Gilbert Sorrentino - Little Casino

It is the fashion to make fun of New Jersey, much as it is the fashion to denigrate Los Angeles and to praise the San Francisco Bay Area. “What weather!” they bubble, as the earth splits open amid vast fires, and the houses slide downhill, in cataracts of mud, onto the clogged and poisonous freeways.

Sexual experiences are rarely reported with candor, accuracy, or honesty, and these are no exceptions.

Why is this the case? It’s magic?

In 1968, CBS wanted Thelonious Monk to record an album of Beatles tunes. There sat the band’s songbook on his piano. To add, as the nice phrase has it, insult to injury, the company sent someone to Monk’s apartment to play through the book. In case Monk couldn’t read music.

Well, you needn’t, motherfucker.

APHOTOGRAPH OF DOLORES IN PROSPECT Park. She is in a dusty-rose suit and has on a small white hat with a half-veil, white gloves, blush-tan nylons, and white high heels. Behind her are Mary and Liz. In another photograph we discover Dolores and Georgene, the latter in a pale-yellow suit with matching gloves and a flat straw hat, white heels. Annette is beside her, too, her face in half-profile, laughing, one hand holding down her light beige skirt, which the wind is lifting, slightly, above her knees. Their teeth seem remarkably white, their figures just beginning to take on womanly contours. It must be Easter Sunday, let us assume that it is Easter Sunday. On the back of a photograph of Dolores — yet another one, in which she poses dramatically against a lamppost — someone has written, in a labored, childish hand, “sweet young girl.”

Time. The photographs, somewhat carelessly and inadequately described here, are in black and white.

“Photographs, because they exclude everything except the split second in which they are snapped, always lie,” he once wrote. Time.

And the angels sing, but perhaps not always.

Dusty rose, pale yellow, and light beige were spring colors, worn exclusively by virgins. Don’t argue with me!

DONALD SMIRKS AND TELLS THE FOOL THAT Liz told him, and that Mary, Liz’s best friend, told her, and that she, Mary, heard it from Georgene, who goes to Fontbonne Hall with Dolores, that she, Dolores, sometimes changes, after physical education class, into black lace underwear, garments that look, according to Georgene, like sin itself, garments that have been proscribed by the Pope, garments that the nuns have forbidden the girls even to think about, on pain of mortal sin.

The fool can no longer look at dark, tall, shy Dolores without having the urge to say or do something so idiotically reprehensible that the neighborhood will never forget it, even unto the tenth generation.

The fool can’t talk to Dolores without blushing.

The fool can’t think of Dolores without committing the terrible sin of self-abuse that will send him to hell soon after he loses his health and sanity and life. But Dolores will also be in hell, oh Jesus Christ, and naked, like everybody else. God must be out of his mind.

The fool thinks about talking to Donald concerning this vile tale, but Donald is a thickheaded lump of a boy, ravaged by acne, meanness, and varied budding pathologies, and would, the fool knows, probably snicker and grab at his crotch in overt insult to the dark goddess.

One day, when the fool sees Dolores skipping rope with Mary and Liz, the snowy whiteness of her slip glancing out, each time she skips, from under her navy-blue jumper, he realizes that he will probably collapse and die if he can’t stop thinking of Dolores standing, nervously blushing and trembling, in nothing but her black lace underwear, the specific configuration of which he cannot imagine. Just as well. A few minutes later, as the girls start for home and supper, Dolores approaches the fool and asks him if he’d like to keep her company on the following Thursday night when she baby-sits for the Ryans. He nods, from out of the darkness of erotic mania that has enshrouded him. That would be nice, he says, sure, he says, to the impossibly lovely and amazingly half-naked girl who is smiling at him. His hands at his side are, what are they? They are cauliflowers, much too big to put into his stupid pockets.

Mount St. Vincent’s Academy, St. Mary’s Academy, Cathedral Girls’, Bishop McDonnell Memorial. Each has at least one Dolores among their various student bodies. “Such is the way of Satan and his clever wiles, boys.”

There is no proscription, in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, against the wearing of black lace underwear. If such apparel should become the occasion of sin, however, well, you’re on your own.

Donald, you will not be surprised to know, was secretly in love with Dolores, of course. He often whispered her name as he punched himself in the mouth. What the hell happened to your face, Don?

Donald liked to eat chocolate-covered graham crackers covered with grape jelly, and adorned with chopped-up marshmallows, all washed down with Dixie Shake. His acne sang the song of empty gratification.

To think that God might be out of his mind is blasphemous. On the other hand, is it blasphemous to think that God might occasionally wear a dusty-rose suit? A string of pearls?

“You’re on dangerous ground, boys, with a thought like that, just what the foul fiend likes to see.”

“La volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal.”

DOLORES, DARK, BLACK-EYED, SWEET ITALIAN girl, with a straight-A average at Fontbonne Hall, who looks absolutely beautiful in her school uniform, asks him if he’d like to come over to the Ryans’ apartment to keep her company while she’s baby-sitting. Her breasts are too small — just as well — for her to wear a brassiere, but lovely beneath her snowy, spotless blouse.

He sees that the Ryans have a piano in the living room, a small upright that, he will soon discover, is utterly out of tune. They drink Cokes, they eat peanut-butter sandwiches, and then Dolores, he’s certain, looks directly into his face and tells him that she’s wearing black lace underwear. He thinks that he probably hasn’t heard this, so he grins and says — what savoir faire! — “What?” She says, he is certain that she says, “I know you won’t believe me, you’re such a dope, but I’m wearing, really, black lace underwear.” Just as he’s about to do something crazed and reckless, he has no idea what, perhaps pull up her skirt or kiss her white anklets, she smiles, drapes, for some arcane reason, a towel over his head, and sits down at the piano. She plays, mechanically, the tinny piano making the music sinister, “All or Nothing at All.” One of the straps of her jumper slips off her shoulder and he buries his face in the towel. He cannot look at her and he cannot think of her and he cannot say her name. Even the towel is making him crazy.

“Just as well,” in the context of this faux-vignette, or, perhaps more accurately, Catholic joke, means “just as well,” and only “just as well.”

Dolores became a registered nurse.

“Haunted heart,” a malady with which this “dope” was afflicted, has an almost comic or melodramatic ring to it, especially when paired with “registered nurse.” Can’t be helped.

Many of the boys and young men in the neighborhood thought that Dolores’s nose was too big, and made crude and vulgar comments about her. These comments issued from those who had driven themselves senseless with pink-and-white fantasies concerning blondes like Doris Day, June Allyson, and Virginia Mayo, women who, it might fairly be argued, were virtually noseless. Dolores’s nose was the nose of Clodia and Lesbia, of Sulpicia and Cynthia. Of Helen.