“This is the girl’s room, stupid!” Tonnie Ray laughed. Her voice was as thin as an ill-poached egg thrown against the treble strings of a harp, like I did once. Besides that, it had a little wavering crackle in it Tonnie Ray was slightly drunk.
I was very sad that night, especially after seeing Lala Sink and wishing for her. Almost sorrowfully, I was re-signed to getting from Tonnie Ray whatever I could get Oh, I thought of taking Tonnie Ray out to the pool and drowning her in her evening gown. I felt some betrayal to Earl and Bob for not killing her in an inventive way. But I went on. Said what I had to say.
“I know where we are. Let’s change together.” My curiosity mounted, with a little conscious effort from me.
“Ohhhhh. Naughty!” she rebuked me coyly. But she sat up on one of the tables and started working her panties down. Her evening gown fell back to her knees, and her feet became coiled in a mess of garters, stockings, and shoes. When I saw her open her knees a little to make room for everything, I leaned over, grasped down her thigh, and put my middle finger up to her prize, felt her slippery flaccid sex, and plunged in. My finger was attacked by salty, numbing chemicals. It seemed to float. Solid to muscle to jelly to gas. I was trying very clinically to understand it She reared up her face. It looked like an old servant in a horror movie, only … there was a wide swipe of red smile on it. Her feet turned together in her white high heels. She was uniquely unalluring. Then her head went down and she started working, seriously. I saw a woman, how a woman does, in the act, without her man. This was a sight. I looked on like a doctor.
“Harry, Harry!” she began spewing. “You are a serious musician, and I am your date to the senior party, and oooooh! … Oh, Dream of Pines High! What fun it’s been … oh, I was such a … success! Yes. Success, success, success, sue, sue, success! The parties — I had dates, real dates. I didn’t miss a thing!”
Her dress thrashed and scrunched around her hips, wide white silk sliding everywhere. Felt to me as if I had my arm down in a bin of popcorn. Tonnie Ray had her moment She froze, lifted up, and moaned like an emergency stroke victim. Then a big expulsion of shark’s breath blew out of the lifted dress. It was hard to forgive her that. I was really outraged. I pinched her with my thumb on top.
“Wow! Golleeeeee! Yes! Do it again! Oh, you have been to New York to study music …”
What do you mean “Yes?” I thought. Oh, ugly, ugly, nauseous ugly … When would you ever stop? You’re a roach. You have been some serious roach … have been away to some foul garbage lair in the basement of the filthiest most monstrous city dump in the country to study being a serious roach. Her feet turned together in the wad of stockings and panties. Ugh. The crabshells of her knees rattled together.
“… and now it’s all over, Harry. Can you believe it? Our best days are over?” God save me, then. “The parties and the friends and the good times,” she went on, still lying flat. I leaned over to check out her face. All the beauty parlor glow had sweated off of it, and the original pasty shell with nose-holes expanding showed, the chin clopping away. “Oh, Harry! I think I’m sick. I’m going to …”
“No, Tonnie Ray, don’t, please. Sit up. We were going to change together, remember?” I helped her up.
Then I saw a pair of girl’s horn-rimmed glasses lying by a bundle of clothes on a table. I grabbed them and wore them; they were extremely thick. I saw a haze of brown and gray, and Tonnie Ray hovering four feet off the ground in it.
“Oh, Harry, silly … Uuuuuuuuurrrrrppp!” Curdled Seven-Up broke out of her. A speck hit my spectacles. I jumped in the air and my pants knees got really washed.
“Aaaah!” I screamed in horror. “Stop!” But she wouldn’t. The sheeny mound of white fell off the bench. Then it moved off low. This was Tonnie Ray, saying, “I feel better.”
I commenced ripping off my clothes. It was unbearable that I had Tonnie Ray’s muck on me. But it was so beautiful not to be seeing Tonnie Ray clearly. And the world of these thick glasses was rather delightful. Everything waved by me. I didn’t really know where I was. The vodka was working on me too. I got down to my shorts and tee shirt.
“Yoo hoo! I am naked!” sang Tonnie Ray’s voice off to a corner, near the board shield of the girls’ bathroom. I made out the exit door through the edge of the spectacles and rushed that way with hands out, fearing slightly that I would bang a shin on something metal, but keeping on. I felt on a table some girl’s slip and grabbed it.
I dipped down with it to swab off the vomit that had globbed onto me through my pants. Successful at that, I brought the slip up to get the speck off my left spectacle, which was glowing yellow and carrying a small but rancid stench — right from Tonnie Ray’s abdomen — over the rim and into my eye, which was watering. I also had my other hand out still trying to get to the door. I made it, opened it, and a refrigerator-size bright light from the walkway with the boys’ door on the other side burst on me.
But there were persons on the walkway. There were human voices, almost in my face. I never dared to take off the spectacles to see who it was, but there were boys and girls.
“He’s in his underwear in the girls’ dressing room.”
“He is wearing girl’s glasses! He is slobbering on a … girl’s slip. Sssst. He is slobbering on a girl’s slip!”
“A-ummmm!” clucked a girl’s voice.
“It’s Monroe.”
“He was with Tonnie Ray Reese,” called an athlete’s voice. “Check her out! He had done something to her!”
Some bodies knocked me out of the way and coursed past into the dressing room. Immediately they came out, bumping me violently into the walkway. My borrowed spectacles fell off and shattered on the concrete. I was looking at Lala Sink, standing there in her pink pants outfit and holding her neat swimming bundle at her stomach. One boy held my arm from behind.
“Tonnie Ray is sick. She looks … wounded … in some way. She is lying on the floor … (he gulped and whispered) … without no clothes on.”
“You girls go on in there and help her.”
“You better come with us, Monroe.”
I looked back and saw the very same halfback who had had a date with Tonnie Ray that night after the spaghetti supper, the same guy who had called me a queer, the same one-hundred-sixty-pounder I’d beaten until he whimpered. Seeing him, I became a little more canny about the situation. I eased into the door of the boys’ room.
“Just a minute,” I said.
I went in and found a swimming suit hanging on a hook, shucked off my underwear, and got into it. I flexed around a second or two and breathed out hard to get the cigarette trash out of me, then waded out to the walkway scene. Others from the swimming pool had come in to congest the area.
I had a hard time getting the halfback fellow off to my-self. The crowd wanted to just cram the area until they understood every particle of the horror alleged against me. And the two boys wanted to hold me until somebody could get the law. I jumped free, however. Then the girls and boys backed up and gave us an area.
“All right, son of a bitch. Marquess of Queensberry rules!” I spoke to my halfback friend — his name was Everett. He saw me squaring off in my bathing suit and scamping up and down in front of him. He didn’t know what the hell I was getting at. He thought he was getting into some kind of strange, unholy fight; something even beyond no holds barred, or razor fighting. Fright took hold of his face. He put his hands on the lapels of his dinner jacket, but hesitated to take it off. I hit him one solid on the cheek.