Mario Puzo - Fools die

“That’s right,” I said.

“Well, for your information,” Janelle said, “I go to my gynecologist every month and get a complete checkup.”

“That’s full of shit,” I said. “The only way that you can tell is to take a culture. And most gynecologists do not. They take it in a thin glass with light brown jelly from your cervix. The test is very tricky and it’s not always a positive test.”

She was fascinated now, so I threw her a zinger. “And if you think you can beat the rap by just going down on a guy, the percentages are much greater for a woman getting a venereal disease from going down on a man than a man has from going down on a woman.”

Janelle sprang up from the bed. She was giggling, but she yelled, “Unfair! Unfair!”

We both laughed.

“And gonorrhea is nothing,” I said. “Syphilis is the real bad part. If you go down on a guy, you can get a nice chancre on your mouth or your lips or even your tonsils. It would hurt your acting career. What you have to look out for on a chancre is if it’s dull red and breaks down into a dull red sore that does not bleed easily. Now, here’s what’s tricky about it. The symptoms can vanish in one to five weeks, but the disease is still in your body and you can infect somebody after this point. You may get a second lesion or the palms and soles of your feet may develop red bumps.” I picked up one of her feet and said, “Nope, you haven’t got them.”

She was fascinated now, and she hadn’t caught on either to why I was lecturing her.

“What about men? What do you bastards get out of all this?”

“Well,” I said, “we get swelling of the lymph glands in the groin, and that’s why sometimes you tell a guy he’s got two pairs of balls, or sometimes you lose your hair. That’s why in the old days the slang for syphilis was ‘haircut.’ But still, you’re not in too bad a shape. Penicillin can wipe it all out. Again, as I said, the only trouble is men know they got it, but women don’t and that’s why women are not biologically equipped to be promiscuous.”

Janelle looked a little stunned. “Do you find this fascinating? You son of a bitch.” She was beginning to catch on.

I continued very blandly. “But it’s not as terrible as it sounds. Even if you don’t find out that you have syphilis or, as it happens with most women, you have no symptoms of any kind unless some guy tells you out of the goodness of his heart. In one year you won’t be infectious. You won’t infect anyone.” I smiled at her. “Unless you’re a pregnant woman and then your child is born with syphilis.”

I could see her shrink away from the thought. “Now after that one year, two-thirds of those infected will live with no ill effects. They are home free. They are OK.”

I smiled at her.

Janelle said suspiciously, “And the other one-third?”

“They’re in a lot of trouble,” I said. “Syphillis injures the heart, it injures the blood vessels. It can lie low for ten to twenty years, and then it can cause insanity, it can cause paralysis, make you a paralytic. It can also affect your eyes, lungs and liver. So you see, my dear, you’re shit out of luck.”

Janelle said, “You’re just telling me this to keep me from going out with other men. You’re just trying to scare me just like my mother did when I was fifteen by telling me I’d be pregnant.”

“Sure,” I said. “But I’m backing it up with science. I have no moral objection. You can fuck whoever you want. You don’t belong to me.”

“You’re such a smart-ass,” Janelle said. “Maybe they’ll come up with a pill just like the birth control pill.”

I made my voice sound very sincere. “Sure,” I said. “They have that already. If you take a tablet of five hundred milligrams of penicillin one hour before you have contact, it knocks out the syphilis completely. But sometimes it doesn’t work and it just reaches the symptoms and then ten or twenty years later you can be really screwed. If you take it too early or too late, these spirochetes multiply. Do you know what spirochetes are? They’re like corkscrews and they fill up your blood and get into the tissues and there’s not enough blood in your tissues to fight it off. There is something about the drug that keeps the cell from increasing and blocking off the infection, and then the disease becomes resistant to penicillin in your body. In fact, the penicillin helps them grow. But there is another thing you can use. There is a female gel, Proganasy, that’s used as a contraceptive and they found that it destroys VD bacteria as well, so you can kill two birds with one stone. Come to think of it, my friend Osano uses those penicillin pills whenever he thinks he’s going to get lucky with a girl.”

Janelle laughed scornfully. “That’s all right for men. You men will fuck anything, but women never know who or when they are going to fuck until an hour or two hours beforehand.”

“Well,” I said very cheerfully, “let me give you some advice. Never fuck anybody between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. They have about ten times more VD than any other age bracket. Another thing is before you go to bed with a guy, give him a short arm.”

Janelle said. “That sounds disgusting. What is that?”

“Well,” I said, “you strip down his penis, you know, like you’re masturbating him, and if there’s a yellow fluid coming out like a drippage, you know he’s infected. That’s what prostitutes do.”

When I said that, I knew I had gone too far. She gave me a cold look, so I went on hastily. “Another thing is herpes virus. It isn’t really a venereal disease and is usually transmitted by uncircumcised men. It can give women cervical cancer. So you see what the score is. You can get cancer from screwing, syphilis from screwing and never even know you’re infected. And that’s why women can’t fuck as freely as men.”

Janelle clapped her hands, “Bravo, Professor. I think I’ll just fuck women.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said.

It was easy for me to say. I wasn’t jealous of her women lovers.

On my next trip back a month later I called Janelle, and we decided to have dinner and go to the movies together. There was something a little cold in her voice, so I was wary, which prepared me for the shock of seeing her when I picked her up at her apartment.

Alice opened the door and I kissed her and I asked Mice how Janelle was and Alice rolled her eyes up in her head, which meant I could expect Janelle to be a little crazy. Well, it wasn’t crazy, but it was a little funny. When Janelle came out of the bedroom, she was dressed as I had never seen her before.

She had on a white fedora with a red ribbon in it. The brim snapped over her dark brown gold-flecked eyes. She was wearing a perfectly tailored man’s suit of white silk, or what looked like silk. The trouser legs were strictly tailored straight as any man’s. She had on a white silk shirt and the most beautiful red-and-blue-striped tie, and to top it off, she was carrying a delicately slender cream-colored Gucci cane, which she proceeded to stab me in the stomach with. It was a direct challenge, I knew what she was doing; she was coming out of the closet and without words she was telling the world of her bisexuality.

She said, “How do you like it?”

I smiled and said, “Great.” The most dapper dyke I ever met. “Where do you want to eat?”

She leaned on her cane and watched me very coolly. “I think,” she said, “we should eat at Scandia and that for once in our relationship you might take me to a nightclub.”

We had never eaten at the fancy places. We had never gone to a nightclub. But I said OK. I understood, I think, what she was doing. She was forcing me to acknowledge to the world that I loved her despite her bisexuality, testing me to see if I could bear the dyke jokes and snickers. Since I had already accepted the fact myself, I didn’t care what anybody else thought.