Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [16]
that flashes me again of Archy's Mehitabel and sucks on his cock gargling vain half-coherent imprecations out of the side of her mouth up at him while the record player blares the same records again and again a collection of old Motown hits and an Otis Redding album. Otis is moaning “I’ve been loving you a little too long” as I look back to where the sobbing girl is still working on the Mex who is beginning to get pissed off saying “What kinda half-ass creep job is this” and T. R. comes out of his stupor momentarily saying “Clout that bitch upside the head, mothafucka, tell ‘er she better give you some proper fuckin’ head or I’m ‘on make damn straight she ain’t alive to see the sun come up” and the Mex replies “Ahhh she no good, just fuckin’ tease ain’t even give half-ass try” and T. R. lashes out suddenly with his booted foot kicking the girl in the cunt, once, twice, back of the neck, raving at her in heavy medium-tempoed slurred anger of advanced intoxication “I said give that boy some head mothafucka an’ do it right or you ain’t gonna live long!” She sobs out something unintelligible with the Mex's cock still in her mouth. T. R. rises suddenly, unsteady, tottering, stumbles over to her, leans, yanks her hair savagely pulling her head out of the Mex's lap, lifts his boot high and brings it down hard in her face, hard enough to bruise and pain but not so hard she can’t go back to sucking cocks, he gives her another kick, the base of the spine, she hardly makes a sound, this has been going on for several hours now after all…. T. R. drops her head, she returns to the Mex's lap, T. R. lumbers back to his seat, Charlotte reaching immediately for his fly, I hear Otis crying and whining through the haze which by now has turned to static, the joint is passed to me once again, I inhale and hand it to the Mex who as before merely accepts it without even acknowledging my presence, holding my breath I float out for a moment, losing track of place and time and sense, fade back in to banal telegraphy of Bob's and Willy's chitchat, open my eyes and look in the opposite direction from the girl and the Mex, Sammy has gone to sleep, Bob strokes his mustache as he banters with Willy: “Yeah, she was pretty good, took her a little while to get goin’ but at the end she was all there good and solid.”—It took forty-five minutes of steady sucking for this girl to make Bob come. Now in his corner Funky is engrossed in a crossword puzzle book, his gnarled pencil making soft scratching noises in the little boxes, T. R. is mumbling to himself a subdued raving, head fallen back against the wall, Colt .45 can on its side by his side and around it a big dun-colored smear on the couch, Charlotte sits at his feet on the floor with her hands resting in her lap, head wobbling slightly, a dazed abstracted look in her eyes, the Mex's junior-gangster buddy sits just as he sat when I first came in, epitome of coolness, slit-eyes unreadable, hands folded in his lap, mouth at rest in a prim shuttered line which could with utmost simplicity convert to a sneer but never does, a true man of stone, I look back across the room and though those on the other end have not changed from when I last regarded them I now catch something I never noticed before, a tattered vintage copy of Uncle Scrooge from my collection lying open on the carpet, so random fates of real life make this literary symbology complete by their cynical grace, and I’ve taken the whole scene in at last, nothing more to add.
from Part 2, Chapter 12
Previously Unpublished, 1967-8
1The cockroach Archy and the alley cat Mehitabel were created in the light verse of New York newspaper columnist and humorist Don Marquis (1878-1937). These characters then appeared in the 1954 album Archy and Mehitabel, songs written by Joe Kleinsinger and Joe Darion and sung by Carol Channing and former silent-movie comedian Eddie Bracken. That album became the basis for Shinbone Alley, a 1957 Broadway musical written by Mel Brooks, which in turn led to the obscure 1970 animated Hollywood film Archy and Mehitabel, by English