Read Online A Moveable Famine by John Skoyles - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: John Skoyles
Ads: Link
outlandish pansy. I told Monique I was going to sit with my friends and she was fine with that as I could tell she was ready for a night of karate/writing.
The first reader was a brooding solitary farm boy whose mystifying work entranced us all. He read only a few poems and ended with “Darkness Begins with the Dark,” the last two lines of which were:
wavering like a moist nun,
like a sad placenta.
Ridge said he admired the double simile. The featured poet, an overweight woman with a following of overweight women, read a poem called “Twenty Lovers”: twenty sections which described in detail twenty rotten sexual encounters with twenty rotten men. Her audience knew the poem, and cheered favorite passages. She got the biggest hand when she reached Number Twelve, a oneliner she recited in a smashing tone:
You miserable little bastard!
McPeak started dating Taryn, a stripper who worked at The Dugout. He begged us to go with him to see her, and finally one night Pryor, Ridge and I agreed. We met McPeak on the ground floor of EPB, where the university hospital was conducting a blood drive, cots and tables of cookies and punch filling the lobby. Ridge began speaking intimately to one of the nurses and a moment later told us to go without him. Barkhausen got off the elevator and joined us. McPeak swung by Black’s Gaslight Village so Barkhausen could change his clothes. McPeak knew the complex, which had been crazily rigged together by Mr. Black, an eccentric who retrieved his morning paper from his front yard in the nude and who spoke in a falsetto when he spoke to women. On the drive over, McPeak said he had gone out with a girl who lived in the Chinese room which Black had furnished entirely in bamboo and silk and which contained an indoor waterfall pouring from a huge tea pot. Barkhausen’s place was on the second floor, which you could get to by stairs, or climbing a tree in the lobby that leaned toward a balcony. Artie put on a starched white shirt and jeans with pressed creases. He pomaded his hair with Yardley’s Brilliantine, its lavender scent causing Pryor to sneeze repeatedly.
The Dugout had a bar on each side of the room and a round stage in the middle. Taryn waved to McPeak, and we joined her at a table. I was surprised to learn she was an undergraduate English major. Her freckles and dyed hair matched her orange blouse. Drunken men in T-shirts hollered at a woman in a bikini who danced to “Teach Me Tiger,” deftly manipulating her theatre in the round, blowing kisses and whispering to those in front. Taryn told us it was a night of novelty acts and praised her friend’s charms as the girl flung her bra to the crowd. Arms flailed for it, and the winner pressed it to his nose. Barkhausen beamed at an Asian woman in a top hat and green velvet three-piece suit who contorted herself across a green velvet couch. Her last number was accompanied by the theme from Exodus. At the final crescendo, the dancer, naked except for pasties and a G-string, tipped her hat, and long, straight, beautiful black hair fell down the length of her back and almost to the floor.
When Taryn appeared, we were amazed. She had painted more freckles onto her cheeks, large ones, and had braided her orange hair into pigtails. She wore a white bonnet and a white dress, a dress for a lawn party, and twirled around the stage to “Chicago,” her many petticoats lifting, revealing her thighs, hinting at the flesh above, and then lowering the whirling white slips which spun like discs, higher then lower, until for the last five seconds, she spun very fast, raising the petticoats and revealing her perfect buttocks and ruby G-string.
Two businessmen took the table next to us with two women. One said to the other about his date, “Don’t ever come to my room again with a piece of shit like this.”
“Come on,” his friend said. “She’s not so bad.”
Barkhausen turned to them and said, “You watch out how you talk about the
The first reader was a brooding solitary farm boy whose mystifying work entranced us all. He read only a few poems and ended with “Darkness Begins with the Dark,” the last two lines of which were:
wavering like a moist nun,
like a sad placenta.
Ridge said he admired the double simile. The featured poet, an overweight woman with a following of overweight women, read a poem called “Twenty Lovers”: twenty sections which described in detail twenty rotten sexual encounters with twenty rotten men. Her audience knew the poem, and cheered favorite passages. She got the biggest hand when she reached Number Twelve, a oneliner she recited in a smashing tone:
You miserable little bastard!
McPeak started dating Taryn, a stripper who worked at The Dugout. He begged us to go with him to see her, and finally one night Pryor, Ridge and I agreed. We met McPeak on the ground floor of EPB, where the university hospital was conducting a blood drive, cots and tables of cookies and punch filling the lobby. Ridge began speaking intimately to one of the nurses and a moment later told us to go without him. Barkhausen got off the elevator and joined us. McPeak swung by Black’s Gaslight Village so Barkhausen could change his clothes. McPeak knew the complex, which had been crazily rigged together by Mr. Black, an eccentric who retrieved his morning paper from his front yard in the nude and who spoke in a falsetto when he spoke to women. On the drive over, McPeak said he had gone out with a girl who lived in the Chinese room which Black had furnished entirely in bamboo and silk and which contained an indoor waterfall pouring from a huge tea pot. Barkhausen’s place was on the second floor, which you could get to by stairs, or climbing a tree in the lobby that leaned toward a balcony. Artie put on a starched white shirt and jeans with pressed creases. He pomaded his hair with Yardley’s Brilliantine, its lavender scent causing Pryor to sneeze repeatedly.
The Dugout had a bar on each side of the room and a round stage in the middle. Taryn waved to McPeak, and we joined her at a table. I was surprised to learn she was an undergraduate English major. Her freckles and dyed hair matched her orange blouse. Drunken men in T-shirts hollered at a woman in a bikini who danced to “Teach Me Tiger,” deftly manipulating her theatre in the round, blowing kisses and whispering to those in front. Taryn told us it was a night of novelty acts and praised her friend’s charms as the girl flung her bra to the crowd. Arms flailed for it, and the winner pressed it to his nose. Barkhausen beamed at an Asian woman in a top hat and green velvet three-piece suit who contorted herself across a green velvet couch. Her last number was accompanied by the theme from Exodus. At the final crescendo, the dancer, naked except for pasties and a G-string, tipped her hat, and long, straight, beautiful black hair fell down the length of her back and almost to the floor.
When Taryn appeared, we were amazed. She had painted more freckles onto her cheeks, large ones, and had braided her orange hair into pigtails. She wore a white bonnet and a white dress, a dress for a lawn party, and twirled around the stage to “Chicago,” her many petticoats lifting, revealing her thighs, hinting at the flesh above, and then lowering the whirling white slips which spun like discs, higher then lower, until for the last five seconds, she spun very fast, raising the petticoats and revealing her perfect buttocks and ruby G-string.
Two businessmen took the table next to us with two women. One said to the other about his date, “Don’t ever come to my room again with a piece of shit like this.”
“Come on,” his friend said. “She’s not so bad.”
Barkhausen turned to them and said, “You watch out how you talk about the
Similar Books
