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Show Anting Alone Page 174 So, after a whole day spent with these 500-word themes, these questions festering somewhere up behind his big sinuses, Sam descended from Axelrad's cold attic, preparing himself for the usual night of extravagance. His body felt even weirder than usual - lighter and more acidic. And, minutes later in the blues specialty bar, in the standard half-darkness designed to cloak the wrinkles newly-developing on the faces of aging youngsters-on-the-prowl (the same lurid darkness that cloaked the late zits on the faces of budding libertines in the 3.2 beer bars back in Kansas), Sam saw the standard beautiful-girl-to-whom-his-heart-went-spon-taneously- out. The standard beautiful girl who made America's defense posture seem obscene and ultimately unimportant once again. Creating her own little pool of light, looking like a young Anne Bancroft, slightly shy, laughing at the shenanigans of her loud friends but not really participating, smiling with these two unbelievable cheekbones that Sam would've gladly devoted a whole lifetime to in place of anything even vaguely pelvic - this girl, or a girl just like her, was everywhere Sam went in these United Sates of America, one girl in each place, a downright plenitude of them. Sam really had no hurry to get him one. But he was nevertheless sort of half-unconsciously sidling up to this beautiful person in the darkness when some serious, real blood started to fly at the other end of the barroom. As Sam found out later, somebody had told a young woman over there to get her tubes tied. It was just a standard bigtown American sexist insult: "Ahhh, g'wan, git outa here, git yah tooobes tied." Just words, relatively innocuous. But the woman happened to be connected in some |