Free Lunar Follies by Gilbert Sorrentino Page A

Schutz’s exhilarating career of bump, tickle, slap, grind, frig, suck, hump, and bugger. For some as yet unexplained reason, the disturbingly graphic images of Miss Schutz “in action” are collectively entitled “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” In the second gallery, a bartered bride, clad in nothing but black silk stockings, blue garters, and pink satin pumps is performing a “John Henry” on the entire Mulligan Guard, two or three at a time already! “Silver Threads among the Gold” is its wholly opaque title, and tells us nothing of the bride’s feelings; although one might surmise that she hankers for the life of the carefree cafonella, the Vienna woods be damned! She is, as some wag once noted, home on the range in these captured moments of sweaty bliss, that is, quoth the sly dog, “heating up a fellow’s dinner is her constant delight.” And even grandfather’s clock rang its ancient chimes at the sight of the flushed bride in her gentle squirm atop the stove. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” for this was Miss S.’s handle, was the astonished cry of the libido-frenzied youths, each wearing the hats their fathers wore, each with a rose of Killarney in his buttonhole, each lost in impure fantasies in the gloaming. “What a friend we have in Jesus,” a muscular fellow unaccountably murmured, and was immediately set upon by a chopsticks-wielding Oriental lad, who crooned, during the attack, something that sounded like “aloha oe, aloha oe,” later translated by the captain of the H.M.S. Pinafore as “where [was] Moses [when the] lights [went] out?” Nearby this fascinating and instructional panorama, we may descry a curious figure, jocularly called Little Buttercup, a lad of progressive secular tastes for his time, and one highly conversant with the contents of The New York Times Book Review (known in the review industry as “The Skidmore Fancy Ball”), and The New Yorker (smiled upon as “Songs My Mother Taught Me and Taught Me and Taught Me”). Little Buttercup, when he was but a tyke, along with some of the other “babies” on the block, wore golden slippers, and in the evening by the moonlight heard, oh heard dem bells! (Dey be old black Joe’s bells.) This was, of course, long before Buttercup hit the old Chisholm Trail and discovered that the notion that there was but one mo’ ribber to cross ‘fore Loch Lomond, Californiay, hove into view, was no more than a canard, a fib, a runaround, an editor’s rejection letter, a “Norwegian steam engine,” and a shocking lie. Yet Buttercup pressed on, as numerous photographs show us, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier, now as an estudiantina, now as Stéphanie Gavotte, “La Pajera.” “Goodbye, my love, goodbye!” someone supposedly sobbed, while the passionate crowd threw sweet violets, Nellie’s blue eyes, voices of spring, a pansy blossom or two, and a handful of earth from Mother’s Grave (this last but a figure of speech known as a “clementine”). Climbing up the golden stairs to the third and most breathtaking gallery, the viewer is immediately struck by a tableau showing—to the life—Polly Doodle strolling through the park one day on white wings, so to speak, heading toward a big rock candy mountain because of what the catalogue notes term “the letter that never came.” A muscular gladiator follows Miss Doodle like a swan in España, or like Little Annie Rooney, or perhaps like Scheherazade, his eyes flashing the message, “if you love me, darling, tell me with your eyes.” He guessed, surely, in his bursting Eyetalian heart, that love would find a way like a big pizza pie finds its ineffable way down Santo’s t’roat, hey! Sadly, the way, for him, was long and over the waves. Semper fidelis was the brawny rogue’s motto, credo, dado, and blitzen, along with his favorite question to the fair sex, one that clings perpetually to his lips: “Where did you get that hat?” He was a reg’lar down-west McGinty.