David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

Vs. Representative Laughter-Scenario: C. R-Cruz: 'Len, Len, what is different between beer nuts and deer nuts. I hear this in a club on the Loop' (The Loooop.) 'Beer nuts are fifty cents and yet deer nuts are just under a… buck!' (Becoming here crumpled, other, helpless in the grip of the nasty ( grip of the nasty).)

Not to mention an utterly deadly accent, a fellation of each syllable through the auto-lubricated portal that is at once a deep garden and a tall jagged city. A planet.

'OH LENITO I WILL EEET YOU!'

(Congress, by the way, has revealed itself here to be a loud and exquisitely goy affair — cries from Carlina and accessory of a desperation only partly channeled; mad twined scrabble of a search for something key hidden at a system of bodies' center.)

And so ungodly precise about it all:

'Len, Len, how many of the girls known as Jewish American Princesses are needed for the screwing in of a light bulb?'

'Princesses?'

'Answer is two of them I heard. One to call a Daddy and one to buy the Tab!' contorting into wherever she sits. (Wicked. There is a wickedness in the corners here, and it is good, see below, (though I must say I found that particular joke offensive.))

Further,

MIKEY AND LOUIS

"So what's the point of even calling him, then?"

"Advice, Tagus. He's older. He's been around. He's been there. He can put the thing in some perspective for you."

"He's a pecker in situations like Carlina and me, is the thing. He talks down to me when I let him know I want advice."

"He saw how you were treating her good and how she was acting like it was going to last."

"It wasn't like I wanted it to last forever or anything."

"Len's a smart guy, Mikey."

"It's just if I'm going to stop sleeping with somebody I want it to be my decision to stop it, is all. Or to at least talk about it first."

"He'll understand, probably. You said he met her. He'll tell you to not sweat it."

"I really think I'd rather hit somebody."

"Tagus."

"Line's busy anyway."

"Have a beer. At least it means they're home." "Maybe I should just go ahead and call Carlina." "I wouldn't." "I'm predicting right now he'll be a pecker about it."

LEN

I have told the cinnamon girl how I will never be forgiven for this. Never. How by the time you reach a certain history and situation you're bound up with people, part of a larger thing. How the whole constellation becomes as liquid, and any agitation ripples. She asked me who it was who first said never say never. I told her it must have been someone alone.

She is silk in a bed of mail-order satin. Complete and seamless, an egg of sexual muscle. My motions atop her are dislocated, frantic, my lone interstice a trans-cultural spice of encouragement I smell with my spine. As, inside it, I go, I cry out to a god whose absence I have never felt so keenly.

She wears Catholic medals, a jingle all their own. I have apologized for invoking god's name at such a moment. She touches my hip. There are no atheists in foxy holes. She laughs into my chest; I feel her eyes' squeeze.

She is wrong for me.

LABOV

I have arranged Mrs. Tagus's chair so that she is able to use my wall-telephone on the wall of my kitchen to talk to Lenny, her son, without having to stand — which in her conditions, at a time like this, with family and stomach trouble, standing would not be good. She is on the phone with Lenny. There is much bravery here as Mrs. Tagus listens without crying to things Lenny is saying on the wall-telephone. My heart is going out. I love Mrs. Tagus like a man friend loves a woman friend. She is my last true and old friend in this world except for old Schoenweiss the dentist who is too deaf now to converse about weather with even. As I drink my own tea and I look at Mrs. Tagus in her fine and well made coat and fine old wool dress with some small section of slip showing over heavy dark stockings and then the soft white shoes with the thick rubber soles, for her arches, which fell, her thick eyeglasses for her eyes and still mostly dark hair in color under a beaver hat which it breaks my heart to be remembering her late Arnold Tagus wearing just that hat to Bears football games with me, in the cold of old autumns, I know, inside, I love Mrs. Tagus, who I called Greta to her face while I helped her to the chair I arranged under the wall-telephone and strongly urged her, as a friend I said, to make for the sake of her stomach the telephone call that could maybe clear up some of the total misunderstanding. I am a dry and yellow snarling animal who loves another animal.

There is by my wall-telephone a large and wide section of flowered wallpaper, from the wall of my kitchen, which has been peeling since Jimmy Carter (try talking to my landlord about anything), and it is curving over Mrs. Tagus's hat and head like a wave of cornflower-blue water, with flowers. I do not like the way it appears to curve over Greta Tagus.

Anger from me at her Lenny, however? This I could not manage even if I could understand quite this trouble which keeps Mrs. Tagus crumpled over her stomach under my telephone. Lenny Tagus is a nice boy. This is a thing I know. I know the Lenny Tagus who put himself through a college, with a doctorate even, and all the time was helping the finances of Arnold and Greta Tagus when Arnold Tagus's office got bought by State Farm and he got put on commission only, which if you ask anybody is what killed him. The Lenny who would have helped also put Mikey through a college if Mike had not received the scholarship in college football to the Illini of the University of Illinois, but dropped out when it was revealed how he had never learned enough about reading, and went instead to work for the Softball Department of the Chicago Park District, where he is doing a fine and solid job, although anybody could see how winters would be slow, in terms of softball business.

The Lenny Tagus who calls his mother, Mrs. Tagus, twice a week, like my clock, "just to talk," is the excuse, except really to always let his mother know how she's loved by him and not forgotten alone in her and Arnold's quite old cold apartment. Not to mention how Mrs. Tagus, often myself in addition, gets invited into Lenny's home and family for such a dinner cooked by Bonnie Tagus! Once a month or more. Josh Tagus and Saul Tagus and little Becky Tagus in pajamas with pajama-feet attached, yawning over milk in plastic mugs with cartoons on their sides. Lenny smoothing their fine thin child's hair and reading to them from Gibran or Novalis under a soft lamp. You know from warmth? There is warmth in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Tagus.

"So I should meet this person?" Mrs. Tagus is questioning under the wave of wallpaper into my phone. "Us and Mike and Bonnie and this person should just sit down and talk like old friends?" She broaches to Lenny the possibility that his mind is maybe temporarily out of order, maybe from stress and tension from middle age. She respectfully mentions just so he'll know that she can hear Becky, and also it sounds like Bonnie, crying in Lenny's telephone's background. She expresses disbelieving shock, plus all-new and severe stomach trouble, at Lenny's revealing that a certain girl who was not Bonnie was right there, he said, now, in his and Bonnie's master bedroom, under a sheet, with Lenny, and that Bonnie: when Lenny last saw her she was in the spray-cleaner closet of the utility room, crying.

The Len Tagus with a crewcut and Bermuda shorts with black socks who mowed the building's lawns when the super was under the weather from gin, to save the Tagus family a little rent. Who I remember refused to let Mike (Mike is four years younger but at ten even he already had inches and pounds over Lenny, over everybody — Mike may be five years younger, it's four or five) who would not let Mike fight a fight on his behalf when wicked boys broke Lenny's French horn and kicked him in the back with shoes as he lay on the ground of the schoolyard and left yellow bruises I can still with my eyes closed see on the back of young Lenny Tagus, who wouldn't let Mikey know who to fight.