Bill Starr - Meanwhile, Back at the Sex Farm

I knew that I should leave that place now and go somewhere else, because it wasn't any good that night. The trouble was that it wouldn't be any better anyplace else, and I knew that too, but I didn't want to stay there any longer. Part of it was that I was getting a little drunk and drunks always depress me; and part of it was that I wasn't getting anywhere near drunk enough. The real trouble was not the people and not the talk, although god knows they were both pretty bad that night, but just that I was seeing too much sense in everything. I was beginning to wonder again what in hell had happened to my life when I wasn't looking, and where everything had gone. It was one of those panicky moods that used to send me back to my room and my typewriter to put a few eternal verities on paper, as though if I didn't get it said I might forget it, but I had found out that when I did that I was usually too drunk to write, and when I read it over the next day it never was what I had wanted it to be. After I had tried that a few times I didn't do it any more, and every time now that somebody tells me that so-and-so does his best work when he is drunk I can be damned certain that so-and-so isn't worth reading. Trying to write when you are drunk is like climbing into bed with a cunt when you are too drunk to get a hard on; if anything at all happens in either case you are lucky, and if you end up with something pretty good you always know that if you hadn't been drunk it would have been better. So I knew that I wasn't going back to my room to work. I was just going there because there wasn't any better place to be.

Uncle Gino was at the bar when I went through on my way out of his place, and he said hello to me the way he always did when I was going out. He never spoke to anybody when they came in, but when they were going out he seemed to notice them for the first time, and if you weren't on to the trick you stopped and talked to him, and because he talked to you over the bar you usually bought at least one more drink. I don't know how many extra drinks he sold in a night that way, but he must have sold some, because he never gave up that trick so far as I know. None of the regular trade paid any attention to him, of course, and I went on through the bar without stopping and went out to the street.

It was raining worse than it had been earlier in the evening, and I stopped by the doorway to turn up my coat collar. Then I saw her standing there. It was Ruth, and she looked as though she had been standing there for hours.

“Toby threw me out,” she said.

“Get the hell out of here. I'm not having any,” I said.

“It's for good this time. He locked me out and won't even let me in to get a toothbrush.”

“I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything. To hell with it. You knew about Toby when you went with him. I don't want to hear your hard-luck story.”

It was raining so hard that the water was running off my hat in a stream. Water was dripping down the back of my neck too, and when I pulled my collar closer it was clammy on my skin. I looked at Ruth standing there in that puddle, and I wondered how long she had been there waiting for me to come out of Uncle's.

“I haven't got any money,” she told me. There isn't any place I can go.”

I stepped back in the doorway where there was some light, but all I had left was about forty-five cents in change. Poppa wouldn't cash a check, either.

“To hell with you then,” Ruth said.

She started to go off down the street. I looked after her for a minute, and then I followed her.

“You'll have to go someplace else tomorrow,” I said. “I don't want you around my place longer than that.”

I had a feeling that I was doing something very foolish to let her stay there even for the night, and if I had waited there in the doorway a while longer I probably wouldn't have gone after her that way, and the whole thing would have been finished and over with, the way it should have been when she left me to live with the fairy, but now that I had told her she could stay that night I couldn't change my mind. We walked over to the street car line, and once on the way she put her arm in mine the way she had always done, but she took it off almost at once. We didn't say anything, not then nor while we were waiting for the trolley. When the car finally came we got a seat near the back and Ruth tried to look out of the window and I read the car ads until we got to my comer.

The landlady had put up some clean curtains for me; except for that, the two rooms were just about the same as they had been when Ruth had been there. She took the newspaper that I hadn't read yet and spread it on the floor in the corner and hung her coat so it would drip on it, and it was all just like it used to be. All but us.

I never have more than one pair of bedroom slippers at a time, but I had some old tennis shoes that I could wear, so I gave the slippers to Ruth and handed her the robe out of the closet. She put it over her arm and touched it with her fingers.

“That was the color I wanted to get you,” she said, “but I never got around to it. Did you buy it?”

I told her yes, but I didn't tell her it was because it was the one she had pointed out to me in the window one day. She lifted the robe to her nose and smelled of it.

“It smells like you,” she said.

“For god's sake, cut out the act and change your clothes,” I said.

I sat down on the chair and pulled off my wet shoes and socks. Ruth picked up my shoes and went to the closet with them. She found the shoe trees she had bought me once.

“They're just where they were when I left,” she said. “I knew that you wouldn't use them if someone didn't make you.”

“There's some stuff of yours on a shelf in there. I put it away in a box. You can take it with you tomorrow.”

Ruth watched me as I undressed and put on the extra robe. I was trying to be casual about it, but I kept remembering that she didn't come and touch me and interfere. I was conscious of my prick dangling down there, and I was conscious of my hairiness, and I put on the robe as quickly as I could. Ruth didn't say anything. She just watched me, and when I had the robe on and went to the closet to hang up my things she started to take her own clothes off. They were very wet, and everything clung to her so even when she had her slip on I could see almost every line of her body. I gave her a towel, and I should have gotten out of the room while I was still able to control what I was doing, but for some reason I didn't. I stayed and watched her rubbing her skin pink.

She looked just the same; her body seemingly slim, but with wide hips and heavy tits that jiggled with her ass when she walked or when she moved suddenly; her belly dark with a streak of hair down through the center of it. I looked at her cunt and the black froth of hair that grew around it. She was just the same, all as I remembered her. She looked up and saw me looking at her.

“Do you remember the first time I was here?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I wasn't a bit afraid. I was a virgin, too. But it was only afterward I was afraid. After you had fucked me and I forgot what it was going to do for my poetry and my soul and found out what a prick meant. Then, after a while, I was not afraid any more. And now I'm afraid again.”

There didn't seem to be any answer. Perhaps she didn't expect any. She lifted the towel above her head to dry her hair, and the movement pulled her tits up, making them flatter. They were colored from being rubbed with the towel, and the nipples stood out sharp and straight. She flung her hair back over her shoulders with a quick motion of her head, and then she hung up the towel. She stood in front of the bureau combing her hair with my comb, and I could remember a hundred times before when it had been just like that, with the two of us there, and everything almost the same as it was just then. She hadn't been away very long. Two months. Two thousand years.