Callahan's Secret Read Free

on which many large somethings were peeing, from a great height. The highway looked glorious-people who wear glasses are lucky, we have stars on rainy nights-but my clothes were getting-wet. Wetter. I considered ducking back inside… but as 1 said, I like warm rain. I particularly like to be naked in warm rain, and don’t get a lot of opportunities. Mike wouldn’t mind, and anyone else I would see drive up.
    So I stripped and looked about for the driest place to stash my clothes.
    The dumbwaiter seemed like the best bet; I could wedge its door open with something to keep it up here at roof level. I padded barefoot toward its tall housing-and discovered that it was already ~so wedged, with a chisel. Inside was a pile of clothing. Big man’s clothes, faded jeans, denim-shut, boots, sized to fit only one man I knew. That solved the mystery of Callahan’s whereabouts. He must be a secret naked-in-the-rain nut, too. He was going to jump a foot in the air when I came around the dumbwaiter. This would be good for laughs-and it might cost him a couple of drinks to keep the story to myself…
    It was just possible that my fellow nudist was not Callahan-in which case I was properly dressed to meet him. Onward.
    I should have lifted up the jeans. The underwear might have warned me. I piled my clothes on top of the others. walked around the dumbwaiter, and became one myself. Waiting, dumb, one foot in the air. She was very beautiful, and in the instant I saw her I wanted urgently to do this right, to not make any mistakes. It was not going to be easy.
     
    I am sorry to say that you would probably not have thought she was beautiful-unless you, too, are a pervert. I mean, going naked in the rain is one, thing, but I’m talking major league perversion here. (From my point of view, I am the only sane man in a perverted culture. Perverts always feel that way.)
    I will state the perversion: I like women who look like women. That is, my ideal of feminine beauty adheres closely to that which has been the generally accepted consensus from the dawn of time until quite recently and quite locally.
    What you would probably have said if you’d seen her, naked or clothed, is, “Handsome woman; she could be beautiful if she lost the weight.” You would probably have gallantly tried to avoid looking at, let alone commenting on her body-you almost certainly would not have drunk the sight of it the way I did.
    She did not, in other words, look the way North America thinks women should look. She did not look like a thirteenyear-old boy with plums in his shirt pockets. Those were her clothes in the dumbwaiter. Amid I do not even mean that she was a Jayne Mansfield/Loni Anderson type, with one of those big bodies that seem packed tight, compressed snugly by invisible plastic, firm as a weightlifter’s shOulder. She had big glorious saggy tits, and what are sometimes affectionately called “love handles,” (that is, the people who use the term sometimes mean it affectionately) and a round belly and thighs-that would jiggle when she walked.
    She looked, in short, much like half the mature women in this sorry culture, and she would have opened the nose of most of the heterosexual males who ever lived. Praxiteles, Titian, Rubens, Rodin, any of the great ones would have reached for their tools, if not their work utensils, at the sight of her.
    You know: a whale. A hippo. I’m telling ya, Morty, this broad was a hunnert’ eighty, hun’ninety pounds if she was a friggin’ ounce, no shit. One of America’s millions of rejects, forever barred from The Good Life, too sunk in sloth or genetic degeneracy to torture herself into the semblance of an undernourished adolescent male. A pig. No character, no willpower, no selfdiscipline, no self-respect, certainly no sex appeal. A lifelong figure of fun, doomed to be jolly, member of the only minority group that “comedians” like Joan Rivers can still get away with viciously assaulting.
    I could tell I was