The long creamy spill (and fall).

I suppose it should come as no surprise—Dad loved ’em, Mom’s folks had ’em by the shelf-load, those cheaply designed but nonetheless beautiful Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks, each with the color and the iconic figure of a “girl” rendered variously by Divers Hands, I was reading ’em long before I could make sense of the drearily complicated business shenanigans or relate to the paternalistically didactic sexual politics, they’re bred in the dam’ bone, for all I haven’t read one in twenty years—it shouldn’t, but still, it surprises the hell out of me to find the bass line I’ve been playing in the metaphoric pop band of my style is a lifted hook; that the characteristic stink I can’t scrub away whiffs so redolently of John D. MacDonald.