Bogeywoman

I got down on my knees, tweezer shaking between my fingers, but she pulled me back up. Led me to her bed and spread herself out on the edge of it, with one bare foot on the floor. I began. I began with a sense of ruin, of pulling apart some secret of nature like a birdsnest that no human could build or rebuild, but soon I got into it, nibbling my tweezer along the border, making the shield perfectly symmetrical, dexter like sinister, the raw cooked. All the same my hand shook. It was her coochie after all. I tried not to look at the curtained, bubblegum-pink tunnel at the center of it. Neatly I heaped the questionmarky hairs to one side on the hospital sheet. Stepped back to view my work. “It looks like a perfect little keyhole-sumpm from a lady’s writing desk. Lemme leave it like that.” “No, all of it.” “I’m the artiste in this salon and I refuse.” “Sufferin cheeses.” She scrambled up on the side of the bathtub, craned her neck at herself and sniffed: “Take the rest.” And she rearranged herself on the bed.

But now when I knelt to the work I saw a sort of candle glint in the pink tumblers and before I could think she pressed my hand against the wetness there. Somehow I got rid of the tweezer and finally, finally, sank a finger into the dark center of some beauty, felt along the satin muscle banks to her blind end and felt her burst around me. Implode, shudder, dissolve. Her skinny arms flew around my neck and wrenched me to her nuzzies but when I opened my mouth to taste them, she shoved me mightily away. “I ain’t no bull dagger,” she panted, and at last I deduced what this must mean. “I know,” I politicly replied. I rolled away from her, closed my eyes, only now the darkness organized itself around the wet pink jewel of

“Finish me,” she whispered in my ear. She was pressing the tweezer into my fingers but I made a fist against it. “Don’t wanna,” I said, staring into the black, half expecting one of her knives in the gut. “Come on,” she spooky- fluted. “Don’t wanna and anyhow you don’t need it. You’re too pretty down there already.” “Pretty? Cheeses.” To my surprise her hand folded around my hand. Her thumb made lazy circles on my palm. I felt the quick length of her against me, soft swellings and concavities, fluted bones. “I got a joke for you,” she breathed in my ear. “This guy’s walking down the avenue, right? Joe. On the corner he runs into his old friend. Joe, what’s wrong, you look awful. I do? Well I feel good, Joe says, and he keeps going and sees this other old friend. Are you sick, Joe, the other friend says, cheese, you look bad! Well I feel good, Joe says, and walks on and soon he comes across his third old friend. Joe, what happened to you, this one says, you look terrible. But I feel good, says Joe, and he decides he better see a doctor. Doc examines him and shakes his head and says, I don’t know, Joe, I never seen a case like this. He opens this big black book and runs his finger down the column, Hmmm, looks good and feels good, that’s not you, Joe. Looks terrible, feels terrible, that’s not you either. Wait a minute, here it is, looks terrible and feels good. Say, Joe, you’re a vagina!” We snickered, helplessly.

The city glowed at the window bars and its glow pooled on the bed. I dared to look in O’s face. She was unearthly beautiful in that light. She was crude and bloodthirsty, and under her icy billows of hair and fake calm she had turned out to be one of those menstrual fantod types strung tight as a toy violin, but I kind of loved her. “Guess who told me,” she whispered. “Reggie.” “How’d you know?” “Who else?” We laughed into each other’s hair. “I can’t figure out if the Regicide likes girls or hates girls,” I said. O sighed. “What’s the difference? He’s the best we got in here, I mean think of the dreambox mechanics, what a buncha nuttins.”

I did. I sat up like one of those stiffs in their refrigerator drawers, bonk. “I gotta go,” I said. “You better not leave me now,” O spooky-fluted, sinking her black nails into my hand. “I gotta. I told you.” “How come,” she said, “for who?” She peered at me and I bit down hard to heat up the fat between my ears, tried to fry away Zuk, knowing O could see right through my headbone when she got in this state. “For who?” “I gotta get off East Five,” I said, “I’m going buggy up there.” That much was the truth. “I gotta make em think I’m getting better.” “Sufferin cheeses, you left more’n an hour ago. Don’t you think they found out by now? They’ll throw you in leg irons or sumpm.” “I gotta go.” “Don’t go,” she sing-sang warningly, “you can hide in my closet.” “I gotta.” I stood on my feet. “You two-timing jew oink, I hate you.” At this I lifted her up by her skinny shoulders and shook her a bit, so that her dark nuzzies trembled. Now that we knew each other down to our coneyholes, I wasn’t going to stand for this kind of talk. “You can call me Jew if you want, that’s not even a cuss word ya know, but if you call me a this jew or a that jew anymore I’ll punch you right in your popey nose. It’s not ladylike.”

Naturally I wouldn’t have done anything to her unless completely necessary, but I was way stronger than she was and people from her side of town understand that kind of thing. She lay there blinking up at me and I took the opportunity to run. On my way I snatched a fuzzy robe from the hook on her bathroom door. I knew that first she would puzzle on that queer pheenom, a Hebrew toughgirl, and next she would come looking for me, maybe throwing knives and maybe not.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

No I did not forget the keys and a very good thing I didn’t. By now the ward doors on East Six and East Five were locked inside and out, and this change of policy, which had rolled over in a single midnight hour, was not a good sign. They had found me out. They were upping the security in my wake. Outside East Five I hunched down below the little porthole, thumbed through the keys and tried them one after the other. Finally a key worked and there I was, back on that gleaming green hall of glassed-in chicken wire and locked steel doors.

Only the broom closet was slightly ajar. I peered into its darkness. No one. Nothing. Crawled by the nurse’s station to my quietroom, unlocked it and left it open just a crack. Hands and knees back to the broom closet, set the lock to lock, and lost the keys and fuzzy robe inside. Then back to my quietroom. Took a deep breath. Okay, I was a grown-up woman, starting right now. It wasn’t going to be easy to shut myself into that void stark naked, without even the diversion of an itch, but then I saw a little white thing flickering from the exact center of the padded floor. There on the x spot of libations was a torn-off corner of paper. I ran to it in time to see it had a phone number written on it. Then the door closed.

6

I Blab to Foofer

AND HE BLABS BACK

“So, er, uh,” I inquired, “just exactly what is that Doctor Zuk person, anyhow?” Foofer looked pained. He took off his glasses, laid them carefully in his lap, and touched the shiny bulges under each eye with a green silk handkerchief. “Vot do you mean by vot?” he asked. “Unh-unh, Doc,” I wagged a finger at him, “still my question.” “You must narrow your question. I cannot answer a question the size of seven worlds.” “O all right,” said I.

For, whatever I meant by vot, this is how we proceeded now: by the fishiest bughouse decorums. Even I was scandalized by what the dreambox mechanics were letting me get away with these days. I had a good mind to write myself a letter about it, alerting me to the dark clinical consequences, but perhaps I wouldn’t have understood. And then I’d have had the trouble, for nothing, of smuggling the thing into Rohring Rohring, where of course the mental patients’ mail got read. (Somewhere Royal Censors were busily at work.)

So what the hump. I went along with it. I was a grown-up woman now. I had sniffed the truth: The rewards for playing ball with the royals were not bobkes. This way I could see Doctor Zuk when I wanted, even though it gave me a kind of spongy feeling in my guts to see her, to say nothing of calling her up at the number she had given me, turned out it was a little cellophane square at the top of one of those new medical residences that tower over the old hospital dome like a bunch of giant Krispies boxes. I could see her window from my window, and the candid little eyebrow of her naked balcony. She could have seen my bars, if she had looked.

And listen to this, for two weeks we even had walky-talkies. For my birthday I charged a pair to Merlin at Charlie Rudo’s, fifty dollars. Madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse took one “for experiment” and we talked in the middle of the night when she was on call in some distant part of the bughouse. The static was terrible, like talking through a tunnel of hair on fire, and the whole time I could hear my gopher brain cells popping up and whistling