Frankfurt/Main 1972), translated by Hannelore Neves.
In 1974 the work was bought by Artistes de Paris and translated into French by Daniel Maroc. Before the book could be printed the publishing offices were closed by the police and the publisher, a Vietnamese named Truong, was thrown out of France. The Grove Press cloth edition (GP-565) was published in 1969, the paperback (B-240) one year later. The work was taken out of print in 1973.
X : : FÆLLESHOBBY
: : "RESUSCI-ANNE, CREEPY COMPLETELY REALISTIC plastic model of young girl, say twelve or thirteen. They use it for demonstrating and practicing methods of resuscitation. Yeah. Mouth-to-mouth method for instance. Soft with hair, teeth, tits, everything. Manufactured in Norway."
"Who was the model?"
"Look around. Probably some young housewife now who's friends with the butcher. If there was a model, that is."
Billie D. Stonecipher was in Denmark legally, now, and swaggering in his old clothes and the swell new officer's foulweather jacket snitched off the "Catfish Row." Big crowd, mostly Danes, outside the door of Café Fælleshobby. Guys fixing their hair. Candled shadows rippling through the glass. He and Vibeke Hansen pushed through and rapped on the door with a coin. Tord opened up and let Billie D. and Vibeke enter, the outsiders protesting in their language, Tord beaming. Gustos of smoke and music. The place was full of foreigners and girls who go in for that sort of thing.
David
Marshall
Bernhard
Andreis
Michael
Jack
Bill
Tim
Denis
Ken
Tony
Linda Woodruff sitting on the janes' jakes contemplating, a little drunkenly, the names scratched on the door in front of her. Didn't want to leave, wanted to sit there locked in and taking herself seriously.
"I feel so gay in a melancholy way."
"Eating a man without salt is like kissing an egg without a mustache."
"How did you ever find out that my father is a Major?"
"Krak's directory is an indispensable handbook for all active Danes."'
"Cars with purple mustaches of heather."
"I wait and wait, trying to make up my mind which tongue to use, or neither. She must be ever aware that it's not just another heedless countryman trying to get it in."
"You mean just an ordinary rubber cheese?"
"Yeah. The kind that has to sprinkle alum on her futz for them to get anything at all out of it."
Knock-knock-knocking at the toilet door. Linda roused herself. Tord was announcing something on the loudspeakers outside. Couldn't possibly be about her being so long at the fair. She pulled the chain and made sure her fly was zipped. Three irate Danish girls were lined up and dancing outside. Billie D. Stonecipher and some girl were about to sing something. The two first girls muttered something offensive in Danish to Linda, and the third, sizing her up, asking in English:
"Was it a good book, honey?"
Well you come to Europe
and you talk so wise,
know all the right places
and say hi to the guys,
but you've never never never
had a dick inside.
just a ditty-bop,
she won't flop,
likes a nice ride
but won't let it inside. . .
". . . the very spiritual way that fish and amphibians have of making it, you dig, never touching each other. She lays and he sprays."
"Aw, you're putting me on."
"Of course not."
"I'm pretty sure I've seen frogs locked in an aquatic embrace."
"Naw, they must have been doing something else."
An American draft dodger pretending to be a Dane and speaking Danish so that he sounded like a Dane pretending to be a foreigner said something to Linda Woodruff. She ignored him, just as she was about to begin to ignore the personable young Dane for whom she'd just bought a meal and four beers and who was starting to get a little too physical. Benny, the draft dodger's alias, repeated the thing to Linda and her ambitious suitor Bengt, who seemed to be on familiar terms with Benny, laughed and said:
"Say it to her in English."
"Hell no, man. You want I should show my hand?"
"No. just show her your ring."
"You want to see my secret?" he asked her, in American, to which she smiled and shook her honey head.
"No thanks."
"It's okay. Nothing that'll make you pregnant."
He slipped it off his little finger and put it on the table before her. lt was one of those adjustable kid's rings, brass-plated and very tarnished, indecipherable inscriptions, loose and rattling.
"This is my special Tom Mix Secret Ring with a compartment for secret messages and a mirror. If you hold it up like this . . ." he showed her how ". . . you can see what's going on behind your back."
Linda giggled and tried the ring.
"Well, Benny. How's trips?" Bengt asked. "Trips? Man, you should have been along day before yesterday. We had a five-hour freakout on the ever-moving elevator at Frederiksberg Town Hall!"
Linda, meanwhile, had caught sight of Billie D. "The Silver Stud" Stonecipher leering at her in the mirror and blowing her a kiss from the other side of Fælleshobby. She blushed and returned the ring to Benny.
"And this, dear American chick," he said, drawing something hanging on a string up from under his sweater, "is my Tom Mix Secret Arrowhead."
And indeed it was, complete with time-rusted tiny compass and retractable magnifying glass.
"It glows in the dark, too," he boasted, letting it vanish again.
"What in the world do you have these old things for?" she asked.
"Ah hah!" The draft dodger lifted a conspiratorial eyebrow. "In order to obfuscate my pursuers. You want to see it glow in the dark?"
He leaned his head back as far as it would go and stretched the neck of his sweater as far as it would open. Linda peered. Bengt continued the conversation she'd broken off a half an hour ago by going and taking a piss.
"What was the biggest thing that happened to you when you were in high school?"
"When I got to be Drum Majorette. That was, let me see, in my junior year." She spoke down into Benny's chest. The plastic arrowhead glowed green and comforting. His flesh smelled good.
Billie D. working up a convincing sweat. The girl looked at him with roe in her eyes and her girl friend watching her watch him. He smiled back at the big girl with the municipal-colored hair and thought he'd sing for her. Then he caught sight of Jens and Signe and was nearly struck stupid.
"Now, this here's a song in memory of Ann Lee, called Mother Ann by the People, for she was foundress of the Shakers, a religious sect that flourished in God's Country a while back. Mother Ann was born in England
"Up the Irish!"
"Up yours, Stephen."
Laughter and commotion.
". . . and persecuted. They put her in stir without food for a fortnight and thought it was a miracle when she survived and in good spirits. Actually, the spirits were supplied by one of her accomplices who fed her milk and wine through the keyhole of her cell door. Later, the Shakers sailed to the New World which they had supposed was The Promised Land, but they were beaten and spat upon over there too. Anyhow, to make a molehill out of a mountain, Mother Ann's pet theory was that God was both man and woman, that she herself was the female counterpart of Jesus Christ, and that the sin of Adam and Eve was that they discovered the joys of cock in cunt."
"Hear! Hear!"
"They were called Shakers because their ecstatic singing and dancing was thought to resemble the leaves of trees shaking in the wind. They lived in total and successful communism. The only thing they didn't share with each other were their bodies. No fucking, no more Shakers. Vibeke and I dedicate this song to the beautiful people we see all around us."
Billie D. had slim Vibeke boxed in with his intense body behind her and his guitar in front of her, strumming and swaying, cheek to cheek, one of her arms like a tendril above her head, the other hand in her crotch. A girl with a career ahead of her.
Lift your skirts
above the Toad Lane dirt
your simple gift
remembering the miracle
of milk and wine through your keyhole
and your people
all gone.
Spread the word
that God are two,
the secret all have heard
of Him and you,
that love is sweet
but peace is best,
instead of wooing-heat
eternal rest.
Mother Ann, Oh Mother Ann
the world wins.
Tangled couples
that fills their cups,
the lovers will.
Your altar stones
are buried in the hill
so dance alone,
remembering the miracle
of milk and wine through your keyhole
and your people
all gone.
". . . eight-man jackoff contests with the tent rocking and flapping. Some really ingenious ways of beating your meat, in the vacuum cleaner hose . . ."
"Or with a candle up your ass. Gets curved and corrugated like your innards, then pull it out quick while you're coming and it feels like your guts come out with it . . ."
". . . and the dog licking your toes, licking your pecker, snapping at the drops of jizz as they come flying out, all excited."
"I was by way of knowing a guy named Peter Peckinpaugh who built a jerkoff machine with his Erector Set, little motor, gears, flywheels. The sponge rubber worked loose and he got cut bad."
"Thirteen years old. God, how I prayed to you for five minutes with a girl between the sheets . . ."
"The ardor of youth. That's what the ladies want, the older women between twenty-five and thirty who took care of me in my teens. Tight ass, flat belly, utter devotion."
". . . hardons from riding on the back seat of the bus."
"Southern Comfort."
"Moved in under the stairs with a chick and an alarm clock."
"I'm auditing a sociology course with Professor Schein. Maybe you know him."
"I know a few shines, but not that one."
"Maybe one of them's his son."
"Oh, that one."
"Level-headed? Man, my brain's mounted on gimbals."
"Inge, perhaps, can be picked up with dialectic, though sometimes I catch her sitting at my feet. Just another poor soul hedged round by bullshit."
"Your greatest gift would be to have given succuba to men of genius, like Lou Salomé."
"Pullman train speeding at a hundred miles per hour, passengers feeding, toilets flushing, shit and garbage spraying over the countryside. lt passes, seagulls in hot pursuit, beating their wings
". . . the Mark Twain fire-control radar which is capable of locking onto and tracking an enemy seagull and whose block diagram reminds one of the signature of the devil Almishak . . ."
"Grandpa used to demand and get the watermelon heart. The rest of the family had to spit seeds."
"Primam noctem."
"Cock of interlocked oak boles."
". . . brought at great expense, axheads, burro shoes, wallpaper of newspapers 1903, long past All Snows. Found a bluebelly lizard mummified in a wine bottle, dead drunk on the dregs. What must have happened springtimes mortal bloating over and over, too soused on thaw, the second-stand needles already
middening . . ."
". . . another earthquake. God's fault
"Fat Kanaka slapping down Hotel Street in his shower shoes."
"The highest emotion of which Man is capable is not love of country. It is love of Woman."
"That London creep. He thinks he gets all the utilities if he just drops a sixpence in the slot. You're one cape of what may be a continent. Guys like that, letting you go for an island, never find out."
Tom from Sidney sitting with an orange crush. The music rocketed through him just like the night before when he was in Fælleshobby on his first trip. "Mr. Tambourine Man" tambourined him to the quick and brought tears to his eyes, thinking all this time that it was about pot. Sweet error. Paper and lavender fiber pen. My dearest Karen. I'm in Fælleshobby and turned on. The whole thing rushes into me again like last night. You didn't tell me about these things, warn me, but they're happening to me. It's like learning new things about you. Just then a drunken young man at the other end of the table started whistling and banging his beer bottle. Tom looked at him with horror and levitated out of his seat.
Cats' cradle melodies on the tape. Billie D. waded about with a tambourine and thanked everybody whether they dropped coins into it or not. The big lovely girl with cat scratches on her hand gave him a streetcar token and a contact high. And then there were Jens and Signe sitting beside her and it blew his mind.
". . . in bed so long he wore holes in the soles of his ass, the old man coughed sentences, whole paragraphs, until he was dead. Period."
"I wouldn't think of fucking a girl in your bed."
"Why not?"
"Because it'd be like wearing another man's jock strap."
". . . an ordinary rubber cheese . . ."
"People living their lives out like puppets kicking each
other . . ."
American girls in foreign saloons soon learn to talk with their hands, just like Italian papagalli. Linda Woodruff expounding and gesticulating to the air with Bengt's face buried in her throat, hands busy on her thorax.
"I have a turtle growing in me."
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion."
"Tourist snaps me outside Tivoli giving him the finger. Souvenir of Wonderful Copenhagen."
"What would it be like feet-first into the sockets, the twitching sockets? Here it comes. The mechanical parts of returning never occurred to me steaming like a tub of components. . ."
"What is this some kind of snatch?"
". . . I never realized, trying not to snow you with the snake the circumlocutions of ten years ago the birds squeal the sun in their eyes my intake and exhaust. It's difficult to admit . . ."
"We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
"The Expatriate and Time magazine. Wouldn't put it past them. The solution is continuous and simultaneous what with all those gears and cams . . ."
"... planked and clinkered frame house flung keg clattering hoops and staves my jujube, your tongue is an Indian paintbrush."
Geoff Prygge, the aforementioned London creep, successful freeloader, one of these cats who goes from capital to capital bleeding the chicks, was attempting to bum a fag.
"Can I bum a fag off you?" he asked Benny, eyes glittering, goatee raffishing.
Benny shook his head.
"Can I con a butt, buddy?"
Bengt smiled:
"Not a chance, Geoff."
"How about you?" he asked Linda, as though he were offering her something. She pushed her pack of Kools at him.
"Thanks."
He fished one out so nonchalantly that it slipped out of his fingers and onto the floor. After having stooped for and found it among feet, he rose, flushed, and asked:
"Anybody want to trade cigarets with me?"
"... acid upset stomach . . ."
"Close your eyes and open your mouth."
Gordon Breckenridge, completely beguiled, did as he was told. Helle drew her hand out from under her skirt and wiped a finger across his tongue, filling his head with fresh duck unction. His eyes clacked open and ran smack into hers.
"I'm looking for the biggest dick in Copenhagen," she explained.
"Maybe mine's the one."
Her hand felt, of all things, his hardon.
"My goodness! Maybe it is!"
"How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning."
". . . BB gun blowarms my one sparrow a stroke of rumdum. Rose flats at low tide, sundown hamfisting the fields glasses galoshes bird peeping . . ."
". . . Tom scored on paper . . ."
"He was leery of trying it and maybe . . ."
"It works in practice but not in theory."
"Erase the theory off the blackboard, then clean the erasers after school. It'll purge your soul."
"My sister's birthday three days ago. I didn't feel a thing."
"Right now this minute under Errisbeg the seepage drips its whistling serial tune in the flooded mineshaft. Schönberg's numbers racket. They were getting copper there in the bronze age."
Her girl friend Helle had never tripped, he could tell, but she was turned on all right. He asked herself a question.
"What's the name of your cat?"
Billie D.'s right thigh was against Jens's left, and Signe's left thigh was against Jens's right. Billie D. received the information through his left thigh and sent it over to Signe, who then glowed with glee.
"It's not a question of money. No smoking in a strange language. Flemish? Man, I didn't even know German. Handwrought nails tin buttons ball old campfires relics of the Battle of White Plains. Relics of the Irish Republican Army celibate louts go drive your own Land Rover lobbing bombs at police barracks barley sprouts from the pockets of the slain. A ciphered stone, the Armada wrecked and looted splintered for firewood old fire exhumed above tideline with a ring of stones and bones of game broken for the marrow, whole ringed charcoal in that country where no wood has grown in a bog's age. I found a silver coin on the beach after the gale. It must have slipped my mind . . ."
"A tourist took a picture of me giving him the finger. My dad saw it later at a get-together."
"The Hero With A Thousand Silly Faces."
"If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."
"I'm from the country where they punish you for having a hardon," lamented Gordon. Helle drew him to her breast while running her fingers over the miracle. Billie D. had heard, and wanted to kiss him on the forehead.
". . . stuck birds bleed noise. It comes with a working drawing getting used to it and it won't be me getting used to it and taking it for granted. Fall on your face and all the spec sheets sheaves and scrolls roll and scatter. Hobbyshop window HO loco Southern Pacific cab-ahead articulated made in Italy . . ."
"Of course he's a cop. You can tell, just like knowing somebody's queer."
"I love you."
"Jeg elsker dig."
"Chives or cloves?"
"Euphoria. The Angelic Concert, both before and after the St. Anthony's Fire stage. I've often wondered if ergotism had anything to do with the flowering of the Middle Ages. Chartres. The Eisenheim Altarpiece. The Fioretti of Saint Francis . . ."
"It's this madman's secret, anyway. Swilling the moon like coyotes."
". . . all that stuff about the Blues, travel folk and all that. Real folky. I hear it. But the land lay there all those eons . . ."
"The ninth swell whumps forty feet into the air somebody laughing Earawalla, Gorteen, fishhook of land somebody laughed leave a ha'penny with the ship on it whump somebody laughed on that index finger of a rock. It's not a question of money still there and verdigrised after all these years. I seem to have lost a nine-hundred-year-old silver coin . . ."
"Remember, 0 Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it even to the foundation thereof."
"Your mouth is a knockout like those speedup movies of flowers opening, and then the words come out of it. I'm not used to hearing them in my own language, no charming accent – sort of self-evident truth there. I'm tired of looking at international traffic signs, although I'd certainly walk a Swedish mile for a hump with you."
Linda smiled at this. Lots of beers. Careful. Then she frowned:
"Why are you saying such things to me, Benny?"
"He means every word of it," said Bengt. "My balls ache for
you."
Vibeke put a comforting arm around her brother.
"No, that one's not a cop. He's just a carphologist out for an evening of slumming. Yeah. Carphologist. On the faculty of the University. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the corollary between carphological contours and the computations of the Maya astrologers. No, don't skoal with him. If you make friends with him you can risk being awakened early some morning by him wanting to appraise your bed. Outrageous? But he has professional immunity, you know. Not that he goes around wearing a white coat. A deathbed he calls a 'haul.' His prize haul is a plaster cast of what he claims is the deathbed of Karen Blixen, with Karen in it. Yeah. He gives lectures on things like, for example, 'The Wadded Pillow.' We'll audit one sometime. Of course he specializes in the sickbeds of the mentally ill. Memorable was the time Annette's parents broke down and took him to see her. At the spectacle of the girl uncurling from fetal position to glaze-eyed rictus, he creamed his Terylenes."
"Squat little factory expressing its vivid poisons into the
river . . ."
". . . slash of aspens' golden-bowed violas up the firred fiords of purple-jellyfished Puget from the hurricane deck of fair ferryboat Chippewa built at Toledo Ohio and shipped in plates and rivets smuggling fireworks to throngs of kid brothers. Long toppled house wired for roses, furrows of their last famined tillage. Not you. The other one . . ."
Footsies is the pedal counterpart of holding hands."
"Thank God Grethe retumed all of my boogers and fingernail clippings!"
". . . sun's evening out the tiny spiders argosying grassblade-to-blade. We all loved your mother the poets and painters who paved your court nipped the grassblades with our toes and you called yourself beautiful madness. Oh bonny's my lad he walks through the street just to hurt your mommy and lose sleep Oh Danny Boy opens with two snaps his cosmetic case and rubs his eyes in disbelief churchbells all up and down Woodward of a winter's morning. Sevenleague Sun sinks pink on Mt. Rainier."
"Gee. I'm going to send you dreams. I want to get involved with you."
"Pauvre routeboeuf." Helle stroked Gordon's hair. Billie D. Stonecipher turned at last to Jens.
"Spending fall vacation in the big city?"
"Yep. "
"How was the harvest this year?"
"Better last year."
"Uh, you're Jens, aren't you, and the lady's name is Signe?"
The little couple looked hard at each other, and then at Billie D.
"That's right," said Jens. "Have we met before?"
"Not really," said Billie D. "Actually, you're figments of my imagination."
Tord was perturbed. He had been sensing currents, recently, which suggested to him that beer was being phased out . . . He came blustering over to Billie D., the toast of Fælleshobby.
"Skoal, Billie, and thank you for coming and playing in Fælleshobby."
"Skoal, Tord. It's always a pleasure." Stonecipher lifted his glass of pasteurized apple cider.
"But you have nothing to skoal with," Tord pouted, juiced, "and neither do any of your friends, here."
She raised her own glass of cider, and Gordon and Helle too:
"Skoal, good old Tord!"
"I won't skoal with you unless you buy a beer."
"Well, Tord," said Billie D., "I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna buy you a beer, and then you can go off and skoal with yourself."
". . . drumlin gremlins take their bores and files and give The Eagle a working over. Then, just for the hell of it, start a new religion."
"A dog is a watching machine trot trot belly swaying swigs the air old dogs walk right plantigrade first one side and then the other in a sort of toothless twosome demonstrating the dugged darling's bilateral symmetry. Unimagined siblings don't bother me. I'm the one what got a break, lived to see his tail whacked off and the fascination of the human nastynasty. But now you take a pup, ears breasting the watercolor grasses . . ."
"Vibeke? Tighter'n a bull's ass in fly season."
". . . stop the boat. Slipshod sun pinkfingers behind the Olympics and I just about believed, from the hurricane deck of fair ferryboat Chippewa built at Toledo Ohio in nineteen-oh-whatever-it-was and rounded Cape Horn to Puget Sound, and I honestly hoped, pork and beans blowing bubbles on the stove . . ."
"Tom? We'll see what happens. Larry's good-looking and he's a good lover. Lars is even better looking, but he's a bad lover."
". . . I actually got inside every one of those houses before they were razed for the World's Fair, that you'd be waiting at the ferry slip . . ."
"O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us."
"Why won't you come home with me?"
"What a suggestion! I wouldn't even consider doing such a thing. Let's see . . ." Linda consulted her bitty watch . . . "we've only known each other for five hours."
"You're awfully free with your breasts."
"Think nothing of it. Creates brand loyalty."
"But my unrequited hardon!"
"Never mind, Bengt," Vibeke consoled him. "Here comes Susanne."
"Swift Chippewa, Lincoln, Renville, lac Qui Parle, Redwood, Brown, Cottonwood, Watonwan, Jackson, Nobles, Lyon, Yellow Medicine, Nicolet, McLeod, Blue Earth, Wright, Carver, Douglas, Hubbard, Todd, Morrison, Sherburne, Le Sueur, Waseca, Pipestone, Rock, Clay, Becker, Traverse, Norman, Polk, Red Lake, Marshall, Roseau, Wadena, Faribault, Dakota, Steele, Goodhue, Freeborn, Wabasha, Winona, Houston, Carlton, Pine, Mille Lacs, Isanti, Itasca, St. Louis, Kanabec, Anoka, Chisago, Mower, Fillmore, Ramsey, Hennepin, Benton, Aitkin, Crow Wing, Cass, Lake, Clearwater, Cook, Norman, Mahnomen, Otter Tail, Koochiching, Sibley, Stearns, Lake Of The Woods. Now how about that?"
"American tourist takes snapshot of me outside Tivoli. Me local color. Me give him Kodachrome finger to show folks back home."
"Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."
". . . Irish stoutheart on a fishhook of hurricane Atlantic deluding myself all the time snug up in Sparks's shack with a letter from your mother and you humble with child . . ."
"Oh, your arms are like big teddybear thighs."
"It happened little over a year after she got married, she was afraid to go outside. Just the thought of being down on the street was enough to make her turn pale and start to shake all over. You know, up there in the apartment day after day. Not for me."
Tord, standing at a far table, skoaling.
". . . and heard over the ship's radio, just happened to hear that Pamir had gone down under all fours."
"Will you come home with me?"
"Yes, thanks," said Billie D.
Benny making ready to go home with Vibeke and Susanne making ready to go home with Bengt the four of them in one taxi, which would leave Linda Woodruff unattended and unhappy in Fælleshobby. And drunk. A guy with a red beard came up to her as the others were leaving.
"You're American, aren't you?" he asked.
"Yes I am. Why?"
"And you're a virgin, aren't you?"
That was when "Rainy Day Women" came in over the many speakers and everybody started singing along, inundating perplexed Tord who retreated to his position of authority beside the door. And he exercised it, as he did just about every evening at this late hour, by flinging wide the gates. Duffel coats tumbled in, stumbles, stoned laughter, jamming the place like a church in a bombing raid, and Tord beamed like the Ciborium. The dismayed waiters readied their trays with soda pops.
Hardly any traffic on Knippelsbro. Below them, floating in the water, was the Bornholm liner "Kongedybet," and on the other side, moored and snoring at Asiatisk Plads, was the packet "Gullfoss" of Reykjavik. Gordon pulled a Toblerone out of his musette bag and broke off brown segments for the company.
"Did you miss your boat, Gordon?" Stonecipher asked, out of the black.
"Sold the ticket. Amazing how these stories get around."
"Sharkey told me he bought it from you."
The moon howled in the trees along the canal. Christianshavn was built by Christian IV, king and sea hero, who also built, a long time ago, the Stock Exchange, the Round Tower, Nyboder for his sailors, and Rosenborg Castle. Christian also gave a coin to mothers who named a son after him. Soft yellow lights from the former lightship across the canal and from other houseboats and from the squeezeplay companionways of fishing craft. Ship-ballast cobbles. The veteran steamer "Skjælskør," dinky relic of bygones, was tied up for a checkup over at Burmeister & Wain. And at last Bodenhoffs Plads, where in the near past, "Botnia," the final steamer in the Danish mercantile fleet, had waited out the winters with tarps over funnel and vents.
She made mint tea in the kitchen, the gas giving a surprising little pop when she turned it off. Gordon Breckenridge was mixing the pipe, expertly holding a corner of the hashish to the candle's flame until it just smoldered then expertly enjoying the heat of it milling between his fingers, crumbling over the little pile of tobacco ripped from a Pall Mall and making the room smeech of flowers. She came in with the sweet tea and they drank and smoked. Her two cats pranced on thorned stilts, rared their black backs for a fight, and boxed with the hash-shadowy humans, gave proud marks to their hands and purred.
"Cat, man. Do!" whispered Billie D.
Tails like bright bracelets of hair around their wrists. Good books on the orange crates. Gordon and Helle in American darkness in the other room with Gordon going through his bravura variations and asking Helle does it feel good Baby and she murmuring that he shouldn't worry about it and to just fuck her. The cats were winding up for a fuck. She squatted down and her ass and tail vibrated provocatively. He knocked her over and imperiously turned his back on her. But she bit his hind foot hard and they tumbled with a slap of the eloquent tails and kicked and nipped. They rose and stalked each other, spitting, ears flat out, until their noses touched. Then she nosed his furry balls with his tail around her neck. He turned and investigated her snatch and licked it dry, kept licking it with his rough tongue, licking it roughly so that she was lifted with her hind legs off the floor, then she went down again, her tail stiff as a crozier, and he covered her. Girl with lowing calves, what sunstroke in the night to see her and have known her, call to her. She looked at him with the long eye and made him lie there while she scratched her extra eye with his extra finger, then exercised her squatter's rights by giving him possession of the Pacific Ocean. In the swim, dog-paddling, knifing whale tresses, the big muffins suffering from the vapors. Her pussy farted shamelessly. Swoon. Pushing this big tall girl onto her back. Oh Mother of Snails, and easing it in while Thurston Dart played the harpsichord cadenza in the first movement of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and irreverent cats scattered books. Billie D. socked into her velvet spider, the long legs swingling, dazzle-patch, just the air of her, the cider of her breasts and we stroll from dreams into the sun. My love is October tulips. Are we going to make the last ship to Greenland? Oh the shades of her, the birded groves of her where she laughs. The sheepfold.
Cheese on toast with soft-boiled eggs and black coffee next morning. Helle and Gordon in fine fettle and holding as much hands as possible while the cats went around polishing ankles. The Rolling Stones painting everything black. Billie D. Stonecipher and he never did catch her name were still buffeted by sounds and feeling like Adam and Eve before angels were invented. She mashed her eggshell down into its cup.
"What did you do that for?" Billie D. asked.
"Break your eggshell and you save a sailor's life."
He gazed into the perfect membrane of his own, carefully intact eggshell. He killed a sailor most every morning.
Copyright © 1969 by Kenneth Tindall