The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/All the Same

Written by
Sal Cetrano

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URL: http://prmlr.us/mr13cet3

—“Political correctness is the most cowardly form
of free speech.” — Frank Zappa

Old Berkowitz, distracted, fights to recollect the names for things, the windblown kind: philosophies, programs, the inveterate skirmishes that script and score an era, pack its duffel tight with forbidden freight. Would the lady, he extends, care to be more specific? Who was it, exactly, who’d held you down—or was that back? The wash of her alarums makes waves in his whiskey, disturbs icy faces, the cozy leaden feel of the tumbler, snug as a hand grenade. What a gift, to recognize the enemy in any landscape! Parties, he aches wistfully, once offered shelter. The Lady, for all her rocks and ten-buck words just a dyke in taffeta to Berkowitz, chafes on: equal something for somebody, level tracks, affirmative assholes . . . He is dim on the details. Life is complicated enough, he is thinking. Can he even find his way to the john? Men now used ju-jitsu— kiss her ass just right, and she’ll swear she’s kicking yours. Refocusing the mute blonde over by the dip, it is all the same to him—the hollow that he may have had her before, or the notion that she’s had him.

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