Dhalgren

“Yeah. I just wanted to get out and walk around.” He told us he liked to go around naked. To his u

Then Fireball got on his pants and chains—

“So long,” Lanya said.

Fireball gri

—and went down.

We came closer together at the far corner and talked about him awhile, me and Lanya mostly, mostly De

Sort of awed, De

Lanya said: “You are kidding, aren’t you…? Jesus, you’re not!” She was sitting cross-legged with her back on the low wall. When she lifted her harmonica, there were two parallel dashes on her thigh.

“No, I’m not kidding. It was interesting.”

“The awful thing is, I’m sure you did it to find out what it felt like, or for some other half-assedly commendable reason.”

“The main thing,” I explained, “isn’t that I was so scared, but if you get off this very thin line, you get angrier than a motherfucker—”

“Look,” she said, “you wouldn’t kill somebody just to find out what it felt like.”

“It would be easier here than any place else.”

“Christ!” She looked up at the sky.

“Okay,” I said. “So you don’t approve. Why are you angry?”

“Because,” and her eyes came down to mine, “in some fu

While I tried to figure out some way to get her to explain, practical De

“Three bucks. For the work, it pays better than the Richards’s.” I reached over for my pants, took the bills out of my pocket, and gave them to him. “Here.” I glanced at Lanya with a little smile. “I’d split it between you, but she won’t take one.”

She got a tightish expression that let me know she certainly would.

De

Lanya watched me. “I suppose I’d find you dull if you didn’t keep dropping stuff like that into my head. No, don’t say anything. I’m still thinking.” She pushed herself to her knees. “I’ve got to take a piss too.” Her buttocks and one thigh were printed from the roofing paper.

At the corner drain, De

“No,” she said in a considered tone that, when the rest of their exchange was finished, should have made me realize she knew what it was going to be.

“Oh, yeah. I guess you can squat here.” De

“What makes you think I have to squat to piss?”

“You’re a girl. You can’t do it st…I mean I thought girls had to sit down or something.”

“Jesus God!” Lanya said.

“Well, how do you guide it then?” De

“Same way you do.”

“But you don’t have a—?”

She held up two fingers in a peace sign, turned them down against her cunt and sort of pulled. “Like that, if you must know. Now would you please stop staring and let me pee?”

“Oh…yeah.” De

Like something had been given back to him.

He went to the wall. “Now I never knew that,” he said.

When she came up, he was looking at the harmonica; turned and handed it to her across my shoulder.

“You know how to play it?” she asked.

“Naw.”

“The scale starts here,” she said. “See, at the fourth hole.”

We went down (putting on clothes half here, half there), and in the living room got into the discussion with some of the people mentioned (Fireball, Filament, et al) that I wanted to write down some of the things Lanya said in it in the first place. (When I started this, I’d thought that the business about Lanya being turned on by all those fu

One of the things that also went down in the discussion was an argument about getting food, which I guess was really what started the whole thing, and this other part just came up; but my mind follows fu

It had to do with the differences (and similarities) between the girls who were scorpions and the girls who just hung around with us. With reference to the guys who were members and the guys who just hung. It was a good discussion to have and a dull one to reconstruct. And I guess it was mainly for Mike’s benefit anyway (Mike is one of said guys who hangs, a long-haired friend of Devastation’s; sleeps here most of the time but also doesn’t want to join) and I guess/think/suspect one difference between members and non-members anyway is that members know the difference already and don’t have to talk about them (that politeness again) though from some of the things Tarzan says, I wonder.

an intercallory jamb between Wednesday and the twenty-second, bless. Grain, blabbed on slip-time, told its troubles to the tree (all ru

Hart’s blood is good fly-catching bait. So’s fresh sheep-shit. Blatting about in the empty aurical, you think Atocha is in Madrid, what about 92nd Street, or what she told me of St. Croix? She isn’t your ru