Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

He finished Black Beauty in bed with the chicken pox and cried so that he had to wipe his glasses.

In Caught Caught Blackwell once, all the kids quit because they couldn’t catch him, the last kid out.

Gramp got him an Army.45 cap gun for his ninth birthday right after they moved in with him and Granma.

Buttons that said something he couldn’t understand, green ribbons attached, one had a tiny white stone pipe pinned to the ribbon.

Mom bought him Skippy by Percy Crosby for his ninth birthday and he read it four times in a row straight through. He didn’t know any kids like that.

Granma shaking the Brooklyn Eagle at Mom: “Are you going to let this goddamned bimbo get away with this? Mrs. Recco? Mrs. Recco?”

After the lady from the Relief came to the house Mom cried and they moved in with Granma a few weeks later.

He heard Mom say that she had a crackerjack lawyer now, Aloysius Moran, “a black Irishman smart as a Jew.”

He got to know the kids on Senator Street but it was the same thing all over again with playing ball. “This new four-eyed kid can’t catch.”

Mom stopped working at the steam table.

He saw Tom Thebus touch Mom low on her back, almost on the heinie, when everybody was going in to supper, she turned around quick all red in the face, and gave him a little push.

He joined the library and got a book about a caveman and one called Penrod . He didn’t know any kids like that either.

“The son of a bitch is out on Gerritsen Avenue pretty as you please with that tramp!” Gramp was supposed to do something about it or something.

Kickie said that ladies had their holes between their legs, not in their stomachs .

He started crying in a movie about Tarzan and Daddy took him home and on the way bought him Charms.

The bookmaker asked Mom if he could help her through some slush at the corner and she made believe she didn’t hear him.

Mom slapped him across the face so quick that nobody saw it when they left Granma’s grave but he didn’t remember what for.

Rhoda Sandgren wet herself right in her seat in school and all the pee ran down on the floor. He laughed like the other kids but he felt really sorry for her. Later he thought of what Kickie had told him about ladies’ holes.

He kept missing the ball in a catch with Uncle Tom and wanted to cry.

Georgie Olsen told him in the schoolyard that his mother had to fuck to make him get born and he hit him on the head with his wooden pencil case and Georgie knocked his glasses off. They told Miss Lanchantin they were fooling around.

He’d never seen anything as white as the armband and tie he wore for his First Holy Communion. Blue serge suit from A&S. The host tasted like glue. “All the girls are so cunning, they look like little angels.” Even the Mother Superior smiled.

As long as he was washed and in bed he could stay awake and listen to Lux Radio Theatre.

“Tito Guizar will sing for you.”

Sister Andrew said that a boy once bit a host and it started to bleed, and some boy didn’t tell all his sins in Confession and when the priest put the host on his tongue he dropped dead right at the altar rail. Jack Gannon asked if you by accident swallowed a drop of water when you were washing your face in the morning before Communion, could you receive? You couldn’t.

Mrs. Schmidt sat down next to Gramp on a wooden lawn chair and started talking to him and Mom turned her head away and made a face.

He helped Louis bring the cows into the barn at night. They smelled delicious, like sweet hay and milk.

Max, the Russian barber who was Cousin Katie’s friend, smoked long cardboard cigarettes and cut all his curls off. His hair grew in straight and Mom cried about it for almost three days. “He has to look like boy, not girl and sissy.” Mom told Cousin Katie that as far as she was concerned he was a goddamn Polack greenhorn who had no business being in this country.

Vinnie Castigliano passed him a note in class and it had a stick-figure drawing of a girl and between her legs a big dark pencil scribble. Vinnie had written “Pat Christie’s bush” and drawn an arrow pointing to the scribble. That was another word. Kickie said that Vinnie used to play with his own sister’s cunt and she was fourteen , with a bush and all.

He won a Missal for getting the best mark on the Catechism test, the regular Catholic School kids got a Missal plus a comb in a little black cardboard case.

Mr. Bloom, the druggist, took a cinder out of his eye and gave him two Hershey kisses.

When he had the measles, Mom pulled down the shades and made him poached eggs and junket.

Tom Thebus made him laugh when he imitated Mrs. Schmidt: “Oh, ja, undt vor der lunsh ve haff it der Floadingk Islandt dessert, zo-oo-oo nize.” Gramp said he was a goddamned overgrown horse’s ass.

Mom saw a picture of Daddy and Margie in the Eagle with some other man and got so upset and mad that she started to cry. Daddy had a suit on with a bow tie like rich people wear, and Margie looked really fat.

He saw Gramp drinking whiskey right out of the bottle one day. Wilson’s “That’s All.”

Mom had an argument with Gramp across on the old church steps one hot afternoon.

Uncle Charlie took him out of the funeral parlor and bought him a black-and-white in Holsten’s.

Mom dried him after a bath in front of the kitchen stove at Cousin Katie’s.

He had three pennies and lost one and threw the others in the snow because now they were no good.

As soon as he got a new Big Little Book he tore out all the pictures he didn’t like.

A stack of cardboard things they called “coasters” right next to a ball of string. And the buttons said “Erin Go Bragh.”

Bubbsy said that Mrs. Long caught one of the big kids feeling a girl up in the auditorium and he got sent to reform school. How did a girl feel? A bush.

He never wanted anything so bad as to smoke tobacco like Tom’s in a pipe like his.

He saw Mom clap when Tom made a really good croquet shot and she looked like a girl.

When The Shadow laughed on the radio he would start to cry in fear.

The bookmaker gave him a nickel once and he was afraid to tell Mom.

Why did God make the world?

He played Alkali Ike in a school play and everybody said he should be a movie star, Dolores Marshall kissed him once in the middle of the play and her mouth tasted like orange Lifesavers.

To know Him and love Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

Surely she doesn’t look like the mother of a ten-year-old boy. Perhaps the woman thinks this as she examines herself in the mirror in her small room. Her figure, in a flowered bathing suit, is trim and well-shaped, is what may be termed desirable. She does not think this word and has not thought of herself as such for years, six, seven?

The bathing suit is of one piece, rather too generously cut, and skirted: one cannot know whether out of modesty or a desire to conceal what she fears is a slight thickening of her thighs. She grasps the skirt at its hem and pulls it to either side in a flare, as if she is about to curtsy, looking at herself in the glass. Her face seems to disapprove. The bathing suit is, for a woman of her age, somewhat prim, much like the kind her mother wore the last time she wore a bathing suit. She has had this garment for four years, it is as it is, although she has done her best to ignore it or deny it to herself, because of her wish to preclude what would have been her mother’s mocking laughter had she bought a suit that showed her figure to advantage. Her father, too, would have laughed, desperate as usual to ingratiate himself with his wife. He would have contributed the words “chippy,” and “jane,” the phrase “like Astor’s pet horse,” and her mother would have repeated it.