Bill Starr

Meanwhile, Back at the Sex Farm

Chapter I

I knew that I should leave that place now and go somewhere else, because it wasn't any good that night. The trouble was that it wouldn't be any better anyplace else, and I knew that too, but I didn't want to stay there any longer. Part of it was that I was getting a little drunk and drunks always depress me; and part of it was that I wasn't getting anywhere near drunk enough. The real trouble was not the people and not the talk, although god knows they were both pretty bad that night, but just that I was seeing too much sense in everything. I was beginning to wonder again what in hell had happened to my life when I wasn't looking, and where everything had gone. It was one of those panicky moods that used to send me back to my room and my typewriter to put a few eternal verities on paper, as though if I didn't get it said I might forget it, but I had found out that when I did that I was usually too drunk to write, and when I read it over the next day it never was what I had wanted it to be. After I had tried that a few times I didn't do it any more, and every time now that somebody tells me that so-and-so does his best work when he is drunk I can be damned certain that so-and-so isn't worth reading. Trying to write when you are drunk is like climbing into bed with a cunt when you are too drunk to get a hard on; if anything at all happens in either case you are lucky, and if you end up with something pretty good you always know that if you hadn't been drunk it would have been better. So I knew that I wasn't going back to my room to work. I was just going there because there wasn't any better place to be.

Uncle Gino was at the bar when I went through on my way out of his place, and he said hello to me the way he always did when I was going out. He never spoke to anybody when they came in, but when they were going out he seemed to notice them for the first time, and if you weren't on to the trick you stopped and talked to him, and because he talked to you over the bar you usually bought at least one more drink. I don't know how many extra drinks he sold in a night that way, but he must have sold some, because he never gave up that trick so far as I know. None of the regular trade paid any attention to him, of course, and I went on through the bar without stopping and went out to the street.

It was raining worse than it had been earlier in the evening, and I stopped by the doorway to turn up my coat collar. Then I saw her standing there. It was Ruth, and she looked as though she had been standing there for hours.

“Toby threw me out,” she said.

“Get the hell out of here. I'm not having any,” I said.

“It's for good this time. He locked me out and won't even let me in to get a toothbrush.”

“I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything. To hell with it. You knew about Toby when you went with him. I don't want to hear your hard-luck story.”

It was raining so hard that the water was running off my hat in a stream. Water was dripping down the back of my neck too, and when I pulled my collar closer it was clammy on my skin. I looked at Ruth standing there in that puddle, and I wondered how long she had been there waiting for me to come out of Uncle's.

“I haven't got any money,” she told me. There isn't any place I can go.”

I stepped back in the doorway where there was some light, but all I had left was about forty-five cents in change. Poppa wouldn't cash a check, either.