South of No North Read online

  “They make these now,” she said, “they’re very expensive. They cost around $2,000 apiece when I got them. They go for around $2,400 now. I don’t know the manufacturing process but it’s probably against the law.”

  The little people were walking around on the top of the bar. Suddenly one of the little guys slapped one of the little women across the face.

  “You bitch,” he said, “I’ve had it with you!”

  “No, George, you can’t,” she cried, “I love you! I’ll kill myself! I’ve got to have you!”

  “I don’t care,” said the little guy, and he took out a tiny cigarette and lit it. “I’ve got a right to live.”

  “If you don’t want her,” said the other little guy, “I’ll take her. I love her.”

  “But I don’t want you, Marty. I’m in love with George.”

  “But he’s a bastard, Anna, a real bastard!”

  “I know, but I love him anyhow.”

  The little bastard then walked over and kissed the other little woman.

  “I’ve got a triangle going,” said the lady who had bought me the drink. “That’s Marty and George and Anna and Ruthie. George goes down, he goes down good. Marty’s kind of square.”

  “Isn’t it sad to watch all that? Er, what’s your name?”

  “Dawn. It’s a terrible name. But that’s what mothers do to their children sometimes.”

  “I’m Hank. But isn’t it sad…”

  “No, it isn’t sad to watch it. I haven’t had much luck with my own loves, terrible luck really…”

  “We all have terrible luck.”

  “I suppose. Anyhow, I bought these little people and now I watch them, and it’s like having it and not having any of the problems. But I get awfully hot when they start making love. That’s when it gets difficult.”

  “Are they sexy?”

  “Very, very sexy. My god, it makes me hot!”

  “Why don’t you make them do it? I mean, right now. We’ll watch them together.”

  “Oh, you can’t make them do it. They’ve got to do it on their own.”

  “How often do they do it?”

  “Oh, they’re pretty good. They go four or five times a week.”

  They were walking around on the bar. “Listen,” said Marty, “give me a chance. Just give me a chance, Anna.”

  “No,” said Anna, “my love belongs to George. There’s no other way it can be.”

  George was kissing Ruthie, feeling her breasts. Ruthie was getting hot.

  “Ruthie’s getting hot,” I told Dawn.

  “She is. She really is.”

  I was getting hot too. I grabbed Dawn and kissed her.

  “Listen,” she said, “I don’t like them to make love in public. I’ll take them home and have them do it.”

  “But then I can’t watch.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to come with me.”

  “All right,” I said, “let’s go.”

  I finished my drink and we walked out together. She carried the little people in the small wire cage. We got into her car and put the people in between us on the front seat. I looked at Dawn. She was really young and beautiful. She seemed to have good insides too. How could she have gone wrong with her men? There were so many ways those things could miss. The four little people had cost her $8,000. Just that to get away from relationships and not to get away from relationships.

  Her house was near the hills, a pleasant looking place. We got out and walked up to the door. I held the little people in the cage while Dawn opened the door.

  “I heard Randy Newman last week at The Troubador. Isn’t he great?” she asked.

  “Yes, he is.”

  We walked into the front room and Dawn took the little people out and placed them on the coffeetable. Then she walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and got out a bottle of wine. She brought in two glasses.

  “Pardon me,” she said, “but you seem a little bit crazy. What do you do?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Are you going to write about this?”

  “They’ll never believe it, but I’ll write it.”

  “Look,” said Dawn, “George has got Ruthie’s panties off. He’s fingering her. Ice?”

  “Yes, he is. No, no ice. Straight’s fine.”

  “I don’t know,” said Dawn, “it really gets me hot to watch them. Maybe it’s because they’re so small. It really heats me up.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Look, George is going down on her now.”

  “He is, isn’t he?”

  “Look at them!”

  “God o mighty!”

  I grabbed Dawn. We stood there kissing. As we did her eyes went from mine to them and then back to mine again.

  Little Marty and little Anna were watching too.

  “Look,” said Marty, “they’re going to make it. We might as well make it. Even the big folks are going to make it. Look at them!”

  “Did you hear that?” I asked Dawn. “They said we’re going to make it. Is that true?”

  “I hope it’s true,” said Dawn.

  I got her over to the couch and worked her dress up around her hips. I kissed her along the throat. “I love you,” I said.

  “Do you? Do you?”

  “Yes, somehow, yes…”

  “All right,” said little Anna to little Marty, “we might as well do it too, even though I don’t love you.”

  They embraced in the middle of the coffeetable. I had worked Dawn’s panties off. Dawn groaned. Little Ruthie groaned. Marty closed in on Anna. It was happening everywhere. I got the idea that everybody in the world was doing it. Then I forgot about the rest of the world. We somehow walked into the bedroom. Then I got into Dawn for the long slow ride….

  When she came out of the bathroom I was reading a dull dull story in Playboy.

  “It was so good,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” I answered.

  She got back into bed with me. I put the magazine down.

  “Do you think we can make it together?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you think we can make it together for any length of time?”

  “I don’t know. Things happen. The beginning is always easiest.”

  Then there was a scream from the front room. “Oh-oh,” said Dawn. She leaped up and ran out of the room. I followed. When I got there she was holding George in her hands.

  “Oh, my god!”

  “What happened?”

  “Anna did it to him!”

  “Did what?”

  “She cut off his balls! George is a eunuch!”

  “Wow!”

  “Get me some toilet paper, quickly! He might bleed to death!”

  “That son of a bitch,” said little Anna from the coffeetable, “if I can’t have George, nobody can have him!”

  “Now both of you belong to me!” said Marty.

  “No, you’ve got to choose between us,” said Anna.

  “Which one of us is it?” asked Ruthie.

  “I love you both,” said Marty.

  “He’s stopped bleeding,” said Dawn. “He’s out cold.” She wrapped George in a handkerchief and put him on the mantle.

  “I mean,” Dawn said to me, “if you don’t think we can make it, I don’t want to go into it anymore.”

  “I think I love you, Dawn.”

  “Look,” she said, “Marty’s embracing Ruthie!”

  “Are they going to make it?”

  “I don’t know. They seem excited.”

  Dawn picked Anna up and put her in the wire cage.

  “Let me out of here! I’ll kill both of them! Let me out of here!”

  George moaned from inside his handkerchief upon the mantle. Marty had Ruthie’s panties off. I pulled Dawn to me. She was beautiful and young and had insides. I could be in love again. It was possible. We kissed. I fell down inside her eyes. Then I got up and began running. I knew where I was. A cock
roach and an eagle made love. Time was a fool with a banjo. I kept running. Her long hair fell across my face.

  “I’ll kill everybody!” screamed little Anna. She rattled about in her wire cage at 3 a.m. in the morning.

  POLITICS

  At L.A. City College just before World War II, I posed as a Nazi. I hardly knew Hitler from Hercules and cared less. It was just that sitting in class and hearing all the patriots preach how we should go over and do the beast in, I grew bored. I decided to become the opposition. I didn’t even bother to read up on Adolf, I simply spouted anything that I felt was evil or maniacal.

  However, I really didn’t have any political beliefs. It was a way of floating free.

  You know, sometimes if a man doesn’t believe in what he is doing he can do a much more interesting job because he isn’t emotionally caught up in his Cause. It wasn’t long before all the tall blond boys had formed The Abraham Lincoln Brigade—to hold off the hordes of fascism in Spain. And then had their asses shot off by trained troops. Some of them did it for adventure and a trip to Spain but they still got their asses shot off. I liked my ass. There really wasn’t much I liked about myself but I did like my ass and my pecker.

  I leaped up in class and shouted anything that came to my mind. Usually it had something to do with the Superior Race, which I thought was rather humorous. I didn’t lay it directly onto the Blacks and the Jews because I saw that they were as poor and confused as I was. But I did get off some wild speeches in and out of class, and the bottle of wine I kept in my locker helped me along. I was surprised that so many people listened to me and how few, if any, ever questioned my statements. I just ran off at the mouth and was delighted at how entertaining L.A. City College could be.

  “Are you going to run for student body president, Chinaski?”

  “Shit, no.”

  I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t even went to go to gym. In fact, the last thing I wanted to do was to go to gym and sweat and wear a jockstrap and compare pecker-lengths. I knew I had a medium-sized pecker. I didn’t have to take gym to establish that.

  We were lucky. The college decided to charge a two dollar enrollment fee. We decided—a few of us decided, anyhow—that that was unconstitutional, so we refused. We struck against it. The college allowed us to attend classes but took away some of our privileges, one of them being gym.

  When time arrived for gym class, we stood in civilian clothing. The coach was given orders to march us up and down the field in close formation. That was their revenge. Beautiful. I didn’t have to run around the track with my ass sweating or try to throw a demented basketball through a demented hoop.

  We marched back and forth, young, full of piss, full of madness, oversexed, cuntless, on the edge of war. The less you believed in life the less you had to lose. I didn’t have very much to lose, me and my medium-sized cock.

  We marched around and made up dirty songs, and the good American boys on the football team threatened to whip our asses but somehow never got around to it. Probably because we were bigger and meaner. To me, it was wonderful, pretending to be a Nazi, and then turning around and proclaiming that my constitutional rights were being violated.

  I did sometimes get emotional. I remember one time in class, after a little too much wine, with a tear in each eye, I said, “I promise you, this will hardly be the last war. As soon as one enemy is eliminated somehow another is found. It’s endless and meaningless. There’s no such thing as a good war or a bad war.”

  Another time there was a communist speaking from a platform on a vacant lot south of the campus. He was a very earnest boy with rimless glasses, pimples, wearing a black sweater with holes in the elbows. I stood listening and had some of my disciples with me. One of them was a White Russian, Zircoff, his father or his grandfather had been killed by the Reds in the Russian revolution. He showed me a sack of rotten tomatoes. “When you give the word,” he told me, “we’ll begin throwing them.”

  It occurred to me suddenly that my disciples hadn’t been listening to the speaker, or even if they had been, nothing he had said would matter. Their minds were made up. Most of the world was like that. Having a medium-sized cock suddenly didn’t seem the world’s worst sin.

  “Zircoff,” I said, “put the tomatoes away.”

  “Piss,” he said, “I wish they were hand grenades.”

  I lost control of my disciples that day, and walked away as they started hurling their rotten tomatoes.

  I was informed that a new Vanguard Party was to be formed. I was given an address in Glendale and I went there that night. We sat in the basement of a large home with our wine bottles and our various-sized cocks.

  There was a platform and desk with a large American flag spread across the back wall. A healthy looking American boy walked out on the platform and suggested that we begin by saluting the flag, pledging allegiance to it.

  I always disliked pledging allegiance to the flag. It was so tedious and sillyass. I always felt more like pledging allegiance to myself, but there we were and we stood up and ran through it. Then, afterwards, the little pause, and everybody sitting down feeling as if they had been slightly molested.

  The healthy American began talking. I recognized him as a fat boy who sat in the front row of the playwriting class. I never trusted those types. Sucks. Strictly sucks. He began: “The Communist menace must be stopped. We are gathered here to take steps to do so. We will take lawful steps and, perhaps, unlawful steps to do this…”

  I don’t remember much of the rest. I didn’t care about the Communist menace or the Nazi menace. I wanted to get drunk, I wanted to fuck, I wanted a good meal, I wanted to sing over a glass of beer in a dirty bar and smoke a cigar. I wasn’t aware. I was a dupe, a tool.

  Afterwards, Zircoff and myself and one ex-disciple went down to Westlake Park and we rented a boat and tried to catch a duck for dinner. We managed to get very drunk and didn’t catch a duck and found we didn’t have enough money between us to pay the boat rental fee.

  We floated around the shallow lake and played Russian Roulette with Zircoff’s gun and we all lucked through. Then Zircoff stood up in the moonlight drunk and shot the hell out of the bottom of the boat. The water started coming in and we ran her for shore. A third of the way in the boat sank and we had to get out and get our assholes wet wading to shore. So the night ended up well and hadn’t been wasted…

  I played Nazi for some time longer, while caring for neither the Nazis nor the Communists nor the Americans. But I was losing interest. In fact, just before Pearl Harbor I gave it up. The fun had gone out of it. I felt the war was going to happen and I didn’t feel much like going to war and I didn’t feel much like being a conscientious objector either. It was catshit. It was useless. Me and my medium-sized cock were in trouble.

  I sat in class without speaking, waiting. The students and the instructors needled me. I had lost my drive, my steam, my mox. I felt that the whole thing was out of my hands. It was going to happen. All the cocks were in trouble.

  My English instructor, quite a nice lady with beautiful legs asked me to stay after class one day. “What’s the matter, Chinaski?” she asked. “I’ve given up,” I said. “You mean politics?” she asked. “I mean politics,” I said. “You’d make a good sailor,” she said. I walked out…

  I was sitting with my best friend, a marine, in a downtown bar drinking a beer when it happened. A radio was playing music, there was a break in the music. They told us that Pearl Harbor had just been bombed. It was announced that all military personnel should return immediately to their bases. My friend asked that I take the bus with him to San Diego, suggesting that it might turn out to be the last time I ever saw him. He was right.

  LOVE FOR $17.50

  Robert’s first desire—when he began thinking of such things—was to sneak into the Wax Museum some night and make love to the wax ladies. However, that seemed too dangerous. He limited himself to making love to statues and mannequins in his sex fantasies and lived in hi
s fantasy world.

  One day while stopped at a red light he looked into the doorway of a shop. It was one of those shops that sold everything—records, sofas, books, trivia, junk. He saw her standing there in a long red dress. She wore rimless glasses, was well-shaped; dignified and sexy the way they used to be. A real class broad. Then the signal changed and he was forced to drive on.

  Robert parked a block away and walked back to the shop. He stood outside at the newspaper rack and looked in at her. Even the eyes looked real, and the mouth was very impulsive, pouting just a bit.

  Robert went inside and looked at the record rack. He was closer to her then and sneaked glances. No, they didn’t make them like that anymore. She even had on high heels.

  The girl in the shop walked up. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Just browsing, miss.”

  “If there’s anything you want, just let me know.”

  “Surely.”

  Robert moved over to the mannequin. There wasn’t a price tag. He wondered if she were for sale. He walked back to the record rack, picked up a cheap album and purchased it from the girl.

  The next time he visited the shop the mannequin was still there. Robert browsed a bit, bought an ashtray that was moulded to imitate a coiled snake, then walked out.

  The third time he was there he asked the girl: “Is the mannequin for sale?”

  “The mannequin?”

  “Yes, the mannequin.”

  “You want to buy it?”

  “Yes, you sell things, don’t you? Is the mannequin for sale?”

  “Just a moment, sir.”

  The girl went to the back of the shop. A curtain parted and an old Jewish man came out. The bottom two buttons of his shirt were missing and you could see his hairy belly. He seemed friendly enough.

  “You want the mannequin, sir?”

  “Yes, is she for sale?”