The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin Page B

luggage in an open place, feeling the attention divided and a touch of panic.
    “Today with an hour to kill in Des Moines I would call up the big radio station, introduce myself and accept whatever professional courtesy was offered. But not then.
    “In a few hours I was traveling again, comfortable and safe now that it was dark, snug, aware of the glowing dials on the driver’s console, relaxed by the long moist hiss of the tires.
    “Somewhere along its route a girl had boarded the bus and sat down beside me. I saw her when I woke. Her eyes were shut but facing my lap. I turned on my haunch and closed my eyes again. I do not like to fall asleep in public because of the erection. I had one now—piss and lust—and I turned away to hide it. Something about my breathing must have put her wise, and I sensed that she too only pretended to sleep. We traveled like this for a time, both of us ever more wakeful. That she had come aboard some time after eleven o’clock from some small town, or even from beside the road perhaps, made her tremendously sexy to me. Somehow, even more than her proximity, her isolation and the lateness of the hour—which suggested that she was in trouble—made her seem available. It excited me that she had seen my hard-on, and our mimed sleep, of course. My God, I don’t know what I might have done, but just when I could stand it no longer, just when I was capable of doing something for which they could have thrown me off the bus, just then her hand moved, made a suicide leap from its place in her lap to the narrow space between us. No, not a leap; it was one of those great surrenders from an enormous height, this lovely Acapulcan plunge. The edge of her hand grazed my hip as it fell, took a wee nip of my buttock. Ah, I was on fire. Oh, I was hot. From this I took hot heart and turned blindly, still feigning sleep, boldly forcing my erection into her palm.
    “She shrieked and slapped me. Was I wrong about her? ‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. I shook her shoulders and pulled her to me and maneuvered the whole works into her hand again. And you know what? She took it.
    “What a lesson! What a lesson! So much for your timidities and reservations, so much for your doubts and reluctances, your equivocations and hesitancies and shields of decorum more heavy than the world. She held me, I tell you. Then I held her. We grabbed at each other like drowners grasping at spars. (We sparred all right: sparring partners!) But she had been sleeping, there was no question about it. It was like something in a charm: one smash of passion and poof went the world. There is more rape than ever gets into the papers, and madness is the common cold of the emotions.
    “So we hugged and we kissed. Right there in the bus I put my hands up her skirt and down her panties and in her crotch. We hadn’t yet spoken, nor had either of us seen what the other even looked like. She unzipped me and pulled me off and collected my come and patted it on my prick like butter. In the bus. She squeezed it for luck and locked her legs around my hand when I started to withdraw it. These were her first words to me: ‘Not so fast, not so fast. Do me. Do me or I’ll scream again.’
    “I did her. I thrummed her parts like rubber bands. Right there in the bus where they could throw you off for lighting a cigarette or talking to the driver. Then, when it was over and I was thinking, well now we can relax, she still held on. She did me again and I did her again. Then she started to tell me jokes, and that was the way we traveled through the night—me with my hand in her pants and her playing with my cock and ears and touching my teeth lightly with her fingers so that I could taste my own semen, and telling me jokes. Dumb little jokes like a kid might know, not even dirty, just silly riddles and ‘Knock Knock’ stories and dopey limericks and one-liners about ‘the little moron.’ She knew them all and whispered them to me as if they