Everything Arthur and I say is very amusing, and sometimes it’s amusing when we don’t intend it to be.
That little cunt! She’s fascinating, sitting up in a chair that’s a mile too big for her, crossing her tiny legs and drawing her skirt up to give us a peep at what’s under there… . . But how the fuck to get a midget into bed with you is something I’ve never had to worry about before, and I don’t know what to do next. I look at Arthur; Arthur grins back at me. We go on drinking Charlotte’s very good scotch
… . she’s taking shots down with water; and it shouldn’t take many of them to do something to her… .
The liquor hits her very suddenly … one minute she’s all right … the next she’s completely up to the ears in it. I don’t realize what’s happened until I’ve gotten up to pour her another… I’m leaning over the chair with my back to Arthur; and before I know what’s going on she has reached for my dong and grabbed the front of my pants. It’s an amazing feeling … . those baby fingers tickling around your fly … I simply stand there and let her fiddle with the thing.
She pats it and strokes it the way some women handle a piece of fur, holding her glass in the other hand and smiling as though we had a secret. But we haven’t any secret for very long … . Arthur gets a squint at what’s going on, and be lets out a howl.
“Hey what about me?” he wants to know … and nobody thinks he’s asking for another shot.
That little cunt doesn’t even stop playing with me. She has such small hands that she can put them into my fly without so much as opening a button, and she shows how it’s done while she turns her doll’s smile on Arthur… .
“You didn’t come over to me,” she says.
It looks as though Arthur had forgotten all about our agreement. He’s off the couch and sitting on the other arm of Charlotte’s chair in as fast a move as I’ve ever seen him make.
“Don’t pay any attention to that guy,” he tells her. “Here feel this … Isn’t that a beauty?” He takes the glass from her and places her hand over his fly. “You don’t want to fool around with anything he’s got… Anyway you never can tell anything about a guy like that… . Where’s he been in the past week? Do you know? Does anybody know? Hell, probably even he doesn’t know… . Here … just squeeze it, like, and see how big it’s getting.”
Charlotte giggles and gives us both a squeeze. He’s being silly, she says …
they’re both too big… Can’t we see that she’s just a very little girl with very small ambitions?
