My Life as a Man Read Online Free PDF

Zipper King ” Shatzky? By the time Zuckerman was about to graduate (third in his class, same rank as at Bass) from MP school, Sharon was a freshman at Juliana Junior College, near Providence. Every night she wrote him scandalous letters on the monogrammed pink stationery with the scalloped edges that Zuckerman ’ s mother had given the perfect young lady for a going-away present: “ dearest dearest all I could think ab out while playing tennis in gym class was getting down on my hands and knees and crawling across the room toward your prick and then pressing your prick against my face i love it with your prick in my face just pressing your prick against my cheeks my lips my tongue my nose my eyes my ears wrapping your gorgeous prick in my hair —“ and so on. The word, which (among others) he had taught her and encouraged her to use during the sex act and also, for titillation ’ s sake, on the phone and through the mails—had a strong hold over the young girl locked up in the dormitory room in Rhode Island: “ every time the ball came over the net, ” wrote Sharon, “ i saw your wonderful prick on top of it. ” This last, of course, he didn ’ t believe. If Sharon had a fault as a student of carnality, it was a tendency to try a little too hard, with the result that her prose (to which Zuckerman, trained by Miss Benson in her brand of the New Criticism, was particularly attuned) often offended him by a too facile hyperbole. Instead of acting upon him as an aphrodisiac, her style frequen tly jarred him by its banal insistence, reminding him less of Lawrence than of those mimeographed stories his brother used to smuggle home to him from the navy. In particular her use of “ cunt ” (modified by “ hot ” ) and “ prick ” (modified by “ big ” or “ gorgeous ” or both) could be as mannered and incantatory, in a word, as sentimental, as his own use, or misuse, in college of the adjective “ human. ” Nor was he pleased by her refusal to abide by the simple rules of grammar; the absence of punctuation and capitalization in her obscene letters was not exac tly an original gesture of defiance (or an interesting one ei the r, to Zuckerman ’ s mind, whether the iconoclast was Shatzky or cummings), and as a device to communicate the unbridled flow of passion, it seemed to him, a votary not only of Mrs. Dall ow ay and To the Lighthouse, but also of Madame Bovary and The Ambassadors (he really could not read Thomas Wolfe any more), to have been conceived at a rather primitive level of imagination.
    However, as for the passion itself, he had no criticism to make.
    Practically overnight (correction: overnight), the virgin whose blood had stained his thighs and matted his pubic hair when he had laid her on a blanket in the back seat of his father ’ s new Cadillac, had developed into the most licentious creature he ’ d ever known. Nobody like Sharon had been in attendance at Bass, at least nobody he had ever undressed, and he had traveled with the college ’ s half dozen bohemians. Even Barbara Cudney, leading lady of the Bass Drama Society and Zuckerman ’ s companion during his final year of success and celebrity at college, a girl who had thrown herself all over the stage in Medea and was now studying at the Yale Drama School, had nothing like Sharon ’ s sensual adventurousness or theatricality, nor had it ever occurred to Zuckerman to ask of Barbara, free and uninhibited spirit that she was, such favors as Sharon virtually begged to bestow upon him. Actually the teacher was not so far out in front of his pupil as he led her to think he was, though of course his surprise at her willingness to satisfy his every whim and farfetched desire was something he kept to himself. In the beginning it exceeded all understanding, this bestiality he had awakened in her simply by penetration, and recalled to mind those other startling and baffling metamorphoses he had witnessed—his mother ’ s transformation into