16 August 2008

simple soul she couldn’t fathom my kind of glad nervous talk. I let it drop. She begun to get drunk in the bathroom. “Come on to bed!” I kept saying. “Sixfoot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself ‘Hmm ain’t he nice.’ No! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!” “What on earth are you talking about?” Don’t stand there and tell me that sixfoot redhead ain’t a madame, cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you’re just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody’s a pimp.” “Listen Bea, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a pimp. My only interest is you.” “All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said ‘Hmm a real nice boy instead of a pimp.’” “Bea,” I pleaded with all my soul, “please listen to me and understand. I’m not a pimp.” An hour ago I thought she was a hustler. How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged. O gruesome life how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her red pumps and hurled them at the bathroom door and told her to get out. “Go on, beat it!” I’d sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. There was dead silence in the bathroom. I took off all my clothes and went to bed. Bea came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes. In her simple and funny little mind had been decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman’s shoes against the door and does not tell her to get out. In reverent and sweet little silence she took off all her clothes and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes. I bit her poor belly where a Caesarian scar reached clear to her button. Her hips were so narrow she couldn’t bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were like little sticks. She was only four feet ten. She spread her little legs and I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hungup forlornly in an L.A. shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon. For the next fifteen days we were