I saw a well-dressed man start trying to make love to a girl with really snaggly teeth, I mean her teeth were rotted and crooked, she had some kind of bad gum disease, she was loose, a loose woman, a woman who wore loose, dirty T-shirts and was fat in that way that you knew when you looked at her that she could never be any way other than the way she was, no matter how much dieting she did, no matter how much she exercised, that she would always hang out in bars drunk, the last one to be pulled off the dance floor and fucked in the bushes by people who wouldn’t give her two glances when they were sober, and this man, this well-dressed man, he made it a point to come up to her and remark that he’d been meaning to talk to her, that he’d meant to talk to her the other night, and that if she had a few minutes he’d like to talk to her right away. She grinned, that awful black-toothed grin, and said she had plenty of time, and they went off into a corner after he bought her a drink.

She’d been running with a little road-lizard who couldn’t pay his bar tab and had been cut off for it. Her teeth were awful, something you’d see in a nightmare, something you’d never want to kiss. I thought it was plain to everybody in the bar that the man was wanting to have sexual intercourse with her. It was plain to me. I wouldn’t have even bought her a beer. I’d have moved if she sat next to me. I wouldn’t have danced with her at all. She seemed to be expecting to hear the good things the man was saying to her. I didn’t watch where they went. I knew that the bushes were dark at night and that there were secret things that went on that nobody but the participants saw.