As a matter of fact, Curley was digging away very industriously. He must have had five or six on the string at one time, from what I could gather. There was Valeska, for example – he had made himself pretty solid with her. She was so damned pleased to have some one fuck her without blushing that when it came to sharing him with her cousin and then with the midget she didn't put up the least objection. What she liked best was to get in the tub and let him fuck her under water. It was fine until the midget got wise to it. Then there was a nice rumpus which was finally ironed out on the parlour floor. To listen to Curiey talk he did everything but climb the chandeliers. And always plenty of pocket money to boot. Valeska was generous, but the cousin was a softy. If she came within a foot of a stiff prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a trance. It was almost shameful the things Curiey made her do. He took pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You'd almost swear she didn't own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he got her alone he made her pay for her high-falutin' ways. He went at it cold-bloodedly. “Pish 'it out!” he'd say opening his fly a little. “Fish it out with your tongue!” (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.) Anyway, once she got the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he'd stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a wheelbarrow. Or else he'd do it dog fashion, and while she groaned and squirmed he'd nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her legs. Once he played her a dirty little trick doing it that way. He had worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat. “That, Miss Abercrombie,” he said, “is a sort of Doppelganger to my regular cock,” and with that he unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the carrot. At least, that's how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yam, but there's no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a purist. Somehow Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got a personal hard-on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He meant that Nature was asserting itself – through his, Hymie Laubscher's fat, circumcised dick. It was the same with his wife's cunt. It was something she wore between her legs, like an ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but it wasn't Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean.

Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the Land of Fuck. The girl upstairs, for instance… she used to come down now and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was so obviously a simpleton that I didn't give her any notice at first. But like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the key-hole and see for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn't standing in front of the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she was. I was so excited I didn't know what to do first. I went back into the big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt others and the fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in the cool of the dark, I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. “Come here, you bitch,” I kept saying to myself, “come here and spread that cunt over me.” She must have caught the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn't say a word, I didn't make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the dark like a crab. Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn't say a word either. She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more. I don't think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life. It was like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in her mouth. I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a froth. Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably the best fuck I ever had. She never once opened her trap – not diat night, nor the next night, nor any night. She'd steal down like diat in the dark, soon as she smelted me there alone, and plaster her cunt all over me. It was an enormous cunt, too, when I think back on it. A dark, subterranean labyrinth fitted up widi divans and cosy comers and rubber teedi and syringeas and soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely silent, and so soft and restful diat I lay like a dolphin on the oyster-banks. A slight twitch and I'd be in the Pullman reading a newspaper or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones

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and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of tingling sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops. In the immense black grotto there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music. When she pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventiloqual twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate. It made me think of cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amok, of wild unicorns rutting in rhododendron beds. Everything was anonymous and unformulated, John Doe and his wife Emmy Doe: above us the gas tanks and below the marine life. Above the belt, as I say, she was batty. Yes, absolutely cuckoo, though still abroad and afloat. Perhaps that was what made her cunt so marvellously impersonal. It was one cunt out of a million, a regular Pearl of the Antilles, such as Dick Osborn discovered when reading Joseph Conrad. In the broad Pacific of sex she lay, a gleaming silver reef surrounded with human anemones, human starfish, human madrepores. Only an Osborn could have discovered her, given the proper latitude and longitude of cunt. Meeting her in the daytime, watching her slowly going daft, it was like trapping a weasel when night came on. All I had to do was to lie down in the dark with my fly open and wait. She was like Ophelia suddenly resurrected among the Kaffirs. Not a word of any language could she remember, especially not English. She was a deaf-mute who had lost her memory, and with the loss of memory she had lost her frigidaire, her curling-irons, her tweezers and handbag. She was even more naked than a fish, except for the tuft of hair between her legs. And she was even slippier than a fish because after all a fish has scales and she had none. It was dubious at times whether I was in her or she in me. It was open warfare, the new-fangled Pancrace, with each one biting his own ass. Love among the newts and the cut-out wide open. Love without gender and without lysol. Incubational love, such as the wolverines practise above the tree line. On the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other the Gulf of Mexico. And though we never referred to it openly there was always with us King Kong, King Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of millionaires and lampreys. No logic could drive King Kong away. He was the giant truss that supports the soul's fleeting anguish. He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and arms a mile long. He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away. He was the muzzle of the revolver that never went on, the leper armed with sawed-off gonococci.