Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow: Sex Scene 2

The thing about Drew was she was not genitally direct, she wanted to kiss my ribs and my white boyish chest, she held my legs and ran her hands up and down the backs of my thighs, she caressed my ass and sucked my earlobes and my mouth, and she did all these things as if they were all that she wanted, she made small editorial sounds of approval or delectation, as a commentator to the action, little single high notes, whispers without words like remarks to herself, it was as if she was consuming me as an act of eating and drinking, and it wasn't designed to arouse me, what boy in that situation needed arousal? from the moment she stopped the car I was tumescent, and I waited for some acknowledgment from her that this was in fact part of me too but it didn't come and it didn't come and I flared through my need into an exquisite pain, I thought I would go mad, I became agitated and discovered only then her availability, that in all of this she was only waiting for me to find her absolute willingness to be still and listen to me for a change. This was so girlish of her, so surprisingly restrained and submissive, I was not artful but simply myself and this brought forth from her a conspiratorial laughter, it gave her the pleasure of generosity to have me in her, it was not an excitement but more like a happiness of having this boy in her, she wrapped her legs around my back and I rocked us up and down in the back seat of the car with my feet sticking out of the open door, and when I came she held her arms around me tight enough to stop my breath and she sobbed and kissed my face as if something terrible had happened to me, as if I had been wounded and she was, in an act of desperate compassion, trying to make it as if it had not happened.

Then I was following her stark naked through the brush into this noplace of such great green presence she had chosen arbitrarily or by happenstance, with her gift for centering the world around herself, so that it was all very beautifully central in my mind, the place to be, following her flashing white form around trees, under tangles, avoiding the whip of branches, with a brilliant chatter of communities of unseen birds telling me how late I was to have found it. And then we were going generally downward, and the ground became swampy and the air close and I found myself slapping at stings in my skin, I had wanted to catch her, tackle her and fuck her again, and she was doing this to me, taking me into furies of mosquitoes. But I came upon her squatting and ladling handfuls of mud over herself and we applied this cold mud to each other and then we walked like children into the sinking darkness of forest, hand in hand like fairy-tale children in deep and terrible trouble, as indeed we were, and then we found ourselves at this still pond as black as I had ever seen water to be and of course she waded in and bid me to follow and my God it was fetid, it was warm and scummy, my feet were in wet mats of pond weed, I treaded water to keep my feet from sinking and couldn't crawl back out fast enough but she swam on her back a few yards and then came crawling out on all fours, and she was covered with this invisible slime, her body was slimed as mine was and we lay in this mud and I punched into her and held her blond head back in the mud and pumped slime up her and we lay there rutting in this foul fen and I came and held her down and wouldn't let her move, but lay in her with her breath loud in my ear, and when I lifted my head and looked into her alarmed green eyes in their panic of loss, I grew hard again right in her and she began to move, and this time we had the time, by the third time it takes its time, and I found the primeval voice in her, like a death rattle, a shrill sexless bark, over and over again as I jammed into her, and it became tremulous a terrible crying despair, and then she screamed so shriekingly I thought something was wrong and reared to look at her, her lips were pulled back over her teeth and her green eyes dimmed as I looked in them, they had lost sight, gone flat, as if her mind had collapsed, as if time had turned in her and she had passed back into infancy and reverted through birth into nothingness, and for an instant they were no longer eyes, for an instant they were about to be eyes, the eyes of soullessness.

Yet a few moments later she was smiling and kissing me and hugging me as if I had done something dear, brought her a flower or something.

Posted here for discussion purposes, in this essay.

Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow: Sex Scene 1

Much later Rebecca and I were sitting on one of the couches and she had her legs crossed at the knees and one dirty foot swinging and her night-gown showing below the hem of her black lace dress. She was the last kid there. She raised her arms and she pulled her black hair back behind her head and did something deft back there the way girls do with their hair so that it stays the way they fix it without any visible reason to and despite the law of gravity. Maybe I was a little drunk by then, maybe we both were. Also the dancing had been warm and close. I was smoking a cigarette and she took it out of my fingers and drew on it, one puff, and blew out the smoke without inhaling and put the cigarette back in my fingers. I saw now she was wearing mascara on her eyelashes and eyelids and had on that communal red lipstick, paled somewhat since its application, and was glancing at me sideways with her foot swinging, and those eyes dark as black grapes, and her white neck draped in that torn shawl of dusty pink -- I had no warning or preparation from one moment to the next, I was swimming in a realm of intimacy, as if I had just met her, or as if I had just lost her, but surely as if I had never roof-fucked her. My mouth went dry she was so incredibly childishly beautiful. Until this moment I had been the party giver and big boss of the evening, dispensing his largesse and granting his favors. All those dances--oh I knew everyone knew I favored her on my randy forays up the fire escape, but it was athletics, I paid her, for chrissake, I must have been staring at her because she turned away and lowered her eyes, her foot going madly--all those dances I had danced with her and only her were the exacting ceremonies of possession. And this ancient witch child understood before I did that everything was now up in the heart, as if my rise in the world had lifted us to an immensity of consequence, which we were now allowed to see, like a distance ahead of us, like a horizon. They must all have understood, every fucking kid there, while I thought what I had been feeling was only a sweetly mellow good time.

So when everyone else had gone we lay for the first time together without any clothes on that same couch, everyone else asleep, even Garbage in some inner bin of his privacy. We lay in the dark cellar of dust and ash, and I was passive and on my back and Rebecca lay on top of me and cleaved herself on me letting herself down with a long intake of her breath which I felt as a cool flute of air on my neck, and slowly awkwardly she learned her rhythm upon me as I was patient to allow her to do. My hands were on her back for a while and then on her buttocks, I followed the soft down with my fingers, I knew it was as black as her hair, it went from the bottom of her spine down into the crack between her ass, and then I put my finger on her small ring of an asshole and as she raised her hips I lost it in the clamp of her hard buttocks. Her hair fell forward as she raised herself and it brushed my face, and when she lowered herself it fell around my ears, and I kissed her cheeks as she rested and I felt her lips on my neck and her hard little nipples against my chest and her wet thighs on my thighs, and then I didn't remember when it started she was making little discoveries which she voiced in private almost soundless whimperings in my ear and then she moved into some arrhythmic panic and went stiff and I felt around my cock the grasp of her inner musculature and when I reached down with my finger and touched the asshole it clamped around my fingertip and released and contracted and released in the same rhythm as her interior self was squeezing and unsqueezing my cock and I couldn't stand it anymore I arched myself into her and pulled back, raising myself and lowering myself with her dead bodyweight as vehemently as if I were on top, pretty soon going so fast she was being bounced on my chest and thighs with little grunts until she found my rhythm and went stuttering and imperfectly and finally workingly, smoothly against it, meeting me when I was to be met, leaving me when I was leaving to be left, and that was so unendurably exquisite I shot into her and held her down against me with my hands while I came pulsing up into her milkingly lovely little being as far as I could go. And she held her arms around me to get me through that, and then there was peace between us, and we lay as we were with such great trust as to require no words or kisses, but only the gentlest, slowest and most coordinate drift into sleep.

Posted here for discussion purposes, in this essay.

Paul Wells, The Longer I'm Prime Minister: Stephen Harper And Canada, 2006-

"I just said yes to everything I was ever asked to do" - John Baird

Harper knew the damage a disloyal lieutenant could do to a leader because for years that was the kind of lieutenant he’d been.

Preston Manning’s memoir of his years as Reform Party leader, Think Big, is in part a chronicle of Stephen Harper’s troublemaking years. At almost every turn, if Harper felt that Manning was making a bad decision, the young renegade felt free to agitate against his leader, whether through rebellious action or indiscreet communication. When Manning took a long time deciding whether to support the Charlottetown constitutional amendments in 1992, Harper, who was sure Manning shouldn’t, chafed at the boss’s indecision. “When these internal disagreements were eventually leaked to the media -- as such disagreements invariably are -- they gave our opponents fresh ammunition,” Manning wrote. “‘Friendly fire’ invariably attracts ‘enemy fire.’” When Manning hired Rick Anderson, a Liberal-connected Charlottetown supporter, as Reform’s national campaign director, Harper objected and was “prepared to air his objections in the media.”

In 1994 two Globe columnists, “fed by a disgruntled caucus member,” wrote columns that alleged Manning was abusing his parliamentary expense account. During the Easter break from Parliament, “Stephen Harper and several other caucus members went public with their criticism,” Manning wrote. “Even though procedures existed for handling any complaints . . . Stephen went to the media.”

There followed a special caucus meeting and several rounds of internal finger-pointing. Manning’s relations with his wife, Sandra, at whom “part of Stephen’s attack had been directed,” suffered. She felt he hadn’t done enough to defend her.

“This whole issue -- which really wasn’t about expenses at all -- was the most painful experience our family had endured to date,” Manning wrote. “What made it particularly hard to endure was that it was initiated not by an external opponent, but by one of our own.” If being a Member of Parliament meant his family would be attacked, Manning wanted no part of it. “That night, I took off my House of Commons pin -- given only to MPs -- threw it into my briefcase, and never put it on again until the day I left Parliament.”

So yeah, Harper liked Baird, because for all his pluck, the thing he resembled least was a young Stephen Harper.

Updated: Wells on Baird, today.

LZ-’75: The Lost Chronicles Of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour by Stephen Davis

Stephen Davis recalls the summer of ’75. Although I was only ten years old at the time, his memory of things rings true to me. I was watching the older long-haired kids do their thing. And the hippie girl who babysat me and my siblings told me a few stories. We all knew “Peggy Day.” And we all had at least one “Peggy Day” in our acquaintance who never returned from the adventure.

Peter and Peggy broke up somewhere around 1972, and she disappeared, having lit out for the territory. A postcard to me had been mailed from Santa Cruz, California. We’d last heard that she was in Central America, where she’d gone on a spiritual quest of some kind. So it was good to know she was alive and coming to visit Peter. He was living alone; maybe their old love would rekindle. It was a beautiful concept. But then she moved in with me instead.

I’d gone to Boston for the day, and when I returned to the island on the midnight freight boat, Peggy Day was lying there -- in my bed, really beautiful in the glow of a glass oil lamp. Beautiful, but also damaged. She was rail-thin and dark brown, her blond hair very long and braided for bed. We talked a little. She said she was hitchhiking up-island on her way to Peter’s but decided my house was closer, and she knew the key was in the mailbox. She said she’d been through hard times in Guatemala. She said she was now twenty-four years old. She said she needed looking after. I had a girlfriend who was off in graduate school for the summer, so I told Peggy to get some rest, and I had a cold shower and slept on the daybed in the parlor.

The next day, she went to see Peter, and I figured I’d see Peggy at the beach. But they didn’t show up. That night was a hot one, and I went to bed early with Tender Is The Night. An hour later, I heard soft footsteps, the screen door opening, and there she was, slipping out of her summer dress, turning down the wick of the oil lamp until it was too dark to read. We made love in the morning as well.

So Peggy Day spent about three weeks in my care, which is the only way I can put it. She had come to the island to recover from some trauma she had suffered. She was very quiet, preferring not to be specific about her experiences in Guatemala. She needed to eat fresh food, swim in the warm sea, walk in the cool woods every day, and be looked after. She was indeed quite spooked and stayed close by my side every day she was with me. Later, she told me that she’d gone to Central America with a boyfriend, but he had somehow died. I couldn’t get much info from her. She was more a mysterious presence than a person.

After a week, Peggy had gained some weight and developed a healthy glow. After two, she’d become voluptuous again, and was turning heads when we went into town. She liked being driven around the island in my old blue BMW, her long hair streaming in the breeze. At home she moved around like a sylph, soundlessly, making clever arrangements with the wildflowers she picked. I bought her some watercolors at Alley’s Store, and she began painting again. When she smiled, it was like diamonds and sunrays. But she had her darker moods, too, and when she was in one of them, it was a good time to make love to her. She said that helped.

Through all this, I managed to stay friends with Peter. He had several other girlfriends anyway, and it was all over between him and Margaret Day. Then summer began to wane, and my girlfriend was coming to the island. Peggy said she wanted to stay and live with us, maybe have a child. I told her that my girlfriend might kill both of us. There were tears, and not hers alone, as I drove her to the ferry.

After that, I didn’t see Peter for a while. Then, around the time I needed a photographer, I got a postcard from him in Los Angeles, which is exactly where I would be covering the Led Zeppelin tour in a fortnight.

So we worked it out. Peter Simon and I were on the job once again. The story was Led Zeppelin, and we had to get the goods.