Read Online Room Service by Frank Moorhouse - Free Book Online

doing business with her – I was there, wasn’t I, to visit room 2109 where Scott and Zelda had their honeymoon – but nor, on the other hand, was I doing a reporter-who-pays-whore-for-interview-but-does-not-touch-her-story. We talked about the dreams we had for ourselves and our people. She told me how in the 1930s and 1940s coloured people couldn’t kiss on stage or screen because it showed they had real human emotion. I said that in Australia men were still not allowed to kiss sheep on stage and screen. She said that she thought men were not allowed to kiss sheep on stage or screen even in New York! The conversation had that relaxing frankness you get with a stranger when you’re feeling low and don’t give a damn. However, I did keep an alert nerve near my wallet. She complimented me on my sensitivity to her race and to animals. We said goodnight (I was too tired). Back in my hotel room I found that while my wallet was still with me, my American Express card, which I kept separately in another pocket, was missing. She’d stolen it. Since then I’ve been told that stolen credit cards are worth $500 on the street. I fell into a deep depression– travellers who lose their American Express card are like police officers who lose their guns.
    Prostitutes have taken over the language of radical psycho therapy and call whorehouses ‘sensitivity centres’ and the whores are called ‘counsellors’. Seems reasonable to me.
    Â 
    How some things are universal and never changing even in New York: An eight-year-old negro boy in East Harlem to his friend: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ The friend said, ‘Because he saw your face.’ The eight-year-old said, ‘No, to get to the other side.’
    Â 
    A New York subway graffiti story: Young people still do elaborate illegal decoration of the subway trains with spray paint, although now art galleries and art groups take up the best and market their work. But my carriage was done through with ‘Ricardo is finished with graffiti’.
    Â 
    A dinner party in Greenwich Village which sums it all up story: An academic lives with a woman who is a feminist psychotherapist. She runs a Women’s Psychotherapy Referral Service – fifty psychotherapists who have been active in the women’s movement and have participated in consciousness raising. At dinner they told me they were going to marry after having lived together, ‘It is the most bohemian thing left to do in New York – getting married’. Someone at the dinner party asked the woman if she were going to invite her group-therapy patientsto the wedding. She laughed and said no, it was going to be a traditional family wedding ‘with vows, the lot’.
    Â 
    Quaint ideas about Australia story: A drunken professor of music from Maryland asked me if I had ever screwed a sheep because he’d heard that a bit of that went on down under. I said it was interesting that he should mention that as I had heard a paper in Italy on just that subject. Oh really? he said. He said the thing that intrigued him was how you chose which one to screw when there were 53 million of them. I said that according to the paper it was like being in a lift, there is always one person in the lift you would go to bed with by the time it has reached your floor. But, he said, there was no communication, the sheep couldn’t express its preferences. I said that speech was not the only band of communication. It was no different to making love with someone who couldn’t speak English. He was satisfied by my answers. I said I’d send him a copy of the academic’s paper from Italy. I always wanted to ask, he said. ‘One day I’d like to visit Australia.’
    Â 
    What’s happening in art (to show that painters are crazy and art no longer makes sense and why don’t they get back to painting landscapes and horses): At the downtown