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By Root 666 0

had some boils on my ass before, but this mother has to be the daddy of them all. Boy, is this a big boil. I thought that these characters had gone out of my life along with circle-jerks and slipped octaves. Apparently not, apparently not. It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography... I feel as though I'm sitting on a molten walnut or a goof ball of critical plutonium. Amazing, even flattering, to think that the body still harbours this stinging volatility, these spiteful surface poisons. It fucking hurts, too. If I turn my back on the uncensored mirror, touch my shins and peer through my parted legs, like a scowling pornographic come-uppance, then I get a pretty good view, thanks, of this purple lulu scoring its bullseye on my left buttock. It really means business. It isn't messing about. No wonder they call them boils. Oh, brother, sometimes, bathrooms, familiar as the body itself or just rented like this one, with sheets of doublehired reflection, spotty steel, the shower curtain as wrinkled as an elderly raincoat, they take you back twenty years and make you question whether you have travelled at all ... Lying down is okay. Walking hurts, standing hurts, sitting hurts. Abiding hurts. It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography.

So my day became a strange one of tracing paper and invisible ink. I sat there reading, re-reading, and sieving my mind and room for clues and taunts. Beasts of England. Boxer, the big drudge. The face-flannel in the bathroom looked like a roller-towel in a busy cat-house: where did that lipstick come from? Whose lips imparted it? She could only have been a professional. No one kisses me willingly any more. Squealer, the liar. It must be the booze, it must be the ... As I bathed my boil (whew — my ass was never one of the world's great sights but it's a real clock-stopper now) I couldn't help thinking of the Happy Isles: She-She — she did it. I have a confession to make. I might as well come clean. I can't fool you. The truth is, I — I haven't been behaving as well as I've led you to believe. No doubt you suspected that it was all too good to be true. I've gone back to Third Avenue, not to the Happy Isles but to places like it, to Elysium, to Eden, to Arcadia — no more than once a day, I swear to God, and only for handjobs (and on the days when I'm ill or unusually hung-over I don't go there at all). I go to adult movies on Forty-Second Street instead. I go to porno-loop parlours. There is no kissing in hard core. Come to think of it, there is no kissing in Third Avenue either. There is French and English, Greek and Turkish, but no kissing. I must have paid extra for this perversity. I must have paid through the nose. Ah, I'm sorry. I didn't dare tell you earlier in case you stopped liking me, in case I lost your sympathy altogether—and I do need it, your sympathy. I can't afford to lose that too. Napoleon, the bully: this pig likes his apples. I found a bookmatch in my jacket pocket: Zelda's — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. Where else have I been? Maybe I should ask the woman who trails me around New York. She'd know. I found a three-pack of condoms in my wallet, two joint-ends in my turn up, and a cocktail stick in my rug. Is it any wonder I've got a boil on my ass? It must be the booze, it must be the junk, it must be all the pornography.

You know (and the afternoon is now tilting past me in strictest blue, and the book is also turning on itself and getting nearer to being over), I lie here and cower to a sense of cautionary justice in matters of the body— and maybe there simply isn't any, any justice. Think of the nun who wears her grey skin and its no-sex cosmetic as she twists with curse-pains and life-change in her standardized cell. Certain children are perfectly capable of dying young from old age. Deprived of their zinc or iron, their manganese or bauxite, impeccable stoics start to crackle and fizz. The foes of my body are legion, and far more vicious than my sins. They have the organization. They have the finance (who tabs