The Ginger Man

by J.P. Donleavy

Sebastian walked white faced from the room, slamming the broken door, cutting off the sound of suffering from a guilty heart.

But Jesus, when you don’t have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both it’s health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you’re frightened of death.

She danced on the long hood of her crimson Cadillac, and watching her, I thought that God must be female.

“General misunderstanding. Absence of dignity in our lives.

Chris’s willowy fingers dug into his thighs and hers closed over his ears and he stopped hearing the soup sound of her mouth and felt the brief pain of her teeth nipping the drawn foreskin and the throb of his groin pumping the teeming fluid into her throat, stopping her gentle voice and dripping from her chords that sung the music of her lonely heart. Her hair lay athwart in clean strands on his body and for the next silent minute he was the sanest man on earth, bled of his seed, rid of his mind.

Wow, what conversation. Doctor of Platitudes. Holiday, my painful arse. But a nice bit of liver.

came down the stairs with my usual innocence and pain right smack into her silence which is the sign that she has a weapon.

They called me names. I was so afraid of them. And they could never look inside me and see a whole world of tenderness or leave me alone because I was so sad and suffering. Why did you do it. And hearts. And why was love so round.

I went into a bar, crowded and dark, tripping over people’s legs. Voices, sighs and laughs and lies and lips and teeth and whites of eyes. Secrets of shaved armpits and the thin, small hair on women’s upper lips showing through tan powders. All these breasts slung in rayon cradles.

Now that I’m here it all seemed so very simple and easy and I’m glad I did. And I’m beginning to see that that is the way to do a lot of things in life—just to go ahead and do them.

She says a pair of decent balls in the hand is worth a cock in the bush.”

For women are lonely people, lonelier with women and with men, enclosed by sunless children and the little vanishing things that go away during the years of waiting. And hearts. And how was love so round.

There are forty of them and one policeman and he comes over and says, ’ere, ’ere, this ’ere is King’s land, now behave yourselves or I’ll have to lock the whole lot of ye up. They all get long faces, roll up the tricolor, put away the bombs and go into the first pub and get drunk, with the policeman with them as well.

Turning from me Lilly as I bump these mounds. And the cool pressure. It’s as they say, tight circle with nothing beyond. And my arms around your neck. Riding you. Brown for lust or bronco.

Beauty of kids. They only miss love and food.”