Paola wants Profane to be good to her, but he doesn’t know what that means. And we’ll see it again at the close of the section. We’ve seen voyeurism of a sort already, the onlooker, the bystander: “In times of crisis preferred to sit in as voyeur” (9). He likes to photograph his guests in their post-connubial stupor. Pig, Dewey, Paola, and Profane spend a week crashing in Newport News at the apartment of Morris Teflon. A riot breaks out, the cops show up, Profane and co. She's instituted a ritual she calls Suck Hour whereby the patrons are allowed to gorge themselves at the taps, decorated as breasts. There is a brief burrowing episode to provide the backstory for Ploy, a pugnacious little man who had his teeth forcibly removed by the Navy and his gums fitted with metal plates which he then filed into sinister jaws (this is a year before Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me). There he runs into Pig Bodine, Dewey Gland, and Paola. Recently out of the navy, yo-yoing up and down the East coast (presently Norfolk, Virginia) he goes to a bar, The Sailor’s Grave. Benny is later described as "amoebalike," "soft and fat," with "eyes small like a pig's and set too far apart" (31). Page numbers refer to the Harper Perennial edition. Chapter One is broken into five (V) sections.
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