Ladies' Man by Richard Price Page B

was eleven o'clock.
The Honeymooners
! I hit the remote control on the cable box and breathed easy. I knew every one of
The Honeymooners
by heart. There was something comforting about that show, something safe. Just having them on was like taking a tenmilligram hit of Valium. I sat there wolfing down cheese slices while Jackie Gleason rolled those eyes in that hippo pus for the ten millionth time since I was five. Talk about anchors.
    At twenty after eleven I started nodding out. I figured I could use a good night's sleep for a change so I turned off the TV and the light.
    I sat up like a jack-in-the-box. It was 4:03.
    I had had a dream that my father apologized for fucking me over when I was an infant. I asked, "What happened?" He explained that he used to bring me down to the playground on a walker so he could pick up young mothers. When he scored he parked me in the woman's living room while he did his business in the bedroom. One time when he left me in a lady's living room her cat scratched the hell out of my legs. The reason he was bringing the whole subject up was that he had just received a check from the lady to pay for the damages to my legs from twenty-seven and a half years ago. While he was telling me this my mother stood, arms folded, nodding solemnly by his side. The main sensation I woke up with was feeling sorry for my father because he was hanging out with ladies in the middle of the day when he should have been working or hanging out with men. It was just a dream, but sometimes when I sacked out those things came at me with everything but screen credits.
    I couldn't get back to sleep. The whole package of cheese slices was lying in my gut like wet cement. Work in four hours. Suck-ass work. I started thinking about La Donna. I kept seeing her stretch out her arms to me and it started ripping me up. I touched my stomach—it still felt flat. Stop it. She was gone. Maybe she'd be back and maybe she wouldn't The more I analyzed it, the more I realized that vibrator incident was no accident. That little Tuesday afternoon flip of mine was called "Kenny Makes a Move." A few times in my life I made moves—always with the grace and finesse of a butcher hacking up a mastodon, but they were moves nonetheless. I wasn't saying that little scene was planned, but if I looked back at the big ones, the big moves, they all had the same MO. They seemed thoughtless and stupid or dangerous, but they always got me out of checkmate. I could remember at least three incidents where I had pulled some heavy number and changed my life. After high school I was still living at home. All my friends had split but I couldn't get it together to leave. College was depressing, an extension of high school, a subway commute. I was dying, but I was afraid to leave. Then one night my junior year I fucked this girl in my parents' bed when they were out After we finished I couldn't find the condom. I had tossed it somewhere and couldn't find it. When I came home from school the next day, the house turned into Guadalcanal. My old lady had found the condom that morning. It was in her slipper. By nightfall I had moved in with three guys from school living in Manhattan.
    Kenny makes a move.
    A year after that I was engaged to a girl I didn't love. She had a screechy laugh and hated sex. Her father ran a chain of stationery stores. The deal was I marry his daughter and I would start out at the top. Two weeks after our engagement was announced I was feeling cocky. I figured I had it made so I quit school. Her old man went berserk over my disrespect for education and broke off the engagement.
    Kenny makes a move.
    Three years after that, I'm involved with a chick up in Woodstock who lived in a .cabin, ran with a heavy psychopathic drug crowd, thought Charles Manson was misunderstood, pushed coke for a living, had six cats and wanted me to drop everything and run off to Canada with her to open a health food store. I started pushing a little coke myself to