Great Kisser Read Online Free

through sabotage, denial, or flight. At the same time I thought of women 24 hours a day. My cock became huge when thinking of women or even coming near them, and shrivelled to the size of a pea at the thought of intercourse.
    Bart Stevens never forgave me for that story. Whenever he saw me, he said almost the same words, no matter who was in the room: “That story—Michael—come clean! It’s just not credible! Are you trying to tell me that a little guy like you fucked that big black maid? Who do you think you’re kidding?”
    â€œShe was petite, that’s what I wrote, Bart, and I didn’t fuck her.”
    â€œI mean, come off it. I wasn’t born yesterday. Who do you think you are anyway?”
    Mort Zager, the American on the faculty, was a mousy little Jewish guy with a sweet, open face, a gentle way about him, and a meandering teaching style. He always concluded a class by asking his students the same maddening question: “Do you think anything of value occurred here today?” To which the students, emboldened by Mort’s insecurity, would reply, “Not really,” or remain silent. I spent long evenings at his house listening to his abstract monologues while his wife stared at him with a furious look on her face. Her frustration had turned to rage.
    Totally alone in Vancouver, a city of very few Jews—and most of them lawyers, dentists, accountants and doctors—and thousands of bland blondes, I bonded with Mort—which meant, he talked on and on, I listened. Mort had a solution for every manuscript he received from his students. It was always the same solution, and he didn’t spring it on you immediately. He gestated it. And he was never conscious of the sameness of his response. I saw Steve, a Southern boy, product of a military school, who lived in my boarding house, return from a session with Mort dissolved in tears. Steve had been working on a novel for eight months about Southern brutality, racism, bigotry and homophobia in a military school and had a book-length manuscript. When I saw him crying, I knew what had happened, because I’d seen it happen again and again in class: “Mort,” Steve said. “Mort …” He was almost speechless. “He wants me to turn my protagonist into a mouse. An actual mouse. He mapped out an entire structure for the book. He wants me to turn my main character into a mouse!”
    All the struggles he’d gone through to get through the military school, to travel to Canada, to reach the university and oppose his family’s wishes that he go into the fried chicken business—all the months of writing—and he was a serious boy in his way—had come to this.
    â€œSteve,” I said gently, “this is what Mort always says in the end. Haven’t you heard him?” He had, but had thought not with his manuscript, just with those whose manuscripts deserved to have a mouse as the protagonist.
    In fact, Mort had not done it to me yet. What he had done was to encourage my work in the classroom but ignore it for the literary magazine, the Canadian yawn he edited for the university. He would continue to ignore it for the two years I spent there, even though he praised it to the skies. And in the end, gently, tentatively, he began one day with me: “Say, Mike! I’ve got an idea!” I knew what was coming, although I dreaded it. Mort’s eyes sparkled, his eyebrows danced upwards at this point, “What if … now get this: your character, Marvin, turned into a mouse …?”
    That summer, it was 1973, I returned to a broiling Manhattan. I stayed high on tranquilizers and rum and saw a rerun of Portnoy’s Complaint with Richard Benjamin as Portnoy, a perfect numbing choice to fit my shellshocked mood. I had returned to Manhattan because my best friend Robert Greenberg was getting married and he asked me to write a poem and read it at his wedding. And I was