| OCR Text |
Show Anting Alone pa g e 168 the traditional thousands of tiny real or unreal phosphorescent fishes and seahorses tickling the new hairs on their bellies and thighs and scrota; and afternoons were spent drying out in backyards full of fruit rotting off trees, making a certain wet, hot smell that caused unprovoked slim boners to slap against flat young guts, and Sam would curl back his harelip and try to elicit the Look from Axelrad again, with only cruel words now, no actions, for repressed adulthood loomed an the watery horizon. This singular relationship had continued on unabated clear up to grad-school time, when they'd each flown away over the Wasatch Mountains - fat, unambitious Sam typically to poop out and drop to earth sooner than lithe, well-connected Axelrad. But, whenever he needed distance from his Kansan death-in-life,- or found himself feeling inordinately threatened by his close proximity to Bouncy, who for vague but somehow understandable reasons still wanted to kill him, Sam excused classes for a month or two and drove either up to Chicago or straight down to Houston to be reunited with his little Jewboy-buddy-from-wayback once again. (Sam couldn't recall, at this moment, here in the encampment, with all these zombies drooling on his bloody basket-ball shoes, whether Axelrad's fellowship was at the University of Chicago or Rice University in Houston - he hoped it was one or the other, that he hadn't simply pulled both names completely out of his random asshole.) The humidity turned out to be about the same in whichever of these two places as it was in between, in Kanorado. And so Sam's big forehead was permanently damp as he and Axelrad took part in the whole rigmarole-razzmatazz of depressing, expensive, complex Texan and Illinoisan depravity. |
