Fran Ross - Oreo

“Then I decided, the hell with that. I did something I’ve never done before. I went out cruising in all the bars. Did all the things I’ve always wanted to do. I felt justified because I was tired of living like a vegetable.”

“You wanted to live like a piece of meat,” Oreo said.

Waverley nodded appreciatively. “Oh, you are evil, e-vil ! Anyway, I had all kinds of guys. In the third week, I had my first Oriental.”

“Is it true what they say about Oriental men?”

“What?”

“That their balls are like this”—she placed one fist on top of the other—“instead of side by side?”

Another nod, another “Evil, e-vil !” He said he would top that by starting a rumor that Castilian fags had a double lisp. Then he opened his wallet. “Let me show you some pictures.” He smiled as he looked at the first one. “These are two of my best friends, Phyllis and Billie.”

Oreo nodded. “Phyllis looks like Ava Gardner.”

“That’s Billie, with an i-e . Phyllis is the one who looks like a truck driver. But that just goes to show you looks are deceiving. Phyllis doesn’t drive trucks. She fixes them. My mother got hold of this one — she’s always popping in on me, snooping around, but that’s another story. Anyway, when she saw this, I had to tell her Phyll was Billie’s boy friend. But if you look close, you can see her bra strap through the tee shirt. I showed it to Phyll’s ex-husband. I thought he would wet his drawers, he laughed so hard. He’s gay, too. A real swish, honey. He’s Filipino and they were going to send him back to the islands. He wanted to stay here and he and Phyll were good buddies, so she married him.” He shook his head, remembering. “You should have seen her at the wedding. She let her hair grow long and looked pretty good, for her. Joe, that’s the guy she married, had to buy her a girdle and stockings and show her how to walk in heels. When she walked, it was a complete panic.” He stood up and did a hoarse, deep-voiced cowhand on stilts. “‘By God, when I get out of these damn things, I’ll never put them on again.’ This was years ago, when girls used to wear dresses to work. But old Phyll would always wear her overalls. Of course, she was a mechanic. If her bosses knew she was a girl, they weren’t saying. She was a damn good mechanic.”

‘‘She looks tough,” said Oreo. “Does she give Billie a hard way to go?”

Waverley looked genuinely shocked. “Of course not. Billie ’s the butch. Phyll’s the sweetest girl you’d ever want to meet. She taught me how to knit. Gives cooking lessons to anyone who asks her. She didn’t have to marry Joe. And then there was the baby—”

“The baby?”

“Sure. Joe said he always wanted one, so Phyll said okay. She made the right decision too. Joe’s the best mother a baby could want. But that Billie — she’d break your balls as soon as look at you.”

“Or twist your tits,” Oreo said.

“What?”

“Never mind — a failure of empathy.”

Waverley went on with his adventures. All his talk of cocks he had known and loved reminded Oreo that she had forgotten to pack the gift she had for her father. It was a plaster of Paris mold of Jimmie C. ’s uncircumcised penis. Helen had refused to let the hospital take a hem in her son’s decoration, saying that she considered it mutilation and that when he was old enough, she would let him decide whether he wanted to have it done. He had not decided because Helen had not put the question to him. Helen had not brought it out in the open because she still did not consider Jimmie C. old enough to decide. Jimmie C. brought it out in the open only to go to the bathroom and to conform to Oreo’s special request — no, threat — for a mold. He conformed to her special request because he loved his sister and because she threatened to tell him one of the “suppose” lines that she had been saving up to make him faint. He, in turn, had a special request, which he sang with a hauntingly sweet melodic line: “Nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh, whatever you do, don’t paint it green.” For one fiendish moment, Oreo had contemplated doing just that, but she contented herself with deciding which of two questions she would put to Samuel when she gave him the mold: “How do you like that putz ?” or “How do you like that, putz ?” She had been leaning toward the second, but now all that was moot, since she had forgotten the putz in question.

As the train approached the next stop, Waverley said, “Well, this is it. Today Newark, tomorrow Rahway. Could you stand such excitement?” They exchanged addresses, and he pulled his black case down from the overhead rack. “Ooo, do I have to pee — the first bar I come to gets the gold,” he said piss elegantly.

“Any pot in the storm,” said Oreo. She had no shame. She watched Honor bound for a tearoom.

Oreo in a phone booth at Penn Station

She opened the Manhattan directory. There were twenty-six Samuel Schwartzes and twenty-two S. Schwartzes. She made a list of likely Schwartzes, leaving out businesses and other obvious wrong leads. She picked her first try at random.

Oreo checked her backpack in a locker and bought a booklet of New York maps. The maps told her she should take the IRT subway, then switch to the number 5 bus.

Oreo on the subway

Oreo wondered about the relative funk quotient after three-quarters of play of the New York Jets as compared with the New York Knicks. Was football basically smellier than basketball? On the one hand, basketball uniforms did not have sleeves and the players therefore got a chance to air their pits during the game. Football players, on the other hand, were padded and wrapped. No chance for pit airing there. But — and it was a considerable but — they played outdoors. There were no proximate brick-and-mortar barriers to funk dissipation. Another consideration: although football involved intense periodic effort, it was so specialized that every mother’s son got a chance to rest between bits. Oreo doubted whether dedicated linebackers dared risk their concentration by taking time out to apply spray, cream, or roll-on deodorant during their rest periods. Basketball, with its continual stampede up and down the court — and with its big stars playing virtually the full forty-eight minutes — seemed to offer little chance for deodorant application, even in the face (or pit) of desire or necessity. And what of hockey? Did ice absorb funk? The parameters were tricky.

Football: a subway reverie

Picture this, sports fans. It is the Super Bowl. A woman in full football gear (custom-made) runs onto the field. (Some spectators at first think that the shoulder pads of a demented 120-pound lad have slipped to the front.) This poor woman loves football with a doomed and touching passion. Every man who has longed for the field as he sat rooted to the stands was at least informed with possibility , however faint. If he were but fifty pounds heavier, but five seconds fleeter… But this is a woman. Imagine what astrodomes of nature and nurture she has had to friedan in order to test that artificial turf. She has reached the line of scrimmage. She ducks under a ham-haunched center and scoops up the ball. She starts to run a down-and-out pattern. What happens next? This is the Super Bowl, folks. Bon appétit! They Eat Her. Yes, fans, one crackback block and opposing players join in the gorge. They tear that cheeky female apart, devour her, uniform and all. Watch as a tattered leftover (part of the lower dexter curve of the number 8, the hip of that most feminine number, the number she wore in all her fantasy games) escapes and skitters across the field toward the tumescence-red first-down marker, one of the many totems of the male klan that kuklux the field. (The marker is a circle with a center pee/sperm-hole bullet above a vertex-down isosceles triangle, representing the penis in cross section above a Lindau wedge, or vagina — the missionary position.) Back home at setside, male viewers lick their lips and burp. Nielsen women feel a frisson of fear, shame, and guilt. The President’s eyes glaze over. And the game resumes with a ferocity and joy unequaled in the history of sports. The next day, the newspapers insist that a high-school student (male) ran onto the field and was escorted off. Everyone, especially the players (who all have a touch of salmonella), agrees that that is what happened. The text of the President’s ecstatic telephone calls to both coaches and each and every player is released to the public. He has proclaimed football henceforth and forevermore the national sport (and diet).