Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer

for wages and saw a lot of his old friends.
    Every one of these old friends, I soon discovered, had a quirk, and the rule of the game was to kick your old buddy on the quirk. Some were tight with a dollar, some had foolish habits like betting long shots, one of them always threw up when he was drunk (“I have a sensitive stomach,” he would complain. “Yeah, we have sensitive noses,” they would reply) and my father always got it about kissing.
    â€œOh, Dougy,” his old friend Dynamite Heffernon would say, “last night I was with a nineteen-year-old who had the juiciest, sweetest, plumpest, loveliest mouth you ever saw. Could she kiss! Oh, the moist breath of her fine smile. Do you have any idea of what you’re missing?”
    â€œYeah, Dougy,” another would cry out, “give it a try. Break down. Give the broad a kiss!”
    My father would sit there. It was the game, and he would suffer it, but his thin lips showed no pleasure.
    Francis Frelagh, a.k.a. Frankie Freeload, took his swipes at the ball. “I had one widow with a tongue last week,” he told us. “She put that tonguein my ears, down my mout’, she licked my t’roat. If I let her, she would have swiped my nostrils.”
    At the look of disgust on my father’s face, they laughed like choir boys, high-pitched and shrill, Irish tenors kicking Dougy Madden’s quirk.
    He took it all. When they were done, he shook his head. He did not like to be performed on while I was there—that was the measure of his fallen state—so he said, “I think you’re all full of shit. None of you has been laid in the last ten years.” When they whooped at his anger, he stuck out his palm. “I’ll give you,” he said, “the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say you know a couple of girls. And they like to kiss. Maybe they even go down on you. All right. That’s been known to happen. Only, ask yourself: The broad is taking care of you now, but whose joint did she cop last night? Where was her mouth then? Ask yourself that, you cocksuckers. Cause if she’s able to kiss you, she can eat dog turds.”
    This speech put his old gang in heaven. “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” they would croon in Dougy’s ear.
    He never smiled. He knew he was right. It was his logic. I knew. I had grown up with it.
    This was as much, however, as I could go on thinking about my father before the itch of my tattoo began to distract me out of measure. By a look at the clock, I saw it was nearly afternoon, and I stood up with the thought of taking a walk but had to sit down again beneath the suddenweight of fear that came upon me from no more than the thought of stepping outside.
    Yet now I felt a whole decomposition of myself, a veritable descent from man to dog. I could no longer cower here. So I put on a jacket, and was through the house and into our damp November air with the jaunty sense that I had just performed a near-heroic act. Such are the warps of pure funk. It is a low comedy.
    Once on the street, however, I began to comprehend my reason, at least, for the new fear. Before me, a mile away, was the Provincetown Monument, a pinnacle of stone over two hundred feet high, and not unlike the Tower of the Uffizi in Florence. It was the first sight of our town from the road or sea as one approached our harbor. It sat on a good hill back of the Town Wharf, indeed, so much in the middle of our existence that one saw it every day. There was no way not to. Nothing built by man was of such height until you got to Boston.
    Of course, a native never needed to recognize it was there. I probably had not looked at it for a hundred days, but on this day, so soon as I turned to walk toward the center of town, my tattoo, like a meter to mark the pulsations of my anxiety, seemed to crawl over my skin. If normally I looked at our monument without seeing it, now I most certainly did. It was the same