Ladies' Man
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THE LADIES' MANBy
Richard Price
CONTENTS
The critics love
LADIES' MAN
"Ladies' Man
is a novel of passion and depth written with great precision and control
. . . During one vivid week Kenny Becker loses his girlfriend and his job, confronts the demands of his loneliness and sexual appetite, and explores the sexual underworld of New York… More than anything else,
Ladies' Man
is a novel about love and death… and one of the best novels yet on life in the 1970s."
—Terence Winch,
Washington Post Book World
"
The funniest and most revealing book
I've read about the sexual compulsion of American males."
—Dan Wakefield
"
Richard Price
…
may be the best
we've had at this sort of thing since James T. Farrell. He has an actor's eye for personal particulars, a gorgeous' ear and verbal vigor enough to hold our attention through every breath his narrator draws."
—
Newsweek
"
One of the best
descriptions yet of this generation."
—
Playboy
"ladies' man is
a remarkably sustained portrait
of a present-day underground man."
—
Atlantic Monthly
"ladies' man
is an effective depiction of loneliness
… Richard Price is an expert on the fulsome and frenzied aspects of New York City."
—
Harpers'
"ladies' man
captures our era
the way
The Sun Also Rises
and
Catcher in the Rye
captured theirs… A novel which future generations will read in order to understand the 1970s."
—
Baltimore Sun
"
A beautiful, howlingly funny, terrifying vision
of all the sweet stinks of life… Price's best work to date and that's saying a hell of a lot."
—Harry Crews
"ladies' man
brilliantly portrays the dark side
of youthful passion seeking release in a big-city environment."
—
St. Louis Post Dispatch
"
In
ladies' man
Richard Price can do anything with words
… He captures the spurts of rage in Kenny's mind, gives him airborne fantasies, creates settings that reverberate with his emotional state."
—
Saturday Review
"
This novel… goes screaming
with the rise-and-fall wail of an ambulance siren… This is a burning, hot book. Catch it fast!"
—Jill Robinson
"
An outrageously funny exploration
of the correlation between love and sex and the depths of loneliness and depression."
—Booklist
Bantam Books by Richard Price
BLOODBROTHERS
LADIES' MAN
LADIES'
MAN
RICHARD PRICE
Bantam Books
This low-priced Bantam Book
has been completely reset In a type face
designed for easy reading, and was printed
from new plates. It contains the complete
text of the original hard-cover edition.
NOT ONE WOBD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
LADIES' MAN
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with
Houghton Mifflin Company
PRINTING HISTORY
Houghton Miffin edition published September 1978 A selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club,
February 1979
Bantam edition / October 1979 2nd printing
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1978 by Richard Price.
Cover art copyright © 1979 by Bantam Books, Inc.
ISBN 0-553-12890-6
Published simultaneously In the United Stales and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade-mark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the partrayal of a bantam, Is Registered in US. Patent and Trademark
Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam
Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To Laurie Sammeth with love
To John Calif and for two more years of
growing pains, shared lights, love and friendship
To the memory of my grandfather, Morris Price
I would like to thank the Yaddo Foundation
for the time and the place
"You have no idea what it's like to be me!"
—Peter Lorre in
M
So there we were. Me, I was doing my usual hundred and fifty sit-ups. My feet were jammed under the couch for leverage and I was holding a five-pound barbell behind my head like an iron halo. La Donna was in her black Danskins sitting by the wall doing dancercizes. I had a stomach that looked like six miniature cobblestones. La Donna was so limber that standing and without bending her knees, she could work her head down between her legs and kiss her own ass. How very nice for the both of us. She was a twenty-eight-year-old bank clerk would-be singer; I was a thirty-year-old door-to-door salesman and we both walked around all day like Back to Bataan.
When I was doing my sit-ups I liked to watch TVLucy or Fonzie, whatever reruns I could get a hold of. That was not allowed when La Donna was around. She needed silence to stand there, pull one foot backward, up over her shoulder, and tap the base of her skull with her heel. I could have worked out when she wasn't around, but six weeks before, on a Sunday morning after she finished her dancercizes, she came over to where I was doing sit-ups and just sat on it. There are aborigines in New Guinea who have been squatting by an air strip since 1943 because a plane once landed and dropped off food. Six weeks ain't that long. Meanwhile, if I needed extra money I could do exhibitions, have two-ton semis drive over my stomach at state fairs.
La Donna walked past me on the way to the bathroom, a thumb-pinch of tush peeking out over each thigh. My stomach queered and I couldn't do another sit-up. I lay flat on my back and stared upside-down at the wall unit across the room. I followed her into the bathroom. She was hunched over the sink spitting out toothpaste. I stood behind her, dropped my gym shorts and got into the shower.
"Comin' in, babe?"
She looked up at me with a werewolf froth of toothpaste and spat into the sink again. "I'm gonna work awhile."
The shower curtain had a box design with alternating white and clear plastic squares and I watched her wash her face. When she finished she started to work her dusty black leotard down her shoulders and thumb-hook it below her hips to her knees so she could pee. She had tits the size of fists, hard and muscular with long, rubbery, dark brown nipples. That was unusual because her skin was as pale as dough. She sat on the pot and wiggled her toes which still had weird bumps and corns from when she had been trying to make it as a dancer. I leaned against the wall in my soap overcoat and pulled on myself.
Love. We fought like the U.S. Marines, and the only pleasure we ever got with each other was the hour between the end of a fight and sleep. That was the only time we really talked or fucked. The rest of the time we walked around afraid of each other, not really understanding or appreciating each other; what I found funny she thought pathetic or mean and what she found funny I usually considered a major yawn. I loved good balling and good movies. She was into modern dance and nightclub-type singing.
On the other hand, she had this cute big head with matching big ears. She never smiled and always had an incredible serious look on this outrageous baby faceround, with round gray eyes and a Danish nose, broad but upturned like Hitler intended. But I knew bow to get her laughing, and when she did, that serious baby face broke up, went east and west, and she would cover her mourn and touch the tip of her nose with -her index finger like a high-class Japanese hooker and she was a kid and she was human and I loved her. She needed me. I knew she needed me. And I wasn't stupid or shal-low. I knew all about sexism, and productive relationships and growth, but I'm talking about love. I'm talking about irrational, illogical passion. And you can go to all the forums on meaningful concepts, you can have . all the shared interests you want, but the bottom line with what I'm talking about here was how her arms felt wrapped around my neck when she was coming, how she looked at me when I made her laugh. And how I knew she needed me, how I felt in my heart she needed me. The rest was all good and well, but it wasn't from the gut and it wasn't love. -
