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For future reference: If your boyfriend should ship out to Sam Clam’s Disco for a four-month vacation, leaving you to sleep all alone in a queen-size bed at the back of a big, old, creaky house, and without him laying next to you in the dark, you start to feel a little uneasy, and this uneasiness works itself up into a minor case of insomnia, and you want to read something that’ll put you to sleep, do not, under any circumstances, pick up Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, because three hours later you’ll just be shocked and horrified and engrossed and nauseous and worked up and unable to put it down, until you can’t stand it any longer and sprint to the bookshelf in search of Babar or Alice in Wonderland or anything else with pictures that are pretty and colorful and not in a genital-mutilation kind of way.