Free Soul of a Whore and Purvis by Denis Johnson Page A

Golgotha.
    â€¦An overpowering scent of blossoms on
    The air today. Inebriating.
    MASHA :                                    Just about a stench.
    WILL : Or is it your perfume?
    MASHA :                                I wear no scent.
    WILL : But I can smell you. You smell womanly.
    My my, you give a man an appetite.
    You’re womanly. Dazzlingly. Deeply.
    MASHA : I don’t hear such talk. It strikes me deaf.
    WILL : I know you from Sylvester’s. I know you
    From head to toe three nights a week stark naked,
    No matter how you cover up in gray.
    I don’t forget the times I watched you dance.
    First time, I said to my buddies, Hey now, there’s
    The type I crave, a dancing contradiction:
    I crave my women simultaneously
    Loose and tight.
    MASHA :                        You’re talking to the walls.
    You’re talking to the moon. Nobody hears you.
    WILL : You cast one glance and liquefied my bones
    And alla that. Sweet Jesus, what a rack.
    What a set of pins.
    MASHA :                             Would you not swear?
    WILL : “A set of pins”?
    MASHA :                       You took the Lord in vain.
    WILL : I’ll take him any way that I can get him,
    Honey baby lover fucker-doll.
    MASHA :…Who’s the ones with everything stripped off?
    Who’s the peep show? Is it really me?
    I strut along and toss down feed to you.
    You hunch there with your glass of screw-top wine
    And all the feelings naked in your face.
    You gobble me down with your eyes, but you don’t see me.
    You see the act, you see your fantasy
    And not the person working at a job.
    You see me panting for you, but I’m bored,
    My ankles hurt, my car got repossessed,
    I’d like to move because my rickety
    Apartment’s on the building’s sunny side—
    The prancing slut is prancing in your head.
    You got me backwards. I’m not undercover.
    I never was so hidden as when I was naked.
    â€¦And plus fact is I ain’t no Norma Jean.
    I’m sort of regular, with decent legs.
    Dim light, I’m gorgeous.
    WILL :                                       Dancing decent legs.
    Decent legs made for indecent dancing.
    MASHA : I think I wish to stop this conversation.
    WILL : Dim light, spilt liquor, dancing decent legs.
    â€¦Where does he keep you stashed?
    MASHA : In Hawk Hills. Outside Fort Worth. Way outside.
    WILL : I think you need to get to Houston.
    MASHA :                                                    No.
    WILL : But not downtown. Just out there by the lake.
    I’d put you by the golf course. Weekend nights
    We head downtown, see what the action’s like.
    MASHA : I don’t like the city. I never did.
    It smells. It stinks. I mean it reeks.
    WILL : The smells and lights and noise and all the tense
    Faces and the cries of the lunatics.
    You’ve gotta get out of Hawk Hills, swoop down
    To Second Street and put the world before you.
    Downtown. In the night. That’s where you hide.
    Do you know what this is?
    MASHA :                                         Money, yeah. So what?
    WILL : Two dollars.
    MASHA :                Stick it up your ass!
    WILL :                                                    Come on.
    You never took a little nap for money?
    MASHA : You can go to Hell!
    WILL :                                      I’ll take you with me!
    â€¦All I did was watch. Not like the others.
    Everybody knows what