It

It was not a very comforting thought. It made him feel like a man strapped to the nosecone of a guided missile.
Beep-beep indeed.
‘Well,’ Richie was saying, ‘I could make this lo ng and sad or I could give you the Blondie and Dagwood comic-strip version, but I’ll settle for something in the middle. The year after I moved out to California I met a girl, and we fell pretty hard for each other. Started living together. She was on the pill at first, but it made her feel sick almost all the time. She talked about getting an IUD, but I wasn’t too crazy about that — the first stories about how they might not be completely safe were just starting to come out in the papers.
‘We had talked a lot about kids, and had pretty well decided we didn’t want them even if we decided to legalize the relationship. Irresponsible to bring kids into such a shitty, dangerous, overpopulated world . . . and blah-blah-blah, babble-babble-babble, let’s go out and put a bomb in the men’s room of the Bank of America and then come on back to the crashpad and smoke some dope and talk about the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism, if you see what I mean.
‘Or maybe I’m being too hard on both of us. Shit, we were young and reasonably idealistic. The upshot was that I got my wires cut, as the Beverly Hills crowd puts it with their unfailing vulgar chic. The operation went with no problem and I had no adverse aftereffects. There can be, you know. I had a friend whose balls swelled up to roughly the size of the tires on a 1959 Cadillac. I was gonna give him a pair of suspenders and a couple of barrels for his birthday — sort of a designer truss — but they went down before then.’
‘All put with your customary tact and dignity,’ Bill remarked, and Beverly began to laugh again.
Richie offered a large, sincere smile. ‘Thank you, Bill, for those words of support. The word «fuck» was used two hundred and six times in your last book. I counted.’
‘Beep-beep, Trashmouth,’ Bill said solemnly, and they all laughed. Bill found it nearly impossible to believe they had been talking about dead children less than ten minutes ago.
‘Press onward, Richie,’ Ben said. ‘The hour groweth late.’
‘Sandy and I lived together for two and a half years,’ Richie went on. ‘Came really close to getting married twice. As things turned out, I guess we saved ourselves a lot of heartache and all that community-property bullshit by keeping it simple. She got an offer to join a corporate law-firm in Washington around the same time I got an offer to come to KLAD as a weekend
jock — not much, but a foot in the door. She told me it was her big chance and I had to be the most insensitive male chauvinist oinker in the United States to be dragging my feet, and furthermore she’d had it with California anyway. I told her I also had a chance. So we thrashed it out, and we trashed each other out, and at the end of all the thrashing and trashing Sandy went.
‘About a year after that I decided to try and get the vasectomy reversed. No real reason for it, and I knew from the stuff I’d read that the chances were pretty spotty, but I thought what the hell.’
‘You were seeing someone steadily then?’ Bill asked.
‘No — that’s the funny part of it,’ Richie said, frowning. ‘I just woke up one day with this . . . I dunno, this hobbyhorse about getting it reversed.’
‘You must have been nuts,’ Eddie said. ‘General anesthetic instead of a local? Surgery? Maybe a week in the hospital afterward?’
‘Yeah, the doctor told me all of that stuff,’ Richie replied. ‘And I told him I wanted to go ahead anyway. I don’t know why. The doc asked me if I understood the aftermath of the operation was sure to be painful while the result was only going to be a coin-toss at best. I said I did. He said okay, and I asked him when — my attitude being the sooner the better, you know. So he says hold your horses, son, hold your horses, the first step is to get a sperm sample just to make sure the reversal operation is necessary. I said, «Come on, I had the exam after the vasectomy. It worked.» He told me that sometimes the vasa reconnected spontaneously. «Yo mamma!» I says. «Nobody ever told me that.» He said the chances were very small — infinitesimal, really — but because the operation was so serious, we ought to check it out. So I popped into the men’s room with a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue and jerked off into a Dixie cup — ‘
‘Beep-beep, Richie,’ Beverly said.
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Richie said. ‘The part about the Frederick’s catalogue is a lie — y o u never find anything that good in a doctor’s office. Anyway, the doc called me three days later and asked me which I wanted first, the good news or the bad news.
‘»Gimme the good news first,» I said.
‘»The good news is the operation won’t be necessary,» he said. «The