Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

Peggy Copan sat on the railing of the porch with her legs up and he saw her pink underpants.

Mrs. O’Neill asked Mom if she bought her fish from the guinea street peddler because he had the best. So guineas were dagos and wops and also greaseballs? He was a greaseball like Daddy and his other gramp! But he was also Irish like a thick Mick. A greaseball Mick?

“Is Margie a thick Mick?” Gramp laughed, shelling peas for Sunday dinner. “Between you me and the lamppost, not one of them that’s not, if truth be told, Billy — save your mother.”

When Helen Walsh kneeled down to kiss Jesus he saw her white underpants and so did Guido Pucci who made a hole with his left hand and moved his right finger in and out of it fast. Sister Francis de Sales saw him smiling and yanked him out of the line by his ear: “You committed a terrible sin laughing on Good Friday in Church!”

What Guido did meant fucking, because girls had a hole in their stomachs and you stuck your thing in it. Guido wore rubbers to school because his shoes had such big holes in them. He was a real greaseball because he was born in Italy. In the Christmas play Guido wore a black cardboard moustache and a gold earring and a shiny yellow shirt. His name was Happy Tony and he waved a little Italian flag: “I am Happy Tony, the fruitstand man. I love to sing and dance and my favorite dinner is spaghetti and meatballs! I come from sunny Italy’s pleasant land where grapes and olives grow!”

Granma’s corset stiff and monstrous on the chair, he smelled its flowery perfume. Did that mean that Margie wore one of these things? But her smell was different.

On 68th Street when they moved back from Jersey City he had a fistfight with Angie Salvati his first day on the block. “Cockeyes!” Then they were friends and then he was friends with everybody.

He couldn’t judge a thrown or batted ball and so was admitted into games out of pity. But nobody could run faster.

Mom at the kitchen sink in pink underpants and stockings with her chest bare, drinking a glass of water. “Billy, go back to bed!” her arms crossed over her breasts.

Granma hid the corset when Dr. Drescher came with his medicine bag. He would listen to his chest with his ear thing, just like he did with Granma. Bottles of dark-red and black medicine and sticky spoons. “Port wine to build up the blood, ja.”

He thought the Swedish Hospital would be all white and was astounded to find it drab and ordinary. “Swedish ships are the cleanest.” “The Palmolive company buys all the filthy oil and grease in the tanks after a voyage, that’s what they make that soap from, why do you think they color it green ?”

He thought for sure Granma would open her eyes in the casket, her cheeks were so pink and terrible.

If Tom Thebus got to be his father what would his boy do for a father? White polo shirt and white shorts.

Peggy Copan told him that girls had to sit down to pee. Why was that?

Helen Copan had to go and get dressed two hours before she went dancing with the lifeguard. Two hours! It’s because ladies have to put on under their dresses all those things with straps and hooks and metal things.

“But all Italian ships are white.”

A whole pack of paper napkins: Chez Freddy, Manny’s Rest, Hi-Top, WigWam, Harry and Mary’s, Bluebird, Seven Gables, Blue Front, Red Apple Rest, Mom’s. Granma’s thin belt zipping around in an arc to catch him behind the knees.

Charlie Taylor said his mother had hair all over her hole, he saw it once. What did ladies have to have hair for? Not Mom! His birdie felt itchy when he thought of it.

Guineas were all riffraff and so were the shanty Irish. He was both of them.

His other gramp gave him a funny-looking thing he picked off a tree and Mom told him it was a fig.

Uncle Joe walked back and forth in the living room with his hat on: “Goddamma crip’ thinksa now he’sa the bigga boss!”

Delaney showed him a picture in a little book with Ella Cinders and she had a man’s big birdie in her mouth and big drops of sweat were falling off her face and he felt weak and funny in his head. “Ladies like to suck off a man’s cock.” Cock was the real name for a birdie.

He and Mom visited some old lady cousin or something on a dark winter afternoon and sat in the kitchen in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Tea and stale cookies. “My God! Nothing cheaper than an old skinflint of a shanty spinster.” On the way home they stopped into Holsten’s and had hot chocolate with whipped cream on it. He wasn’t to tell Granma. That night on the couch in the dark front room he heard Mom say that she might have sure picked a winner but God knows what’s right is right and she had the best when she had anything and that if she’d married some Pat or Mike she’d have lived in a coalbin as God was her judge. “That’s right! Praise the greaseball mucky-muck to your own mother’s face! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

A big cardboard box bulging with his toys, the zeppelin down at the bottom but he didn’t play with it anymore.

On the first day of school, Miss Rush pulled him out of a line of children marching in a circle. He cried and didn’t want to go back to school. “You marching goop! Now, sit down in the corner until you can be good!” He had only just been marching around in a circle. Mom said she was an old dried-up battle-ax. She hugged and kissed him and squeezed orange juice and the next day they put him in Miss O’Reilly’s class instead.

The box had two smiling children on it and Mom told him the words said “The Gold Dust Twins.” He learned to read right away.

Miss Rush was round all the way around her body but her legs were skinny and she wore big black shoes. She probably wore a corset like Granma.

Mrs. Schmidt had a big round shape. And her titties were really big, that was a really dirty word, like cock.

They took him in to see Granma at the hospital and she was all grey and took his hand. Her hand felt like a bunch of cold bones and she didn’t have any teeth!

Jimmy Kenny came to the funeral parlor all dressed in his cop suit with a gun and everything. “She was a good woman, Marie. It’s all for the best.” Mom told Gramp it was a wonder the big gawm could spare the time. “Coming to pay his respects in his uniform! What riffraff!” Frankie Caffrey came in his blue serge Confirmation suit and said the Rosary, the thick ignorant Mick.

He got a new box, Super Suds, and threw his zeppelin away.

One summer evening while it was still light and Mom was talking on the front stoop he got up for water. “The Magrinos’ll be around all smiles before you know it looking for your straight Democratic vote.” On a chair he saw something pink with those straps with metal things hanging off it and flushed. But it was small and soft and stretched when you pulled it, so even with the straps and all it wasn’t like Granma’s.

Who made the world? God made the world.

Babies sucked their mothers’ titties? Johnny McNamee said that all ladies had their titties full of milk, like cows. That was the funniest thing he ever heard.

Kickie Delaney was dirty and he felt like with those kids Cookie and Honey when they took him in the garage. “A lady’s hole is a cunt.” Cunt sounded like it had hair all over it.

He told Mom that the Alpine marquee said if you could only cook.“Did you read that?” She bought him Black Beauty in the five-and-ten.

Tom Thebus told him that boys had to be strong and clean to grow up to be men so they shouldn’t touch themselves. He didn’t know what he meant.

At Steeplechase in the place where air from the floor blows ladies’ dresses up he blushed and didn’t know where to look. And those straps were to hold up a lady’s stockings!