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Show Anting Alone Page 328 for, along with the old spit-shine, the military had taught the child its own special brand of uptight cosmetic vanity: they'd taught her to wreak combat upon certain classes of bodily hairs that were and were not naturally present - and Shanny had been an eager student; she apparently had a therapist or advisor of some sort, a person of the commissioned ranks whom she admired, who considered her perfectly balanced hairedness, her clear fuzz inappropriate for Today's Army-woman's renovated "self-image" - no more hairy bulldykes around this fort, hup-hup.) And Sam had primped and preened the miniscule tape, availing himself also of the big magnifying glass he'd stolen out of the Compact OED box last time he'd come here to Saint Paphnutius to be moony over the Poes in the library. His original intention had been to steal the Bausch and Lomb simply for burning sunholes in crickets and in the back of his guitar, and to flirt with the burning of sunholes in his own feet and forearms, so chronically bored and horny and frustrated had his classic "borderline personality" been back in those university days. But, as so often happens where truly, glandularly good people are involved, the instruments of destruction and depilation had become tools of creation in Sam's big hands. Today at Saint Paphnutius, as Bopp droned on about foodstamps and feminists, the regenerate, fully-tenured English professor was putting the apparatus of his former whoredom to good liberal humanist democratic use, and even his creative splice-job was slowly being erased away forever, artistic narcissism giving way for the pure sake of feminized altruism. Maybe after the sermon, if the rain ever let up, Sam would go among the everlasting hills and Sony up some wholesome nature sounds for his dark |