Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

32

Mr. Laurence Clarke

c/o Gumbino

311½ West 20^th St.

New York 10011

Dear Ex,

You make a mistake, lover. Up to a certain point, your letters really were getting to me. So I thought I might drop in on you and see if we couldn’t have fun in an old-friend-type way.

But you loused it up, because I guess you really don’t understand little Lisa at all. You never understood me when we were married, so how you could understand me now is a good question.

Maybe orgies and switcheroos are what you and Miss Fettuccine and your little schoolgirls enjoy. Maybe that’s very much where it’s at, and maybe my generation gap is showing. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit, as Rhett Butler really said.

Lisa is just an old-fashioned girl. I’m afraid. All I want is one man who knows he’s a man and who’s man enough to make me know it.

For a while there, even though I should have known better, I actually thought you might turn out to be that man after all. Maybe that’s because you’re a writer and tend to come across better on paper than you do in person. I don’t know. But it was a mistake on my part, just as every man I meet turns out to be a mistake on my part, although I honestly sometimes think they’re all really a mistake on God’s part and not mine.

I know you think of me as a ballbreaker. You’ve made that perfectly clear often enough. Well, you’re not the only man who ever came to that conclusion, and maybe I am a ballbreaker, but if so, it’s only because every man I meet has unbelievably fragile balls. Hit a high note and they shatter to bits.

What I am, and all I am, is a woman. And what I want, and all I want, is a man who knows what to do with a woman when he finds one. A strong man, Larry. A man with real balls on him. A man that I can’t break. A man that would break me instead, and put the pieces back together so that I could feel whole and complete for the first time in my life.

I don’t know if Daddy read the letter before passing it on to me. A cute little game on your part but I’m afraid I’m not playing, because I really don’t care. I’m sick of Richmond, it was a mistake to come here, but where the hell else would it be any better? I’d go to the moon if I thought it would do me any good.

I’m afraid you and Miss Arrivederci won’t have the pleasure of eating fried rice out of my cunt, or whatever it is you’re doing these days.