The Gaslight Hotel

It was just like that ...

I crawled up the pull-down ladder in the
garage ceiling, crept across the attic floor
to find Annabel, my wife of three weeks,
supine on a cot--

and there I prepared to lick sweat out both
her armpits to inoculate myself against the
sweltering heat and rigors of Air Force sur-
vival training.

Late July, Hondo, Texas.

Yes, just like that. It worked.

Just like that. Now that I a civilian again and
enrolled in Dr. Taylor’s rhetoric class, and I
see what I will have to go through, I need
some kind of inoculation against the way the
man teaches his class-- which we spend 75%
of the time by listening to him read his own
writings.

What the hell! We have books!

I need inoculation, a lick, of something, a
kind of sweat-serum, that when slurped-up
and self-injected into the soft tissues under
the tongue disagrees with common sense
and the more delicate palate—

but necessary.

Yes, it disagrees-- yet,

'Yet' (what a great word!), as we all have
come to understand and value the many
forms of atavistic cannibalism -- in disguise,
sometimes disguised as flanks of hippo meat
(Yes, Conrad meant human flesh).

To guarantee that a person won't find some-
thing even yet more disagreeable during the
day, they must upon waking swallow a toad
or lick sweat out of an armpit or groin.

Swallowing toads or licking sweat, while not
the most savory thing, has not only the effi-
cacy of providing the body with antibodies--
but as well, such licking is an action that in-
troduce synecdoche into the consciousness.

Some professors leave acrid, bitter instruction-
al rank in the room when class is over. This
heavy air feeling is similiar to having dangling
calcium carbonate stalactites on the soft palate,
also vinegar pock on the hard alveolar ridge--

on which a person often runs his tongue back
and forth like a windshield wiper to rid or dil-
ute the taste.

Yes, and to forget forever Taylor's class-- if
it makes you sick because you didn't inoculate.

Maybe some coeds like Taylor's class. If so,
they have to push Taylor's taste into deeper
recesses of their damp oral musculatures--
whence such taste might be coaxed out later
as a memorous vestige-- maybe in those ster-
ile, lonely times when the girl sits on a fire
escape and listens to Steve Lawrence sing,

"The Wee Small Hours of the Morning."

Coming to a Taylor class, itself, is for many
an inoculation against the melancholy brought
on by coming to class, sitting and listening.
Coming to class for some is an offense against
the time spent doing so and a stain that
washes out only when the cause of the stain
is excised.

So, I sat in class, not attentive because my
mind was on Annabel, who, when she got the
chance, ran away with some airman who work-
on helicopters. I guess she ran away from me
because she didn't like my tieing her to that
cot in the attic with her arms pulled back and
roped to the wall--

all required if I were to survive survival.

I remember the scene-- kneeling by the bed,
I looked at Annabel with her mouth taped,
eyes wide and her arms pulled up and back,
armpits soaked and glistening.

On the wall by the stuck-closed attic window
hung a thermometer-- 112 degrees. It was
a good inoculation.

I wonder who licking her now.
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