Page 114 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

102 Jack Fritscher

barber shop my old man took me to had pin-up pictures of really
big girls and I wasn’t a very big boy. I mean now it wouldn’t matter.”
“The bigger the better, huh?” Floyd 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 compared
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 Gil-
lette. 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 Floyd. 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.” Floyd 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 restau-
rants. 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.

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