Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [15]
Looking back around the room, I saw most of the Dago Angels slumped in drunken repose, occasionally mumbling at each other or croaking hoarsely at someone across the room. Nobody seemed to be asleep, but everybody looked pretty drunk. On the second couch in the room sat T. R., swilling Colt 45 and raving drunkenly at various people around the room, sometimes at no one in particular, his volume rising and falling from ragged roar to throaty alcoholic muttering. About half of what he said was intelligible; the rest was lost in animal drunken growls and various inchoate noises from his booze-thickened vocal chords. He was certainly talkative tonight. His woman Charlotte hovered erratically round him, a strange figure of a female in Angel denim “colors” and a head of hair that was incredibly straggly even for one of the mamas, sticking out in weird jagged tangles like black steelywires. Somehow her whole appearance reminded me of Archy's alley cat Mehitabel,1 or some other classic straggly black alley cat of New York slums. Turning to Willy, I said, “Say, man, is there any booze left?”
“Nah,” he laughs, eyes twinkling like Santa Claus, beaming with expansive benevolent beer-joviality, “we drank it all up, ‘cep’ ol’ T. R. there's got his private stash o’ Colt in the kitchen…. I don’t think he's got but a coupler three cans left, butcha kin ask ‘im anyway…”
I decided against that, looking around for a place to sit. Except for the floor, the only place was a space of couch at T. R.'s left side. With only a slight inner tremor of nervous hesitation, I walked over and sat down there, thinking that even if T. R. should flip out in drunken dinosaur rage and start to rend me limb from limb, the others would intercede and save me.
Superficially, though, I absorbed it all like a true pop journalist, open-mouthed mumble-moaning “Wow, wow, wow” over and over, all I could say eyes riveted to the cringing naked girl who blew sixteen of them that night her face a waxy mix of blood and pus and tears and come. No, I never flinched, I watched them all thru Benzedrine and the peripatetic joint that circled the room as she moaned in the center of the floor like the ruined hub of this crazily turning wheel the joint passed from Willy to Bob to Sammy to Funky to Charlotte to T. R. to me to the two nameless stony postadolescent hoods with reptilian faces who sat the far couch slowly chewing their gum with slit-eyes unblinking never widening as they played their cool gangster mannikinisms to the frozen hilt unmoving save when the Mex snapped his fingers and pointed one slow index finger at his crotch signaling the softly sobbing by-now-dazed victim that it was his turn, she must do all for he is only a rock with a cold vicarious half-registered orgasm, she crawls over undoes his pants unzips his fly pushes a dumb half-sleeping hand into his BVD's extracting a limp rubbery tube on which she lays her face her head starts bobbing barely up-down zombielike as I look around and see Bob and Willy shooting the shit, Sammy the hardworked Angel mama sprawled splay-legged against a wall staring dishwater-eyed at absolutely nothing, Funky on the floor head back against the wall contemplating dark blue space in ceiling shadows of an adjacent room a slightly melancholy look on his face, T. R. growling and muttering in unintelligible drunken confusion half-filled can of Colt 45 tilting from his left hand at a precarious angle while his seldom-glimpsed eyes perhaps roll back behind his omnipresent impenetrable sunglasses and he never registers his old lady Charlotte's concentrated attempts to bring some life into his cock as she kneels on the floor in front of him hair a straggly mass