“No,” said Oreo, “I’m having trouble with my wedgies.” The doctor continued, oblivious to her anachronistic answer. “Rub along the inside of your thigh and tell me when you get wet.”
Oreo put down the phone and went over to water her begonia, then she came back and coughed into the phone to let the doctor know she was there.
“Are you wet yet?” he said wistfully.
Oreo said, “You know, doctor, the trouble with masturbation is you come too fast. There’s no one for you to give directions to. You know, like ‘No, not like that, like this. No, yes, no, harder, softer, up, down. No, no. I’m losing it. Yes, yes, that’s it, stay there, right there. No, no, not like that — the way you were doing it before. Yes, that’s it.’ And there’s no one for you not to give directions to. You know what I mean, doctor?”
There was a moan at the other end of the line. “I’d like to come over and give you a complete examination,” said the moaner hoarsely.
“Why don’t you do that,” said the moanee sweetly.
“I’ll bring my tools with me,” the doctor said, in one last effort at pretense.
“Tools?” said Oreo. “One will be enough. Oh, by the way, doctor, I’ve finally thought of some words. I don’t know how they slipped my mind before.” Oreo said a lot of words that begin with p and c and t and x, that rhyme with bunt and pooky and noontang.
The doctor let out a gasp as big as Masters and Johnson and said he could be at her place in an hour. Oreo told him that she would wait for him on her front porch and that she would be wearing a begonia leaf.
She went immediately to a house three doors down from her and told a neighbor, Betty Williams, that she wanted to play a trick on an acquaintance. Betty was the neighborhood nymphomaniac. For two cents she would fuck a plunger. In fact, the story of Betty and the plumber’s friend was a West Philadelphia legend. Anyone who thought that the shibboleth friend referred to a person was known to be an outsider and was therefore the object of xenophobic ridicule and scorn. Betty agreed to help her young friend Oreo.
So it was that when Dr. Jafferts came panting down the street, already slavering, it was Betty who, wearing the begonia leaf, waylaid him, as it were, on Oreo’s porch and led him to her house, where Oreo was in hiding.
After a few preliminaries involving the you-sounded-different-over-the-phone routine, the doctor — a young shmegegge who looked like the kind of person who doted on tapioca pudding, and ergo propter hoc, whose favorite Marx Brother was Gummo — was seated in a chair cruelly sited to give him a view up Betty’s short skirt. Sitting on a high stool, Betty began a rhythmic opening and closing of her legs, revealing and concealing a tangle of pubic hair. The sweat stood out on the doctor’s head after the first two open-close, open-close beats. After a while, he seemed in danger of drowning in his own juice.
But Oreo’s plan was without mercy. Simultaneously with the rhythms she was laying down from her stool, Betty began telling the doctor one of her favorite jokes. “It’s about this man and woman who go down to Florida on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They get up in their room, and the first thing they do is take off all their clothes.”
The doctor licked his lips in anticipation, his eyes fixed on Betty’s open-close, open-close.
Betty was beginning to overheat from hearing her own story, but she went on. “And the man says to the woman, says, ‘Honey, we been married all these years now and we always do it the same way. Let’s screw new a way this time. Now, you stand over in that corner, and I’ll stand over here. Then we’ll run toward each other and meet in the middle.’ So they go to the different corners and start running toward each other. But they miss and run right past. The man is going so fast, he goes sailing out the open window. His room is on the tenth story, but he’s lucky ’cause he falls in the swimming pool. But he’s afraid to come out ’cause he don’t have no clothes on. Everybody seems to be running to the hotel and nobody’s paying him no mind, but he’s still afraid to come out the pool buck naked. Then he sees this bellhop ready to go in the hotel, and he calls him over. He says, ‘Say, bellhop, I want to get out the pool, but I can’t ’cause I ain’t got no clothes on.’ The bellhop don’t even look surprised. He says, ‘That’s all right, sir, nobody’ll pay no ’ttention to you. You just come on out.’ The man says, ‘What do you mean nobody’ll pay no ’ttention to me? I’m buck naked!’ The bellhop says, ‘I know, sir, but most of the people are up on the tenth floor trying to figure out a way to get a woman off a doorknob.’”
By this time both Betty and the doctor were raging beasts. As the doctor ran to the attack — or, rather, the collaboration — Oreo came out of hiding and gave him a quick shu-kik to the groin, then got his jaw in the classic nek-brāc position. With his life but a blō away, he promised Oreo he would never again annoy innocent young women by phone or in person with his snortings and slaverings. With a half-force bak-bop she propelled him off Betty’s porch and watched as he shmegeggely fled the street.
She turned back just in time to hear Betty saying plaintively, “But what about me?”
Oreo realized that it had been very brave and self-sacrificing of Betty to participate in this little hoax. But her face brightened when she saw what time it was. She gave Betty the good news. “What about you? It’s five-thirty. Your father will be home any minute now. Do what you usually do in these circumstances. Fuck him.”
5 Tokens Deposited
Will Farmer
James had been immobilized for fifteen years when Louise decided to take a boyfriend. By this time, she had added drinking to her cooking/eating hobbies and weighed in at a good two hundred pounds. She had a love-tap on her that could paralyze yeast for three days. Louise met her boyfriend, Will Farmer, at a pay party given by her club, the Rainbow Skinners. The Rainbow Skinners got together every Friday night to conduct the regular club business, which was to eat, drink, and play pitty-pat and Pokeno, and to conduct the special club business, which was to plan pay parties, which they gave to raise money to give other pay parties, and so on, unto several generations.
Whenever Louise brought Will home for dinner, she said, “Make yo’seff comf-tubble, Frank… I mean, John… I say, Will.You jus’ like one de fam’ly.”
After he had eaten one of Louise’s specialties, Will, who was in his eighties (this was a Platonic relationship — or maybe Hegelian), would creak into the living room to relax. Once there, he would settle into a chair opposite James and succumb to a myoclonic jerk off to sleep. With his downcurving nose pincering toward his chin like a chela and a cigar held fast between clenched gums, he resembled a pegged lobster. His body became as straight and stiff as a bed slat as he began an inevitable slide to the floor. Just before he clattered into James, Louise would wake him up, thereby preventing him from making a body-temperature cancel mark across her husband’s half swastika. It was Louise’s lot to be surrounded — or, rather, flanked — by rigid but unavailing masculine spare parts — James and Will each in his own quirky fashion an instance of the-part-for-the-whole, a synecdoche of manhood.