Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams

all seasons. I think they compete with insects and with germs for the honor of outliving man on this earth. I thought of germs, the venereal species, because I was twice infected with gonococci by Lance and also with pubic lice. Having to take a prick and rectal smear test at a free clinic twice was about as humiliating and wretched an experience for me as my stay on Governor’s Island, and as for the pubic lice, I have never felt so loathsome. I had never heard they existed until I had them and Lance explained what they were. He was contrite about it but he defended his need of sex on the road with the ice show.
    â€œBaby, if you’d learn to skate I’d get you in the show with me and be a totally faithful lover, but since you claim your ankles are too weak for skating and I am an oversexed cat, once in a while I am bound to infect you with pubic lice and the clap. You know I don’t on purpose, it’s just that I’m overly sexed and nowadays when I’m high on the streets at midnight and am approached by a good-looking long-haired boy, it’s like a call of nature which nobody with an intestinal or urinal tract can ignore.”
    â€œLance, you’re rationalizing the negligence of your nature.”
    â€œBaby, you know they come at me like flies. I’m not lying, they do.”
    â€œWell, why don’t you get you a can of fly-spray to carry in your pocket on the streets after midnight or fantasize your libido like I have to do when you are out on tour?”
    â€œWhat do you mean by fantasizing your libido, baby? You mean you?”
    â€œI mean I think about you and caress my body at night, sometimes burning a candle and looking at your picture in your tights.”
    â€œDo you masturbate, then?”
    â€œNo, I don’t. It desensitizes your sex and is a messy habit, I just fantasize your caresses over me lightly till I fall asleep.”
    He held me close in the lock of his legs for a while, then he said to me, “Sometimes I feel like God has given you to me.”
    He had me stand up, then, and removed from his luggage a bottle called “A-200” containing a pale green liquid which he slowly and thoroughly rubbed into my pubic hairs, around the genitalia, into the armpits, and even over the light down surrounding my nipples. Since the crabs had been burning, it felt deliciously cool and soothing. Apparently it destroyed the vermin at once as well as nearly making me come from his fingers’ manipulation.
    â€œOkay, now do it to me.”
    I gave him the same slow and thorough massage with the excitingly cool liquid, A-200, and this time, rubbing his balls which must have been large as a mule’s, I suddenly gasped to him, “Love, I’m about to come.”
    â€œHell, quick, put it in me!”

    Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a truthful report on your love life and what they call prurience but I don’t let it stop me now in these last remaining pages of the Blue Jay which may well be my last ones of all.
    I was telling you how I wandered into the area beyond the hooked rectangle of love. It is called deviant love so it’s appropriate to “their” definition of it that from time to time one should wander out of its confines, especially when those confines contain no window and you are in them alone and want to see if there is a sign of daybreak.
    It was foolish of me to have thought that there would be a sign of it while still in the wolf’s hours of winter.
    I stood there for a while, my presence known to the rats and making them freeze in motion as addicts of hard-core drugs are said to freeze in motion at times when they feel a strong hit.
    Then I turned on my heels and slipped back through a crevice of the plywood that sectioned off the hooked rectangle from the inhuman vastness outside it in the warehouse, wondering once more why it was not condemned and demolished, being so long unused except as a