I thought he had
finished I looked around and there he was staring at me with a strange
smile. "It's funny", he said, "how hard it is to accept death." I smiled too
now and put my hand on his shoulder. "Go on," I said, "talk your head off.
Get it off your chest." We started walking again, up and down over the
meadows, as though we were walking under the sea. The mist had become so
thick that I could barely discern his features. He was talking quietly and
madly. "I knew it would happen," he said. "It was too beautiful to last."
The night before she was taken ill he had had a dream. He dreamt that he had
lost his identity. "I was stumbling around in the dark calling my own name.
I remember coming to a bridge, and looking down into the water I saw myself
drowning. I jumped off the bridge head first and when I came up I saw Yetta
floating under the bridge. She was dead." And then suddenly he added: "You
were there yesterday when I knocked at the door, weren't you? I knew you
were there and I couldn't go away. I knew too that Yetta was dying and I
wanted to be with her, but I was afraid to go alone." I said nothing and he
rambled on. "The first girl I ever loved died in the same way. I was only a
kid and I couldn't get over it. Every night I used to go to the cemetery and
sit by her grave. People thought I was out of my mind. I guess I was out of
my mind. Yesterday; when I was standing at the door, it all came back to me.
I was back in Trenton, at the grave, and the sister of the girl I loved was
sitting beside me. She said it couldn't go on that way much longer, that I
would go mad. I thought to myself that I really was mad and to prove it to
myself I decided to do something mad and so I said to her it isn't her I
love, It's you, and I pulled her over me and we lay there kissing each other
and finally I screwed her, right beside the grave. And I think that cured me
because I never went back there again and I never thought about her any more
-until yesterday when I was standing at the door. If I could have gotten
hold of you yesterday I would have strangled you. I don't know why I felt
that way but it seemed to me that you had opened up a tomb, that you were
violating the dead body of the girl I loved. That's crazy isn't it? And why
did I come to see you to-night? Maybe it's because you're absolutely
indifferent to me ... because you're not a Jew and I can talk to you...
because you don't give a damn, and you're right... Did you ever read The
Revolt of the Angels?"
We had just arrived at the bicycle path which encircles the park. The
lights of the boulevard were swimming in the mist. I took a good look at him
and I saw that he was out of his head. I wondered if I could make him laugh.
I was afraid, too, that if he once got started laughing he would never stop.
So I began to talk at random, about Anatole France at first, and then about
other writers, and finally, when I felt that I was losing him, I suddenly
switched to General Ivolgin, and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh
either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle, like a rooster with its head on the
block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears
were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most
terrible, heart-rending sobs. "I knew you would do me good," he blurted out,
as the last outbreak died away. "I always said you were a crazy son of a
bitch... You're a Jew bastard yourself, only you don't know it... Now tell
me, you bastard, how was it yesterday? Did you get your end in? Didn't I
tell you she was a good lay? And do you know who she's living with, Jesus,
you were lucky you didn't get caught. She's living with a Russian poet - you
know the guy, too. I introduced you to him once at the Cafe Royal. Better
not let him get wind of it. He'll beat your brains out... and he'll write a
beautiful poem about it and send it to her with a bunch of roses. Sure I
knew him out in Stelton, in the anarchist colony. His old man was a
Nihilist. The whole family's crazy. By the way, you'd better take care of
yourself. I meant to tell you that the other day, but I didn't think you
would act so quickly. You know she may have syphilis. I'm not trying to
scare you. I'm just telling you for your own good. . . ."
This outburst seemed to really assuage him. He was trying to tell me in
his twisted Jewish way that he liked me. To do so he had to first destroy
everything around me - the wife, the job, my friends, the "nigger wench", as
he called Valeska, and so on. "I think some day you're going to be a great
writer," he said. "But," he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer
a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet.
You only think you've suffered. You've got to fall in love first. That
nigger wench now... you don't really suppose that you're in love with her,
do you? Did you ever take a good look at her ass ... how it's spreading, I
mean? In five years she'll look like Aunt Jemima. You'll make a swell couple
walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies trailing behind you.
Jesus, I'd rather see you marry a Jewish girl. You wouldn't appreciate her,
of course, but she'd be good for you. You need something to steady yourself.
You're scattering your energies. Listen, why do you run around with all
these dumb bastards you pick up? You seem to have a genius for picking up
the wrong people. Why don't you throw yourself into something useful? You
don't belong in that job - you could be a big guy somewhere. Maybe a labour
leader ... I don't know what exactly. But first you've got to get rid of
that hatchet-faced wife of yours. Ugh! when I look at her I could spit in
her face. I don't see how a guy like you could ever have married a bitch
like that. What was it - just a pair of streaming ovaries? Listen, that's
what's the matter with you -you've got nothing but sex on the brain... No, I
don't mean that either. You've got a mind and you've got passion and
enthusiasm ... but you don't seem to give a damn what you do or what happens
to you. If you weren't such a romantic bastard I'd almost swear that you
were a Jew. It's different with me -1 never had anything to look forward to.
But you've got something in you - only you're too damned lazy to bring it
out. Listen, when I hear you talk sometimes I think to myself - if only that
guy would put it down on paper! Why you could write a book that would make a
guy like Dreiser hang his head. You're different from the Americans I know;
somehow you don't belong, and it's a damned good thing you don't. You're a
little cracked, too - I suppose you know that. But in a good way. Listen a
little while ago, if it had been anybody else who talked to me that way I'd
have murdered him. I think I like you better because you didn't try to give
me any sympathy. I know better than to expect sympathy from you. If you had
said one false word to-night I'd have really gone mad. I know it. I was on
the very edge. When you started in about General Ivolgin I thought for a
minute it was all up with me. That's what makes me think you've got
something in you ... that was real cunning! And now let me tell you
something ... if you don't pull yourself together soon you're going to be
screwy. You've got something inside you that's eating you up. I don't know
what it is, but you can't put it over on me. I know you from the bottom up.
I know there's something griping you - and it's not just your wife, nor your
job, nor even that nigger wench whom you think you're in love with.
Sometimes I think you were born in the wrong time. Listen, I don't want you
to think I'm making an idol of you but there's something to what I say... if
you had just a little more confidence in yourself you could be the biggest
man in the world to-day. You wouldn't even have to be a writer. You might
become another Jesus Christ for all I know. Don't laugh -1 mean it. You
haven't the slightest idea of your own possibilities ... you're absolutely
blind to everything except your own desires. You don't know what you want.
You don't know because you never stop to think. You're letting people use
you up. You're a damned fool, an idiot. If I had a tenth of what you've got
I could turn the world upside down. You think that's crazy, eh? Well, listen
to me... I was never more sane in my life. When I came to see you to-night I
thought I was about ready to commit suicide. It doesn't make much difference
whether I do it or not. But anyway, I don't see much point in doing it now.
That won't bring her back to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to
bring disaster. But I don't want to sick off yet... I want to do some good
in the world first. That may sound silly to you, but it's true. I'd like to
do something for others ..."
He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile.
It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life
instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to
hope for, he was powerless to kill himself. That hopelessness was something
quite alien to me. I thought to myself - if only we could change skins! Why,
I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more than anything was
the thought that he wouldn't even enjoy the funeral - his own wife's
funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there
was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes
and some hearty belly laughs. Maybe I was too young to appreciate die
sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and wept. But
that never meant much to me because after the funeral sitting in the beer
garden next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer
despite the black garments and the crepes and the wreaths. It seemed to me,
as a kid then, that they were really trying to establish some sort of
communion with the dead person. Something almost Egyptian-like, when I think
back on it. Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch of hypocrites.
But they weren't. They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for
life. Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you
went only by what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal
of their thoughts. But they really didn't grasp it at all - not the way the
Jew does, for example. They talked about the life hereafter but they never
really believed in it. And if any one were so bereaved as to pine away they
looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane
person. There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was
the impression they gave me. And at the extreme limits there was always the
stomach which had to be filled - with limburger sandwiches and beer and
Kummel and turkey legs if there were any about. They wept in their beer,
like Children. And the next minute they were laughing, laughing over some
curious quirk in the dead person's character. Even the way they used the
past tense had a curious effect upon me. An hour after he was shovelled
under they were saying of the defunct - "he was always so good-natured" - as
though the person in mind were dead a thousand years, a character of
history, or a personage out of Nibelungen Lied. The thing was that he was
dead, definitely dead for all time, and they, the living, were cut off from
him now and forever, and to-day as well as to-morrow must be lived through,
the clothes washed, the dinner prepared, and when the next one was struck
down there would be a coffin to select and a squabble about the will, but it
would be all in the daily routine and to take time off to grieve and sorrow
was sinful because God, if there was a God, had ordained it that way and we
on earth had nothing to say about it. To go beyond the ordained limits of
joy or grief was wicked. To threaten madness was the high sin. They had a
terrific animal sense of adjustment, marvellous to behold if it had been
truly animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more
than dull German torpor, insensirivity. And yet, somehow, I preferred these
animated stomachs to the hydra-headed sorrow of the Jew. At bottom I
couldn't feel sorry for Kronski - I would have to feel sorry for his whole
tribe. The death of his wife was only an item, a trifle, in the history of
his calamities. As he himself had said, he was born unlucky. He was born to
see things go wrong - because for five thousand years things had been going
wrong in the blood of the race. They came into the world with that sunken,
hopeless leer on their faces and they would go out of the world the same
way. They left a bad smell behind them - a poison, a vomit of sorrow. The
stink they were trying to take out of the world was the stink they
themselves had brought into the world. I reflected on all this as I listened
to him. I felt so well and dean inside that when we parted, after I had
turned down a side street, I began to whistle and hum. And then a terrible
thirst came upon me and I says to meself in me best Irish brogue - shure and
it's a bit of a drink ye should be having now, me lad - and saying it I
stumbled into a hole in the wall and I ordered a big foaming stein of beer
and a thick hamburger sandwich with plenty of. onions. I had another mug of
beer and then a drop of brandy and I thought to myself in my callous way -
if the poor bastard hasn't got brains enough to enjoy his own wife's funeral
then I'll enjoy it for him. And the more I thought about it, the happier I
grew, and if there was the least bit of grief or envy it was only for the
fact that I couldn't change places with her, the poor dead Jewish soul,
because death was something absolutely beyond the grip and comprehension of
a bum guy like myself arid it was a pity to waste it on the likes of them as
knew all about it and didn't need it anyway. I got so damned intoxicated
with the idea of dying that in my drunken stupor I was mumbling to the God
above to kill me this night, kill me. God, and let me know what it's all
about. I tried my stinking best to imagine what it was like, giving up the
ghost, but it was no go. The best I could do was to imitate a death rattle,
but on that I nearly choked, and then I got so damned frightened that I
almost shit in my pants. That wasn't death, anyway. That was just choking.
Death was more like what we went through in the park: two people walking
side by side in the mist, rubbing against trees and bushes, and not a word
between them. It was something emptier than the name itself and yet right
and peaceful, dignified, if you like. It was not a continuation of life, but
a leap in the dark and no possibility of ever coming back, not even as a
grain of dust. And that was right and beautiful, I said to myself, because
why would one want to come back. To taste it once is to taste it forever -
life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no
stakes. Sure, it's tough to choke on your own spittle - it's disagreeable
more than anything else. And besides, one doesn't always die choking to
death. Sometimes one goes off in his sleep, peaceful and quiet as a lamb.
The Lord comes and gathers you up into the fold, as they say. Anyway, you
stop breathing. And why the hell should one want to go on breathing forever?
Anything that would have to be done interminably would be torture. The poor
human bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that somebody devised a way
out. We don't quibble about going to sleep. A third of our lives we snore
away like drunken rats. What about that? Is that tragic? Well then, say
three-thirds of drunken rat-like sleep. Jesus, if we had any sense we'd be
dancing with glee at the thought of it! We could all die in bed tomorrow,
without pain, without suffering - if we had the sense to take advantage of
our remedies. We don't want to die, that's the trouble with us. That's why
God and the whole shooting match upstairs in our crazy dustbins. General
Ivolgin! That got a cackle out of him . .. and a few dry sobs. I might as
well have said limburger cheese. But General Ivolgin means something to him
... something crazy. Limburger cheese would be too sober, too banal. It's
all limburger cheese, however, including General Ivolgin, the poor drunken
sap. General Ivolgin was evolved out of Dostoievski's limburger cheese, his
own private brand. That means a certain flavour, a certain label. So people
recognize it when they smell it, taste it. But what made this General
Ivolgin limburger cheese? Why, whatever made limburger cheese, which is x
and therefore unknowable. And so therefore? Therefore nothing... nothing at
all. Full stop - or eke a leap in the dark and no coming back.
As I was taking my pants off I suddenly remembered what the bastard had
told me. I looked at my cock and it looked just as innocent as ever. "Don't
tell me you've got the syph," I said, holding it in my hand and squeezing it
a bit as though I might see a bit of pus squirting out. No, I didn't think
there was much chance of having the syph. I wasn't born under that kind of
star. The clap, yes, that was possible. Everybody had the dap sometime or
other. But not syph! I knew he'd wish it on me if he could, just to make me
realize what suffering was. But I couldn't be bothered obliging him. I was
born a dumb and lucky guy. I yawned. It was all so much god-damned limburger
cheese that syph or no syph, I thought to myself, if she's up to it I'll
tear off another piece and call it a day. But evidently she wasn't up to it.
She was for turning her ass on me. So I just lay there with a stiff prick up
against her ass and I gave it to her by mental telepathy. And by Jesus, she
must have gotten the message sound asleep though she was, because it wasn't
any trouble going in by the stable door and besides I didn't have to look at
her face which was one hell of a relief. I thought to myself, as I gave her
the last hook and whistle - "me lad it's limburger cheese and now you can
turn over and snore ..."
It seemed as if it would go on forever, the sex and death chant. The
very next afternoon at the office I received a telephone call from my wife
saying that her friend Arline had just been taken to the insane asylum. They
were friends from the convent school in Canada where they had both studied
music and the art of masturbation. I had met the whole flock of them little
by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and who apparently was
the high priestess of the cult of Fonanism. They had all had a crush on
Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the chocolate eclair
mug wasn't the first of the little group to go to the insane asylum. I don't
say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere
of the convent had something to do with it. They were all spoiled in the
egg.
Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He
arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age,
though he was hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to
liven up a bit. He said he always knew there was something wrong with her.
Why? Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep
hysterically. It wasn't the weeping so much as what she said. She said she
had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life
of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless
way. "I said to her -well you don't need to do it if you don't want... just
hold it in your hand. Jesus, when I said that I thought she'd go clean off
her nut. She said I was trying to soil her innocence - that's the way she
put it. And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so
hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And still harping on
the Holy Ghost and her 'innocence'. I remembered what you told me once and
so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted
down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun
commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman? It's something to
experience. From the instant I got it in she started talking a blue streak.
I can't describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she didn't
know I was fucking her. Listen, I don't know whether you've ever had a woman
eat an apple while you were doing it... well, you can imagine how that
affects you. This one was a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so
that I began to think I was a little queer myself . . . And now here's
something you'll hardly believe, but I'm telling you the truth. You know
what she did when we got through? She put her arms around me and she thanked
me ... Wait, that isn't all. Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and
offered up a prayer for my soul. Jesus, I remember that so well. 'Please
make Mac a better Christian,' she said. And me lying there with a limp cock
listening to her. I didn't know whether I was dreaming or what. 'Please make
Mac a better Christian!' Can you beat that?
"What are you doing to-night?" he added cheerfully.
"Nothing special," I said.
"Then come along with me. I've got a gal I want you to meet... Paula, I
picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She's not crazy - she's just
a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It'll be a treat... just
to watch you. Listen, if you don't shoot off in your pants when she starts
wiggling, well then I'm a son of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. What's
the use of farting around in this place?"
There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went
to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it was
a French joint; now it was a speak-easy run by a couple of wops. There was a
tiny bar near the door and in the back a little room with a sawdust floor
and a slot machine for music. The idea was that we were to have a couple of
drinks and then eat. That was the idea. Knowing him as I did, however, I
wasn't at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland together. If a
woman should come along who pleased his fancy - and for that she didn't have
to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb - I knew he'd leave me in
the lurch and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, when I was with
him, was to make sure in advance that he had enough money to pay for the
drinks we ordered. And, of course, never to let him out of my sight until
the drinks were paid for.
The first drink or two always plunged him into reminiscence.
Reminiscences of cunt to be sure. His reminiscences were reminiscent of a
story he had told me once and which made an indelible impression upon me. It
was about a Scotchman on his deathbed. Just as he was about to pass away his
wife, seeing him struggling to say something bends over him tenderly and
says - "What is it. Jock, what is it ye're trying to say?" And Jock, with a
last effort, raises himself wearily and says:
"Just cunt... cunt... cunt."
That was always the opening theme, and the ending theme, with
MacGregor. It was his way of saying -futility. The leitmotif was disease,
because between fucks, as it were, he worried his head off, or rather he
worried the head off his cock. It was the most natural thing in the world,
at the end of an evening, for him to say - "come on upstairs a minute, I
want to show you my cock." From taking it out and looking at it and washing
it and scrubbing it a dozen times a day naturally his cock was always
swollen and inflamed. Every now and then he went to the doctor and he had it
sounded. Or, just to relieve him, the doctor would give him a little box of
salve and tell him not to drink so much. This would cause no end of debate,
because as he would say to me, "if the salve is any good why do I have to
stop drinking?" Or, "if I stopped drinking altogether do you think I would
need to use the salve?" Of course, whatever I recommended went in one ear
and out the other. He had to worry about something and the penis was
certainly good food for worry. Sometimes he worried about his scalp. He had
dandruff, as most everybody has, and when his cock was in good condition he
forgot about that and he worried about his scalp. Or else his chest. The
moment he thought about his chest he would start to cough. And such
coughing! As though he were in the last stages of consumption. And when he
was running after a woman he was as nervous and irritable as a cat. He
couldn't get her quickly enough. The moment he had her he was worrying about
how to get rid of her. They all had something wrong with them, some trivial
little thing, usually, which took the edge off his appetite.
He was rehearsing all this as we sat in the gloom of the back room.
After a couple of drinks he got up, as usual, to go to the toilet, and on
his way he dropped a coin in the slot machine and the jiggers began to
jiggle and with that he perked up and pointing to the glasses he said:
"Order another round!" He came back from the toilet looking extraordinarily
complacent, whether because he had relieved his bladder or because he had
run into a girl in the hallway, I don't know. Anyhow, as he sat down, he
started in on another tack - very composed now and very serene, almost like
a philosopher. "You know, Henry, we're getting on in years. You and I
oughtn't to be frittering our time away like this. If we're ever going to
amount to anything it's high time we started in..." I had been hearing this
line for years now and I knew what the upshot would be. This was just a
little parenthesis while he calmly glanced about the room and decided which
bimbo was the least sottish-looking. While he discoursed about the miserable
failure of our lives his feet were dancing and his eyes were getting
brighter and brighter. It would happen as it always happened, that just as
he was saying - "Now you take Woodruff, for instance. He'll never get ahead
because he's just a natural mean scrounging son of a bitch..." - just at
such a moment, as I say it would happen that some drunken cow in passing the
table would catch his eye and without the slightest pause he would interrupt
his narrative to say "hello kid, why don't you sit down and have a drink
with us?" And as a drunken bitch like that never travels alone, but always
in pairs, why she'd respond with a "Certainly, can I bring my friend over?"
And MacGregor, as though he were the most gallant chap in the world, would
say "Why sure, why not? What's her name?" And then, tugging at my sleeve,
he'd bend over and whisper:
"Don't you beat it on me, do you hear? We'll give 'em one drink and get
rid of them, see?"
And, as it always happened, one drink led to another and the bill was
getting too high and he couldn't see why he should waste his money on a
couple of bums so you go out first, Henry, and pretend you're buying some
medicine and I'll follow in a few minutes ... but wait for me, you son of a
bitch, don't leave me in the lurch like you did the last time. And like I
always did, when I got outside I walked away as fast as my legs would carry
me, laughing to myself and thanking my lucky stars that I had gotten away
from him as easily as I had. With all those drinks under my belt it didn't
matter much where my feet were dragging me. Broadway lit up just as crazy as
ever and the crowd thick as molasses. Just fling yourself into it like an
ant and let yourself get pushed along. Everybody doing it, some for a good
reason and some for no reason at all. All this push and movement
representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes or fancy
shirts, the new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every
other joint a food emporium.
Every time I hit that runway towards dinner hour a fever of expectancy
seized me. It's only a stretch of a few blocks from Times Square to Fiftieth
Street, and when one says Broadway that's all that's really meant and it's
really nothing, just a chicken run and a lousy one at that, but at seven in
the evening when everybody's rushing for a table there's a sort of electric
crackle in the air and your hair stands on end like an antennae and if
you're receptive you not only get every bash and flicker but you get the
statistical itch, the quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial,
ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which
compose the Milky Way, only this is the Gay White Way, the top of the world
with no roof and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through
and say it's a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch
of warm human delirium which makes you run forward like a blind nag and wag
your delirious ears. Every one is so utterly, confoundedly not himself that
you become automatically the personification of the whole human race,
shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand
different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning,
soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling,
cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so
forth. You are all the men who ever lived up to Moses, and beyond that you
are a woman buying a hat, or a bird cage, or just a mouse trap. You can lie
in wait in a show-window, like a fourteen carat gold ring, or you can climb
the side of a building like a human fly, but nothing will stop the
procession, not even umbrellas flying at lightning speed, nor double-decked
walruses marching calmly to the oyster banks. Broadway, such as I see it now
and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St.
Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be
used only by snakes and lizards, by the homed toad and the red heron, but
when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the
ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and
wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf
links north through the dead and wormy centre of Manhattan Island. From
Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas Aquinas forgot to
include in his magnum opus is here included, which is to say among other
things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot machines,
grey bowlers, typewriter ribbons, oranges sticks, free toilets, sanitary
napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doylies,
manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sour-balls, cellophane, cord tyres,
magnetos, horse liniment, cough drops, feenamint, and that feline opacity of
the hysterically endowed eunuch who marches to the soda fountain with a
sawed off shotgun between his legs. The before-dinner atmosphere, the blend
of patchouli, warm pitchblende, iced electricity, sugared sweat and powdered
urine drives one on to a fever of delirious expectancy. Christ will never
more come down to earth nor will there be any law-giver, nor will murder
cease nor theft, nor rape, and yet... and yet one expects something,
something terrifyingly marvellous and absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with
mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an invention, like the electric light,
like television, only more devastating, more soul rending, an invention
unthinkable that will bring a shattering calm and void, not the calm and
void of death but of life such as the monks dreamed, such as is dreamed
still in the Himalayas, in Tibet, in Lahore, in the Aleutian Islands, in
Polynesia, in Easter Island, the dream of men before the flood, before the
word was written, the dream of cave men and anthropophagists, of those with
double sex and short tails, of those who are said to be crazy and have no
way of defending themselves because they are outnumbered by those who are
not crazy. Cold energy trapped by cunning brutes and then set free like
explosive rockets, wheels, intricately interwheeled to give the illusion of
force and speed some for light, some for power, some for motion, words wired
by maniacs and mounted like fake teeth, perfect, and repulsive as lepers,
ingratiating, soft, slippery, nonsensical movement, vertical, horizontal,
circular, between walls and through walls, for pleasure, for barter, for
crime; for sex;
all light, movement, power impersonally conceived, generated, and
distributed throughout a choked, cunt-like deft intended to dazzle and awe
the savage, the yokel, the alien, but nobody dazzled or awed, this one
hungry, that one lecherous, all one and the same and no different from the
savage, the yokel, the alien, except for odds and ends, bric-a-brac, the
soapsuds of thought, the sawdust of the mind. In the same cunty deft,
trapped and undazzled, millions have walked before me, among them one,
Blaise Cendrars, who afterwards flew to the moon, thence back to earth and
up the Orinoco impersonating a wild man but actually sound as a button,
though no longer vulnerable, no longer mortal, a splendiferous hulk of a
poem dedicated to the archipelago of insomnia. Of those with fever few
hatched, among them myself still unhatched, but pervious and maculate,
knowing with quiet ferocity the ennui of ceaseless drift and movement.
Before dinner the slat and chink of sky light softly percolating through the
boned grey dome, the vagrant hemispheres spored with blue-egged nuclei
coagulating, ramifying, in the one basket lobsters, in the other the
germination of a world antiseptically personal and absolute. Out of the
manholes, grey with the underground life, men of the future world saturated
with shit, the iced electricity biting into them like rats, the day done in
and darkness coming on like the cool, refreshing shadows of the sewers. Like
a soft prick slipping out of an overheated cunt I, the still unhatched,
making a few abortive wriggles, but either not dead and soft enough or else
sperm-free and skating ad astra, for it is still not dinner and a
peristaltic frenzy takes possession of the upper colon, the hypo-gastric
region, the umbilical and the post-pineal lobe. Boiled alive, the lobsters
swim in ice, giving no quarter and asking no quarter, simply motionless and
unmotivated in the ice-watered ennui of death, life drifting by the
show-window muffled in desolation, a sorrowful scurvy eaten away by
ptomaine, the frozen glass of the window cutting like a jack-knife, dean and
no remainder.
Life drifting by the show-window ... I too as much a part of life as
the lobster, the fourteen carat ring, the horse liniment, but very difficult
to establish the fact, the fact being that life is merchandise with a bill
of lading attached, what I choose to eat being more important than I the
eater, each one eating the other and consequently eating, the verb ruler of
the roost. In the act of eating the host is violated and justice defeated
tempor- arily. The plate and what's on it, through the predatory power of
the intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first
hypnotizing it, then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then
absorbing it. The spiritual part of the being passes off like a scum, leaves
absolutely no evidence or trace of its passage, vanishes, vanishes even more
completely than a point in space after a mathematical discourse. The fever,
which may return tomorrow, bears the same relation to life as the mercury in
a thermometer bears to heat. Fever will not make life heat, which is what
was to have been proved and thus consecrates the meat balls and spaghetti.
To chew while thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, gives the
necessary social cast from which you look out the window and see that even
human kind can be slaughtered justly, or maimed, or starved, or tortured
because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair with
clothes on, wiping the mouth with napkin, enables you to comprehend, what
the wisest men have never been able to comprehend, namely that there is no
other way of life possible, said wise men often, disdaining to use chair,
clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying through a cunty deft of a street
called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of this or that, tend
to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of mathematicians,
logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact and
the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish
the facts.
The meat balk devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor,
belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the 24
carat sparkle and with the theatre pack. This time I wander through the side
streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a
stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in
the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. The
woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a
part of life too like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the
Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but
when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When
is it
life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders on and I
remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten: the coffee was
lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid.
The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next
and the next. At the comer the blind man stops again and plays "Home to Our
Mountains". I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket -1 chew it. I chew
for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it
were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and
nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I
belong and I don't belong.
I sit on the stoop for an hour or so, mooning. I come to the same
conclusions I always come to when I have a minute to think for myself.
Either I must go home immediately and start to write or I must run away and
start a wholly new life. The thought of beginning a book terrifies me: there
is so much to tell that I don't know where or how to begin. The thought of
running away and beginning all over again is equally terrifying: it means
working like a nigger to keep body and soul together. For a man of my
temperament, the world being what it is, there is absolutely no hope, no
solution. Even if I could write the book I want to write nobody would take
it -1 know my compatriots only too well. Even if I could begin again it
would be no use, because fundamentally I have no desire to work and no
desire to become a useful member of society. I sit there staring at the
house across the way. It seems not only ugly and senseless, like all the
other houses on the street, but from staring at it so intently, it has
suddenly become absurd. The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that
particular way strikes me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me
as a piece of the highest insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated
lines, slot machines, newspapers, telephones, cops, doorknobs, flop houses,
screens, toilet paper, everything. Everything could just as well not be and
not only nothing lost by a whole universe gained. I look at the people
brushing by me to see if by chance one of them might agree with me.
Su