Whale Music by Paul Quarrington

grabbed the thing back, I had never shared a smoke in such an urgently formalized fashion before. When we were through I turned to re-enter the club and promptly walked into a wall.
    That, then, was my indoctrination to the world of Better Living through Pharmaceuticals. Very impressive. Much more impressive, in fact, than my indoctrination to Sex. That transpired in Little Rock, Arkansas. I wandered into Danny’s motel room in search of a light for my cigarette, a scrawny home-made with a taste recalling bogs in Mesopotamia. There I found three girls, in various states of undress, and Stud E. Baker.
    “Big Desmond!” shouted Stud, standing on his bed in stained underwear. “What’s cooking, Daddy-o?”
    “I’m watching television next door. Dewey and Monty are out somewhere.”
    “Right.” Stud E. Baker bounced off the bed, caught my head in the crook of his arm and ran with me into the bathroom. He slammed the door behind us and fished two beer out of the sink. The sink and the bathtub were loaded with ice cubes and beer. Stud tossed a beer in my direction, bouncing it off my forehead. (Those scrawny cigarettes mess up your reaction time.) Finding himself in the bathroom anyway, Danny/Stud E. Baker decided to have a pee. He pulled his thing out of his underwear and blasted. Stud E. Baker had an overhand holding technique. I tried to adopt it myself, except it obscured my line of vision and usually made me spray all over the wall. “Desmo, baby,” he said, “pick your choose.”
    “Huh?”
    “I can’t figure three women all at once. I
know
there’s a way, dig, but right now I can’t figure it. So pick your choose and take her away.”
    “Take her out for a soda or something?”
    “Desmo!” shouted Stud. “Take her to your room and get your horn scraped, for God’s sake. Get a bee-jay, get reamed! Do whatever you like to do.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How about the big one? The one with garbonzas?”
    “Well …” My stomach tied itself in complicated Boy Scout knots.
    “Her name is Lois. You just say, like, hello Lois, would you like to come next door and watch a little television?”
    “She wants to stay with you.”
    “Who can blame her? I am Stud E. Baker! I wear the wang that makes the women whimper! I own the dork that pops their cork! But I’ll say, like, you want to go with my brother, that’s cool, I’ll dig you later. Get it?”
    “Umm …”
    “Come on.” We re-entered the main room. Stud E. Baker removed the Confederate Army cap and became, for amoment, Daniel. “My brother Desmond,” said Dan, “is lonely. I think the world of my brother Desmond, and it makes me sad that he’s lonely. Now, if any one of you wants to keep my brother company”—he singled out this girl Lois with a stab of his hawklike eyes—“then I’ll be very, very grateful.”
    “Grateful enough to give me a solo shot tomorrow night?” asked Lois.
    “Absolutely, Lois. Tomorrow night, it’s me, you, the Stud and the stars.”
    She bounced off the bed. “Let’s go, Desmond.”
    “Don’t you want to get dressed?”
    “I sort of assumed you wanted me this way.”
    “Sure he does,” said Danny. “And Des, for god’s sake, take it easy on this one. Don’t break her heart. Don’t show her Paradise and then say baby, you can only glimpse it.”
    “Danny—”
    “Go!” Danny gesticulated grandly, he rammed the Union cap back on his head and became his alter ego, Stud E. Baker. “Present those backsides!” he bellowed at the two remaining girls. “Let’s do it jackal style, like laughing hyenas!” Lois and I ran next door to my room. I sat down on the bed and watched the television. Lois sat down beside me, laid a hand on my hip. “What’s your favourite thing?” she whispered in my ear.
    “Music,” I whispered back.
    “What’s your favourite pleasure?”
    “Mu—” I started, but she placed a finger to my lips, shutting me up.
    “How about a bee-jay?”
    I shrugged. Lois