Great Jones Street

"He was wearing perforated shoes."

"I know," Menefee said. "I tried to talk him out of it, the rain and all, but I guess he thought perforated shoes were called for. He's had them twenty years, he said. The man's unca

Menefee closed the great umbrella and walked up the stairs with me. He checked the apartment before allowing me to enter. Then he left like a mythological bird returning to its jeweled nest. There was no heat. I ran the bath water and undressed. The water turned cold almost immediately but I let it run until the tub was nearly full. Then I took a bath, scrubbing my body with a hairbrush, outlasting the series of deep quakes that passed through me. When I stepped out finally, I was colder than the room.

23

"I have a terminal fantasy," Fenig said. "It comes to me more and more often, a recurring obsessive thing, and I add little details every time. Fu

I slaughter whoever breaches the stillness of this building. Guard duty through the night. Feeding raw meat to my dogs. Dragging the dead and wounded down the stairs and placing them along the street at intervals of ten yards. Pouring gasoline. Lighting the bodies. Bonfires of the dead and dying. It's frankly a gorgeous sight. Tomato soup and fiction through the day. Guard duty all the night. Why are terminal events so pleasing, I wonder?"

Fenig was seated on the large trunk that contained his manuscripts. He bumped the heels of his sneakered feet in elusive tempo against the front of the trunk. His clothes, freshly laundered, were the same as those he'd worn every other time we'd talked. Perhaps he bought items in fours and fives. It seemed possible this was everything he owned, five sweat shirts, five pairs of chinos, five pairs of te

"I failed at pornography," he said, "because it put me in a position where I the writer was being manipulated by what I wrote. This is the essence of living in P-ville. It makes people easy to manipulate. It puts people on the level of things. I the writer was probably more aware of this than whoever the potential reader might be because I could feel the changes in me, the hardening of mechanisms, the subservience to lust-making and lust-awakening. You have to be half-mad to be a great pornographer and half-Swedish to expose yourself repeatedly to outright porn without losing a measure of whatever makes you human. Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism. It reduces the human element. It encourages antlike response. I the writer suffered these things myself. As my child-characters whipped and raped each other around the clock, they began to fall apart in my fingers, and I myself slowly began to fragment. Pornography's limits and stereotypes worked against me from the very begi