Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
Harry was placed downstairs on a squealing corduroy couch, while Loudermilk’s non-negligible gifts were shared by the nubile pair who originally picked them up at a downtown bar. Harry cannot remember their names, though the two co-eds are basically distinguishable. For ease of mental reference and to render these alien beings slightly more palatable, he has christened them “Shortstack” and “Skylar.” Shortstack is short (obviously) and deeply, artificially bronzed, with prominent cone-shaped breasts, while Skylar is tall and languid and blond, her face a vivid hybrid of Christie Brinkley and Jean Seberg. Both are, however, in Harry’s less than generous assessment, dumb as dirt and would willingly have mated with Loudermilk in an actual pile of this substance they saw near a parked backhoe on the way back from the fifty-cents-a-cup piss emporium where the initial connection was made.
An attempt to set Skylar up with Harry was of course a complete failure, with Harry staring stonily past her right ear as she droned on about how awesome it must have been to go to college so close to New York City, but how scared she would be, like, if she ever went there, because she had heard that a woman had been dragged for, like, a mile once by a purse-snatcher on a moped who, no joke, literally pulled her into traffic, and she had her entire face torn off. “That is not normal!” Skylar exclaimed, as if there were some chance Harry might be so unfamiliar with the project of human existence that the sensorial implications of being separated from one’s face by means of asphalt-induced abrasion might not be entirely clear.
Loudermilk knew enough not to take Harry aside and demand to know why he did not get how to act when high-quality poontang was being thrown in his general direction. Instead, Loudermilk just tapped Skylar on the shoulder mid-narrative and subtly renegotiated matters.
It is currently 7:34 a.m. by Harry’s watch, and the moaning and sighing and thumping in the room next door finally ceased a little over twenty minutes ago. Harry has not really slept. He has on all of his clothes except for his shoes, and there is a large beach towel depicting a penguin in sunglasses covering him. Not only is it too hot in this room, it also stinks of something all kinds of rank that Harry peevishly identifies as pizza farts plus Vagisil. He is afraid of what he will find if he gets up to go look for the bathroom.