Page 157 - Rainbow County and Other Stories

Rainbow County 145

really big girls and I wasn’t a very big boy. I mean now it wouldn’t
matter.”
“The bigger the better, huh?” Lloyd rinsed his razor. He knew
enough to humor his customers ambiguously. He met all kinds at
the corner of 18th and Castro. “Never kid a kidder,” he said.
“I kid you not,” Robert said.
For years Robert had been titanic cruising among icebergs
of females in his hometown. At the age of four, innocent of all
need for cover, in the driveway between their homes, he had com-
pared himself to the lower half of a giggling little Judy Esterbank.
One month later, a modern doctor, new to small-town practice,
had sold his mother an introductory twofer on the latest big-city
hygiene and had wheeled him through white double doors to pull
out his tonsils and slice off his foreskin.
He never really trusted her ever again.
At the age of ten, playing Lewis and Clark, he had tripped
over a tent peg catching the strapless halter of twelve-year-old
Joyce Gillette. One flawless white breast popped pert and eager
into view. He stared and she smiled. He stepped forward and
she stepped back tucking herself away as neatly as she packed
her camping equipment. He stared at the veil of her halter. She
stepped to him and cupped his groin in her hand. It felt good. “I
ought to kill you,” she had said. But her hand felt warm through
his jeans. Three years later she kissed him there. Repeatedly. Up
and down.
“Indeed I do love the little ladies,” Robert said to Lloyd.
Screw Judy and screw Joyce. He hated himself for continuing the
elaborate lie he had intended to leave back in the Midwest.
“And that’s why you moved to San Francisco.” Lloyd dusted
Robert’s neck with clouds of talcum. “That’s why everybody
moves to San Francisco. They say it’s the weather. They say it’s
the restaurants. But it’s the sex that brings them. San Francisco’s
the place where when you go there you get laid.”
“I’m interested in that Coke,” Robert said. Brown air bubbles
rose in slow chains up through the mocha cola.
“It’s second-hand and half-dead,” Lloyd said. He handed
Robert the bottle. “Just wipe the cooties off the top.”

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