…Your penis gets bigger, of course. Or your breasts. And generally you change your name. You start with a name like Norma Jean or Archie Leach. It’s not required, of course. But here in America, it’s good to remember that we like people to start from scratch. We like inventors. So get with the program. Catch the buzz. Life and liberty you got, now get happy. Don’t be a wimp, don’t be a geek. Get hip. Get laid. Get rich. Think big.
Look at Jonathan Calloway, a space cadet of galactic proportions, a dreamer — he starts with zip. Seems like only yesterday. A Sunday morning late in the century, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Check it out–
Calloway sitting innocently in his barber chair, reading the Sunday Times magazine, television set waxing evangelical in the background. The barber chair, like most of Jonathan’s furniture, salvaged from the street, equipped on one side with a chromed lever so that, like nothing else in the world, it rises and falls at his express command.
With a black felt tip pen he had drawn in the margins of the Sunday Times magazine a female form of surreal proportions. Looking up from the page, he gazed into the ether, which is to say that an observer would have been hard-pressed to determine the focal length of his stare, then lowered his eyes and his pen to the magazine and wrote:
Indecenies of the pen noir, coffee
And OJ in a funny chair.
He looked up again. The decorative flourishes, few in number, were largely relics of college dorm rooms: Gallerie Maeght lithographs of Picassos and Giacomettis; a poster from the Rolling Stones 1978 tour; a reproduction of Augustus John’s portrait of Dylan Thomas; a stolen Mercedes Benz hood ornament mounted on the television set. One memento of childhood, a brittle, flaking scale model of a birch bark canoe, circa 1967, provenance Camp Wannamuckie, Maine.
The television preacher rolling and tumbling, howling about how to get rich and get God, neither of which seemed imminent to Jonathan. His modest hopes were focused on the prospect of hot water. In his building, a hot shower constituted a miracle. Meanwhile he was studying the ads for luxury homes — his favorite section of the Sunday Times, along with the wedding announcements. A touch of awe, a tincture of masochism informed by his interest in luxury real estate and matrimony, those grown-up sports. He always deferred those tart pleasures, though, by starting with the Week in Review, then going on to the Book Review and Arts and Leisure, as if some stern arbiter of culture camped out on his shoulder, or perhaps on the principle of saving the best ’til last. (Wimp tendencies.) No one he knew had been married or engaged that week so far as the Times was concerned. He was enjoying the description of a forty-room cottage in Newport, Rhode Island, which he presumed to have numerous tubs and showers and faucets, all of which would liberally dispense hot water, when there was a knock on the bedroom window.
The face of Juan Baptiste was framed in one of the upper panes, his complexion lunar. Juan’s fifth-floor apartment in the adjoining tenement was linked to Jonathan’s by a fire escape which had become in practice an exterior hallway between their apartments, being much more convenient than the alternative, which was to descend five flights of stairs, walk outside, climb over one or two infragrant unoffical doormen on loan from the Rescue Mission down the street who were crashed out in the entry hall, ring the buzzer — if it worked — and climb up five flights. The landlord, who was tring to co-op both buildings, referred to the fire escapes as terraces in his correspondence with his bankers and architects.
–Jesus wants you to be materially comfortable and prosperous, the better to serve him.
Jonathan opened the window for his visitor. Between brick chimneys and water tanks, above the clothes line, a faceted sliver of the Empire State Building glittered in the sunlight, forty blocks uptown. The landlord’s minions appraised this vista at $5,000 on top of the price they could expect once they pried Jonathan out of what was to be called a penthouse. Juan climbed through the window, a pale blond Creole prince, dressed in basic black from shades to shoes, redolent with the smoke and sweat of a long night among the vampires and the zombies.
“Any hot water?”
Jonathan shook his head.
“No matter. I bring you tidings of great joy,” he said, proffering a tablet of newsprint. “Unto us this day in the town of Manhattan a cipher is born.”
The printed matter was an advance copy of South of the Border, a sporadic periodical which chronicled major non-events and Blitzkrieg trends of the fashionable downtown scene and which marginally employed Juan as a gossip columnist, a historian of quips that pass in the night. (Juan had a day job, too, but like everyone else, he aspired to one of the agented professions.)
Sitting in his barber chair and pumping the handle for elevation, Jonathan skimmed the unjustified columns of Inside Out, by Juan Baptiste, Voice in the Wilderness, pausing briefly at each of the NAMES in boldface. The names belonged to luminaries of the demimonde, individuals who were renowned for the way they styled their hair or for their acquaintance with a rock star.
It had been more than a year since Jonathan had wittingly entered a fashionable nightspot. He was familiar with these names through Juan’s conversation and his column. To him they were characters in a serial fiction, a soap opera. The present installment looled like a case of the usual suspects in the usual places. Or not in the usual places. The whole world was apparently wondering why Donny Deal hadn’t shown up for Susan Roebuck’s birthday party at Kilimanjaro. Tongues were wagging. Eyebrows arching. Fingers pointng all over the place. Fingers with nails outlandishly painted and polished. False fingernails. Green fingernails, shiny black fingernails, fingernails sculpted in the shape of crucifixes or filed to dagger points. All in all, though, from Jonathan’s unsophisticated point of view, not nearly as racy as last week’s installment of “Dynasty.”
Drumming his garden-variety fingernails impatiently on the top of the bureau, Juan couldn’t stand the suspense.
“There!” He pointed.
Jonathan read:
Susan’s 21st bash was brightened by the ubiquitous JOHNNY MONIKER, who allegedly flew in for the event from London, where he was reported to be staying at the Belgravia townhouse of a recording star whose name we need hardly repeat here for the cognoscenti. Johnny, of course, confirms nothing, denies nothing, since he doesn’t believe in the past. Makes us historians crazy, but we love him still because he’s always good for a quote. “I don’t remember” is his favorite. “I’m here now,” he confided to us at Susan’s fete. So just for the record, he was there, then.
“Who’s Johnny Moniker?”
“This was your idea.” Juan was exultant. “You said I should create a fictional celebrity.”
“I thought that was your general practice.”
“This is the first I made up from scratch. In the beginning was the word. Johnny Moniker — a pure signifier. Liz Smith thinks she’s a starmaker? I’m going to make a star out of thin air.” As he spoke he moved around the room, handling Jonathan’s personal effects, examining his hairbrush, his unremarkable Japanese watch, a bottle of aspirin and a wedding picture of his parents, as if they were artifacts of a vanished culture. Juan opened the bottle of aspirin and swallowed three of them dry. “First we conquer downtown. Next thing you know, Johnny Moniker will be popping up in New York magazine. Guest spots on Letterman, a recording contract. Hollywood or bust. And we’re all exquisitely aware that it’s a short step from Hollywood to the White House.”
–How much more shall your father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? Matthew Seven, Eleven, Brothers and Sisters.
“Something’s missing here,” Jonathan said.
“It can’t miss.”
“You don’t have a body.”
(Oh, Jonathan, you killjoy. Ye of little faith. Check your mailbox for Christ’s sake, you may already be a winner.)
“If this wasn’t your idea I’d say you lack imagination,” Juan said. “It’s terribly retro to suppose that the product pre-exists the package.”
Part Two
–Brothers and sisters, operators are standing by…
“What is this crap?” Juan went over and spun the dial on the TV set. “What channel’s ‘Masters of the Universe’?”
Jonathan shook his head to indicate lack of knowledge on the subject. “No hot water in your place?”
“Not a drop. I called Benito and said if he didn’t turn on the boiler immediately I’d be forced to go to a local bathhouse frequented by muscular homophiles, and if I had do that I was going to scrawl his name and phone number on every available surface.”
“Water from a stone,” Jonathan said, practicing a laconic cynicism which he had lately been working on in the hope it might be attractive to the opposite sex.
“Hey, it’s been done. Moses or Jacob, one of those guys. But certainly not since the birth of Elvis.”
Benito was the nominal super of the two buildings, a sullenly passive monster who absorbed all complaints into his massive bulk and stored them there, unanswered.
“I’m tired of calling the legal aid society every time I want to take a shower,” Jonathan said. “I see myself in a suite at the Carlyle steaming up the Carerra marble in the bathroom while a bottle of champagne chills in a sweating silver bucket on the bar.”
“We’ve just begun to fight,” Juan said, continuing to check the channels on the TV set. “What is this, dial a preacher? Whatever happened to secular humanism? Or cartoons?” He passed over “Superstar Wrestling” and “Wall Street Week In Review,” in which sages in gray suits discussed the prospects for a continued bull market.
“Listen to this,” Jonathan said, reading from the Times: “Spectacular Central Park West Triplex. Fourteen rooms. Maid quarters. Park views. Formal dining room, six and a half baths, reasonably priced.” The term maid’s quarters particularly stirred Jonathan’s imagination, conjuring the word French with all its humid associations…
“Thou shalt not cover thy neighbord triplex.”
Juan was organizing a rent strike. His task was complicated by the fact that many of the other inmates of the two buildings didn’t speak English. Some were not legal residents of the United States and wished not to call attention to themselves. Jonathan had picked up his lease three years before when he first came to the city, after getting thrown out of a monastery in Tuscany. At the time it was still possible to rent an apartment in Manhattan on a combined income of a part-time clerk for an East Village art gallery and bus boy at a Cajun restaurant — this being precisely Jonathan’s vitae — if you weren’t fussy about where you lived. When the gallery moved uptown to accommodate the spectacular overnight success of a client artist, Jonathan was not asked along. He was told he did not have “the look.” Finding a full-time job at a publishing house, he thought he would improve his standard of living. But after taxes he made less money than before, and even before he figured this out, when he went to look for a new apartment commensurate with his semi-professional status, he found rents had somehow doubled and tripled so that he couldn’t afford to move.
The real problem was he didn’t know what he wanted to do when he grew up. His college classmates had somehow accumulated graduate degrees, careers, condominiums, spouses and divorces. Jonathan was twenty-seven and still looking, an unpublished poet afflicted with the kind of chronic dreaminess which in a younger man might have been diagnosed as a symptom of artistic temperament by an indulgent grandparent.
They watched a show in which the contestants lip-synced hit songs and writhed on stage in imitation of the original recording stars. The show was called “Putting on the Hits.” The winner got $1,000 and a shot at the $25,000 grand prize. This week’s winner mimicked Madonna singing “Material Girl.”
“Look at that slut,” Juan said. Sprawled across the unmade bed, he threw some of Jonathan’s socks at the screen. Jonathan kept them handy for this and other purposes. “She’s absolutely blitzed on crack.” He was jealous, of course. He wanted to be on the show. His idea was to dress up as Diana Ross and lip-sync Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity.”
Sometimes Juan appalled Jonathan. All they really had in common was the fire escape. High camp did not strike Jonathan as a viable Weltanschauung. He wanted to cuff Juan sharply about the head and say: Be serious. But he wouldn’t have had an answer if Juan asked, “Serious about what?” In his clearer moments, Jonathan felt no one had less of a clue as to what it was all about than he himself did. And so they were friends, allies against the monstrous indifference of the city to their existence.
The phone rang. Jonathan leaped, fumbling for the receiver on the first grab, like a boy who has been drowsing in right field for eight-and-a-half innings without local incident. As the batter rounded second, Jonathan recovered the telephone receiver and raised it to his ear in time to hear the sparkling, interrogative voice of Corrine Sutton. He was slightly in love with Corrine, though she was married to a go-getter named Russell, a man of vaulting ambition and compounding accomplishment. Still, he liked to go to Corrine’s dinner parties — they were having one Thursday night. He liked to talk to her, kiss her hello and goodbye and sometime in between, if he had drunk enough of the Vin de Maison, about which Russell always gave a speech to his guests. Fun in itself, this kissing, it was good practice in case he ever again found a woman of his own.
“Listen, I thought I’d better warn you,” Corrine said. “Russell invited Tawny Steel to the dinner party. … He met her at some MTV thing. Jonathan?”
“No big deal,” Jonathan lied. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
Juan said, “Could you please keep it down?”
“What a terrible thing to say, Jonathan.”
“Actually it’s from a play.”
“Thank God. I thought maybe it was one of your poems. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. Since you two were…”
“Thanks.”
(Violins faded in here, sad strings … stop that! Stop it right now. Like Plato, we want only happy music in our Republic. Shake off those old lonesome blues.”)
Corrine: “Are you bringing a date, cutie? Or shall I get you one?”
“Is she bringing a date?”
“I think so.”
“I’ll find one.”
(Sure you will. She’s not the only fish in the sea. Plenty more where she came from, and besides, frankly, she hasn’t released an album in almost two years, whereas you got your whole life ahead of you.)
Part Three
At the end of the lip-sync show there was still no hot water, so they decided to go over to the Russian baths on Tenth Street.
Rolling down the stairs, they descended through strata of salsa music, Italian and Chinese cooking odors, television voices, baby howls. At the third floor landing, Mrs. Olivetti opened her door as far as the chain stretched and peered out, her prune-y face framed between door and jamb. “I thought you was Benito,” she explained. Mrs. Olivetti spent her waking hours standing behind the door, waiting for the sound of a footstep on the stairs, as if it were her fondest wish to be a prosecution witness before she died. First he tore off her clothes our honor and then he did it six times all different ways it was disgusting your on ‘er the man should receive the death penalty. All day long she opened and closed the door like a bivalve drawing nutrients from the murk of the ocean.
“If I was Benito, I’d throw myself down the stairs headfirst,” Juan said.
“Them stairs is treacherous,” Mrs. Olivetti observed.
“I hope will see you at the tenants’ meeting tomorrow night,” Juan said.
“I got my rosary society from four to six.”
“The meeting’s at seven-thirty. We really need your help, Mrs. Olivetti.”
“Well, I’ll try.”
At the bottom of the stairs they were confronted with a mass of debris filling the foyer between inner and outer doors. Juan tentatively tried the inside door, blocked by something solid.
“Billy?” he called, pushing the door again. Gradually the bundle stirred and shifted. A hand appeared, then startled, moist eyes deep within a crusted face.
“What time is it?” Billy asked.
“About noon,” Juan said.
Assuming human shape within his cloak of many layers, Billy struggled toward vertical.
“You seen that big cat?” Billy asked.
“I read about it in the Post,” Juan said.
“I seen it. It’s got big yellow eyes and it killed a guy name of Frank sometimes sleeps up to the Rescue Mission. A bunch of us was crashed out in the abandoned building and it come. Dragged Frank off screaming. Big spotted cat, eyes like the devil. I ain’t going back there.”
He glared at them as if they had demanded he return.
“I don’t blame you,” Jonathan said.
“I ain’t.”
“Be careful.”
Finally Billy opened the outside door and pitched out into the morning, staggering like a dazed crustacean. Juan and Jonathan followed out onto the Bowery sidewalk, trying not to inhale deeply in Billy’s wake.
Juan said he had to get something at the hardware on Elizabeth Street. Jonathan waited in front of the Morgue. What they called the Morgue was an outpost of Little Italy, a few blocks south and east, a mysterious building the first floor of which was occupied by a pasta and dry goods grocery open one or two days a week, at random. The rest of the building appeared to be unoccupied, although trucks arrived, pulled up to the loading dock now and then, boxes moved in or out. Everyone seemed to know the building was owned by the Colombo family, and speculation about its function provided the neighborhood with legends.
When Juan returned they set out north, past Bruno’s Thrift Shop, Anything of Value, past the Secunda Iglesia Pentecostal el Refugio Inc., Dr. Jesucristo, Pastor, playing street soccer with the empty bottles of Night Train and Wild Irish Rose. At the corner, the men were lining up outside the Rescue Mission for their free lunch, Billy among them.
Across Houston, they peered up at the shuttered windows of the building in which William Burroughs was supposed to live. In three years they had never seen him, but that seemed appropriate, Juan remarking once that he was a writer whose absence seemed more characteristic than his presence could have been.
“What?” demanded Jonathan.
“Well, take Mailer,” said Juan. “He’s someone you expect to see everywhere — I’m amazed when I go to a party and don’t see him, and you can’t read his stuff without this image of him. But Burroughs is like a phantom.”
In a parking lot beside the novelist’s alleged house, Juan stopped and pointed to the cinder block wall.
“What do you see?”
Jonathan looked at the wall, as densely illustrated and annotated as a page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, searching among the names, slogans and images for something of particular significance. U.S. OUT OF NICARAGUA and U.S. OUT OF ORDER. EAT THE RICH, FEED THE POOR. DOWNTOWN SISSIES IN REVOLT. ENO IS GOD. Also the scrupulously rendered logo for a brand of jeans called Guess?
“The underground press,” Juan said. He reached into his pocket with the air of a purveyor of dirty postcards and produced a can of spray paint. “We start at street level,” he said.
Doctoring an existing graffito, which he explained was acceptable graffiti etiquette, he ran a line through ENO and wrote JOHNNY MONIKER.
By the time they hit Tenth Street, the spray can was empty, Juan having inscribed numerous storefronts and brick walls along the way.
Well above street level, peeling and fading, the old sign was still there, Russian and Turkish baths, a relic encroached upon by incipient Art Galleries. The trouble with Art was the kind of company it attracted; Art tended to be sluttish, inevitably inviting Money up to see its etchings. Jonathan expected the bathhouse would be gone any day now. It was the last of its kind. Buildings disappeared overnight in the city, like black rhinos from the African savanna. In the morning there would be a smoking pile of brick and mortar — skin and bones; the next day, a Pasta Fasta or a Younique boutique.
(And good riddance. Out with the old and in with the new. Blight on the landscape. Drain on the tax base.)
They paid at the door, stashed keys and wallets in the safe and picked up locker keys. Old men with proud bellies and withered limbs strutted between the locker room and the deli counter, slapping their thighs and chests, moving with exaggerated unconcern, speaking through various tongues and accents with the same stage-y gruffness, in accordance with the international rules of fraternal male nudity. Although the rules were a little bit different in the baths Juan used to frequent, back before the plague.
Part Four
They undressed and went downstairs wearing belt-less green robes and giant plastic flip-flops. Outside the Russian steam room, Sidney the masseuse was pounding a body lying prostrate on a wooden catafalque, obscured beneath Ivory soap lather. “Hey boys,” Sidney called. “Anyone for a wash and a rubdown later?”
“Can’t afford you, Sid,” Jonathan said.
“Be a lot more expensive you end up at the doctor’s office with hypertension, or at the shrink with nerves.” Sidney believed himself to be engaged in a venerable branch of preventative medicine, and indeed, many of his regular customers appeared to have lived far beyond a natural lifespan.
“You take Blue Cross?” Juan asked.
“I take long green,” Sidney said, which is what he always said.
After showering off, they opened the door to the Russian blast furnace where six or seven of the regulars, melting into the wooden benches, fell silent as the newcomers sat down. Abe, a senior citizen with hairless, blotchy pink and white flesh who was the unofficial patriarch of the steam room, stood up and doused himself with a bucket of cold water, then resumed his interrupted commentary on the news of the day.
“So the driver of this vehicle is a paraplegic. Doesn’t even have a license. He shouldn’t have been in that car.”
“What happened to the other guy?” someone asked.
“What, the bus driver?”
“No, the guy that got hit.”
“Like I was saying, the paraplegic, who had no business driving that car, he hits the pedestrian, hits him pretty good, and he goes flying across the street. Then he gets run over by the bus.”
“Who got run over by the bus, the paramedic?”
“Paraplegic. That means he’s paralyzed.”
“How’d he get out of the car if he’s paralyzed?”
“No, it was the guy he hit that got run over by the bus. The paraplegic was driving.”
The room fell silent. Everyone looked at Abe through the steam to see if there would be a moral, some edifying coda to this story, but he was finished. After a minute he started to talk about a Brooklyn school superintendent who was caught in a closet with an eight-year-old girl. “Said he was playing hide and seek.”
Jonathan slouched on the bench, wilting pleasantly in the heat.
Juan wiped his forehead and examined his slick fingers. “I shudder to imagine what a chemical analysis of this perspiration would reveal. Some hitherto undiscovered pharmaceutical cocktail.”
Abe flashed a censorious look through the steam. Juan sometimes forgot where he was. Or, to give him credit, he just didn’t care where he was. Being something of a chameleon himself, Jonathan admired and abhorred Juan’s candor, his insistence on behaving consistently like himself — or at least like the drugs he was doing at any given moment. Not many of us even know who we are, Jonathan imagined.
He himself was a low-Church Darwinian, a believer in adaptation and mutation in the service of survival. Like Keats, his hero, he was negatively capable; like running water, Jonathan tended to seek the past of least resistance and take on the color of the local soil, picking up silt and twigs on his way down to the sea. Put him in a room with a British subject and he would have an accent before the kettle boiled. In college, he had gone through five majors — drama, philosophy, economics, English and art history — dedicating himself wholeheartedly to a succession of disciplines while adopting the speech and mannerisms of his professors. One of the homeless residents of the neighborhood had a fused knee and Jonathan could sometimes be seen limping after the cripple had passed. Here in the baths, he tried to slouch and give himself a bit of a paunch, as if he too had seen life and eaten too many pierogies.
Hanging out with Juan, he felt, was like walking down Fifth Avenue with a lobster on a leash. The opposite of the camouflage principle. Jonathan liked coming to the baths, plumbing problems in the apartment aside, and wanted to maintain at least a tepid welcome among the crusty regulars, these immigrants and sons of immigrants whom he imagined as seeking refuge here from the glib horrors of prosperity and progress.
“How about that panther,” Jonathan said, drawing on his store of greater metropolitan tabloid reality as a diversionary tactic.
“I thought it was a leopard.”
“The kind that don’t change spots.”
“It’s a thigment,” Abe growled.
“A what?”
“They made it up to take our minds off the political corruption.”
“Something tore up that bum. Ripped him to shreds.”
“A guy in a leopard suit.”
“Panther, not leopard.”
“If it’s made up, what difference does it make what kind it’s supposed to be?”
Part Five
A discussion of the phantom panther/leopard segued into the subject of official incompetence and graft. Jonathan poached silently as his thoughts drifted through the steam toward Tawny Steel.
He’d first seen her in 1980 at Club 47, the night she and her garage band debuted on stage. Jonathan had recently arrived in the city after a post-graduate year in Florence, fresh-faced and street-dumb. Some people from the art gallery took him out his first night, where he had seen Tawny on stage, kohl-eyed and spandexed, spewing hormones and power chords. As he was leaving the club, the door of a van parked at the curb popped open and a body fell out, propelled by a booted foot. Jonathan recognized the lead singer in the passenger seat. She slid across to the driver’s seat and looked out at the inert form on the sidewalk, then noticed Jonathan. “Elavil’s and tequila,” she said. “Give me a hand, will you?” She got out of the car and together they hauled the man into the back of the van and deposited him among the drums and amplifiers. Painted on the bass drum was the name The Vibrators. “Wanta buy me a drink?” she asked. Jonathan nodded. Looking at her in her leathers, he could easily believe he would be punished if he said no. He nodded again when she said, “Do you drive a standard?” and also when she said, “Do you talk? Spikka English? Cat got your tongue?” tongue-tied because he had felt himself from the moment he helped her with the comatose figure to be in the proximity of sex.
They left the drummer in the back as they went first for a drink and then back to Jonathan’s place. It turned out she had spent a year at the Rhode Island School of Design and knew quite a bit about art. She gradually forgot to live up to her image, shedding most of her butchiness before she shed her leathers, although she would never pass for an ingenue. She was a postmodern girl. She liked it when he told her that.
They talked until she finally said, “First I can’t get you to talk and now I can’t get you to shut up,” and ripped the front of his shirt open. Later she purred, “Now the cat’s really got your tongue.” They stayed up all night and slept all day and for a few weeks, or months, it seemed that they never quite went to bed. He followed her on the few, mostly outer-borough and Jersey, gigs the band had then. The three guys in the band, for all their psycho-killer attitude and practiced nastiness, held Tammy in awe and acceded to Jonathan — while he was her man — a margin of tolerance if not of respect. They practiced at a rented studio on Oliver Street in the afternoons and he worked at the gallery, but otherwise they were together. She had a connection for thousand-dollar ounces and he had a modest legacy from his half of the insurance and the house sale when his parents had died, and they were both young and something was always going on and there was no time to sleep.
(What’s past is past, Jonathan. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.)
When the first album came out it had a track called “Cat Got Your Tongue, Boy” — a title watered-down from the original in the hope of radio play. And another one called “Post-Modern Girl.” By then Jonathan hadn’t seen Tawny in almost a year. Since then he couldn’t help seeing her picture, reading about her latest famous boyfriend. From People magazine he learned that she had been born Amy Teasdale Makepeace to an old Baltimore family. Jonathan’s memories made his few subsequent amours seem pale and second-hand by comparison.
For all of his sadness, the memory of Tawny, vivid and raunchy, was beginning to effect a visible change on Jonathan’s present anatomy, which he moved his hands to conceal.
Lying back on the bench with his eyes closed, Juan suddenly felt composed to report his own daydream. “I’m on a beach in Aruba. And these two native boys are ladling coconut oil out of a big pre-Columbian stone urn…”
Jonathan retreated to the pool and immersed himself in the shocking blue water, submerged to the neck, mortifying the flesh, traumatizing his tender parts, which shrank dramatically as if to reflect his prospects, romantic and otherwise.
(Oh, Jonathan, wake up and smell the coffee. It’s up to you. Think big. Think huge.)
