what do folded girls do?

Next June, the 27th will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the flying saucer. It was in this neighborhood, in the vicinity of Mt. Rainier that Kenneth Arnold saw nine disklike objects while flying in his own plane. They were described over the news wire as saucers. Another area native, Dennis the Menace, is being celebrated in a new anniversary edition of early comics. The boy whose father drew the strip, Dennis Ketchum, grew up on Queen Anne Hill, where I lived for many years. He was as mischeivous as a Little Rascal, but beat a strangely solitary path. Other kid characters in the strip never seemed to share the spoils, nor participate in the plotting. Another thing that was unique about Dennis was the absence of a supplied cause for his delinquency and malevolence, his adult-proportioned menace. Dennis' popularity had to be connected to the spontaneous generation of his crimes, his criminal turn of mind, his jail-bird patois. This might alternate with a naive, hickish huck finn like candor.
Neither the behavoir of his father nor mother could explain Dennis'. He was a product of the time and exculpated the both of them. I think it has been a late popular development to not visit the sins of the son upon his father or family but to blame them upon the zeitgeist. As though the young transmit the evils of the times.
++++ ++++++B++++++ +++
I went on a coffee date with Claire and the baby. We sat at a sidewalk table, at the 45th Starbucks. We had parked the stroller at Tully's initially. They have sidewalk speakers that amplify the music they play indoors, a New Age concoction- sax, timbale, and unconsonant vocals. We moved. Two unoccupied tables in the sun only the rush of traffic at our ankles to disturb us. And the baby.
We are deep in the crossword when a bearded gay with a border collie negotiates for the table next to us. In a few minutes a black man in his late fifties comes up and begins addressing the gay, the collie, the baby, Claire, me. He tells me loudly, insistently that I am holding the baby wrong. "Stir, don't shake." He takes a cowbell and drumstick out of a bag and begins to play. He stops every young girl on the sidewalk, with either a "Hey, girl! Look at that nice skirt. I like your skirt, that's a nice skirt....mmmm-hmmm." or a variation. He talks to the gay about the hard load his race carries. The gay baits him. The cowbell guy addresses his righteous indignation to the baby. I tell him we are not a part of his conversation, though the five of us are nearly touching knees.
Claire walks the baby around and leaves me with the two of them.
"I come here on a slave ship. Yes I come on a slave ship here," the man says.
He does not mean the 45th Starbucks.
Claire and I decide to walk to a garage sale even though the posterboard sign we read on a telephone pole suggests that there will be live music. There is. A man is playing a guitar next to a folding table of kitchen items. Claire points out a table ten rows deep with mass market paperbacks. I find a Thorsten Veblen 'Theory of the Leisure Class', and a Norman Mailer 'Naked and the Dead'. I already own the Veblen, but it is a quarter a book, and the covers of both are terrific. 'Theory' has a coat of arms featuring a groomed poodle and a luxury car. Mailer has a bedraggled soldier and jagged typography, to suggest the horror and chaos of war.
I've read the Veblen before but the Mailer is new to me. The first chapter is not encouraging- shipboard poker game. The Boston cynic, the hard sergeant, and worse than one could hope for, the Southerner, who might say, "By gumption! Ah'll niver git the little ol' card Ah want!"
It is impossible to believe that this is a male speaking. It seems drawn almost entirely from the Southern-variety starlets of movie musicals and comedies. The kind in which, to differentiate, the Southern girl drawls her one unremarkable line, unfolds her legs and undulates across a room. By the way....Why why why do they perch like that? Where did it come from? Perched so far forward that their ankles are nearly beneath their anuses. Why must they simper bent? Is it sexual? What does a folded girl do? He ponduhed and ponduhed, and figgered and figgered but he got no closer to cipherin' it out than a ol' coon dog gits to tinned victuals.
Mailer's omniscient narration just sounds insane when it reproduces characters' voices in their dialects, or with their particular lack of understanding, and when it assumes an easy familiarity with our habits of perspective..."At a second glance you could see he was 28," it has gone too too far.
I think only a gay man could write of men together with any knowledge. A gay man might know, like he knows thread count, what activity makes shoulders like those.