Read Little Casino for Free Online Page A

a time, waiting for his attentions, in the impossible gleam of their satin, the immaculate crispness of their lace.
    They are all there, Mary Marshall, Dolores Salvati, Georgene Rydstrom, Charlotte Ryan, Nancy Ippolito, Terri O’Neill: minions and bacchantes, servants of Aphrodite and Dionysos, slaves to the black force of Eros, devotees of earthy, occulted mysteries. They order that which they desire to be done to them by their acolytes, their groveling husbands and lovers and trembling fools. They are pleased to have this power, although they are not aware of its effect on the boy who, though its creator, is obedient before it. Their not knowing is very much the same as not caring, the aristocratic aloofness of the hierophants who keep secret the sacred mysteries. They will live forever, at the behest of the dark gods, their incarnations will be endless, unceasing. Mary, Dolores, Georgene, Charlotte, Nancy, Terri.

    For three months of the year, Apollo left his temple at Delphi, and his place was taken by Dionysos.
    It is, surely, ludicrous to think of this stupefied boy, in 1944, as venerator of the god, but in the slow, burning days of that wartime summer, he worshiped, as it was given him to worship, as best he could. It may be that the god noticed and was pleased.
    Drunk, with a half-smile, his hair bound up with aromatic grasses, a “young boy loggy with vine-must.” And the burning, orange-colored sky.

Mechanics of the dream world

    I N THE STRANGELY UNBALANCED YET PER fect mechanics of the dream world, he’s stroking the girl’s breasts through the smooth material of a blouse or dress, while she licks a Charlotte Russe which he holds rather carelessly. Then he’s inside of her, but with no appreciable change in their positions, and he is mildly surprised to find that she’s Ruth, after all. Her young breasts fall easily out of her creamy-white, frothy slip. He smiles at her serious face, which seems to be receding into the suddenly dim room, and he realizes that she doesn’t know who he is. She’s sweet and kind, though, and her mouth is wet and cool and sweet, filled, as it is, with whipped cream. He decides that he’s probably going to have an orgasm in a bed that he seems to be lying in, and as he begins to ejaculate, she waves and walks down 14th Street, toward S. Klein’s. He wakes up, more or less, and begins to substitute for her face the face of somebody else, he begins, that is, to arrange the dream. Slowly, it is compromised and written, that is, of course, faked.

    In “The Dream-Work,” Freud says, quite clearly, that a dream is a picture puzzle, a rebus, and that the dream contents’ hieroglyphics, or symbols, must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts. It is, then, incorrect to read the symbols as to their values as pictures. A rebus, that is, may not be judged as an artistic composition.
    It has been smugly fashionable and acceptable for some years now to denigrate Freud as a kind of bourgeois homophobic misogynistic charlatan, wholly insensitive to the needs of This, and wholly dishonest in his writings on That. Many of those who so denigrate him have advanced degrees from excellent universities, at which latter they also teach, drive, for, doubtlessly, some intellectual reason, expensive cars, have friends with whom they—you’ll pardon the expression—“play tennis”—and care not a whit for conventional thought. They are, for the most part, a credit to American education. At last count, they numbered 47,109. They dress very badly and read third-rate fiction.
    In the thirties and early forties in New York, there was a Charlotte Russe “season,” during which period (it was, I believe, in late spring) Charlotte Russe purveyors rented empty stores to sell their delectable confection. They remained for, perhaps, two or three weeks, then they would disappear until the following year. A mysterious hieroglyphic, or symbol. For, perhaps, the