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

83

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

84

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

85

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

86 HENRYMILLER

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

87

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

88

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

89

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

90

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

91

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-

92

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

93

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. Supposing I intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question. Supposing I just

94

said to him suddenly: "Why do you go on living the way you do?" He would probably call a cop. I ask myself - does any one ever talk to himself the way I do? I ask myself if there isn't something wrong with me. The only conclusion I can come to is that I am different. And that's a very grave matter, view it how you will. Henry, I say to myself, rising slowly from the stoop, stretching myself, brushing my trousers and spitting out the gum. Henry, I say to myself, you are young yet, you are just a spring chicken and if you let them get you by the balls you're an idiot because you're a better man than any of them only you need to get rid of your false notions about humanity. You have to realize Henry me boy, that you're dealing with cut-throats, with cannibals, only they're dressed-up, shaved, perfumed, but that's all they are - cut-throats, cannibals. The best thing for you to do now. Henry, is to go and get yourself a frosted chocolate and when you sit at the soda fountain keep your eyes peeled and forget about the destiny of man because you might still find yourself a nice lay and a good dean lay will dean your ballbearing out and leave a good taste in your mouth whereas this only brings on dyspepsia, dandruff, halitosis, encephalitis. And while I'm soothing myself thus a guy comes up to me to bum a dime and I hand him a quarter for good measure thinking to myself that if I had had a little more sense I'd have had a juicy pork chop with that instead of the lousy meat balls but what the difference now it's all food and food makes energy and energy is what makes the world go round. Instead of the frosted chocolate I keep walking and soon I'm exactly where I intended to be all the time, which is front of the ticket window of the Roseland. And now. Henry, says I to myself, if you're lucky your old pal MacGregor will be here and first hell bawl the shit out of you for running away and then he'll lend you a five-spot, and if you just hold your breath while climbing the stairs maybe you'll see the nymphomaniac too and you'll get a dry fuck. Enter very calmly. Henry, and keep your eyes peeled! And I enter as per instructions on velvet toes, checking my hat and urinating a little as a matter of course, then slowly redescending the stairs and sizing up the taxi girls all diaphanously gowned, powdered, perfumed, looking fresh and alert but probably

95

bored as hell and leg weary. Into each and every one of them, as I shuffle about, I throw an imaginary fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck and that's why I'm reasonably sure to find my old friend MacGregor here. The way I no longer think about the condition of the world is marvellous. I mention it because for a moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I almost went into a trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe I ought to beat it and go home and begin the book. A terrifying thought! Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair and saw nothing and heard nothing. I must have written a good sized book before I woke up. Better not to sit down. Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come here some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it'll take you. I mean a hundred or two hundred bucks, and spend it like water and say yes to everything. The haughty looking one with the statuesque figure, I bet she'd squirm like an eel if her palm were well greased. Supposing she said - twenty bucks! and you could say Sure! Supposing you could say - Listen, I've got a car downstairs ... let's run down to Atlantic City for a few days. Henry, there ain't no car and there ain't no twenty bucks. Don't sit down ... keep moving.

At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing around. This is no harmless recreation... this is serious business. At each end of the floor there is a sign reading "No Improper Dancing Allowed". Well and good. No harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompei they probably hung a phallus up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn't think about Pompei or I'll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving Henry. Keep your mind on the music. I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have had if I had the price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I'm standing knee-deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn't the lava that killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that predpitated the eruption. That's how the lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were. If suddenly all New York were caught that way - what a museum

96

it would make! My friend MacGregor standing at the sink scrubbing his cock... the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed ... the nuns laying in bed and masturbating one another ... the auctioneer with an alarm in his hand ... the telephone girls at the switchboard ... J. P. Morganana sitting on the toilet bowl placidly wiping his ass ... the dicks with rubber hoses giving the third degree ... strippers giving the last strip and tease...

Standing knee-deep in the lava beds and my eyes choked with sperm; J. P. Morganana is placidly wiping his ass while the telephone girls plug the switchboards, while dicks with rubber hoses practice the third degree, while my old friend MacGregor scrubs the germs out of his cock and sweetens it and examines it under the microscope. Everybody is caught with his pants down, including the strip teasers who wear no pants, no beards, no moustaches, just a little patch to cover their twinkling little cunts. Sister Antolina lying in the convent bed, her guts trussed up, her arms akimbo and waiting for the Resurrection, waiting, waiting for life without hernia, without intercourse, without sin, without evil, meanwhile nibbling a few animal crackers, a pimento, some fancy olives, a little head cheese. The Jew-boys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Carnarsie, Bronville, opening and dosing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the sausage machine, dogging up the drains, working like fury for cash down and if you let a peep out of you out you go. With eleven hundred tickets in my pocket and a Rolls Royce waiting for me downstairs I could have the most excruciatingly marvellous time, throwing a fuck into each and everyone respectively regardless of age, sex, race, religion, nationality, birth or breeding. There is no solution for a man like myself, I being what I am and the world being what it is. The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. The haughty one with the statuesque figure is probably a cold turkey fuck, a sort of con anonyme plastered with gold leaf and tin foil. Beyond despair and disillusionment there is always the absence of worse things and the emoluments of ennui. Nothing is lousier and emptier than the midst of bright

97

gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical epoch, life maturating in a black box, a negative tickled with add and yielding a momentaneous simulacrum of nothingness. At the outermost limit of this momentaneous nothingness my friend MacGregor arrives and is standing by my side and with him is the one he was talking about, the nymphomaniac called Paula. She has the loose, jaunty swing and perch of the double-barrelled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist, and clutch, the eyes going tic-toc, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac's arms. I watch the two of them as they move spasmodically inch by inch around the floor; they move like an octopus working up a rut. Between the dangling tentacles the music shimmers and flashes, now breaks in a cascade of sperm and rose water, forms again into an oily spout, a column standing erect without feet, collapses again like chalk, leaving the upper part of the leg phosphorescent, a zebra standing in a pool of golden marshmallow, one leg striped, the other molten. A gold marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten hooves, its sex undone and twisted into a knot. On the sea floor the oysters are doing the St. Vitus dance, some with lockjaw, some with double-jointed knees. The music is sprinkled with rat poison, with the rattlesnake's venom, with the fetid breath of the gardenia, the spittle of the sacred yak, the bolloxed sweat of the musk-rat, the leper's sugar-coated nostalgia. The music is a diarrhoea, a lake of gasolene, stagnant with cockroaches and stale horse piss. The drooling notes are the foam and dribble of the epileptic, the night sweat of the fornicating nigger frigged by the Jew. All America is in the trombone's smear, that frazzled brokendown whinny of the gangrened sea cows stationed off Point Loma, Pawtucket, Cape Hatteras, Labrador, Camarsie and intermediate points. The octopus is dancing like a rubber dick - the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil inedit. Laura the nympho is doing the rhumba, her sex exfoliated and twisted like a cow's tail. In the belly of the trombone lies the American soul farting its contented heart

98

out. Nothing goes to waste - not the least spit of a fart. In the golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance of sodden piss and gasolene, the great soul of the American continent gallops like an octopus, all the sails unfurled, the hatches down, the engine whirring like a dynamo. The great dynamic soul caught in the click of the camera's eye, in the heat of rut, bloodless as a fish, slippery as mucus, the soul of the people miscegenating on the sea floor, pop-eyed with longing, harrowed with lust. The dance of Saturday night, of cantaloupes rotting in the garbage pail, of fresh green snot and slimy unguents for the tender parts. The dance of the slot-machine and the monsters who invent them. The dance of the gat and the slugs who use them. The dance of the blackjack and the pricks who batter brains to a polypous pulp. The dance of the magneto world, the spark that unsparks, the soft purr of the perfect mechanism, the velocity race on a turntable, the dollar at par and the forests dead and mutilated. The Saturday night of the soul's hollow dance, each jumping jigger a functional unit in the St. Vitus' dance of the ringworm's dream. Laura the nympho brandishing her cunt, her sweet rose-petal lips toothed with ballbearing clutches, her ass balled and socketed. Inch by inch, millimetre by .millimetre they shove the copulating corpse around. And then crash! Like pulling a switch the music suddenly stops and with the stoppage the dancers come apart, arms and legs intact, like tea leaves dropping to the bottom of the cup. Now the air is blue with words, a slow sizzle as of fish on the griddle. The chaff of the empty soul rising like monkey chatter in the topmost branches of the trees. The air blue with words passing out through the ventilators, coming back again in sleep through corrugated funnels and smokestacks, winged like the antelope, striped like the zebra, now lying quiet as the mollusc, now spitting flame. Laura the nympho cold as a statue, her parts eaten away, her hair musically enraptured. On the brink of sleep Laura stands with muted lips, her words falling like pollen through a fog. The Laura of Petrarque seated in a taxi, each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then cauterized. Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a

99

mouth full of gum. Hunkydory is the word on her lips. The heavy fluted Ups of the sea-shell. Laura's lips, the lips of lost Uranian love. All floating shadow-ward through the slanting fog. Last murmuring dregs of shell-like lips slipping off the Labrador coast, oozing eastward with the mud tides, easing starward in the iodine drift. Lost Laura, last of the Petrarques, slowly fading on the brink of sleep. Not grey the world, but lustlack, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed innocence.

And tins in the black frenzied nothingness of the hollow of absence leaves a gloomy feeling of saturated despondency not unlike the topmost tip of desperation which is only the gay juvenile maggot of death's exquisite rupture with life. From this inverted cone of ecstasy life will rise again into prosaic skyscraper eminence, dragging me by the hair and teeth, lousy with howling empty joy, the animated foetus of the unborn death maggot lying in wait for rot and putrefaction.

Sunday morning the telephone wakes me up. It's my friend Maxie Schnadig announcing the death of our friend Luke Ralston. Maxie has assumed a truly sorrowful tone of voice which rubs me the wrong way. He says Luke was such a swell guy. That too sounds the wrong note for me because while Luke was all right, he was only so-so, not precisely what you might call a swell guy. Luke was an ingrown fairy and finally, when I got to know him intimately, a big pain in the ass. I told Maxie that over the telephone: I could tell from the way he answered me that he didn't like it very much. He said Luke had always been a friend to me. It was true enough, but it wasn't enough. The truth was that I was really glad Luke had kicked off at the opportune moment: it meant that I could forget about the hundred and fifty dollars which I owed him In fact, as I hung up the receiver I really felt joyous. It was a tremendous relief not to have to pay that debt. As for Luke's demise, that didn't disturb me in the least. On the contrary, it would enable me to pay a visit to his sister, Lottie, whom I always wanted to lay but never could for one reason or another. Now I could see myself going up there in the middle of the day and offering her my condolences. Her husband would be at the office and there

100

would be nothing to interfere. I saw myself putting my arms around her and comforting her; nothing like tackling a woman when she is in sorrow. I could see her opening her eyes wide -she had beautiful, large grey eyes - as I moved her towards the couch. She was the sort of woman who would give you a fuck while pretending to be talking music or some such thing. She didn't like the naked reality, the bare facts, so to speak. At the same time she'd have enough presence of mind to slip a towel under her so as not to stain the couch. I knew her inside out. I knew that the best time to get her was now, now while she was running up a little fever of emotion over dear dead Luke -whom she didn't think much of, by the way. Unfortunately it was Sunday and the husband would be sure to be home. I went back to bed and I lay there thinking first about Luke and all that he had done for me and then about her, Lottie. Lottie Somers was her name - it always seemed a beautiful name to me. It matched her perfectly. Luke was stiff as a poker, with a sort of skull and bones face, and impeccable and just beyond words. She was just the opposite - soft, round, spoke with a drawl, caressed her words, moved languidly, used her eyes effectively. One would never take them for brother and sister. I got so worked up thinking about her that I tried to tackle the wife. But that poor bastard, with her Puritanical complex, pretended to be horrified. She liked Luke. She wouldn't say that he was a swell guy, because that wasn't like her, but she insisted that he was genuine, loyal, a true friend, etc. I had so many loyal, genuine, true friends that that was all horse shit to me. Finally we got into such an argument over Luke that she got an hysterical attack and began to weep and sob - in bed, mind you. That made me hungry. The idea of weeping before breakfast seemed monstrous to me. I went downstairs and I fixed myself a wonderful breakfast, and as I put it away I was laughing to myself, about Luke, about the hundred and fifty bucks that his sudden death had wiped off the slate, about Lottie and the way she would look at me when the moment came . . . and finally, the most absurd of all, I thought of Maxie, Maxie Schnadig, the faithful friend of Luke, standing at the grave with a big wreath and perhaps throwing a handful of

101

earth on the coffin just as they were lowering it. Somehow that seemed just too stupid for words. I don't know why it should seem so ridiculous, but it did. Maxie was a simpleton. I tolerated him only because he was good for a touch now and then. And then too there was his sister Rita. I used to let him invite me to his home occasionally, pretending that I was interested in his brother who was deranged. It was always a good meal and the halfwitted brother was real entertainment. He looked like a chimpanzee and he talked like one too. Maxie was too simple to suspect that I was merely enjoying myself; he thought I took a genuine interest in his brother.

It was a beautiful Sunday and I had as usual about a quarter in my pocket. I walked along wondering where to go to make a touch. Not that it was difficult to scrape up a little dough, no, but the thing was to get the dough and beat it without being bored stiff. I could think of a dozen guys right in the neighbourhood, guys who would fork it out without a murmur, but it would mean a long conversation afterwards - about art, religion, politics. Another thing I could do, which I had done over and over again in a pinch, was to visit the telegraph offices, pretending to pay a friendly visit of inspection and then, at the last minute, suggesting that they rifle the till for a buck or so until the morrow. That would involve time and even worse conversation. Thinking it over coldly and calculatingly I decided that the best bet was my little friend Curley up in Harlem. If Curley didn't have the money he would filch it from his mother's purse. I knew I could rely on him. He would want to accompany me, of course, but I could always find a way of ditching him before the evening was over. He was only a kid and I didn't have to be too delicate with him.

What I liked about Curley was, that although only a kid of seventeen, he had absolutely no moral sense, no scruples, no shame. He had come to me as a boy of fourteen looking for a job as messenger. His parents, who were then in South America, had shipped him to New York in care of an aunt who seduced him almost immediately. He had never been to school because the parents were always travelling; they were carnival people who worked "the griffs and the grinds", as he put it. The father

102 HENKY MILLER

had been in prison several times. He was not his real father, by the way. Anyway, Curley came to me as a mere lad who was in need of help, in need of a friend more than anything. At first I thought I could do something for him. Everybody took a liking to hira immediately, especially the women. He became the pet of the office. Before long, however, I realized that he was incomgible, that at the best he had the makings of a clever criminal. I liked him, however, and I continued to do things for him, but I never trusted him out of my sight. I think I liked him particularly because he had absolutely no sense of honour. He would do anything in the world for me and at the same time betray me. I couldn't reproach him for it... It was amusing to me. The more so because he was frank about it. He just couldn't help it. His Aunt Sophie, for instance. He said she had seduced him. True enough, but the curious thing was that he let himself be seduced while they were reading the Bible together. Young as he was he seemed to realize that his Aunt Sophie had need of him in that way. So he let himself be seduced, as he said, and then, after I had known him a little while he offered to put me next to his Aunt Sophie. He even went so far as to blackmail her. When he needed money badly he would go to the aunt and wheedle it out of her - with sly threats of exposure. With an innocent face, to be sure. He looked amazingly like an angel, with big liquid eyes that seemed so frank and sincere. So ready to do things for you - almost like a faithful dog. And then cunning enough, once he had gained your favour, to make you humour his little whims. Withal extremely intelligent. The sly intelligence of a fox and - the utter heartlessness of a jackal.

It wasn't at all surprising to me, consequently, to learn that afternoon that he had been tinkering with Valeska. After Valeska he tackled the cousin who had already been deflowered and who was in need of some male whom she could rely upon. And from her finally to the midget who had made herself a pretty little nest at Valeska's. The midget interested him because she had a perfectly normal cant. He hadn't intended to do anything with her because, as he said, she was a repulsive little Lesbian, but one day he happened to walk in on her as she was taking a bath, and that started things off. It was getting to be too much

103

for him, he confessed, because the three of them were hot on bis trail. He liked the cousin best because she had some dough and she wasn't reluctant to part with it. Valeska was too cagey, and besides she smelled a little too strong. In fact, he was getting sick of women. He said it was his Aunt Sophie's fault. She gave him a bad start. While relating this he busies himself going through the bureau drawers. The father is a mean son of a bitch who ought to be hanged, he says, not finding anything immediately. He showed me a revolver with a pearl handle... what would it fetch? A gun was too good to use on the old man ... he'd like to dynamite him. Trying to find out why he hated the old man so it developed that the kid was really stuck on his mother. He couldn't bear the thought of the old man going to bed with her. You don't mean to say that you're jealous of your old man, I ask. Yes, he's jealous. If I wanted to know the truth it's that he wouldn't mind sleeping with his mother. Why not? That's why he had permitted his Aunt Sophie to seduce him... he was thinking of his mother all the time. But don't you feel bad when you go through her pocketbook, I asked. He laughed. It's not her money he said, it's his. And what have they done for me? They were always farming me out. The first thing they taught me was how to cheat people. That's a hell of a way to raise a kid...

There's not a red cent in the house. Curley's idea of a way out is to go with me to the office where he works and while I engage the manager in conversation go through the wardrobe and dean out all the loose change. Or, if I'm not afraid of taking a chance, he will go through the cash drawer. They'll never suspect us, he says. Had he ever done that before, I ask. Of course ... a dozen or more times, right under the manager's nose. And wasn't there any stink about it? To be sure ... they had fired a few clerks. Why don't you borrow something from your Aunt Sophie, I suggest. That's easy enough, only it means a quick diddle and he doesn't want to diddle her any more. She stinks. Aunt Sophie. What do you mean, she stinks? Just that ... she doesn't wash herself regularly. Why, what's the matter with her? Nothing, just religious. And getting fat and greasy at die same time. But she likes to be diddled just the same? Does

104

she? She's crazier than ever about it. It's disgusting. It's like going to bed with a sow. What does your mother think about her? Her? She's as sore as hell at her. She thinks Sophie's trying to seduce the old man. Well, maybe she is! No, the old man's got something else. I caught him red-handed one night, in the movies, mushing it up with a young girl. She's a manicurist from the Astor Hotel. He's probably trying to squeeze a little dough out of her. That's the only reason he ever makes a woman. He's a dirty, mean son of a bitch and I'd like to see him get the chair some day! You'll get the chair yourself some day if you don't watch out. Who, me ? Not me ! I'm too clever. You're clever enough but you've got a loose tongue. I'd be a little more tight-lipped if I were you. You know, I added, to give him an extra jolt, O'Rourke is wise to you; if you ever fall out with O'Rourke it's all up with you . . . Well, why doesn't he say something if he's so wise? I don't believe you.

I explain to him at some length that O'Rourke is one of those people, and there are damned few in the world, who prefer not to make trouble for another person if they can help it. O'Rourke, I say, has the detective's instinct only in that he likes to know what's going on around him: people's characters are plotted out in his head, and filed there permanently, just as the enemy's terrain is fixed in the minds of army leaders. People think that O'Rourke goes around snooping and spying, that he derives a special pleasure in performing this dirty work for the company. Not so. O'Rourke is a born student of human nature. He picks things up without effort, due, to be sure, to his peculiar way of looking at the world. Now about you ... I have no doubt that he knows everything about you. I never asked him, I admit, but I imagine so from the questions he poses now and then. Perhaps he's just giving you plenty of rope. Some night he'll run into you accidentally and perhaps he'll ask you to stop off somewhere and have a bite to eat with him. And out of a dear sky he'll suddenly say - you remember, Curley, when you were working up in SA office, the time that little Jewish clerk was fired for tapping the till? I think you were working overtime that night, weren't you? An interesting case, that. You know, they never discovered whether the clerk stole the money

105

or not. They had to fire him, of course, for negligence, but we can't say for certain that he really stole the money. I've been thinking about that little affair now for quite some time. I have a hunch as to who took that money, but I'm not absolutely sure . . . And then he'll probably give you a beady eye and abruptly change the conversation to something else. He'll probably tell you a little story about a crook he knew who thought he was very smart and getting away with it. He'll draw that story out for you until you feel as though you were sitting on hot coals. By that time you'll be wanting to beat it, but just when you're ready to go he'll suddenly be reminded of another very interesting little case and he'll ask you to wait just a little longer while he orders another dessert. And he'll go on like that for three or four hours at a stretch, never making the least overt insinuation, but studying you closely all the time, and finally, when you think you're free, just when you're shaking hands with him and breathing a sigh of relief, he'll step in front of you and, planting his big square feet between your legs, he'll grab you by the lapel and, looking straight through you, he'll say in a soft winsome voice - now look here, my lad, don't you think you had better come clean? And if you think he's only trying to browbeat you and that you can pretend innocence and walk away, you're mistaken. Because at that point, when he asks you to come clean, he means business and nothing on earth is going to stop him. When it gets to that point I'd recommend you to make a clean sweep of it, down to the last penny. He won't ask me to fire you and he won't threaten you with jail - he'll just quietly suggest that you put aside a little bit each week and turn it over to him. Nobody will be the wiser. He probably won't even tell me. No, he's very delicate about these things, you see."

"And supposing," says Curley suddenly, "that I tell him I stole the money in order to help you out? What then?" He began to laugh hysterically.

"I don't think O'Rourke would believe that," I said calmly. "You can try it, of course, if you think it will help you to dear your own skirts. But I rather think it will have a bad effect. O'Rourke knows me ... he knows I wouldn't let you do a thing like that."

106

"But you did let me do it!"

"I didn't tell you to do it. You did it without my knowledge. That's quite different. Besides, can you prove that I accepted money from you? Won't it seem a little ridiculous to accuse me, the one who befriended you, of putting you up to a job like that? Who's going to believe you? Not O'Rourke. Besides, he hasn't trapped you yet. Why worry about it in advance? Maybe you could begin to return the money little by little before he gets after you. Do it anonymously."

By this time Curley was quite used up. There was a little schnapps in the cupboard which his old man kept in reserve and I suggested that we take a little to brace us up. As we were drinking the schnapps it suddenly occurred to me that Maxie had said he would be at Luke's house to pay his respects. It was just the moment to get Maxie. He would be full of slobbering sentiments and I could give him any old kind of cock-and-bull story. I could say that the reason I had assumed such a hard-boiled air on the phone was because I was harassed, because I didn't know where to turn for the ten dollars which I needed so badly. At the same time I might be able to make a date with Lottie. I began to smile thinking about it. If Luke could only see what a friend he had in me! The most difficult thing would be to go up to the bier and take a sorrowful look at Luke. Not to.laugh!

I explained the idea to Curley. He laughed so heartily that the tears were rolling down his face. Which convinced me, by the way, that it would be safer to leave Curley downstairs while I made the touch. Anyway, it was decided on.

They were just sitting down to dinner when I walked in, looking as sad as I could possibly make myself look. Maxie was there and almost shocked by my sudden appearance. Lottie had gone already. That helped me to keep up the sad look. I asked to be alone with Luke a few minutes, but Maxie insisted on accompanying me. The others were relieved, I imagine, as they had been conducting the mourners to the bier all afternoon. And like the good Germans they were they didn't like having their dinner interrupted. As I was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I became aware of

107

Maxie's eyes fixed on me inquisitively. I looked up and smiled at him in my usual way. He seemed absolutely nonplussed at this. "Listen, Maxie," I said, "are you sure they won't hear us?" He looked still more puzzled and grieved, but nodded reassuringly. "It's like this, Maxie... I came up here purposely to see you ... to borrow a few bucks. I know it seems lousy but you can imagine how desperate I must be to do a thing like this." He was shaking his head solemnly as I spit this out, his mouth forming a big 0 as if he were trying to frighten the spirits away. "Listen, Maxie," I went on rapidly and trying to keep my voice down sad and low, "this is no time to give me a sermon. If you want to do something for me lend me ten bucks now, right away . .. slip it to me right here while I look at Luke. You know, I really liked Luke. I didn't mean all that over the telephone. You got me at a bad moment. The wife was tearing her hair out. We're in a mess, Maxie, and I'm counting on you to do something. Come out with me if you can and I'll tell you more about it.. .*' Maxie, as I had expected, couldn't come out with me. He wouldn't think of deserting them at such a moment..." Well, give it to me now," I said, almost savagely. "I'll explain the whole thing to you tomorrow. I'll have lunch with you downtown."

"Listen, Henry," says Maxie, fishing around in his pocket, embarrassed at the idea of being caught with a wad in his hand at that moment, "listen," he said, "I don't mind giving you the money, but couldn't you have found another way of reaching me? It isn't because of Luke... it's..." He began to hem and haw, not knowing really what he wanted to say.

"For Christ's sake," I muttered, bending over Luke more closely so that if any one walked in on us they would never suspect what I was up to ... "for Christ's sake, don't argue about it now... hand it over and be done with it... I'm desperate, do you hear me?" Maxie was so confused and flustered that he couldn't disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. Leaning over the coffin reverendy I peeled off the topmost bill from the wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn't tell whether it was a single or a ten-spot. I didn't stop to examine it but tucked it away as rapidly as possible and

I08

straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but heartily. They wanted me to stay for a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face twitching now with hysterical laughter.

At the comer, by the lamp post, Curley was waiting for me. By this time I couldn't restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom laughed in my life. I thought it would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start explaining the incident I had an attack. Finally I got frightened. I thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I had managed to quiet down a bit, in the midst of a long silence. Cur-ley suddenly says: "Did you get it?" That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before. I had to lean against a rail and hold my guts. I had a terrific pain in the guts but a pleasurable pain.

What relieved me more than anything was the sight of the bill I had filched from Maxie's wad. It was a twenty dollar bill! That sobered me up at once. And at the same time it enraged me a bit. It enraged me to think that in the pocket of that idiot, Maxie, there were still more bills, probably more twenties, more tens, more fives. If he had come out with me, as I suggested, and if I had taken a good look at that wad I would have felt no remorse in blackjacking him. I don't know why it should have made me feel so, but it enraged me. The most immediate thought was to get rid of Curley as quickly as possible - a five-spot would fix him up - and then go on a little spree. What I particularly wanted was to meet some low-down, filthy cunt who hadn't a spark of decency in her. Where to meet one like that. . . just like that? Well, get rid of Curley first. Curley, of course, is hurt. He had expected to stick with me. He pretends not to want the five bucks, but when be sees that I'm willing to take it back, he quickly stows it away.

Again the night, the incalculably barren, cold, mechanical night of New York in which there is no peace, no refuge, no intimacy. The immense, frozen solitude of the million-footed mob, the cold, waste fire of the electrical display, the over-

109

whelming meaningless of the perfection of the female who through perfection has crossed the frontier of sex and gone into the minus sign, gone into the red, like the electricity, like the neutral energy of the males, like planets without aspect, like peace programmes, like love over the radio. To have money in the pocket in the midst of white, neutral energy, to walk meaningless and unfecundated through the bright glitter of the calcimined streets, to think aloud in full solitude on the edge of madness, to be of a city, a great city, to be of the last moment of time in the greatest city in the world and feel no part of it, is to become oneself a city, a world of dead stone, of waste light, of unintelligible motion, of imponderables and incalculables, of the secret perfection of all that is minus. To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money ?

Again the dance hall, the money rhythm, the love that comes over the radio, the impersonal, wingless touch of the crowd. A despair that reaches down to the very soles of the boots, an ennui, a desperation. In the midst of the highest mechanical perfection to dance without joy, to be so desperately alone, to be almost inhuman because you are human. If there were life on the moon what more nearly perfect, joyless evidence of it could there be than this. If to travel away from the sun is to reach the chill idiocy of the moon, then we have arrived at our goal and life is but the cold, lunar incandescence of the sun. This is the dance of ice-cold life in the hollow of an atom, and the more we dance the colder it gets.

So we dance, to an ice-cold frenzied rhythm, to short waves and long waves, a dance on the inside of the cup of nothingness, each centimetre of lust running to dollars and cents. We taxi from one perfect female to another seeking the vulnerable

110

defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in the impeccable lunar consistency. This is the icy white maidenhead of love's logic, the web of the ebbed tide, the fringe of absolute vacuity. And on this fringe of the virginal logic of perfection I am dancing the soul dance of white desperation, the last white man pulling the trigger on the last emotion, the gorilla of despair beating his breast with immaculate gloved paws. I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the centre of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.

In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with

111

many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

Thus moments pass, veridic moments of time without space when I know all, and knowing all I collapse beneath the vault of the selfless dream.

Between these moments, in the interstices of the dream, life vainly tried to build up, but the scaffold of the city's mad logic is no support. As an individual, as flesh and blood, I am levelled down each day to make the fleshless, bloodless dty whose perfection is the sum of all logic and death to the dream. I am struggling against an oceanic death in which my own death is but a drop of water evaporating. To raise my own individual life but a fraction of an inch above this sinking sea of death I must have a faith greater than Christ's, a wisdom deeper than that of the greatest seer. I must have the ability and the patience to formulate what is not contained in the language of our time, for what is now intelligible is meaningless. My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling. The dty grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The dty eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a dty in order to become again a man. Therefore I dose my ears, my eyes, my mouth.

Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of

112

little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer between the white louse and the red corpuscle. I shall be a ventilator for removing the poisons accumulated through the effort to perfect that which is imperfecdble. I shall be law and order as it exists in nature as it is projected in dream. I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic. I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. I shall say nothing until the time comes again to be a man. I shall make no effort to preserve, no effort to destroy. I shall make no judgments, no criticisms. Those who have had enough will come to me for reflection and meditation; those who have not had enough will die as they lived, in disorder, in desperation, in ignorance of the truth of redemption. If one says to me, you must be religious, I shall make no answer. If one says to me, I have no time now, there's a cunt waiting for me, I shall make no answer. Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I shall make no answer. There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the comer, but the mother who bore me turned many a comer and made no answer, and finally she turned herself inside out and I am the answer.

Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is infinitely better, while attending death, to live in a state of grace and natural bewilderment. Infinitely better, as life moves towards a deathly perfection, to be just a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of water. Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no answer to make them while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

I'm thinking now about the rock fight one summer's afternoon long long ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My Cousin Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in the park. We didn't know which side we were fighting for but we were fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to

113

show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of being sissies. That's how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang. Just as they were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and caught him in the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the same instant and my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the same age as us. What they would have done to us if they caught us I don't know. Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home: we had cleaned up a bit on the way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking almost as immaculate as when we had left the house. Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she thought we had better stay in the house, in the big front room where the blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with our little friend Joey Resselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute understanding. Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dresses and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they called her, and I remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from another part of the city, so far away it seemed to them that it was almost like coming from another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it any more for the other boys - we were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight.

When I left my cousin at the end of the summer I didn't see him again for twenty years or more. When we did meet what deeply impressed me was the look of innocence he wore - the same expression as the day of the rock fight. When I spoke to him about the fight I was still more amazed to discover that he

114

had forgotten that it was we who had lolled the boy: he remembered the boy's death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I had had any part in it. When I mentioned Weesie's name he had difficulty in placing her. Don't you remember the cellar next door.. .Joey Kesselbaum ? At this a faint smile passed over his face. He thought it extraordinary that I should remember such things. He was already married, a father, and working in a factory making fancy pipe cases. He considered it extraordinary to remember events that had happened so far back in the past.

On leaving him that evening I felt terribly despondent. It was as though he had attempted to eradicate a precious part of my life, and himself with it He seemed more attached to the tropical fish which he was collecting than to the wonderful past. As for me I recollect everything, everything that happened that summer, and particularly the day of the rock fight. There are times, in fact, when the taste of that big slice of sour rye which his mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth than the food I am actually tasting. And the sight of Weesie's little bud almost stronger than the actual feel of what is in my hand. The way the boy lay there, after we downed him, far far more impressive than the history of the World War. The whole long summer, in fact, seems like an idyll out of the Arthurian legends. I often wonder what it was about this particular summer which makes it so vivid in my memory. I have only to close my eyes a moment in order to relive each day. The death of the boy certainly caused me no anguish - it was forgotten before a week had elapsed. The sight of Weesie standing in the gloom of the cellar with her dress lifted up, that too passed easily away. Strangely enough, the thick slice of rye bread which his mother handed me each day seems to possess more potency than any other image of that period. I wonder about it... wonder deeply. Perhaps it is that whenever she handed me the slice of bread it was with a tenderness and a sympathy that I had never known before. She was a very homely woman, my Aunt Caroline. Her face was marked by the pox, but it was a kind, winsome face which no disfigurement could mar. She was enormously stout and she had a very soft, a very caressing voice. When she ad-

115

dressed me she seemed to give me even more attention, more consideration, than her own son. I would like to have stayed with her always; I would have chosen her for my own mother had I been permitted. I remember distinctly how when my mother arrived on a visit she seemed peeved that I was so contented with my new life. She even remarked that I was ungrateful, a remark I never forgot, because then I realized for the first time that to be ungrateful was perhaps necessary and good for one. If I dose my eyes now and I think about it, about the slice of bread, I think almost at once that in this house I never knew what it was to be scolded. I think if I had told my Aunt Caroline that I had killed a boy in the lot, told her just how it happened, she would have put her arm around me and forgiven me - instantly. That's why perhaps that summer is so precious to me. It was a summer of tacit and complete absolution. That's why I can't forget Weesie either. She was full of a natural goodness, a child who was in love with me and who made no reproaches. She was the first of the other sex to admire me for being different. After Weesie it was the other way round. I was loved, but I was hated too for being what I was. Weesie made an effort to understand. The very fact that I came from a strange country, that I spoke another language, drew her closer to me. The way her eyes shone when she presented me to her little friends is something I will never forget. Her eyes seemed to be bursting with love and admiration. Sometimes the three of us would walk to the riverside in the evening and sitting on the bank we would talk as children talk when they are out of sight of their elders. We talked then, I know it now so well, more sanely and more profoundly than our parents. To give us that thick slice of bread each day the parents had to pay a heavy penalty. The worst penalty was that they became estranged from us. For, with each slice they fed us we became not only more indifferent to them, but we became more and more superior to them. In our ungratefulness was our strength and our beauty. Not being devoted we were innocent of all crime. The boy whom I saw drop dead, who lay there motionless, without making the slightest sound or whimper, the killing of that boy seems almost like a clean, healthy performance. The

116

struggle for food, on the other hand, seems foul and degrading and when we stood in the presence of our parents we sensed that they had come to us unclean and for that we could never forgive them. The thick slice of bread in the afternoons, precisely because it was not earned, tasted delicious to us. Never again will bread taste this way. Never again will it be given this way. The day of the murder it was even tastier than ever. It had a slight taste of terror in it which has been lacking ever since. And it was received with Aunt Caroline's tacit but complete absolution.

There is something about the rye bread which I am trying to fathom - something vaguely delicious, terrifying and liberating, something associated with first discoveries. I am thinking of another slice of sour rye which was connected with a still earlier period, when my little friend Stanley and I used to rifle the icebox. That was stolen bread and consequently even more marvellous to the palate than the bread which was given with love. But it was in the act of eating the rye bread, the walking around with it and talking at the same time, that something in the nature of revelation occurred. It was like a state of grace, a state of complete ignorance, of self-abnegation. Whatever was imparted to me in these moments I seem to have retained intact and there is no fear that I shall ever lose the knowledge that was gained. It was just the fact perhaps that it was no knowledge as we ordinarily think of it. It was almost like receiving a truth, though truth is almost too precise a word for it. The important thing about the sour rye discussions is that they always took place away from home, away from the eyes of our parents whom we feared but never respected. Left to ourselves there were no limits to what we might imagine. Facts had little importance for us: what we demanded of a subject was that it allow us opportunity to expand. What amazes me, when I look back on it, is how well we understood one another, how well we penetrated to the essential character of each and every one, young or old. At seven years of age we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much

117

more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists. Alfie Betcha turned out to be an absolute bum: Johnny Gerhardt went to the penitentiary: Bob Kunst became a work horse. Infallible predictions. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing: on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.

With the sour rye the world was what it is essentially, a primitive world ruled by magic, a world in which fear played the most important role. The boy who could inspire the most fear was the leader and he was respected as long as he could maintain his power. There were other boys who were rebels, and they were admired, but they never became the leader. The majority were clay in the hands of the fearless ones: a few could be depended on, but the most not. The air was full of tension -nothing could be predicted for the morrow. This loose, primitive nucleus of a society created sharp appetites, sharp emotions, sharp curiosity. Nothing was taken for granted: each day demanded a new test of power, a new sense of strength or of failure. And so, up until the age of nine or ten, we had a real taste of life - we were on our own. That is, those of us who were fortunate enough not to have been spoiled by our parents, those of us who were free to roam the streets at night and to discover things with our own eyes.

What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe and the life which followed upon it, the life of the adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost: one has the feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it Everything is calculated and everything has a price upon it.

My cousin Gene became an absolute nonentity: Stanley became a first-rate failure. Besides these two boys, for whom I had the greatest affection, there was another, Joey, who has since become a letter carrier. I could weep when I think of what life

118

has made them. As boys they were perfect, Stanley least of all because Stanley was more temperamental. Stanley went into violent rages now and then and there was no telling how you stood with him from day to day. But Joey and Gene were the essence of goodness: they were friends in the old meaning of the word. I think of Joey often when I go out into the country because he was what is called a country boy. That meant, for one thing, that he was more loyal, more sincere, more tender, than the boys we knew. I can see Joey now coming to meet me:

he was always running with arms wide open and ready to embrace me, always breathless with adventures that he was planning for my participation, always loaded with gifts which he had saved for my coming. Joey received me like the monarchs of old received their guests. Everything I looked at was mine. We had innumerable things to tell each other and nothing was dull or boring. The difference between our respective worlds was enormous. Though I was of the city too, still, when I visited my cousin Gene, I became aware of an even greater city, a city of New York proper in which my sophistication was negligible. Stanley knew no excursions from his own neighbourhood, but Stanley had come from a strange land over the sea, Poland, and there was always between us the mark of the voyage. The fact that he spoke another tongue also increased our admiration for him. Each one was surrounded by a distinguishing aura, by a well-defined identity which was preserved inviolate. With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away and we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own selves. And it is this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps unimportant individuality, which saddens me and makes the rye bread stand out glowingly. The wonderful sour rye went into the making of our individual selves: it was like the communion loaf in which all participate but from which each one receives only according to his peculiar state of grace. Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual. There was another thing about the sour rye and that was that

119

we often ate a raw onion with it. I remember standing with Stanley in the late afternoons, a sandwich in hand, in front of the veterinary's which was just opposite my home. It always seemed to be late afternoon when Dr. McKinney elected to castrate a stallion, an operation which was done in public and which always gathered a small crowd. I remember the smell of the hot iron and the quiver of the horse's legs. Dr. McKinney's goatee, the taste of the raw onion and the smell of the sewer gas just behind us where they were laying in a new gas main. It was an olfactory performance through and through and, as Abelard so well describes it, practically painless. Not knowing the reason for the operation we used to hold long discussions afterwards which usually ended in a brawl. Nobody liked Dr. McKinney either: there was a smell of iodoform about him and of stale horse piss. Sometimes the gutter in front of his own office was filled with blood and in the winter time the blood froze into the ice and gave a strange look to his sidewalk. Now and then the big two-wheeled cart came, an open cart which smelled like the devil, and they whisked a dead horse into it. Rather it was hoisted in, the carcass, by a long chain which made a creaking noise like the dropping of an anchor. The smell of a bloated dead horse is a foul smell and our street was full of foul smells. On the comer was Paul Sauer's place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in the street: they stank frightfully too. And then the acrid odour coming from the tin factory behind the house - like the smell of modem progress. The smell of a dead horse, which is almost unbearable, is still a thousand times better than the smell of burning chemicals. And the sight of a dead horse with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood and his asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the arched doorway of the tin factory with a hand-truck loaded with bales of fresh-made tin. Fortunately for us there was a bakery opposite the tin factory and from the back door of the bakery, which was only a grill, we could watch the bakers at work and get the sweet, irresistible odour of bread and cake. And if, as I say, the gas mains were being laid there was another

120

strange medley of smells - the smell of earth just turned up, of rotted iron pipes, of sewer gas, and of the onion sandwiches which the Italian labourers ate whilst reclining against the mounds of upturned earth. There were other smells too, of course, but less striking: such, for instance, as the smell of Silverstein's tailor shop where there was always a great deal of pressing going on. This was a hot, fetid stench which can be best apprehended by imagining that Silverstein, who was a lean, smelly Jew himself, was cleaning out the farts which his customers had left behind in their pants. Next door was the candy and stationery shop owned by two daffy old maids who were religious: here there was the almost sickeningly sweet smell of taffy, of Spanish peanuts, of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The stationery store was like a beautiful cave, always cool, always full of intriguing objects: where the soda fountain was, which gave off another distinct odour, ran a thick marble slab which turned sour in the summer time and yet mingled pleasantly, the sourness, with the slightly ticklish, dry smell of the carbonated water when it was fizzed into the glass of ice cream.

With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to be replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable smell - the odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before, this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carried with it the perfume of the past tense, than the odour of the cunt itself. But this odour, which belongs to maturity, is but a faint odour compared with the odours attaching to childhood. It is an odour which evaporates, almost as quickly in the mind's imagination, as in reality. One can remember many things about the woman one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt - with anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a woman's wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting - why, I don't know. I can remember even now, after almost forty years, the smell of my Aunt Tillie's hair after she had taken a shampoo. This shampoo was performed in the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a

121

late Saturday afternoon, in preparation for a ball which meant again another singular thing - that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far too gracious, manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tulle. But anyway, there she sat on a little stool by the kitchen table drying her hair with a towel. Beside her was a little lamp with a smoked chimney and beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which filled me with an inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on the table: I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the blackheads out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature with two enormous buck teeth which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips drew back in a smile. She smelled sweaty, too, even after a bath. But the smell of her hair - that smell I can never forget, because somehow the smell is associated with my hatred and contempt for her. This smell, when the hair was just drying, was like the smell that comes up from the bottom of a marsh. There were two smells - one of the wet hair and another of the same hair when she threw it into the stove and it burst into flame. There were always curled knots of hair which came from her comb, and they were mixed with dandruff and the sweat of her scalp which was greasy and dirty. I used to stand by her side and watch her, wondering what the ball would be like and wondering how she would behave at the ball. When she was all primped up she would ask me if she didn't look beautiful and if I didn't love her, and of course I would tell her yes. But in the water closet later, which was in the hall just next to the kitchen, I would sit in the flickering light of the burning taper which was placed on the window ledge, and I would say to myself that she looked crazy. After she was gone I would pick up the curling irons and smell them and squeeze them. They were revolting and fascinating - like spiders. Everything about this kitchen was fascinating to me. Familiar as I was with it I never conquered it. It was at once so public and so intimate. Here I was given my bath, in the big tin tub, on Saturdays. Here the three sisters washed themselves and primped themselves. Here my grandfather stood at the sink and washed him-

122

self to the waist and later handed me his shoes to be shined. Here I stood at the window in the winter time and watched the snow fall, watched it dully, vacantly, as if I were in the womb and listening to the water running while my mother sat on the toilet. It was in the kitchen where the secret confabulations were held, frightening, odious sessions from which they always reappeared with long, grave faces or eyes red with weeping. Why they ran to the kitchen I don't know. But it was often while they stood thus in secret conference, haggling about a will or deciding how to dispense with some poor relative, that the door was suddenly opened and a visitor would arrive, whereupon the atmosphere immediately changed. Changed violently, I mean, as though they were relieved that some outside force had intervened to spare them the horrors of a protracted secret session. I remember now that, seeing that door open and the face of an unexpected visitor peering in, my heart would leap with joy. Soon I would be given a big glass pitcher and asked to run to the comer saloon where I would hand the pitcher in, through the little window at the family entrance, and wait until it was returned brimming with foamy suds. This little run to the comer for a pitcher of beer was an expedition of absolutely incalculable proportions. First of all there was the barber shop just below us, where Stanley's father practised his profession. Time and again, just as I was dashing out for something, I would see the father giving Stanley a drubbing with the razor strop, a sight that made my blood boil. Stanley was my best friend and his father was nothing but a drunken Polak. One evening, however, as I was dashing out with the pitcher, I had the intense pleasure of seeing another Polak go for Stanley's old man with a razor. I saw his old man coming through the door backwards, the blood running down his neck, his face white as a sheet He fell on the sidewalk in front of the shop, twitching and moaning, and I remember looking at him for a minute or two and walking on feeling absolutely contented and happy about it. Stanley had sneaked out during the scrimmage and was accompanying me to the saloon door. He was glad too, though he was a bit frightened. When we got back the ambulance was there in front of the door and they

123

were lifting him on the stretcher, his face and neck covered with a sheet. Sometimes it happened that Father Carroll's pet choir boy strolled by the house just as I was hitting the air. This was an event of primary importance. The boy was older than any of us and he was a sissy, a fairy in the making. His very walk used to enrage us. As soon as he was spotted the news went out in every direction and before he had reached the corner he was surrounded by a gang of boys all much smaller than himself who taunted him and mimicked him until he burst into tears. Then we would pounce on him, like a pack of wolves, pull him to the ground and tear the clothes off his back. It was a disgraceful performance but it made us feel good. Nobody knew yet what a fairy was, but whatever it was we were against it. In the same way we were against the Chinamen. There was one Chinaman, from the laundry up the street, who used to pass frequently and, like the sissy from Father Carroll's church, he too had to run the gauntlet. He looked exactly like the picture of a coolie which one sees in the school books. He wore a sort of black alpaca coat with braided button holes, slippers without heels, and a pig tail. Usually he walked with his hands in his sleeves. It was his walk which I remember best, a sort of sly, mincing, feminine walk which was utterly foreign and menacing to us. We were in mortal dread of him and we hated him because he was absolutely indifferent to our gibes. We thought he was too ignorant to notice our insults. Then one day when we entered the laundry he gave us a little surprise. First he handed us the package of laundry: then he reached down below the counter and gathered a handful of lichee nuts from the big bag. He was smiling as he came from behind the counter to open the door. He was still smiling as he caught hold of Alfie Betcha and pulled his ears: he caught hold of each of us in turn and pulled our ears, still smiling. Then he made a ferocious grimace and, swift as a cat, he ran behind the counter and picked up a long, ugly-looking knife which he brandished at us. We fell over ourselves getting out of the place. When we got to the comer and looked around we saw him standing in the doorway with an iron in his hand looking very calm and peaceful. After this incident nobody

124

would go to the laundry any more: we had to pay little Louis Pirossa a nickel each week to collect the laundry for us. Louis's father owned the fruit stand on the comer. He used to hand us the rotten bananas as a token of his affection. Stanley was especially fond of the rotten bananas as his aunt used to fry them for him. The fried bananas were considered a delicacy in Stanley's home. Once, on his birthday, there was a party given for Stanley and the whole neighbourhood was invited. Everything went beautifully until it came to the fried bananas. Somehow nobody wanted to touch the bananas, as this was a dish known only to Polaks like Stanley's parents. It was considered disgusting to eat fried bananas. In the midst of the embarrassment some bright youngster suggested that crazy Willie Maine should be given the fried bananas. Willie Maine was older than any of us but unable to talk. He said nothing but Bjark I Bjork! He said this to everything. So when the bananas were passed to him he said Bjork! and he reached for them with two hands. But his brother George was there and George felt insulted that they should have palmed off the rotten bananas on his crazy brother. So George started a fight and Willie, seeing his brother attacked, began to fight also, screaming Bjork! Bjork I Not only did he strike out at the other boys but at the girls too, which created a pandemonium. Finally Stanley's old man, hearing the noise, came up from the barber shop with a strop in his hand. He took crazy Willie Maine by the scruff of the neck and began to lambast him. Meanwhile his brother George had sneaked off to call Mr. Maine senior. The latter, who was also a bit of a drunkard, arrived in his shirt sleeves and seeing poor Willie being beaten by the drunken barber, he went for him with two stout fists and beat him unmercifully. Willie, who had gotten free meanwhile, was on his hands and knees, gobbling up the fried bananas which had fallen on the floor. He was stuffing them away like a nannygoat, fast as he could find them. When the old man saw him there chewing away like a goat he became furious and picking up the strop he went after Willie with a vengeance. Now Willie began to howl - Bjork! Bjark I - and suddenly everybody began to laugh. That took the steam out of

125

Mr. Maine and he relented. Finally he sat down and Stanley's aunt brought him a glass of wine. Hearing the racket some of the other neighbours came in and there was more wine and then beer and then schnapps and soon everybody was happy and singing and whistling and even the kids got drunk and then crazy Willie got drunk and again he got down on the floor like a nannygoat and he yelled Bjork! Bjork! and Alfie Betcha, who was very drunk though only eight years old, bit crazy Willie Maine in the backside and then Willie bit him and then we all started biting each other and the parents stood by laughing and screaming with glee and it was very very merry and there were more fried bananas and everybody ate them this time and then there were speeches and more bumpers downed and crazy Willie Maine tried to sing for us but he could only sing Bjork! Bjark! It was a stupendous success, the birthday party, and for a week or more no one talked of anything but the party and what good Polaks Stanley's people were. The fried bananas, too, were a success and for a time it was hard to get any rotten bananas from Louis Pirossa's old man because they were so much in demand. And then an event occurred which cast a pall over the entire neighbourhood - the defeat of Joe Gerhardt at the hands of Joey Silverstein. The latter was the tailor's son: he was a lad of fifteen or sixteen, rather quiet and studious looking, who was shunned by the other older boys because he was a Jew. One day as he was delivering a pair of pants on Fillmore Place he was accosted by Joe Gerhardt who was about the same age and who considered himself a rather superior being. There was an exchange of words and then Joe Gerhardt pulled the pants away from the Silverstein boy and threw them in the gutter. Nobody had ever imagined that young Silverstein would reply to such an insult by recourse to his fists and so when he struck out at Joe Gerhardt and cracked him square in the jaw everybody was taken aback, most of all Joe Gerhardt himself. There was a fight which lasted about twenty minutes and at the end Joe Gerhardt lay on the sidewalk unable to get up. Whereupon the Silverstein boy gathered up the pair of pants and walked quietly and proudly back to his father's shop. Nobody said a

126

word to him. The affair was regarded as a calamity. Who had ever heard of a Jew beating up a Gentile? It was something inconceivable, and yet it had happened, right before everyone's eyes. Night after night, sitting on the curb as we used to, the situation was discussed from every angle, but without any solution until... well until Joe Gerhardt's younger brother, Johnny, became so wrought up about it that he decided to settle the matter himself. Johnny, though younger and smaller than his brother, was as tough and invincible as a young puma. He was typical of the shanty Irish who made up the neighbourhood. His idea of getting even with young Silverstein was to lie in wait for him one evening as the latter was stepping out of the store and trip him up. When he tripped him up that evening he had provided himself in advance with two little rocks which he concealed in his fists and when poor Silverstein went down he pounced on him and then with the two handsome little rocks he pounded poor Silverstein's temples. To his amazement Silverstein offered no resistance: even when he got up and gave him a chance to get on his feet Silverstein never so much as budged. Then Johnny got frightened and ran away. He must have been thoroughly frightened because he never came back again: the next that was heard of him was that he had been picked, up out West somewhere and sent to a reformatory. His mother, who was a slatternly, jolly Irish bitch, said that it served him right and she hoped to God she'd never lay eyes on him again. When the boy Silverstein recovered he was not the same any more: people said the beating had affected his brain, that he was a little daffy. Joe Gerhardt, on the other hand, rose to prominence again. It seems that he had gone to see the Silverstein boy while he lay in bed and had made a deep apology to him. This again was something that had never been heard of before. It was something so strange, so unusual, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon almost as a knight errant. Nobody had approved of the way Johnny behaved, and yet nobody would have thought of going to young Silverstein and apologizing to him. That was an act of such delicacy, such elegance, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon as a real gentleman - the first and only gentleman in the neighbourhood. It

127

was a word that had never been used among us and now it was on everybody's lips and it was considered a distinction to be a gentleman. This sudden transformation of the defeated Joe Gerhardt into a gentleman I remember made a deep impression upon me. A few years later, when I moved into another neighbourhood and encountered Claude de Lorraine, a French boy, I was prepared to understand and accept "a gentleman". This Claude was a boy such as I had never laid eyes on before. In the old neighbourhood he would have been regarded as a sissy: for one thing he spoke too well, too correctly, too politely, and for another thing he was too considerate, too gentle, too gallant. And then, while playing with him, to hear him suddenly break into French as his mother or father came along, provided us with something like a shock. German we had heard and German was a permissible transgression, but French! Why to talk French, or even to understand it, was to be thoroughly alien, thoroughly aristocratic, rotten, distingue. And yet Claude was one of us, as good as us in every way, even a little bit better, we had to admit secretly. But there was a blemish - his French! It antagonized us. He had no right to be living in our neighbourhood, no right to be as capable and manly as he was. Often, when his mother called him in and we had said good-bye to him, we got together in the lot and we discussed the Lorraine family backwards and forwards. We wondered what they ate, for example, because being French they must have different customs than ours. No one had ever set foot in Claude de Lorraine's home either - that was another suspicious and repugnant fact. Why? What were they concealing? Yet when they passed us in the street they were always very cordial, always smiled, always spoke in English and a most excellent English it was. They used to make us feel rather ashamed of ourselves - they were superior, that's what it was. And there was still another baffling thing - with the other boys a direct question brought a direct answer, but with Claude de Lorraine there was never any direct answer. He always smiled very charmingly before replying and he was very cool, collected, employing an irony and a mockery which was beyond us. He was a thorn in our side, Claude de Lorraine, and when finally

128

he moved out of the neighbourhood we all breathed a sigh of relief. As for myself, it was only maybe ten or fifteen years later that I thought about this boy and his strange elegant behaviour. And it was then that I felt I had made a bad blunder. For suddenly one day it occurred to me that Claude de Lorraine had come up to me on a certain occasion obviously to win my friendship and I had treated him rather cavalierly. At the time I thought of this incident it suddenly dawned on me that Claude de Lorraine must have seen something different in me and that he had meant to honour me by extending the hand of friendship. But back in those days I bad a code of honour, such as it was, and that was to run with the herd. Had I become a bosom friend of Claude de Lorraine I would have been betraying the other boys. No matter what advantages lay in the wake of such a friendship they were not for me, I was one of the gang and it was my duty to remain aloof from such as Claude de Lorraine. I remembered this incident once again, I must say, after a still greater interval - after I had been in France a few months and the word "raisomiable" had come to acquire a wholly new significance for me. Suddenly one day, overhearing, I thought of Claude de Lorraine's overtures on the street in front of his house. I recalled vividly that he had used the word reasonable. He had probably asked me to be reasonable, a word which then would never have crossed my lips as there was no need for it in my vocabulary. It was a word, like gentleman, which was rarely brought out and then only with great discretion and circumspection. It was a word which might cause others to laugh at you. There were lots of words like that - really, for example. No one I knew had ever used the word really - until Jack Lawson came along. He used it because his parents were English and, though we made fun of him, we forgave him for it. Really was a word which reminded me immediately of little Carl Ragner from the old neighbourhood. Carl Ragner was the only son of a politician who lived on the rather distinguished little street called Fillmore Place. He lived near the end of the street in a little red brick house which was always beautifully kept. I remember the house because passing it on my way to school I used to remark how

129

beautifully the brass knobs on the door were polished. In fact, nobody else had brass knobs on their doors. Anyway, little Carl Ragner was one of those boys who was not allowed to associate with other boys. He was rarely seen, as a matter of fact. Usually it was a Sunday that we caught a glimpse of him walking with his father. Had his father not been a powerful figure in the neighbourhood Carl would have been stoned to death. He was really impossible, in his Sunday garb. Not only did he wear long pants and patent leather shoes, but he sported a derby and a cane. At six years of age a boy who would allow himself to be dressed up in this fashion must be a ninny - that was the consensus of opinion. Some said he was sickly, as though that were an excuse for his eccentric dress. The strange thing is that I never once heard him speak. He was so elegant, so refined, that perhaps he had imagined it was bad manners to speak in public. At any rate, I used to lie in wait for him Sunday mornings just to see him pass with his old man. I watched him with the same avid curiosity that I would watch the firemen cleaning the engines in the fire house. Sometimes on the way home he would be carrying a little box of ice cream, the smallest size they had, probably just enough for him, for his dessert. Dessert was another word which had somehow become familiar to us and which we used derogatorily when referring to the likes of little Carl Ragner and his family. We could spend hours wondering what these people ate for dessert, our pleasure consisting principally in bandying about this new-found word, dessert, which had probably been smuggled out of the Ragner household. It must also have been about this time that Santos Dumont came into fame. For us there was something grotesque about the name Santos Dumont. About his exploits we were not much concerned - just the name. For most of us it smelled of sugar, of Cuban plantations, of the strange Cuban flag which had a star in the comer and which was always highly regarded by those who saved the little cards which were given away with Sweet Caporal cigarettes and on which there were represented either the flags of the different nations or the leading soubrettes of the stage or the famous pugilists. Santos Dumont, then, was something delightfully foreign, in contradistinction to the usual

130

foreign person or object, such as the Chinese laundry, or Claude de Lorraine's haughty French family. Santos Dumont was a magical word which suggested a beautiful flowing moustache, a sombrero, spurs, something airy, delicate, humorous, quixotic. Sometimes it brought up the aroma of coffee beans and of straw mats, or, because it was so thoroughly outlandish and quixotic, it would entail a digression concerning the life of the Hottentots. For there were among us older boys who were beginning to read and who would entertain us by the hour with fantastic tales which they had gleaned from books such as Ayesha or Ouida's Under Two Flags. The real flavour of knowledge is most definitely associated in my mind with the vacant lot at the comer of the new neighbourhood where I was transplanted at about the age often. Here, when the fall days came on and we stood about the bonfire roasting chippies and raw potatoes in the little cans which we carried, there ensued a new type of discussion which differed from the old discussions I had known in that the origins were always bookish. Some one had just read a book of adventure, or a book of science, and forthwith the whole street became animated by the introduction of a hitherto unknown subject. It might be that one of these-boys had just discovered that there was such a thing as the Japanese current and he would try to explain to us how the Japanese current came into existence and what the purpose of it was. This was the only way we learned things - against the fence, as it were, while roasting chippies and raw potatoes. These bits of knowledge sunk deep - so deep, in fact, that later, confronted with a more accurate knowledge it was often difficult to dislodge the older knowledge. In this way it was explained to us one day by an older boy that the Egyptians had known about the circulation of the blood, something which seemed so natural to us that it was hard later to swallow the story of the discovery of the circulation of the blood by an Englishman named Harvey. Nor does it seem strange to me now that in those days most of our conversation was about remote places, such as China, Peru, Egypt, Africa, Iceland, Greenland. We talked about ghosts, about God, about the transmigration of souls, about Hell, about astronomy, about strange birds and fish, about the

131

formation of precious stone, about rubber plantations, about methods of torture, about the Aztecs and the Incas, about marine life, about volcanoes and earthquakes, about burial rites and wedding ceremonies in various parts of the earth, about languages, about the origin of the American Indian, about the buffaloes dying out, about strange diseases, about cannibalism, about wizardry, about trips to the moon and what it was like there, about murderers and highwaymen, about the miracles in the Bible, about the manufacture of pottery, about a thousand and one subjects which were never mentioned at home or in school and which were vital to us because we were starved and the world was full of wonder and mystery and it was only when we stood shivering in the vacant lot that we got to talking seriously and felt a need for communication which was at once pleasurable and terrifying.

The wonder and the mystery of life - which is throttled in us as we become responsible members of society! Until we were pushed out to work the world was very small and we were living on the fringe of it, on the frontier, as it were, of the unknown. A small Greek world which was nevertheless deep enough to provide all manner of variation, all manner of adventure and speculation. Not so very small either, since it held in reserve the most boundless potentialities. I have gained nothing by the enlargement of my world: on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development, pass into a super-infantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an adult and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my daily bread. I have adapted myself to a world which never was mine. I want to break through this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of an unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into shadow. I want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to the irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the night-rider who, under the spread of

132

his black wings, eliminates both the beauty and the horror of the past: I want to flee towards a perpetual dawn with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse to an earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse. Even if I must become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible, adult life. I must do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me, and alien and hostile. In retraversing the first bright world which I knew as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not know, nor am I even sure that I will find it, but it is my world and nothing else intrigues me.

The first glimpse, the first realization, of the bright new world came through my meeting Roy Hamilton. I was in my twenty-first year, probably the worst year of my whole life. I was in such a state of despair that I had decided to leave home but thought and spoke only of the California where I had planned to go to start a new life. So violently did I dream of this new promised land that later, when I had returned from California, I scarcely remembered the California I had seen but thought and spoke only of the California, which I had known in my dreams. It was just prior to my leave-taking that I met Hamilton. He was a dubious half-brother to my old friend MacGregor: they had only recently made each other's acquaintance, as Roy, who had lived most of his life in California, had been under the impression all along that his real father was Mr. Hamilton and not Mr. MacGregor. As a matter

133

of fact it was in order to disentangle the mystery surrounding his parentage that he had come East. Living with the MacGregors had apparently brought him no nearer to a solution of the mystery. Indeed he seemed to be more perplexed than ever after getting acquainted with the man whom he had concluded must be his legitimate father. He was perplexed, as he later admitted to me, because in neither man could he find any resemblance to the man he considered himself to be. It was probably this harassing problem of deciding whom to take for a father which had stimulated the development of his own character. I say this, because immediately upon being introduced to him, I felt that I was in the presence of a being such as I had never known before. I had prepared, through MacGregor's description of him, to meet a rather "strange" individual, "strange" in MacGregor's mouth meaning slightly cracked. He was indeed strange, but so sharply sane that I at once felt exalted. For the first time I was talking to a man who got behind the meaning of words and went to the very essence of things. I felt that I was talking to a philosopher, not a philosopher such as I had encountered through books, but a man who philosophized constantly - and who lived this philosophy which he expounded. That is to say, he had no theory at all, except to penetrate to the very essence of things and, in the light of each fresh revelation to so live his life that there would be a minimum of discord between the truths which were revealed to him and the exemplification of these truths in action. Naturally his behaviour was strange to those about him. It had not, however, been strange to those who knew him out on the Coast where, as he said, he was in his own element. There apparently he was regarded as a superior being and was listened to with the utmost respect, even with awe.

I came upon him in the midst of a struggle which I only appreciated many years later. At the time I couldn't see the importance which he attached to finding his real father: in fact, I used to joke about it because the role of the father meant little to me, or the role of the mother, for that matter. In Roy Hamilton I saw the ironic struggle of a man who had already emancipated himself and yet was seeking to establish a solid

134

biological link for which he had absolutely no need. This conflict over the real father had, paradoxically, made him a superfather. He was a teacher and an exemplar: he had only to open his mouth for me to realize that I was listening to a wisdom which was utterly different from anything which I had heretofore associated with that word. It would be easy to dismiss him as a mystic, for a mystic he undoubtedly was, but he was the first mystic I had ever encountered who also knew how to keep his feet on the ground. He was a mystic who knew how to invent practical things, among them a drill such as was badly needed for the oil industry and from which he later made a fortune. Because of his strange metaphysical talk, however, nobody at the time gave much heed to his very practical invention. It was regarded as another one of his cracked ideas.

He was continually talking about himself and his relation to the world about, a quality which created the unfortunate impression that he was simply a blatant egotist. It was even said, which was true enough as far as it went, that he seemed more concerned about the truth of Mr. MacGregor's fatherhood than about Mr. MacGregor, the father. The implication was that he had no real love for his new-found father but was simply deriving a strong personal gratification from the truth of the discovery, that he was exploiting this discovery in his usual self-aggrandizing way. It was deeply true, of course, because Mr. MacGregor in the flesh was infinitely less than Mr. MacGregor as symbol of the lost father. But the MacGregors knew nothing about symbols and would never have understood even had it been explained to them. They were making a contradictory effort to at once embrace the long lost son and at the same time reduce him to an understandable level on which they could seize him not as the "long lost" but simply as the son. Whereas it was obvious to any one with the least intelligence that his son was not a son at all but a sort of spiritual father, a sort of Christ, I might say, who was making a most valiant effort to accept as blood and flesh what he had already all too clearly freed himself from.

I was surprised and flattered, therefore, that this strange individual whom I looked upon with the warmest admiration

135

should elect to make me his confident. By comparison I was very bookish, intellectual, and worldly in a wrong way. But almost immediately I discarded this side of my nature and allowed myself to bask in the warm, immediate light which is profound and natural intuition of things created. To come into his presence gave me the sensation of being undressed, or rather peeled, for it was much more than mere nakedness which he demanded of the person he was talking to. In talking to me he addressed himself to a me whose existence I had only dimly suspected, the me, for example, which emerged when, suddenly, reading a book I realized that I had been dreaming. Few books had this faculty of putting me into a trance, this trance of utter lucidity in which, unknown to oneself, one makes the deepest resolutions. Roy Hamilton's conversation partook of this quality. It made me more than ever alert, preternaturally alert, without at the same time crumbling the fabric of dream. He was appealing, in other words, to the germ of the self, to the being who would eventually outgrow the naked personality, the synthetic individuality, and leave me truly alone and solitary in order to work out my own proper destiny.

Our talk was like a secret language in the midst of which the others went to sleep or faded away like ghosts. For my friend MacGregor it was baffling and irritating: he knew me more intimately than any of the other fellows but he had never found anything in me to correspond to the character which I now presented him with. He spoke of Roy Hamilton as a bad influence, which again was deeply true since this unexpected meeting with his half-brother served more than anything else to alienate us. Hamilton opened my eyes and gave me new values, and though later I was to lose the vision which he had bequeathed me, nevertheless I could never again see the world, or my friends, as I had seen them prior to his coming. Hamilton altered me profoundly, as only a rare book, a rare personality, a rare experience, can alter one. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to experience a vital friendship and yet not to feel enslaved or attached because of the experience. Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of

136

his actual presence: he had given himself completely and I possessed him without being possessed. It was the first dean, whole experience of friendship, and it was never duplicated by any other friend. Hamilton was friendship itself, rather than a friend. He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory hence no longer necessary to me. He himself understood this thoroughly. Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road towards the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the useless-ness of ties. Certainly, as he stood then, in the full plenitude of self-realization, no one was necessary to him, least of all the father of flesh and blood whom he vainly sought in Mr. MacGregor. It must have been in the nature of a last test for him, his coming East and seeking out his real father, for when he said good-bye, when he renounced Air. MacGregor and Mr. Hamilton also, he was like a man who had purified himself of all dross. Never have I seen a man look so single, so utterly alone and alive and confident of the future as Roy Hamilton looked when he said good-bye. And never have I seen such confusion and misunderstanding as he left behind with the MacGregor family. It was as though he had died in their midst, had been resurrected, and was taking leave of them as an utterly new, unknown individual. I can see them now standing in the areaway, their hands sort of foolishly, helplessly empty, weeping they knew not why, unless it was because they were bereft of something they had never possessed. I like to think of it in just this way. They were bewildered and bereft, and vaguely, so very vaguely aware that somehow a great opportunity had been offered them which they had not the strength or the imagination to seize. It was this which the foolish, empty fluttering of the hands indicated to me: it was a gesture more painful to witness than anything I can imagine. It gave me the feeling of the horrible inadequacy of the world when brought face to face with truth. It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the blood tie and of the love which is not spiritually imbued. I look back rapidly and I see myself again in California. I am

137

alone and I am working like a slave in the orange grove at Chula Vista. Am I coming into my own? I think not. I am a very wretched, forlorn, miserable person. I seem to have lost everything. In fact I am hardly a person -1 am more nearly an animal. All day long I am standing or walking behind the two jackasses which are hitched to my sledge. I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive and healthy that I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. "Pourri avant d'etre muri!"

Is it really me that is rotting in this bright California sunshine? Is there nothing left of me, of all that I was up to this moment? Let me think a bit... There was Arizona. I remember now that it was already night when I first set foot on Arizona soil. Just light enough to catch the last glimpse of a fading mesa. I am walking through the main street of a little town whose name is lost. What am I doing here on this street, in this town? Why, I am in love with Arizona, an Arizona of the mind which I search for in vain with my two good eyes. In the train there was still with me the Arizona which I had brought from New York - even after we had crossed the state line. Was there not a bridge over a canyon which had startled me out of my reverie? A bridge such as I had never seen before, a natural bridge created by a cataclysmic eruption thousands of years ago? And over this bridge I had seen a man crossing, a man who looked like an Indian, and he was riding a horse and there was a long saddle-bag hanging beside the stirrup. A natural millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked like the youngest, newest bridge imaginable. And over that bridge so strong, so durable, there passed, praise be to God, just a man and a horse, nothing more. This then was Arizona, and Arizona was not a figment of the imagination but the imagination itself dressed as a horse and rider. And this was even more than the imagination itself because there was no aura of ambiguity but only sharply and dead isolate the thing itself which was the dream and the dreamer himself seated on horseback. And as the train stops I put my foot down and my

138

foot has put a deep hole in the dream: I am in the Arizona town which is listed in the timetable and it is only the geographical Arizona which anybody can visit who has the money. I am walking along the main street with a valise and I see hamburger sandwiches and real estate offices. I feel so terribly deceived and I begin to weep. It is dark now and I stand at the end of a street, where the desert begins, and I weep like a fool. Which me is this weeping? Why it is the new little me which had begun to germinate back in Brooklyn and which is now in the midst of a vast desert and doomed to perish. Now, Roy Hamilton, I need you! I need you for one moment, just one little moment, while I am falling apart. I need you because I was not quite ready to do what I have done. And do I not remember your telling me that it was unnecessary to make the trip, but to do it if I must? Why didn't you persuade me not to go? Ah, to persuade was never his way. And to ask advice was never my way. So here I am, bankrupt in the desert, and the bridge which was real is behind me and what is unreal is before me and Christ only knows I am so puzzled and bewildered that if I could sink into the earth and disappear I would do so.

I look back rapidly and I see another man who was left to perish quietly in the bosom of his family - my father. I understand better what happened to him if I go back very, very far and think of such streets as Maujer, Conselyea, Humboldt... Humboldt particularly. These streets belonged to a neighbourhood which was not far removed from our neighbourhood but which was different, more glamorous, more mysterious. I had been on Humboldt Street only once as a child and I no longer remember the reason for that excursion unless it was to visit some sick relative languishing in a German hospital. But the street itself made a most lasting impression upon me: why I have not the faintest idea. It remains in my memory as the most mysterious and the most promising street that ever I have seen. Perhaps when we were making ready to go my mother had, as usual, promised something spectacular as a reward for accompanying her. I was always being promised things which never materialized. Perhaps then, when I got to

139

Humboldt Street and looked upon this new world with astonishment, perhaps I forgot completely what had been promised me and the street itself became the reward. I remember that it was very wide and that there were high stoops, such as I had never seen before, on either side of the street. I remember too that in a dressmaker's shop on the first floor of one of these strange houses there was a bust in the window with a tape measure slung around the neck and I know that I was greatly moved by this sight. There was snow on the ground but the sun was out strong and I recall vividly how about the bottoms of the ash barrels which had been frozen into the ice there was then a little pool of water left by the melting snow. The whole street seemed to be melting in the radiant winter's sun. On the bannisters of the high stoops the mounds of snow which had formed such beautiful white pads were now beginning to slide, to disintegrate, leaving dark patches of the brown stone which was then much in vogue. The little glass signs of the dentists and physicians, tucked away in the comers of the windows, gleamed brilliantly in the noonday sun and gave me the feeling for the first time that these offices were perhaps not the torture chambers which I knew them to be. I imagined, in my childish way, that here in this neighbourhood, in this street particularly, people were more friendly, more expansive, and of course infinitely more wealthy. I must have expanded greatly myself though only a tot, because for the first time I was looking upon a street which seemed devoid of terror. It was the sort of street, ample, luxurious, gleaming, melting which later, when I began reading Dostoievski, I associated with the thaws of St. Petersburg. Even the churches here were of a different style of architecture; there was something semi-Oriental about them, something grandiose and warm at the same time, which both frightened me and intrigued me. On this broad, spacious street I saw that the houses were set well back from the sidewalk, reposing in quiet and dignity, and unmarred by the intercalation of shops and factories and veterinary stables. I saw a street composed of nothing but residences and I was filled with awe and admiration. All this I remember and no doubt it influenced me greatly, yet none of

140

this is sufficient to account for the strange power and attraction which the very mention of Humboldt Street still evokes in me. Some years later I went back in the night to look at this street again, and I was even more stirred than when I had looked upon it for the first time. The aspect of the street of course had changed, but it was night and the night is always less cruel than the day. Again I experienced the strange delight of spadousness of that luxuriousness which was now somewhat faded but still redolent, still assertive in a patchy way as once the brown stone bannisters had asserted themselves through the melting snow. Most distinct of all, however, was the almost voluptuous sensation of being on the verge of a discovery. Again I was strongly aware of my mother's presence, of the big puffy sleeves of her fur coat, of the cruel swiftness with which she had whisked me through the street years ago and of the stubborn tenacity with which I had feasted my eyes on all that was new and strange. On the occasion of this second visit I seemed to dimly recall another character out of my childhood, the old housekeeper whom they called by the outlandish name of Mrs. Kicking. I could not recall her being taken ill but I did seem to recall the fact that we were paying her a visit at the hospital where she was dying and that this hospital must have been near Humboldt Street which was not dying but which was radiant in the melting snow of a winter's noon. What then had my mother promised me that I have never since been able to recall? Capable as she was of promising anything, perhaps that day, in a fit of abstraction, she had promised something so preposterous that even I with all my childish credulence could not quite swallow it. And yet, if she had promised me the moon, though I knew it was out of the question, I would have struggled to invest her promise with a crumb of faith. I wanted desperately everything that was promised me, and if, upon reflection I realized that it was dearly impossible, I nevertheless tried in my own way to grope for a means of making these promises realizable. That people could make promises without ever having the least intention of fulfilling them was something unimaginable to me. Even when I was most cruelly deceived I still believed; I found that something

141

extraordinary and quite beyond the other person's power had intervened to make the promise null and void.

This question of belief, this old promise that was never fulfilled, is what makes me think of my father who was deserted at the moment of his greatest need. Up to the time of his illness neither my father nor my mother had ever shown any religious inclinations. Though always upholding the church to others, they themselves never set foot in a church from the time that they were married. Those who attended church too regularly they looked upon as being a bit daffy. The very way they said -"so and so is religious" - was enough to convey the scorn and contempt, or else the pity, which they felt for such individuals. If now and then, because of us children, the pastor called at the house unexpectedly, he was treated as one to whom they were obliged to defer out of ordinary politeness but whom they had nothing in common with, whom they were a little suspicious of, in fact as representative of a species midway between a fool and a charlatan. To us, for example, they would say "a lovely man", but when their cronies came round and the gossip began to fly, then one would hear an entirely different brand of comment, accompanied usually by peals of scornful laughter and sly mimicry.

My father fell mortally ill as a result of swearing off too abruptly. All his life he had been a jolly hail fellow well met: he had put on a rather becoming paunch, his cheeks were well filled out and red as a beet, his manners were easy and indolent, and he seemed destined to live on into a ripe old age, sound and healthy as a nut. But beneath this smooth and jolly exterior things were not at all well. His affairs were in bad shape, the debts were piling up, and already some of his older friends were beginning to drop him. My mother's attitude was what worried him most. She saw things in a black light and she took no trouble to conceal it. Now and then she became hysterical and went at him hammer and tongs, swearing at him in the vilest language and smashing the dishes and threatening to run away for good. The upshot of it was that he arose one morning determined never to touch another drop. Nobody believed that he meant it seriously: there had been others in the family who

142

swore off, who went on the water wagon, as they used to say, but who quickly tumbled off again. No one in the family, and they had all tried at different times, had ever become a successful teetotaler. But my old rnan was different. Where or how he got the strength to maintain his resolution. God only knows. It seems incredible to me, because had I been in his boots myself I would have drunk myself to death. Not the old man, however. This was the first time in his life he had ever shown any resolution about anything. My mother was so astounded that, idiot that she was, she began to make fun of him, to quip him about his strength of will which had heretofore been so lamentably weak. Still he stuck to his guns. His drinking pals faded away rather quickly. In short, he soon found himself almost completely isolated. That must have cut him to the quick, for before very many weeks had passed, he became deathly ill and a consultation was held. He recovered a bit, enough to get out of bed and walk about, but still a very sick man. He was supposed to be suffering from ulcers of the stomach, though nobody was quite sure exactly what ailed him. Everybody understood, however, that he had made a mistake in swearing off so abruptly. It was too late, however, to return to a temperate mode of living. His stomach was so weak that it wouldn't even hold a plate of soup. In a couple of months he was almost a skeleton. And old. He looked like Lazarus raised from the grave.

One day my mother took me aside and with tears in her eyes begged me to go visit the family doctor and learn the truth about my father's condition. Dr. Rausch had been the family physician for years. He was a typical "Dutchman" of the old school, rather weary and crochety now after years of practising and yet unable to tear himself completely away from his patients. In his stupid Teutonic way he tried to scare the less serious patients away, tried to argue them into health, as it were. When you walked into his office he didn't even bother to look up at you, but kept on writing or whatever it might be that he was doing while firing random questions at you in a perfunctory and insulting manner. He behaved so rudely, so suspiciously, that ridiculous as it may sound, it almost appeared

143

as though he expected his patients to bring with them not only their ailments, but the proof of their ailments. He made one feel that there was not only something wrong physically but that there was also something wrong mentally. "You only imagine it," was his favourite phrase which he flung out with a nasty, leering gibe. Knowing him as I did, and detesting him heartily, I came prepared, that is, with the laboratory analysis of my father's stool. I had also analysis of his urine in my overcoat pocket, should he demand further proof.

When I was a boy Dr. Rausch had shown some affection for me, but ever since the day I went to him with a dose of clap he had lost confidence in me and always showed a sour puss when I stuck my head through the door. Like father like son was his motto, and I was therefore not at all surprised when, instead of giving me the information which I demanded, he began to lecture me and the old man at the same time for our way of living. "You can't go against Nature," he said with a wry, solemn face, not looking at me as he uttered the words but making some useless notation in his big ledger. I walked quietly up to his desk, stood beside him a moment without making a sound, and then, when he looked up with his usual aggrieved, irritated expression, I said - "I didn't come here for moral instruction ... I want to know what's the matter with my father." At this he jumped up and turning to me with his most severe look, he said, like the stupid, brutal Dutchman that he was: "Your father hasn't a chance of recovering; he'll be dead in less than six months." I said "Thank you, that's all I wanted to know," and I made for the door. Then, as though he felt that he had committed a blunder, he strode after me heavily and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he tried to modify the statement by hemming and hawing and saying I don't mean that it is absolutely certain he will die, etc., which I cut short by opening the door and yelling at him, at the top of my lungs, so that his patients in the anteroom would hear it - "I think you're a goddamned old fart and I hope you croak, good-night!"

When I got home I modified the doctor's report somewhat by saying that my father's condition was very serious but that

144

if he took good care of himself he would pull through all right. This seemed to cheer the old man up considerably. Of his own accord he took to a diet of milk and Zwieback which, whether it was the best thing or not, certainly did him no harm. He remained a sort of semi-invalid for about a year, becoming more and more calm inwardly as time went on and apparently determined to let nothing, disturb his peace of mind, nothing, no matter if everything went to hell. As he grew stronger he took to making a daily promenade to the cemetery which was nearby. There he would sit on a bench in the sun and watch the old people potter around the graves. The proximity to the grave, instead of rendering him morbid, seemed to cheer him up. He seemed, if anything, to have become reconciled to the idea of eventual death, a fact which no doubt he had heretofore refused to look in the face. Often he came home with flowers which he had picked in the cemetery, his face beaming with a quiet serene joy, and seating himself in the armchair he would recount the conversation which he had had that morning with one of the other valetudinarians who frequented the cemetery. It was obvious after a time that he was really enjoying his sequestration, or rather not just enjoying it, but profiting deeply from the experience in a way that was beyond my mother's intelligence to fathom. He was getting lazy, was the way she expressed it. Sometimes she put it even more extremely, tapping her head with her forefinger as she spoke of him, but not saying anything overfly because of my sister who was without question a little wrong in the head.

And then one day, through the courtesy of an old widow who used to visit her son's grave every day and was, as my mother would say, "religious" he made the acquaintance of a minister belonging to one of the neighbouring churches. This was a momentous event in the old man's life. Suddenly he blossomed forth and that little sponge of a soul which had almost atrophied through lack of nourishment took on such astounding proportions that he was almost unrecognizable. The man who was responsible for this extraordinary change in the old man was in no way unusual himself; he was a Congregationalist minister attached to a modest little parish which adjoined our neighbour-

145

hood. His one virtue was that he kept his religion in the background. The old man quickly fell into a sort of boyish idolatry; he talked of nothing but this minister whom he considered his friend. As he had never looked at the Bible in his life, nor any other book for that matter, it was rather startling, to say the least, to hear him say a little prayer before eating. He performed this little ceremony in a strange way, much the way one takes a tonic, for example. If he recommended me to read a certain chapter of the Bible he would add very seriously - "it will do you good." It was a new medicine which he had discovered, a sort of quack remedy which was guaranteed to cure all ills and which one might even take if he had no ills, because in any case it could certainly do no harm. He attended all the services, all the functions which were held at the church, and between times, when out for a stroll, for example, he would stop off at the minister's home and have a little chat with him. If the minister said that the president was a good soul and should be re-elected the old man would repeat to every one exactly what the minister had said and urge them to vote for the president's re-election. Whatever the minister said was right and just and nobody could gainsay him. There's no doubt that it was an education for the old man. If the minister had mentioned the pyramids in the course of his sermon the old man immediately began to inform himself about the pyramids. He would talk about the pyramids as though every one owed it to himself to become acquainted with the subject. The minister had said that the pyramids were one of the crowning glories of man, ergo not to know about the pyramids was to be disgracefully ignorant, almost sinful. Fortunately the minister didn't dwell much on the subject of sin: he was of the modem type of preacher who prevailed on his flock more by arousing their curiosity than by appealing to their conscience. His sermons were more like a night school extension course and for such as the old man, therefore, highly entertaining and stimulating. Every now and then the male members of the congregation were invited to a little blow-out which was intended to demonstrate that the good pastor was just an ordinary man like themselves and could, on occasion,

146

enjoy a hearty meal and even a glass of beer. Moreover it was observed that he even sang - not religious hymns, but jolly little songs of the popular variety. Putting two and two together one might even infer from such jolly behaviour that now and then he enjoyed getting a little piece of tail - always in moderation, to be sure. That was the word that was balsam to the old man's lacerated soul - "moderation". It was like discovering a new sign in the zodiac. And though he was still too ill to attempt a return to even a moderate way of living, nevertheless it did his soul good. And so, when Uncle Ned, who was continually going on the water-waggon and continually falling off it again, came round to the house one evening the old man delivered him a little lecture on the virtue of moderation. Uncle Ned was, at that moment, on the water-waggon and so, when the old man, moved by his own words, suddenly went to the sideboard to fetch a decanter of wine every one was shocked. No one had ever dared invite Uncle Ned to drink when he had sworn off; to venture such a thing constituted a serious breach of loyalty. But the old man did it with such conviction that no one could take offence, and the result was that Uncle Ned took a small glass of wine and went home that evening without stopping off at a saloon to quench his thirst. It was an extraordinary happening and there was much talk about it for days after. In fact. Uncle Ned began to act a bit queer from that day on. It seems that he went the next day to the wine store and bought a bottle of Sherry which he emptied into the decanter. He placed the decanter on the sideboard, just as he had seen the old man do, and, instead of polishing it off in one swoop, he contented himself with a glassful at a time - "just a thimbleful", as he put it. His behaviour was so remarkable that my aunt, who was unable to quite believe her eyes, came one day to the house and held a long conversation with the old man. She asked him, among other things, to invite the minister to the house some evening so that Uncle Ned might have the opportunity of falling under his beneficient influence. The long and short of it was ±at Ned was soon taken into the fold and, like the old man, seemed to be thriving under the experience. Things went fine until the day of the picnic.

147

That day, unfortunately, was an unusually warm day and, what with the games, the excitement, the hilarity. Uncle Ned developed an extraordinary thirst. It was not until he was three sheets to the wind that some one observed the regularity and the frequency with which he was running to the beer keg. It was then too late. Once in that condition he was unmanageable. Even the minister could do nothing with him. Ned broke away from the picnic quietly and went on a little rampage which lasted for three days and nights. Perhaps it would have lasted longer had he not gotten into a fist fight down at the waterfront where he was found lying unconscious by the night watchman. He was taken to the hospital with a concussion of the brain from which he never recovered. Returning from the funeral the old man said with a dry eye - "Ned didn't know what it was to be temperate. It was his own fault. Anyway, he's better off now ..."

And as though to prove to the minister that he was not made of the same stuff as Uncle Ned he became even more assiduous in his churchly duties. He had gotten himself promoted to the position of "elder", an office of which he was extremely proud and by grace of which he was permitted during the Sunday services to aid in taking up the collection. To think of my old man marching up the aisle of a Congregationalist church with a collection box in his hand; to think of him standing reverently before the altar with this collection box while the minister blessed the offering, seems to me now something so incredible that I scarcely know what to say of it. I like to think, by contrast, of the man he was when I was just a kid and I would meet him at the ferry house of a Saturday noon. Surrounding the entrance to the ferry house there were then three saloons which of a Saturday noon were filled with men who had stopped off for a little bite at the free lunch counter and a schooner of beer. I can see the old man, as he stood in his thirtieth year, a healthy, genial soul with a smile for every one and a pleasant quip to pass the time of day, see him with his arm resting on the bar, his straw hat tipped on the back of his head, his left hand raised to down the foaming suds. My eye was then on about a level with his heavy gold chain which was spread

148

cross-wise over his vest; I remember the shepherd plaid suit which he wore in mid-summer and the distinction it gave him among the other men at the bar who were not lucky enough to have been born tailors. I remember the way he would dip his hand into the big glass bowl on the free lunch counter and hand me a few pretzels, saying at the same time that I ought to go and have a look at the scoreboard in the window of the Brooklyn Times nearby. And, perhaps, as I ran out of the saloon to see who was winning a string of cyclists would pass close to the curb, holding to the little strip of asphalt which had been laid down expressly for them. Perhaps the ferry-boat was just coming into the dock and I would stop a moment to watch the men in uniform as they pulled away at the big wooden wheels to which the chains were attached. As the gates were thrown open and the planks laid down a mob would rush through the shed and make for the saloons which adorned the nearest comers. Those were the days when the old man knew the meaning of "moderation", when he drank because he was truly thirsty, and to down a schooner of beer by the ferry house was a man's prerogative. Then it was as Melville has so well said: "Feed all things with food convenient for them - that is, if the food be procurable. The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of the body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be." Yes, then it seems to me that the old man's soul had not yet shrivelled up, that it was endlessly bounded by light and space and that his body, heedless of the resurrection, was feeding on all that was convenient and procurable - if not champagne and oysters, at least good lager beer and pretzels. Then his body had not been condemned, nor his way of living, nor his absence of faith. Nor was he yet surrounded by vultures, but only by good comrades, ordinary mortals like himself who looked neither high nor low but straight ahead, the eye always fixed on the horizon and content with the sight thereof.

And now, as a battered wreck, he has made himself into an elder of the church and he stands before the altar, grey and bent

149

and withered, while the minister gives his blessing to the measly collection which will go to make a new bowling alley. Perhaps it was necessary for him to experience the birth of the soul, to feed this sponge-like growth with that light and space which the Congregational church offered. But what a poor substitute for a man who had known the joys of that food which the body craved and which, without the pangs of conscience, had flooded even his sponge-like soul with a light and space that was ungodly but radiant and terrestrial. I think again of his seemly little "corporation" over which the thick gold chain was strung and I think that with that death of his paunch there was left to survive only the sponge of a soul, a sort of appendix to his own bodily death. I think of the minister who had swallowed him up as a sort of inhuman sponge-eater, the keeper of a wigwam hung with spiritual scalps. I think of what subsequently ensued as a kind of tragedy in sponges, for though he promised light and space, no sooner had he passed out of my father's life than the whole airy edifice came tumbling down.

It all came about in the most ordinary lifelike way. One evening, after the customary men's meeting, the old man came home with a sorrowful countenance. They had been informed that evening that the minister was taking leave of them. He had been offered a more advantageous position in the township of New Rochelle and, despite his great reluctance to desert his flock, he had decided to accept the oner. He had of course accepted it only after much meditation - as a duty, in other words. It would mean a better income, to be sure, but that was nothing compared to the grave responsibilities which he was about to assume. They had need of him in New Rochelle and he was obeying the voice of his conscience. All this the old man related with the same unctuousness that the minister had given to his words. But it was immediately apparent that the old man was hurt. He couldn't see why New Rochelle could not find another minister. He said it wasn't fair to tempt the minister with a bigger salary. We need him here, he said ruefully, with such sadness that I almost felt like weeping. He added, that he was going to have a heart to heart talk with the minister

150

that if anybody could persuade him to remain it was he. In the days that followed he certainly did his best, no doubt much to the minister's discomfiture. It was distressing to see the blank look in his face when he returned from these conferences. He had the expression of a man who was trying to grasp at a straw to keep from drowning. Naturally the minister remained adamant. Even when the old man broke down and wept before him he could not be moved to change his mind. That was the turning point. From that moment on the old man underwent a radical change. He seemed to grow bitter and querulous. He not only forgot to say grace at the table but he abstained from going to church. He resumed his old habit of going to the cemetery and basking on a bench. He became morose, then melancholy, and finally there grew into his face an expression of permanent sadness, a sadness encrusted with disillusionment, with despair, with futility. He never again mentioned the man's name, nor the church, nor any of the elders with whom he had once associated. If he happened to pass them in the street he bade them the time of day without stopping to shake hands. He read the newspapers diligently, from back to front, without comment. Even the ads he read, every one, as though trying to block up a huge hole which was constantly before his eyes. I never heard him laugh again. At the most he would give us a sort of weary, hopeless smile, a smile which faded instantly and left us with the spectacle of a life extinct. He was dead as a crater, dead beyond all hope of resurrection. And not even had he been given a new stomach, or a tough new intestinal tract, would it have been possible to restore him to life again. He had passed beyond the lure of champagne and oysters, beyond the need of light and space. He was like the dodo which buries its head in the sand and whistles out of its ass-hole. When he went to sleep in the Morris-chair his lower jaw dropped like a hinge that has become unloosened; he had always been a good snorer but now he snored louder than ever, like a man who was in truth dead to the world. His snores, in fact, were very much like the death rattle, except that they were punctuated by an intermittent long-drawn-out whistling of the peanut stand variety. He

151

seemed, when he snored, to be chopping the whole universe to bits so that we who succeeded him would have enough kindling wood to last a lifetime. It was the most horrible and fascinating snoring that I have ever listened to: it was sterterous and stentorian, morbid and grotesque; at times it was like an accordion collapsing, at other times like a frog croaking in the swamps; after a prolonged whistle there sometimes followed a frightful wheeze as if he were giving up the ghost, then it would settle back again into a regular rise and fall, a steady hollow chopping as though he stood stripped to the waist, with axe in hand, before the accumulated madness of all the bric-a-brac of this world. What gave these performances a slightly crazy quality was the mummy-like expression of the face in which the big blubber lips alone came to life; they were like the gills of a shark snoozing on the surface of the still ocean. Blissfully he snored away on the bosom of the deep, never disturbed by a dream or a draught, never fitful, never plagued by an unsatisfied desire; when he closed his eyes and collapsed, the light of the world went out and he was alone as before birth, a cosmos gnashing itself to bits. He sat there in his Morris-chair as Jonah must have sat in the body of the whale, secure in the last refuge of a black hole, expecting nothing, desiring nothing, not dead but buried alive, swallowed whole and unscathed, the big blubber lips gently flapping with the flux and reflux of the white breath of emptiness. He was in the land of Nod searching for Cain and Abel but encountering no living soul, no word, no sign. He dove with the whale and scraped the icy black bottom; he covered furlongs at top speed, guided only by the fleecy manes of undersea beasts. He was the smoke that curled out of the chimney-tops, the heavy layers of cloud that obscured the moon, the thick slime that made the slippery linoleum floor of the ocean depths. He was deader than dead because alive and empty, beyond all hope of resurrection in that he had travelled beyond the limits of light and space and securely nestled himself in the black hole of nothingness. He was more to be envied than pitied, for his sleep was not a lull or an interval but sleep itself which is the deep and hence sleeping ever deepening, deeper and deeper

152

in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep's sweet sleep. He was asleep. He is asleep. He will be asleep. Sleep. Sleep. Father, sleep, I beg you, for we who are awake are boiling in horror . . .

With the world fluttering away on the last wings of a hollow snore I see the door opening to admit Grover Watrous. "Christ be with you!" he says, dragging his club foot along. He is quite a young man now and he has found God. There is only one God and Grover Watrous has found Him and so there is nothing more to say except that everything has to be said over again in Grover Watrous' new God-language. This bright new language which God invented especially for Grover Watrous intrigues me enormously, first because I had always considered Grover to be a hopeless dunce, second because I notice that there are no longer any tobacco stains on his agile fingers. When we were boys Grover lived next door to us. He would visit me from time to time in order to practise a duet with me. Though he was only fourteen or fifteen he smoked like a trooper. His mother could do nothing against it because Grover was a genius and a genius had to have a little liberty, particularly when he was also unfortunate enough to have been born with a club foot. Grover was the kind of genius who thrives on dirt. He not only had nicotine stains on his fingers but he had filthy black nails which would break under hours of practising, imposing upon young Grover the ravishing obligation of tearing them off with his teeth. Grover used to spit out broken nails along with bits of tobacco which got caught in his teeth. It was delightful and stimulating. The cigarettes burned holes into the piano and, as my mother critically observed, also tarnished the keys. When Grover took leave the parlour stank like the backroom of an undertaker's establishment. It stank of dead cigarettes, sweat, dirty linen, Grover's oaths and the dry heat left by the dying notes of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. It stank too of Grover's running ear and of his decaying teeth. It stank of his mother's pampering and whimpering. His own home was a stable divinely suited to his genius, but the parlour of our home was like the waiting room of a mortician's

153

office and Grover was a lout who didn't even know enough to wipe his feet. In the winter time his nose ran like a sewer and Grover, being too engrossed in his music to bother wiping his nose, the cold snot was left to trickle down until it reached his lips where it was sucked in by a very long white tongue. To the flatulent music of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and Co. it added a piquant sauce which made those empty devils palatable. Every other word from Grover's lips was an oath, his favourite expression being - "I can't get the fucking thing right!" Sometimes he grew so annoyed that he would take his fists and pound the piano like a madman. It was his genius coming out the wrong way. His mother, in fact, used to attach a great deal of importance to these fits of anger; they convinced her that he had something in him. Other people simply said that Grover was impossible. Much was forgiven, however, because of his club foot. Grover was sly enough to exploit this bad foot; whenever he wanted anything badly he developed pains in the foot. Only the piano seemed to have no respect for this maimed member. The piano therefore was an object to be cursed and kicked and pounded to bits. If he were in good form, on the other hand, Grover would remain at the piano for hours on end; in fact, you couldn't drag him away. On such occasions his mother would go stand in the grass plot in front of the house and waylay the neighbours in order to squeeze a few words of praise out of them. She would be so carried away by her son's "divine" playing that she would forget to cook the evening meal. The old man, who worked in the sewers, usually came home grumpy and famished. Sometimes he would march directly upstairs to the parlour and yank Grover off the piano stool. He had a rather foul vocabulary himself and when he let loose on his genius of a son there wasn't much left for Grover to say. In the old man's opinion Grover was just a lazy son of a bitch who could make a lot of noise. Now and then he threatened to chuck the fucking piano out of the window - and Grover with it. If the mother were rash enough to interfere during these scenes he would give her a clout and tell her to go piss up the end of a rope. He had his moments of weakness too, of course, and in such a mood he might ask Grover what the hell

154

he was rattling away at, and if the latter said, for example, "why the Sonata Pathetique", the old buzzard would say - "what the hell does that mean? Why, in Christ's name don't they put it down in plain English?" The old man's ignorance was even harder for Grover to bear than his brutality. He was heartily ashamed of his old man and when the latter was out of sight he would ridicule him unmercifully. When he got a little older he used to insinuate that he wouldn't have been born with a club foot if the old man hadn't been such a mean bastard. He said that the old man must have kicked his mother in the belly when she was pregnant. This alleged kick in the belly must have affected Grover in diverse ways, for when he had grown up to be quite a young man, as I was saying, he suddenly took to God with such a passion that there was no blowing your nose before him without first asking God's permission.

Grover's conversion followed right upon the old man's deflation, which is why I am reminded of it. Nobody had seen the Watrouses for a number of years and then, right in the midst of a bloody snore, you might say, in pranced Grover scattering benedictions and calling upon God as his witness as he rolled up his sleeves to deliver us from evil. What I noted first in him was the change in his personal appearance; he had been washed dean in the blood of the Lamb. He was so immaculate, indeed, that there was almost a perfume emanating from him. His speech too had been cleaned up, instead of wild oaths there were now nothing but blessings and invocations. It was not a conversation which he held with us but a monologue in which, if there were any questions, he answered them himself. As he took the chair which was offered him he said with the nimbleness of a jack-rabbit that God had given his only beloved Son in order that we might enjoy life everlasting. Did we really want this life everlasting - or were we simply going to wallow in the joys of the flesh and die without knowing salvation? The incongruity of mentioning the "joys of the flesh" to an aged couple, one of whom was sound asleep and snoring, never struck him, to be sure. He was so alive and jubilant in the first flush of God's merciful grace that he must have forgotten that my sister was dippy, for, without even

155

inquiring how she had been, he began to harangue her in this new-found spiritual palaver to which she was entirely impervious because, as I say, she was minus so many buttons that if he had been talking about chopped spinach it would have been just as meaningful to her. A phrase like "the pleasures of the flesh" meant to her something like a beautiful day with a red parasol. I could see by the way she sat on the edge of her chair and bobbed her head that she was only waiting for him to catch his breath in order to inform him that the pastor - her pastor, who was an Episcopalian - had just returned from Europe and that they were going to have a fair in the basement of the church where she would have a little booth fitted up with doylies from the five-and-ten cent store. In fact, no sooner had he paused a moment than she let loose - about the canals of Venice, the snow in the Alps, the dog carts in Brussels, the beautiful Uverwurst in Munich. She was not only religious, my sister, but she was clean daffy. Grover had just slipped in something about having seen a new heaven and a new earth... for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, he said, mumbling the words in a sort of hysterical glissando in order to unburden himself of an oracular message about the New Jerusalem which God had established on earth and in which he, Grover Watrous, once foul of speech and marred by a twisted foot, had found the peace and the calm of the righteous. "There shall be no more death ..." he started to shout when my sister leaned forward and asked him very innocently if he liked to bowl because the pastor had just installed a beautiful new bowling alley in the basement of the church and she knew he would be pleased to see Grover because he was a lovely man and he was kind to the poor. Grover said that it was a sin to bowl and that he belonged to no church because the churches were godless: he had even given up playing the piano because God needed him for higher things. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things," he added "and I will be his God, and he shall be my son." He paused again to blow his nose in a beautiful white handkerchief, whereupon my sister took the occasion to remind him that in the old days he always had a running nose but that he never wiped it. Grover listened

156

to her very solemnly and then remarked that he had been cured of many evil ways. At this point the old man woke up and, seeing Grover sitting beside him large as life, he was quite startled and for a moment or two he was not sure, it seemed, whether Grover was a morbid phenomenon of dream or an hallucination, but the sight of the clean handkerchief brought him quickly to his wits. "Oh, it's you!" he exclaimed. "The Watrous boy, what? Well, what in the name of all that's holy are you doing here?"

"I came in the name of the Holy of Holies," said Grover unabashed. "I have been purified by the death on Calvary and I am here in Christ's sweet name that ye maybe redeemed and walk in light and power and glory."

The old man looked dazed. "Well, what's come over you?" he said, giving Grover a feeble, consolatory smile. My mother had just come in from the kitchen and had taken a stand behind Grover's chair. By making a wry grimace with her mouth she was trying to convey to the old man that Grover was cracked. Even my sister seemed to realize that there was something wrong with him, especially when he had refused to visit the new bowling alley which her lovely pastor had expressly installed for young men such as Grover and his likes.