Lawrence Block - Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

How are you getting along with your mother and her new husband? (I hate to keep calling him that, it’s so damned depersonalizing, but although you must have told me his name several times, I can’t remember it. I keep thinking Ralph, but that can’t be right, can it? I’ll call him Ralph in this letter just to save time.)

There is one problem you are going to have to face, one question you are going to have to answer. It is simply this — whether or not to fuck Ralph.

No point pretending the question won’t come up. You’re both sexual and desirable, honey, and you’ve got enough of a mother hangup so that you can’t help being attracted to her men for purely competitive reasons. (I seem to recall discussing this with you.) So you are going to want to fuck Ralph and Ralph is going to want to fuck you. You will both also want not to fuck each other. That’s where the conflict is.

Be grateful you’re not a virgin anymore. That would just make things more complicated.

I can’t tell you how to answer the question. What I can tell you is this: If you decide to fuck him, you’ve got to do it in a messless fashion.

(1) Your mother must not find out. This means that you must avoid discovery. It also means that you must be sure Ralph will not, through some misguided impulse, tell her himself. He could do this out of guilt, or he could throw it in her face out of sheer shitfulness. If there’s the slightest chance he might do this, stay the hell away from him.

(2) Neither of you can fall in love with the other. I think you’re sharp enough not to fall in love with Ralph. It would be a natural mistake for you to make, but fortunately you’re sufficiently self-analytical enough to be forewarned. And if you make it sufficiently obvious that the whole thing is inconsequential to you, male pride should keep Ralph from falling in love with you. Unless he’s a hopeless loser, in which case you ought to stay away from him in the first place.

End of lecture.

Things have been generally good for me lately. As you can see from the return address, I’ve moved slightly uptown and am living with Rozanne Gumbino. I think you read some of my letters about her during your defloration. Well, not during. Before or after.

Have a good summer, kid. I envy you all that fresh air and sunshine. But New York does have its compensations, as you know.

Do you ever get a chance to get away? If you can ever make it to New York, please do. You can always stay overnight at our place. Rozanne is anxious to meet you.

Miss Mary Katherine O’Shea

and Miss Barbara Judith Castle

Bar-Bison Dude Ranch

Altamont, New Mexico

Dear Merry Cat and B.J.:

By now I trust you are both settled in for the summer, riding spirited bays and roans and mucking out the stables. When I think of you on the horses, I wish I were your saddles. When I think of the stables, I am reminded of that furnished room in Darien.

May I offer some unsolicited advice? It is, after all, one of the prerogatives of old age. If you’re not in the mood, just skip the following paragraph.

Here goes. The thing is, the two of you are very much involved with one another. As I’m sure you have already come to realize. This never constituted any enormous hangup while you were at school, because the other four daughters of Lancaster were around, and there were various males, myself not (I fondly hope) the least among them.

Now you’re out in God’s country with nothing much around but squares on vacation and cowboys on horseback. You may dig some of the cowboys — anything’s possible — in which case there’s no problem. You may even dig some of the squares, as far as that goes, in which case again there’s no problem.

But it’s also possible that you won’t, and that there won’t be any other interesting females around either, and that you’ll have only each other.

If so, there’s nothing to worry about. That’s the whole point, there’s nothing to worry about. The only worry is worry, to paraphrase FDR. Because you might start brooding that you’re lesbians and that that’s bad and all the rest of it. If you wind up spending the entire summer just balling each other, that’s perfectly fine. It’s much better than balling someone else whom you don’t like, just to convince yourself you’re straight. End of lecture.

Things have been generally good for me lately. As you can see from the return address, I’ve moved slightly uptown and am living with Rozanne Gumbino. I think you read some of my letters about her.

Have a good summer, kids. I envy you all that fresh air and sunshine. But New York does have its compensations, as you know.

I don’t suppose you’ll ever get a chance to get away? But if the summer is a bummer and you quit early, please make it to New York if possible. You can always stay overnight at our place. Rozanne is anxious to meet you.

Miss Alison Keller

c/o General Delivery

Hicksville, Long Island, N.Y.

Dear Alison:

By now I trust you are settled in for the summer with your folks. I hope the painting is going well, and that the rest of the situation is not as bad as you thought it might be.

I also trust you remember I said I would write you c/o General Delivery. I’m also marking the envelope “Hold for Pickup” to prevent some over-zealous postmaster from taking matters into his own hands. I know you’re positive your parents wouldn’t open your mail. But why tempt fate? At the least, you would have to invent something when they asked you who the letter was from. I’ve always found that it pays to tell the truth whenever possible. Since it’s rarely possible, the idea is to minimize situations in which lying becomes necessary.

May I offer some unsolicited advice? It is, after all, one of the prerogatives of old age. If you’re not in the mood, just skip the following paragraph.

Here goes. The thing is, it looks as though you’re pretty sure to have a shitty summer. I wish you just the opposite, but in view of your intrafamily conflicts and your particular social role in Hicksville (and in view of Hicksville itself, which certainly must live up to its name) you and I both know that an idyllic summer is less than likely.

You may be tempted to try to work out some of these conflicts, to try to open things up and assert yourself a little. This sounds like an invitation to cop out, but I think you should, well, cop out. There’s no way you can really resolve anything, and if you try you’ll just make yourself (and everybody else) still more miserable. A vital part of the whole maturation process is learning when to cop out, and this is one of those times.

Take the frustration and put it into your painting. It’s very important to develop a creative means of getting accumulations of garbage out of your head. I do it with a typewriter. You learned a long time ago to do it in paint, and you have the advantage of producing something beautiful, while all I do is write silly letters. Stay with it, Alison. Paint like a madwoman. I think you’re phenomenally talented, for whatever it’s worth.

Things have been generally good for me lately. As you can see from the return address, I’m still living with Rozanne. She knows you were here that day, by the way, and is perfectly agreeable about that sort of thing.

Have a good summer, kid. I envy you all that fresh air and sunshine. But New York does have its compensations, as you well know.