Free The Naughty Bits by Jack Murnighan Page A

refreshed him with mulled wine while I sang him a little song about the fortitude of spawning salmon. He was a gallant gentleman and offered a different way of pleasuring me, since I was the first woman he said he had failed. Accordingly, he burrowed down the way ferrets do and tried to take me in his mouth. I was very comfortable about this, having nothing to be bitten off. But in a moment he thrust up his head and eyed me wearily.
    “Madam,” he said, “I am sorry, I beg your pardon but I cannot.”
    “Cannot?”
    “Cannot. I cannot take that orange in my mouth. It will not fit. Neither can I run my tongue over it. You are too big, madam.”
    I did not know what part of me he was describing, but I felt pity for him and offered him more wine and some pleasant chat.
    When he had gone I squatted backwards on a pillow and parted my bush hair to see what it was that had confounded him so. It seemed all in proportion to me. These gentlemen are very timid.

from Portable People
     
    PAUL WEST
    There’s a phrase bandied about in philosophy classrooms that gives me enormous pleasure: the problem of other minds. Much as I would like these words to refer to the irremovable thorn-in-the-side fact that other people have ideas and opinions of their own (Why? I ask, why?), the phrase is actually used to talk about the fact that neither Descartes nor Russell nor anybody else has been able to prove with certainty that there are intelligences beyond their own. The upshot is that the only consciousness you can attest to is yours, and all else could be a hallucination, an error, a fabrication. (To this, however, my response was always, If I was cooking this whole thing up, there would be a lot more free parking.)
    In writing, of course, the phrase could be adapted quite readily to speak to the difficulty of creating characters that aren’t mere extensions of the author. Not surprisingly, the protagonists in my early stories were chaps rather like myself—lonely, emotionally stunted ne’er-do-wells who talked a lot better than they listened. Only later did I even dare to try to generate characters from my own imagination. And even those, as it turned out, tended to be drawn from some distant corner of my self. We bear a lot of people within us, and to be a decent fiction writer you end up seeking out even the Rhode Island delegates from the Congress of Identity.
    It is the mark of a truly gifted writer to be able to go beyond this. Not only must they enter into the minds of others, they also have to make the minds themselves. Paul West takes this challenge to an extreme in his “novel” Portable People, a collection of channeled voices from the living and the long and recently dead, with characters as diverse as Imelda Marcos and Lord Byron’s doctor. West’s gift is dazzling: No two sound alike (beyond suspiciously prodigious vocabularies), and, what’s more, no two seem to share a philosophical or ethical position. Each is a discrete human writ large on three pages or less. So the scandal of a crotchety and mischievous Rodin in the excerpt that follows is counterbalanced elsewhere by the proud and surgical Edith Sitwell or the consummately disdainful Hermann Goering. West speaks more voices than the whispering winds.
    Auguste Rodin
    God’s dong, if such a thing can be, is a velvet hammer made of love that thumps the stars home, where they belong, in the moist pleat of the empyrean. Surely He needs no goading on, unlike myself, finger-dipping each and every cleft of every model, and all that a mere preliminary to what goes on after the day’s work is done, and we twist the big key clockwise. That is when I get my girls to tongue one another before my very eyes. It is almost as if the sculpting is mere prelude to the venery. By midnight, they are all going their ways, about their business, with Rodin syrup dribbling from them as they walk, like molten marble. Those who pose for me must taste my will, upended like ducks on a