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called, I lit a cigarette and asked her if my girl Rooney, her roommate, knew
about it, and she said yes, Rooney knew and had suggested the call to me. I
told her to take a copy of McCall's and go to the bathroom, that I had to
think about it, and would call her back in twenty minutes. She wasn't crying
when she hung up, which was something to be thankful for.
There is a crime in our land more heinous than any other I can think of, right
offhand, and yet it goes unpunished. It is the crime of gullibility. People
who actually believe the lowballing of used car dealers; people who accept the
penciled "2 Drink Minimum" card on their table as law;
girls who swallow the line of horse crud a swinger uses to get them in the
rack. Like that, yeah.
Jenny was a product of that crime wave. She was a typical know-nothing, a
little patsy who had been seduced by four-color lithography and dream-images
from a million mass media, and she believed the stork brought babies.
In about ninety days her tummy was going to tell her she'd been lied to. And
been had.
When I'd started dating Rooney, and had learned that the roommates were two
eighteen-year-olds fresh out of nowhere and firmly under Rooney's wing, it had
been a toss-up whether I'd try to make them on the sly, or become Big Brother
to the brood. As it turned out, Rooney was enough action for me, and I took
the latter route.
We started taking Jenny and Kitten (née Margaret Alice Kirgen, the second
roommate) with us when we went out. Parties, movies, schlepping-around
sessions in which we put miles on the car and layers on our ennui. Kitten
wasn't bad; she was a reasonably hip kid who was actually six months younger
than Jenny, but much more aware of what was going on around her. Jenny was
impossible.
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There was a naïve quality about her that might have been ingenuous, if she
hadn't been so gawdawful stupid along with it. They are two different facets,
naïveté and stupidity, and combined they make for a saccharine-sweet dumb that
paralyzes as it horrifies.
Why did we allow them to come along with us, to adopt us someway; or rather,
let us adopt them?
Put it down to my past, which was filled with incomplete memories of deeds I
did not care to think about. I can't remember ever having been young, not
really. On my own as far back as I can recall, there was never that innocence
of childhood or nature that I longed to see in others. So Jenny and
Kitten became my social projects. Not in any elaborate sense, but it pleasured
me to see them enjoy the bounties of the young ... oh hell, Norman Rockwell
and Edgar A. Guest and let's all pose for a Pepsi ad.
Kenneth Duane Markham, thirty years old and a humanitarian. Let's send this
child to camp (if we can't roll her in the hay, hey hey!). Call it noble
intentions, for all the wrong reasons.
At one of the parties we took Jenny to, I ran across Roger Gore. He was (is)
(will be, till I
catch his face in my right hand) a good-looking jackpotter with a flair for
wearing clothes that would look slovenly on other guys, and a laudable record
of having avoided honest labor. His father owned a chain of something or
others, and Roger indulged himself by taking jobs as switchman on the
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railroad, soap salesman door to door, night watchman. He never did any of them
for very long; his rationale for taking on such onerous tasks was the same as
that of the aspiring novelist. He wanted to be able to say he had done these
things. It was all very Robert Ruark and hairy-chested and proletarian. He was
a fraud. But a good-looking, smooth fraud with a flair for wearing clothes
that would look--but I said that already.
It was one of those parties where some college kid had met a hipster in a
downtown black-and-tan club, and had invited him over the following night for
"a little get-together." As a consequence, the room was jammed, half with
inept, callow UCLA students, half with sinuous spades wrapped up in color. It
was one of those scenes where the gray cats felt a sense of adventure and
titillation just being in the same time-zone with Negroes, and the blacks were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]