I drank for the next week. I drank night and day and wrote 25 or 30 mournful poems about lost love.

It was Friday night when the phone rang. It was Mercedes. “I got married,” she said, “to Little Jack. You met him at the party that night you read in Venice. He’s a nice guy and he’s got money. We’re moving to the Valley.”

“All right, Mercedes, luck with it all.”

“But I miss drinking and talking with you. Suppose I come over tonight?” “All right.”

She was there in 15 minutes, rolling joints and drinking my beer.

“Little Jack is a nice guy. We’re happy together.”

I sucked at my beer.

“I don’t want to fuck,” she said, “I’m tired of abortions, I’m really tired of abortions. ...” “We’ll figure something out.”

“I just want to smoke and talk and drink.” “That’s not enough for me.”

“All you guys want to do is fuck.”

“I like it.”

“Well, I can’t fuck, I don’t want to fuck.” “Relax.”

We sat on the couch. We didn’t kiss. Mercedes was not a good conversationalist. She wasn’t interesting. But she had her legs and her ass and her hair and her youth. I’d met some interesting women, God knows, but Mercedes just wasn’t high on the list.

The beer flowed and the joints went around. Mercedes still had the same job with the Hollywood Institute of Human Relationships. She was having trouble with her car. Little Jack had a short fat dick. She was reading Grapefruit by Yoko Ono. She was tired of abortions. The Valley was nice but she missed Venice. She missed riding her bicycle along the boardwalk.

I don’t know how long we talked, or she talked, but much, much later she said she was too drunk to drive home. “Take off your clothes and go to bed,” I told her.

“But no fucking,” she said.

“I won’t touch your cunt.”

She undressed and went to bed. I undressed and went into the bathroom. She watched me coming out with a jar of Vaseline. “What are you going to do?”

“Just take it easy, baby, take it easy.”

I rubbed the Vaseline on my cock. Then I turned out the light and got into bed.

“Turn your back,” I said.

I reached one arm under her and played with one breast and reached over the top and played with the other breast. It felt good with my face in her hair. I stiffened and slipped it into her ass. I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her ass toward me, hard, sliding it in. “Oooooohh,” she said.

I began working. I dug it in deeper. The cheeks of her ass were big and soft. As I slammed away I began to sweat. Then I rolled her on her stomach and sunk it in deeper. It was getting tighter. I nudged into the end of her colon and she screamed.

“Shut up! Goddamn you!”

She was very tight. I slipped it even further in. Her grip was unbelievable. As I rammed it in I suddenly got a stitch in my side, a terrible burning pain, but I continued. I was slicing her in half, right up the backbone. I roared like a madman and came.

Then I lay there on top of her. The pain in my side was murder. She was crying. “Goddamn it,” I asked her, “what’s the matter? I didn’t touch your cunt.”

I rolled off.

In the morning Mercedes said very little, got dressed and left for her job.

Well, I thought, there goes another one.