Free St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler

spurting out of his ears. From the dampness, probably, Jake had thought at the time, like the shoots that grow in potatoes if they are abandoned under the sink.
    Bony little Harry, a veritable bantam, wore a pullover under his jacket and a CND badge on his lapel. The badge was redundant, for his manner bespoke sufficiently of inherited discontent exacerbated by experience. Black, wintry experience. Jake immediately recognized in him the deprived man seething at the end of the bus queue in the driving rain. As he hurtled past in a taxi. It was Harry who called on his way home for a gallon of Esso Pink and lit the Aladdin before setting out the Birdseye frozen potato chips and Walls sausages for his solitary supper. While Jake upbraided the butcher at Harrod’s, demanding and getting a thicker, better-hung slice of Scotch rump. Harry who joined the Christmas club in July andendured tallymen and was not chagrined by the cutback in bank overdrafts. Or the waiting list for Jaguars. Or the ski conditions at Klosters. Or the punitive capital gains tax. Harry whom the world insulted. His gray eyes were perfervid and brimmed with rancor. When he settled into the new winged armchair from Heal’s, Jake couldn’t help noticing the shine on his trousers and the leather strips sewn into his cuffs.
    â€œNice. Very nice,” Harry said, taking in everything in the living room. “Ruthy would fancy a place like this.”
    Ruthy who was still collecting points on the council waiting list.
    â€œBut she can’t afford it. Between you Yanks and Rachmanism the rents have been forced up everywhere.”
    â€œI’m a Canadian.”
    The world seemed especially ordered to tantalize Harry, mock and inflame him. Wakening, the morning after his first visit to Jake’s house, to light his smelly heater and wait for the kettle to whistle, he read on the front page of the
Express
of the latest goddess to descend on Heathrow, Gina Lollobrigida, snug in her coat of jaguar and silver fox. “In addition to the coat La Lollo the Magnificent wore on arrival, she brought another three – a tiger, a sable, and another jaguar. And security staff at the Savoy Hotel were guarding the star’s suite last night.” There was also a photograph of the latest in
Avenger
girls, stooping to reveal a deep enough cleavage to ram it into, given a chance. Then there was a picture of some Swedish bit, the wind billowing her mini high as her cunt. Oh, to stir it into a swamp, and plug it once and for all.
    And Harry only had to flip the page, making a mental note to drop off his seed-stained sheets at the laundromat en route to the office, before other people’s good times obtruded.
    MY LIFE AND LOVES
By Air Canada Steward on Sex Charge
    Air Steward Paul Crane of Kingston Hill, Surrey, accused of raping an air hostess, told yesterday of the women in his life.
    He said he had his regular girlfriend at Surbiton and he would take out air stewardesses between flights.
    There was his girlfriend at traffic control and he also took out one or two other stewardesses.
    His counsel asked: “How many-of them do you sleep with?”
    Crane: “I sleep with nearly all of them.”
    Those stewardesses, Harry was well aware, were not picked for their language skills but were selected for tit size and enthusiasm for taking it from behind, driving it in themselves, impaled on the captain’s lap at thirty thousand feet while the plane was on automatic pilot. Which you could tell just sniffing it on them as they hobbled out of the flight cabin to the loo for a rinse, and if you so much as asked them if there were any cartons of fags or flasks on sale, even if this was the yabbo’s cheap midnight flight to Paris, they gave you the I-know-you’re-dirt look and said, “I’ve only got two hands, haven’t I?” And Harry knew what they’d just been at, tuppenny whore.
    Harry, enjoined to begin his day with a