Page 301 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 289

and Hank the Tank kicking out my teeth in football and breaking
my finger, and returning more than twenty times after summers and
after Christmases on busses and trains to six million tick tick minutes
at Misery. I always went back for more: it took me almost five rounds
to lose the boxing match, because I was rough and tough and ready
to beat them all up. Louisa intuited some things about me, but she
didn’t know everything. She didn’t know about the vast experiments
in the South State Street dives, parlors of tattoo and pool, or about
Jocelyn. When I experimented with giving up Confession, I stopped
telling everybody everything.
Besides, Louisa never would have believed the gang of younger
brewers, five or six, who let me tag along to Rush Street and Wells,
drinking, and then four of us, come on, kid, to South State Street,
stepping over winos, where we yelled, “Go-go, baby, go, go,” at the
white-booted strippers bumping it out over the ancient plush seats
of the burlesque theater. “Take it off, take it off!”
Very jokey, very drunk, two or three of the brewers played at
playing pocket-pool in their pants and moaning and laughing and
mooing like bulls, and we all palsy-walsy went running drunken out
into the spring night, stopping in later at the tavern where the older
whores came to play tennis, and the guys, come on, kid, enrolling me
in higher education, kidded them, the old whoors, all night, buying
plenty of drinks, jeweling them down from twenty to five bucks a
throw, until all their other prospects had stumbled out, and then
laughing in the old cosmetic faces and hooting at them, Oh, sister,
how much will you pay us to gangbang you?
The bartender laughed. He thought it so funny them, the old
whoors, cheated out of their tricks, because the cops could arrest him
for prostitution, because the gag kept everybody drinking longer and
later, everybody so drunk even the old whores were laughing, because
the bartender paid them to keep us all spending like drunken sailors.
At four in the morning, when the bars closed, that world, Oh,
Jesus, was a cold place, Oh, Jesus, where street lights shined, Oh, Jesus,
hard down on hard men hardening me.

May 20, 1964

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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