David Lawrence

David is one of the folks what put out Mudfish, from NYC. No email address, but he lists

360 E. 72nd Street, NY, NY 10021 as his snailmail address.

Good Conversation

My brother was running the family business, a chain of funeral homes. When I was young I

used to sneak into the Madison Avenue location and speak to the corpses. I felt they had a

special wisdom. I once put an apple in a dead old lady's mouth. It fell out dragging her dentures

with it, smashing on the floor. I casught hell for that.

So with my father in the slammer, my mother recovering from the stress of my father's

incarceration by traveling around Europe attending society parties and my older brother adding

up the monthly corpses against the overhead, I pretty much had the palatial Park Avenue pad to

myself.

My dad was doing "vacation" time at Club Fed for tax evasion. He had charged a summer

home in East Hampton to the office, pretending it was a business expense. We had a staff of

three there who were deducted as office help. My father also deducted his car expenses, his

yacht and his helicopter and crew. I loved our summers in the Hamptons. We used to have

stables there where we kept polo ponies. One of them drowned in our Olympic sized swimming

pool. My dad had it stuffed and mounted it in the entrance hall.

The Internal Revenue Service took the home from us. And the yacht and the helicopter.

They left us the stuffed polo pony which we moved into our Park Avenue apartment.

You have no idea how much this richly furnished fifteen room duplex impressed the girls I

met at N.Y.U. where I was majoring in English. I had a sad, sensitive face with dreamy bedroom

eyes and a strong chin that a Hispanic girl told me felt great when she ground it against her

pelvis. It reminded her of a Fuller brush. She'd warn me not to shave days before she planned

to have sex with me. She liked it rough.

A beautiful WASP who was modeling for Ford Modeling Agency to pay for her education and

majoring in philosophy used to tell me to keep my eyes open when we screwed so that she could

look into them and understand the vast deserts of the semetic races. She'd talk the time we

screwed about how there was Hebrew in my eyelashes and the Old Testament in my underarms.

My penis was the Torah. Just before she'd come she'd yell Jahweh and shout at me to wink. I

had long black eyelashes. She said sh'd give her left tit to have them. So I'd flutter my

eyelashes and she'd come. After, she'd tell her friends that she didn't get fucked by me, she got

lashed. She'd quiver like an ancient sacrifice, roll over and say, "I'm dead." I'd then inspect her

asshold for scarebs.

I rarely did a girl more than two or three times. I felt that there was a frailty about

relationships based on all the time I spent in the mortuary. All things came to a funereal end and

there was no sense in my getting too attached to anyone. Better to break off the relationship

myself than to find it laid out on a slab at Finkelstein's Funeral Homes. That is, if my family was

lucky enough to get the account. By the way, my name's Jonathan Finkelstein.

This girlfriend hopscotch stopped when I met Tracie. And looking back at it I still can't figure

out why I let all my other girls lapse as I got more and more involved with her. Tracie was no

better looking or more intelligent than any of the others., She was a so-so skinny blond with

sunny blue eyes and a smiley, spearmint fresh disposition. I liked that about her. I didn't like

angry women. If she had a dark side it was so hidden that it might as well not have existed. She

never asked me anything challenging, never said anything profound and if the conversation

turned political she'd purse her lips and kiss me or let tears well up in her blue eyes and pray for

the boys who were dying in Vietnam. I'd stand at attention and give a mock twenty-one gun

salute for our dead green berets. Not that I gave a damn about dead soldiers. My family

buiness was death. I just wanted to let her feel I was on her side, to keep her hot. Because the

sex, if not fantastic, was interesting, spooky and reliable.

When my apartment was empty, which was often, she and I liked to screw behind the drapes

in the living room. The living room was huge, with high ceilings like a ballroom, and looked out

onto Park Avenue on the third floor. The stuffed polo pony stood in the middle of it. It looked

out of place. But my father always liked that hourse and without the Hampton home he had no

place else to put it.

Tracie and I would stand behind the drapes, close the shades and she'd sit on the window sill

as I'd hump away between her sweet, milky thights. Once she purposely let the shade up so that

elderly peeping Toms from the other pre war coops and the pedestrians on the street could have

a gander. I closed my eyes like an ostrich. When she came she whispered, "My king, I am your

treasure chest. I have gold coins inside me."

All I kept thinking was, "Ducats. Fuck it. Ducats. Fuck it."

I reached up to pull the shade down, opened my eyes and saw three construction workers

laughing and pointing at us. The shade came off and fell on top of us. We rolled on the floor

and got all caught up in it. When I tried to hang the shade back up, I couldn't. That night my

mother came home from Europe with sixteen valises, saw the shade all crumbled up on the

windowsill and asked me what happened. I said I think ghosts did it. My mom was superstitious

and called a spychic, an astrologist and a witch and had them de-ghost the apartment. For a

week I wasn't allowed to wear shoes because I might step on the good fairies.

Amy was an artistic girl in my painting class. I met her around the time I became involved

with Tracie. She was Tracie's opposite. She had brown frizzy hair with black eyes and a zoftig

body that was rich and creamy like kugel. She wore long flowing gowns like the Krishnas and

had a dark, spiritual, other worldly sense of life. She was a cultist without a cult; a feather flying,

detached from a bird.

Amy and I sat next to each other in class. She was a great painter. I stank. In high school

my teacher had said that I couldn't draw a straight line with a ruler. Then she gave me an "A' for

my use of color. I wanted to be a poet not a painter. But I thought that poets should be able to

point, that words were little squibs of color, that I should be familiar with a pallet, brush and oils.

I admired Amy's work. We became fast friends. We had good conversations together about

the meaning of life. We once played Russian roulette with cap guns to get the sense of life's

preciousness. She was the most spiritual girl I'd ever met.

"The spirt is the water in a goldfish bowl without the bowl. Without the fish," she said to me

when we were eating hot dogs by Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. There was a dead fish

floating in the fountain. She said a Hindu prayer.

I admired her loftiness. Even if I came from a background of mummifying bodies. She had a

soul the size of the colliseum. I wanted to sponsor gladitorial events in her. Her spirit rose

above the bleechers. I imagined it would be a religious experience to be married to her. If only I

could feel sexually attracted to her. I prayed that she'd excite me. I once lit a candle asking God

to let her turn me on. I then tried to beat off over the candle thinking about her. But Tracie

came into my mind and I burned my dick before the come put the candle out.

"That's great," I said looking over at her canvas. She had painted a perfect likeness of the

fat, hairy nude who was posing for the class. Blubber behind his arms dripped into spots of

muscle, his rounded back sprouted hairs like hill grass and his spread legs caught stale thunder.

On top of all this debauched flesh she put an innocent, fresh modest face that seemed to be

apologizing for its body. The model was only in his t\wenties. He looked like a nice guy. But I

couldn't figure out what he was doing perching himself naked in such degradation. There was a

glint in his eye of freindly resignation to his own ugliness.

I hadn't painted a line on my canvas yet. All i had done was colorful background. Yellows

melding into blues; reds falling onto greens and purples announcing their startling tackiness.

"Nice color," Amy said.

"You think so?"

"Sure. But why are you drawing the background first?"

"To let it influence the foreground."

"You have to draw the model first."

"When it speaks to me."

"Giuseppe, speak to him," she said.

"What should I say?" the fat model asked. The teacher came over and told him to shut up.

I went back to painting the background. The bell rang and I headed down to the cafeteria with

Amy to get a snack. We both had Hostess cupcakes and coffee. Her table manners weren't

very good. I looked at her mashing a cupcake into her mouth with the cream filling dripping

down her lip as she made chewing sounds. I was disgusted. I didn't understand how someone

so spiritual could eat like such a slob.

Was I wrong to be so repulsed by her lack of etiquette? I told myself I was a bad person to

feel this way. That table manners were bourgeois conventions and that Amy was above such

nonsense. But when I was a kid table manners were the most important thing in the world to my

father. He once bought me a new bicycle when I was six because I was able to explain the

difference between the salad fork and the regular fork to my relatives at a Passover Seder. He

raised my allowance when I played a trick on my friend, giving him a finger bowl and watching

him drink it as if it were soup. He tought that was a sophisticated joke. He wanted me to be a

gentleman. I wondered if he now told the cons he was dining with at Allenwood Federal Prison

Camp that they shouldn't slurp when drinking their soup.

I was tempted to tell Amy that she shouldn't chew with her mouth open. But I had too much

respect for her brushstrokes. She was above table etiquette. And yet. And yet if I could reform

her debilitated manners I might be able to talk myself into going to bed with her. We could

become lovers. I'd drop Tracie and marry her, my true, spirtual soul mate. We'd have good

conversation and I'd be enlightened by the headlights of her spirituality.

No, no, no. It was not her that had to change. It was me. I had to find the true Amy in the

jungle of gestures, the spirit in her flesh's mistakes, the aesthete in the slobber.

"I broke up with Gary, you know," she said.

"What happened?" She had been going out with Gary for a year. He was a good looking guy

who was majoring in economics. This left the field open for me. Did I want to enter?

"I couldn't take all those numbers anymore. Life is not a balance sheet. Money, money,

money, money! He didn't care about Vietnam, feminism, integration; any of the important

things. All we had in common was sex. If you're not a soul mate, there's no sense, is there?"

I though of Tracie and how the sex was everything. How I once licked her when she was

hanging upside down from the chandelier in the living room. The lights seemed to glow brighter.

And how I dry humped her under my fathers stuffed polo pony when she had her period and had

tide hermself with shirts to the horse's hooves.

"Sex can be the main thing," I said, wishing I could get turned on by her.

"You're deeper than that," Amy said. There was a cockroach walking across the table. She

squashed it with her finger. I almost puked.

"Don't get me wrong. Sex is best with some you love," I said. And I looked at Amy's oval,

Modiglianish face and hoped that someone might be her.

"Someone like you," Amy said.

She took the words out of my mouth.

"Someone like you," I said. I stared into her black moon eyes and touched myself under the

cafeteria table. Nothing moved. I was jello. She was a little too intelligent to arouse me. I was

tuned on by the anamalistic. I didn't want to be swapping spit with an intellect. But maybe if we

were in bed together naked?

"Jonathan, I've been looking for you," Tracie said as she interrupted us, chewing gum. I'm

not sure I minded. If I fell in love with Amy, she might steal my soul. I'd become a zombie.

"Tracie, this is Amy. Amy, this is Tracie," I said.

"Jonathan, did you forget?"

"What?"

"We're having a picnic. I have the lunches right here," she said and held up a large plastic

bag.

"You think I'd forget that?" I had forgotten.

We brushed the late spring snow off a bench near the Central Park zoo and opened the

lunches. We had Westphallian ham sandwiches and swiss cheese on black bread; gerkins, cole

slaw and a few small tomatos. In the cool air the tomatos tasted like they had just come out of

the refrigerator. They were fresh as an icicle. An elephant came out of a building, raised his

trunk above his head, roared and took a dump. Steam rose from his shit like an exclamation

mark. Then he walked back inside.

Tracie looked at me cross-eyed like she was overwhelmed with love and sang her favorite

song, "I Want to Hold Your Hand." She sounded exactly like Paul McCartney. It was amazing

how she could transform her girlish voice into a Liverpudlian male's. She reached out and

grabbed my hand, acting out the song. It was so hokey that I blushed, so childish that I liked it.

"We ought to get married," she said.

I hugged her. I hid behind her shoulder. Why would I want to marry her when I was banging

her for free?

"We're too young," I said.

"My sister got married at seventeen."

"But her husband was forty-two," I said. That was disgusting. I hoped Tracie didn't fall for

some old sleeze after I dumped her.

"I can't wait forever. Better marry me soon or I'm going to start dating."

I remembered a few months ago when I thought we were getting too involved. I suggested

we start dating. One evening I ran into her at Max's Kansas City dancing with Thurston Muddle.

He was the only nerd there with a suit and tie. Everyone else was freaked out in velvet clothes

and boots, tripping on acid, dancing to the Doors. It was a typical sixties scene. No way she

could have liked Thurston. I told her no more dating.

"Alright, I'll marry you," I said. I could always back out later. What was the difference? At

least this would stop her from screwing someone else.

"He proposed to me. He proposed," she started screaming and crying to the elephant who

had come back to wrestle with another turd. The elephant let out a roar. And a fart. The smell

traveled across the sidewalk to where we were sitting on the bench. We both gathered our stuff

and skiddadled.

I took Tracie back to my apratment and made love to her under my mother's bed. It was a

raised bed so we were able to screw on the floor under it. There was something nice about doing

it there. I felt closer to my parents. Like I was revisiting the birth scene. My mother and brother

never came home in the afternoon. It was safe.

My brother did't even ring the bell. He just barged in, with his receptionist, Sherry, a big fat

black woman in her fifties. I recognized their voices when he entered my mother's room and lay

on the bed with her. I guess he liked the primal scene too. The bed slunk down and pressed

against us.

"Play dead, big mama," he told Sherry.

"I'm dead," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"Really dead."

"Good," There was a silence. Then I heard a slap, "Don't touch me. You dirty necrophiliac."

"Say it again," my brother said. I could hear him rubbing himself.

"You dirty necrophiliac."

"One more time."

"You dirty necrophiliac."

The bed shook. A heavy sigh. My brother said, "I came."

"Congratulations," Sherry said.

When they left, the bed raised two inches. Tracie kissed me, saying, "My husband. I love the

word husband. I'm going to be Mrs. Tracie Finkelstein. You're brother seems very nice.."

The next day at art class I spoke to Amy. "I told Tracie I might marry her."

"She'll make you dress like the Beatles."

"I love you. I think."

"I might love you too. I think, " she said, and broke out a tootsie roll and started chewing it

with her mouth open. "We're soul mates and our spirits are love's cosmic voyagers," she said,

her voice stuttering through the sticky chocolate.

"We should see if the sex is good."

"We owe it to ourselves."

"It's a debt to true love."

"An obligation."

"I’ll marry you if it works," I said.

I didn't want to take Amy to my home. I had too many memories of other women, particularly

Tracie, to take her there. I wanted to take her to a place that really meant something to me. A

place that made me ponder the meaning of life. I decided to take her to the Finkelstein Funderal

Home on Madison Avenue.

We found a beautiful, sleek mahogany coffin. Very expensive. Lined in lavender satin, it

was scheduled to be the final resting place for Mrs. Gladis Zuckerman,. Gladis was in the

refrigerator, waiting to be laid out.

We took off our clothes and got into her coffin, laying down sideways. Amy had a bit of an

odor like she was already dead. I guess she didn't bathe too well. That shouldn't matter though.

I was after her cosmic mind not her body. I could always buy her some perfume.

"When I was a kid I spent many nights lying in coffins thinking about the meaning of life," I

said.

"This is a very weighty place."

"You feel grounded."

"I never felt so at peace. I think dying is going to be great. My soul is going to set forth in a

flying saucer."

We hugged each other naked and I would have gotten an erection but she picked her nose

and shot it. I wanted to tell her that that wasn't polite. But I didn't think it was polite to say that. I

tried to tell myself that I had just imagined she picked her nose. But I could see the boogie

hanging off the coffin next to us.

"I want to paint the world with your colors," she said and reached down and grabbed my dick.

It was embarrassingly soft and had shrunken to the root. I tried to kiss her, thinking I'd get

aroused, but her breath stank and I gagged.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

I should have told her right then and there that she was a slob. I should have taken her in the

back room where they washed down the corpses and scrubbed her. Made her clean as her

intelligence. Then I could have thmbed through her like the pages of the Bible; intercoursed her

pubic wisdom. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't hurt her feelings.

"I'm beginning to think of you more as a friend than a love," I said.

"It's the delemma of the existentialist to be trapped by his yearnings rather than his spiritual

consciousness," she said.

"It's my soft penis," I said.

"I can't marry a softee."

"Maybe it will get hard."

"I'm afraid we're not radioactive."

"What do you mean?"

"Your penis is the test. It's a geiger counter. It didn't register. We're just not meant for each

other."

"We could have been so perfect together."

"We can still be friends," she said. "You can cheat on Tracie with me."

"But the sex isn't htere."

"We don't need sex."

"Then what?"

"We'll have good conversation."

"That's not cheating."

"It is."

"How?"

"She'll have your body. I'll have your soul," she said and burbed in my face. I threw up and it

took me almost a half an hour to clean up Mrs. Gladis Zuckerman's casket. I sprayed it with

Lysol so as not to infect the corpse. I wanted to let the old lady lie in germ-free peace.

After that evening my talks with Amy just weren't the same. The spirituality of our

relationship had been stained by our junket to the funeral home. The corpoereal had pinched our

cosmic affection and bruised it. The odor of death hung around us and I was haunted by the

vision of her naked in a coffin, belching in my face. So we began to drift apart like we had been

through detox. And I became more hooked on Tracie.

Tracie and I finally got officially engaged. I put a five caret diamond ring on her finger when

we were in my father's hot tub. It down the drain and it cost me a thousand dollars to get a

plumber to open up the piping and get it back.

Even though our conversations revolved around the Beatles, fashion and nonsense, I found

her fresh as a bar of soap and was captivated by her. She had an inner glow that effused from

her like laughing gas in a dentist's office. I was high around her. My gums felt good and my

molars grew. My dick was straight as a drill.

I did a two year tour in Vietnam. Based on my family experience I was assigned to putting

dead soldiers in body bags. I felt right at home doing this. Sometimes at night I'd creep into

empty body bags with Vietnamese hookers. Once I found a toe in there. I used it to tickle a

teenage whore.

Because I didn't speak Vietnamese I found the girls even more exciting. The complete lack

of understanding was titillating. Their squeaky, high-pitched rapid fire chatter was as good as

foreplay. I felt like I was screwing idiots. I felft like I was screwing Tracie.

I told our major that I was responsible for bagging five thousand dead soldiers. Who cared if

they were Americans? i got a medal and came home a hero. My father was out of jail and back

running the family funeral parlor business. He bought the house back in East Hampton. And the

yacht. He drowned another polo pony and mounted it, putting it in the foyer to match the one we

had in the city.

I developed this fetish where I liked to make love to Tracie on the stairwell in the

Metropolotan Museum of Art. She broke off our engagement, saying, "I would have preferred

the Museum of Modern Art."

I said, "I don't have a membership card."

"You don't give good conversation. You don't like to talk about fashion and things," she said.

I cried. I loved the sex with her and the bubble of nonsense that surrounded her like soap. I

particularly liked how wrong she was for me. It was thrilling.

A year later I married her.

Amy moved to California and wrote to me: "I've fallen in with a group of very profound

revolutionaries. I'm living off the land. I found communal love. My brothers and sisters are all

very natural and they walk around naked. I don't bathe. I feel like an animal. Isn't that great?

You'd love the leader of the commune. He is a short guy with long hair and a beard. He sees

deep meaning in simple things. He's a lot like you. And he's been in jail like your dad. He says

if you love someone you should kill for that person. That's real committment. He finds

messages encoded in music; he told me that the Beatles speak to him. Tracie would like that.

She was always a big fan. I did a painting of him where he looks like a cross between, Jesus

Christ, Paul McCartney and Adolph Hitler. I think he's going to be famous one day. I spoke to

him about you and if you came out you two could have some really good conversation. He's a

grety guy. His name's Charlie."

David Lawrence