Lit Riffs (2 page)

lester bangs

Y
ears later, flipping idly through his collection of ten thousand albums, he settled on an original mono copy of Sonny Boy Williamson’s
Down and Out Blues
on Chess, slid it on the turntable, then lay back in his pasha’s throne of a chair, contemplating the irony of it all: the wretched ragged wino on the cover of the LP, and what on earth he would do with a fourteen-year-old girl if she spread her legs before him, begging to be fucked. The wino might do better, he chuckled to himself. After all those
Vogue
manikins, the would-be Bardots, next year’s Lorens and closing-time pickups; with some of them he’d been so drunk he’d never be able to say with absolute certainty that … no, there was just no way. Right now he’d rather be sipping this hundred-year-old brandy and digging Sonny Boy running down those same old lines he first heard when he was living on mashed potatoes than fuck
anything
. Sonny Boy was juicier than Brooke Shields would ever be. It had been better to sit and starve, nursing his desperation till some kinda break came his way. When it came, it wasn’t the kind of break he’d had in mind. Which only figured.

This fictional piece was inspired by the song “Maggie May,” by Rod Stewart and Martin Quittenton, but not by the lives or activities of any real person. Nothing herein is based on any actual circumstances or events, or meant to impute actual conduct, motives, or intentions to any real persons.

It was 1966. There she was, the Perfect Slattern, propped atop that barstool ugly and coarse as only far-gone alcoholics can be, forty if she was alive but still looking all there in a leathery kind of way that surprised him, that turned him on, but here he’d somehow ended up, ditched by a friend who unlike him had enough money to keep on drinking, and he looked at her and she at him and a pact was thereby sealed before a single word was spoken on either side—now is that true love, or what? Mutual convenience perceived through alcoholic fog was more like it. He walked over and slid up onto the empty stool next to her, and she took one look at him—his hair, his clothes, his hangdog face—and immediately knew who was buying the drinks. She asked what he’d have, he ordered a shot of rum and a pint of Guinness. He wanted to court blackout or at least unaccountability before he had a chance to think about what he might be getting into. He drank so fast even she was a little surprised, laughing and drawling something like, “Surely I can’t look
that
bad—Christ, I just came back from the powder room. Or is Art really
that
agonizing?” And she threw back her brass mane, opened those full lips, and laughed again, a true healthy hardehar this time, nothing self-effacing or ingratiating about it. She had him, and she knew it, and somehow his position as Henry Miller-style roué without a sou to his still unfamous name, living off his wits and special Way with the Ladies, did not seem to save much face or cut too far into her cynicism. He was just too pathetic, anybody could have him for a meal, but she was the one willing to take him out of sheer strumpet benevolence if nothing else—and since she now owned him dick to dorsal he might as well get an equivalent eyeful of his Owner: she looked good. Damn good. Better, in fact, at least to him at that moment, than all those damn ersatz Twiggies flitting around Carnaby Street on Dexedrine scripts and boyfriends in bands with first albums just breaking the U.S. Top 100, the kind of girl you saw everywhere then and he’d fucked enough of to know he didn’t really like them, because anorexia somehow just failed to light his fuse, ninety pounds of speed-nattering Everybird, never read a book in their collective lives beyond
Shrimpton’s Beauty Tips
, less soul than Malcolm Muggeridge’s mother, just sitting there waiting for someone to happen but sufficiently plugged into the Scene to let them in on which name it was gonna be hip to drop next week. He always thought when he fucked them he oughta come away with purple bruises on each hip, war trophies of the ’orrid bone-bangin’ he’d endured just ’cause some poof on the telly told them all that you just could
never
be too thin….

Now, here, next to him, sat a middle-aged slut with bulging reddened alkie eyes, leering through rotten teeth, just beginning to go to fat in a serious way. He began to get a serious hard-on, and he wondered for a second if he had some kind of Mother Fixation, then decided that he couldn’t care less. He got harder with the decision to stand his ground, incest be damned. Looked straight at all of her, as she at him: he estimated size 38 tits, beginning to sag a bit but that was all right, the way of nature wa’n’t it?, globes that heaved up from a rather low-cut frock even for that neighborhood, and like the rest of her those breasts might reek but retained just a pinch of that pink, plump, girlishly buxom
crèmecast
of milkmaid tenderness, and gazing rapt and rigid he could not help but wonder awestruck at just what manner of pagan secrets might lie deep in the pit of cleavage. Surely there was
something
down there, one had but to dig breastplate-deep to dredge up treasures untold (the Twigs, of course, had no tits whatsoever and were all prissily proud of it), perhaps jewels and musks she’d carried all the way from the narcotized dens of the mystic East, where she’d spent her girlhood tremulously awaiting the needs of some fat sheikh who was so stoned and overstocked fuckwise he never even got
around
to her, so in revenge she stole into his inner sanctum and purloined his most prized rubies, opals, amulets, and blocks of pure hash and opium, hiding them in the handiest place, and though the master didn’t catch her at theft he did find her encroaching on his hophead den and in punishment booted her ample ass clean out of his fleet of tents and into the molten Sahara sands, a white-hot sea where she’d’ve roasted like a squab had she not hitched a ride from missionaries, whose camel deposited her on the outskirts of Tangiers, where she sold her virgin essence to some stogie-smelly Yank robber baron who came quick anyway, but after he OD’d on absinthe she picked his pockets clean, netting not only enough money to keep her off the streets and in the bars for a while but a ticket to London via Luxury Cruise, in the course of which she enjoyed a brief affair with the son of a famous American expatriate or so he claimed, but then he apologized for his rather pallid passions explaining that Dear Old Dad had bequeathed him a palpable preference for boybutt. She didn’t believe a word out of his mouth and they both had the time of their lives getting drunk like Boer War vets on the anniversary of the Big Battle, forgetting all about sex for the nonce. Landing on Blake’s native soil, she made a beeline for the seediest part of London Central, renting a crummy room she decorated with a reproduction of Man Ray’s famed
Box with Two Peaches in the Sky
taped up on one wall, which cheered her up no end.

Man Ray might have been a gay porno star as far as his knowledge extended. He didn’t know said lithograph was worth twenty-five pounds if it was worth a shot on the house. On the other hand, she had never heard Otis Rush’s original 78 rpm rendition of “Double Trouble” on the Cobra label, which he just happened to be the proud owner of. Clearly it was a match made in heaven, especially when he looked down and discovered himself delighted at the sight of one peremptory ripple of flab around her middle. That hula hoop of fat, he knew there was definitely no turning back now, so downward yet anon did slither his ogling orbs to grow themselves all wet at the sight of two more than amply supple legs in black fishnet stockings crossed under the hem o’ that minidress, the whole thrilling vista tapering in most sublime tribute to Jehovah’s very handiwork in two black patent leather shoes with stiletto heels could slice a porkbutt clean asunder. And amazingly enough, she wanted none other than that scrawny excuse for a failed fop HIM!

By now they’d practically consummated a week of orgiastic gymnopeds via eyes alone, so she paid up quick and out they scooted. Fairly
ran
down the block and up the stairs, through her door, where then she did after all think to stop and ask, “Like my Man Ray?”

“What’s that? Some billboard for a new poofter play?”

She charitably ignored this idiocy, choosing instead to trip and shove him backward onto her scummy rumpled bed, the sheets and blankets not washed in weeks because she was too busy at the wine to remember them so they stank like sick goats but little he cared being drunk and lust-racked, too, so they commenced to make what Shakespeare, who could get at least as down ‘n’ dirty as say Texas Alexander when so he chose, once called “the beast with two backs.” An apt description in this case, because the pair set to rutting like hogs been penned apart all winter, or dogs sprung from sexually segregated pounds (a pup-population control measure once actually tried in America, resulting in one lockup fulla Rovers crawling around the room all day leaving bowwow jizz all over the floors, and another wherein the bitches thus imprisoned and deprived set up such a tempest-trough of yipyap yelpings and piteous yowls not unreminiscent of chalk squeaking on blackboards that the whole idea was abandoned overnight and a platoon truckload of panting Fidos imported special to the Lady Bowzers for a full-scale K-9 orgy just to shut ’em the fuck up) (happened in Keokuk, Iowa, case you wondered where the locals’d be fool enough to concoct such a scheme in the first place), they were hungry, and nosh awhile they did, groinwise that is, grinding away in to-the-hilt gimme-glee sloshed swill-sploshes of Eau de Poozwax Straight Up & Mulching Mit More Spizz-Overflow than whole popovs with some o’ them Twiglets occasioned—it splashed across the grimy walls and soaked through the putrid coverlets, one rampant rivulet running down the bed cross the floor under the door down three flights of stairs and all the way out into the street where it conjugated unnoticed with TB sputum, not that the two lovers in question noticed any such minor details inasmuch as by that time they were too busy eating each other just toothpick-shy of outright cannibalism, after which they did it doggie-style and rocked so mighty they damn near broke the bedposts, the springs meanwhile playing at least five different Bartók string quartets and “From the Diary of a Fly” at once, causing an eighty-nine-year-old widowed pensioner in the next room past the wall which was about as thick as the cover off a copy of
Uncle Scrooge
ca. 1948 to seriously consider attempting to make his way down the stairs, a feat he had not accomplished in a decade and a half, so as to thereafter hit the street and see if he himself could purchase the last hit of whoopie he’d ever know except even allowing for the stairs he was still thinking WWII prices which’d mean he couldn’t afford much beyond a quick whackoff into an old handkerchief while peering through a peephole at some grainy loop or two of (sign on door claimed) Mexican lezzies havin’ at each other orally which mighta been still a heap better’n nothing (I tried it once on 42nd St. and it was great, but felt filthy afterward so never went back) except Pops here ain’t even really had it up since the Rosenbergs were burned so what the fuck….

When they were done dogfucking they sprawled back awhile to rest and pant and contemplate just exactly what they mighta forgot to try. Licking assholes? They talked about it but agreed it was finally neither’s style. Mild B&D/S&M? Well, both were tired. So they tried something really daring, truly
avant
, beyond the pales of known thrash: they snuggled up for warmth, and hugged and kissed, with full passion but also gently and tenderly, sometimes just barely grazing each other’s liptips (which
really
reactivated the lust-pustules in both bodies), for about twenty minutes. They kissed. Like kids, which was what he in fact was, and made her feel like all over again, which was the best feeling she’d had in years if not ever. When fully reprimed, they fucked once more, a long, slow, languorous workout in nothing but the Missionary Position, and when at last they came it seemed as if some timeless primal river was unleashed headwaters between the two as they writhed in one slow sliding tangle of YES from the core to YOU and no other … it was almost like some sort of, well,
religious
experience, mystical somehow, certainly elemental, the mindless melding of two principles always drawn together yet always warring everywhere, no confluently conjoined once-in-lifetime-memorable rapture among all manner of fucks high and low and every pit stop in between but this was one of the few ever that anybody’s lucky enough to get which really actually on some intangible certainly beyond verbalization level
matters
… what you keep on looking for every time you lie down, and suspicion or nerves or reminiscence of some past lover who warn’t so hot or drug-numbness or outright hatred or simple bone-weariness or god knows whatall else seems to come between you and it every time damn near … and True Love has
nothing
to do with it, on one level it’s nothing more than pure chemistry, though on a level a high degree or in-front mutual trust helps plenty, and finally maybe it’s just dumb luck: THIS TIME.

When it was over, they lay in silence for upward of an hour, lost in commingled dreams, drained beyond movement, finally he sat up and said: “What’s your name?”

She looked at him in silence for a full minute before answering. “Thanks a lot, SHITHEAD. That’ll do for you as far as I’m concerned. As far as mine goes, just for that you’ll never know. Now get dressed and get the fuck out of here.”