Kenneth Davids
The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole
Grove Press, 1968
Maybe YOU could resist a fifty-year-old paperback called The Softness on the Other Side of the Hole that you found in the vintage rack at a used bookstore, but I couldn’t. It was $3. The great title was worth at least $1 of that; the bizarre description on the back cover was worth the other $2 and more.
It gets flying right from its opening sentence when our hero, a homeless 72 year old hippie, innocently smokes a joint in the stall of a women’s restroom and a guy in the adjacent men’s room starts to flirt with him through the wall on the assumption that he’s speaking to a woman. Our geriatric pothead likes girls (or used to back when he could get the job done), but he eventually plays along because…
1) he’s high as a giraffe’s eye,
2) he’s a nice old man who likes to make people happy,
and
3) author Kenneth Davids has no interest in making a lick of sense (our 72 year old man somehow convincingly affects the voice of a woman in her 20s as he chats through a glory hole). Davids writes like he just took a couple monster bong hits and then went to type some stuff (and he probably did). He rambles, treats periods and commas as optional, and is most interested in ruminating on loneliness, aging, and drugged mind states–and building up to a taboo plot twist that’s the last atom bomb gross-out after some creepy sex acts and nightmare phallic drug hallucinations.
It’s trash, but it’s a trip. It was put out by the old Grove Press and it plays like psychedelics-sprinkled pornography for a few quick chapters, especially when the old man gets lost in the fantasy that he’s a girl, and then it makes left turns into places where the most shameless boners won’t remain standing.
I give it a thumbs (and ONLY thumbs) up.