Read Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man for Free Online

more. But she paints, does Alison, and I have seen some of her paintings, and they are dark and mordant with echoes of Bosch and Dali, and they are weirdly wonderful, and so is she.
    “We are truly kidnapping you, Mad Poet,” they kept saying. “And we will keep you hidden away in a cellar and smuggle scraps of food to you from the caf, and every day we will all steal down to you and make mad passionate love to you, and we will never never never let our Mad Poet go.”
    How nice indeed.
    The only hangup on the drive to Darien was that Merry Cat kept bitching about having to drive. “It’s not fair,” she would say. “Everybody else gets to neck with Mad Poet and all I have is the steering wheel. Doesn’t anyone else want to drive?”
    No one else had a license. Except Mad Poet, but no one ever had the temerity to suggest that he drive.
    “You’re always pestering to drive,” she accused them, “and now when I’m perfectly willing to let you, nobody wants to all of a sudden.”
    So I could only neck with five of them, which was a shame. If life were perfect, we would have had a chauffeur. But why carp?
    Steve, this was as perfect as life had ever gotten. Incredible.
    You know, I shouldn’t have bothered with that geography shtick. It didn’t apply for very long. By the time we hit the West Side Drive, Dawn had climbed into the backseat, and she and Nancy and B.J. had done whatever it is you do to the backseats of station wagons to flatten them out, so that the backseat area just became part of an expanded luggage compartment. So there I was with the five of them, still in this same alcoholic haze and still sober regardless, and I reached out and kissed one, and the little devil opened her mouth instantly, and another one cuddled up and put my hand on her breast, and from there on you can write your own script. I never knew quite whom I was kissing nor whom I was touching at any given time. Nor did it ever quite matter.
    The trouble is that I’m making it sound like an orgy, and it wasn’t at all like an orgy, not in the least. First of all, there was an air of utter innocence about the proceedings that couldn’t have been greater if we had been playing Parcheesi. We all liked each other and we were all having fun and it was all a lazy, giggly, delicious, magical thing.
    Absolutely no urgency about it. The kisses were long and deliberate, the petting warm and wholehearted, but there was none of the rise and fall of serious sex about it. I find myself groping for words, perhaps because the whole ambience was one I had never experienced before, neither personally nor in fiction.
    How to describe it? I could say that I engaged in two hours of incessant sex play and not only did not have an orgasm, but never much felt like having one. In youth I remember that sort of experience leading to an advanced case of testicular congestion, which I think we used to call Lover’s Nuts. I didn’t get this now. Perhaps it’s because I’m older now, but I rather doubt it.
    Oh, hell, most of the time I didn’t even have an erection. It is not exactly unheard of for me not to have an erection in erotic situations, as I have not the slightest doubt Fran has told you. (Should you experience similar failings, you’re likely to hear about it, man.) But when that happened it was always because my mind was elsewhere, whereas this evening my mind was very much on what was happening. As a matter of fact, I cannot recall ever being so entirely involved in the Now, and entirely concerned with my partners.
    So I not only didn’t have an erection but I didn’t want one. I just wanted to go on kissing and fondling and saying clever things and hearing them say clever things. Do you want to know what happened? I fell in love. I fell in love with all five of them. I fell in love with Merry Cat, too, and without laying a hand on her.
    We played all the way to Darien, and they said I was their own personal Mad Poet and they would all share