Henry Miller's

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN

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FOREWORD

 

to

 

HISTORIA CALAMITATUM

(the story of my misfortunes)

 

����� Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words.� And therefore, because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of himself ever a consoler.� This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily.

 

�������������������������������������������������������������� PETER ABERLARD

 

_________________

 

 

On the Ovarian Trolley

 

Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.� From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills.� In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord.� In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox.� I was my own worst enemy.� There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do.� Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling.� I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for.� Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous.� Especially the successful ones.� The successful ones bored me to tears.� I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so.� It was purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery.� I never helped anyone expecting that it would do me any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise.� To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men?� Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke.� I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

��������� What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful.� Perhaps I did possess these virtues, but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy.� Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of.� I have never envied anybody or anything.� On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything.

��������� From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything too badly.� From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way.� I had need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated.� The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked.� That was the form my independence took.� I was corrupt, in other words, corrupt from the start.� It's as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system.� Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent; most children rebel, or make a pretence of rebelling, but I didn't give a damn.� I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes.� I was against life, on principle.� What principle?� The principle of futility.� Everybody around me was struggling.� I myself never made an effort.� If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn't give a rap.� And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it.� I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb.� I can understand that perfectly.� Why budge?� Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis?� The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls in the kitchen.� Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled?� Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards.� Until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were "warm" countries, places where you didn't have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating.� Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work - which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia.� My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots.� Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs.� Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness.� They were painfully clean.� But inwardly they stank.� Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark.� After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers.� Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.� The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.

��������� In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better to condemn myself.� For I am like them too, in many ways.� For a long while I thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that I am even a little worse, because I saw more clearly than they ever did and yet remained powerless to alter my life.� As I look back on my life it seems to me that I never did anything of my own volition but always through the pressure of others.� People often think of me as an adventurous fellow; nothing could be farther from the truth.� My adventures were always adventitious, always thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken.� I am of the very essence of that proud, boastful Nordic people who have never had the least sense of adventure but who nevertheless have scoured the earth, turned it upside down, scattering relics and ruins everywhere.� Restless spirits, but not adventurous ones.� Agonizing spirits, incapable of living in the present.� Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included.� For there is only one great adventure and that is inward toward the self, and for that, time nor space nor even deeds matter.

��������� Once every few years I was on the verge of making this discovery, but in characteristic fashion I always managed to dodge the issue.� If I try to think of a good excuse I can think only of the environment, of the streets I knew and the people who inhabited them.� I can think of no street in America, or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on toward the discovery of the self.� I have walked the streets in many countries of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America.� I think of all the streets in America combined as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit..� Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munitions plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums.� The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number.� I was one, a single entity in the midst of the greatest jamboree of wealth and happiness (statistical wealth, statistical happiness) but I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy.� At least I knew that I was unhappy, unwealthy, out of whack and out of step.� That was my only solace, my only joy.� But it was hardly enough.� It would have been better for my peace of mind, for my soul, if I had expressed my rebellion openly, if I had gone to jail for it, if I had rotted there and died.� It would have been better if, like the mad Czolgosz, I had shot some good President McKinley, some gentle, insignificant soul like that who had never done anyone the least harm.� Because in the bottom of my heart there was murder: I wanted to see America destroyed, razed from top to bottom.� I wanted to see this happen purely out of vengeance, as atonement for the crimes that were committed against me and against others like me who have never been able to lift their voices and express their hatred, their rebellion, their legitimate blood lust.

��������� I was the evil product of an evil soil.� If the self were not imperishable, the "I" I write about would have been destroyed long ago.� To some this may seem like an invention, but whatever I imagine to have happened did actually happen, at least to me.� History may deny it, since I have played no part in the history of my people, but even if everything I say is wrong, is prejudiced, spiteful, malevolent, even if I am a liar and a poisoner, it is nevertheless the truth and it will have to be swallowed.

 

��������� As to what happened ...

 

��������� Everything that happens, when it has significance, is in the nature of a contradiction.� Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solution to all things.� I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into.� Instead I lost hold of life completely.� I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I found nothing.� But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for - myself.� I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live -if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.� I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it.� What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.� Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel - that bothers me, that rankles.� From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability.� Everything else is a lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this.� And that is pretty much the greater part of my life.

 

��������� I was a contradiction in essence, as they say.� People took me to be serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and earnest, or to be negligent and carefree.� I was all these things at once - and beyond that I was something else, something which no-one suspected, least of all myself.� As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my grandfather's workbench and read to him while he sewed.� I remember him vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the window dreamily.� I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there dreaming, better than the contents of the books I read, better than the conversations we had or the games which I played in the street.� I used to wonder what he was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself.� I hadn't learned yet how to dream wide-awake.� I was always lucid, in the moment, and all of a piece.� His daydreaming fascinated me.� I knew that he had no connection with what he was doing, not the least thought for any of us, that he was alone and being alone he was free.� I was never alone, least of all when I was by myself.� Always, it seems to me, I was accompanied: I was like a little crumb of a big cheese, which was the world, I suppose, though I never stopped to think about it.� But I know I never existed separately, never thought myself the big cheese, as it were.� So that even when I had reason to be miserable, to complain, to weep, I had the illusion of participating in a common, a universal misery.� When I wept the whole world was weeping - so I imagined.� I wept very seldom.� Mostly I was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time.� I had a good time because, as I said before, I really didn't give a fuck about anything.� If things were wrong with me they were wrong everywhere, I was convinced of it.� And things were wrong usually only when one cared too much.� That impressed itself on me very early in life.� For example, I remember the case of my young friend Jack Lawson.� For a whole year he lay in bed, suffering the worst agonies.� He was my best friend, so people said at any rate.� Well, at first I was probably sorry for him and perhaps now and then I called at his house to inquire about him; but after a month or two had elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering.� I said to myself he ought to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and having thought thus I acted accordingly: that is to say, I promptly forgot about him, abandoned him to his fate.� I was only about twelve years old at the time and I remember being proud of my decision.� I remember the funeral too - what a disgraceful affair it was.� There they were, friends and relatives all congregated about the bier and all of the bawling like sick monkeys.� The mother especially gave me a pain in the ass.� She was such a rare, spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she didn't believe in disease and didn't believe in death either, she raised such a stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave.� But not her beloved Jack!� No, Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable.� He was dead and there were no two ways about it.� I knew it and I was glad of it.� I didn't waste any tears over it.� I couldn't say that he was better off because after all the "he" had vanished.� He was gone and with him the sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on others.� Amen!, I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.

��������� This caring too much - I remember that it only developed with me about the time I first fell in love.� And even then I didn't care enough.� If I had really cared I wouldn't be here now writing about it: I'd have died of a broken heart, or I'd have swung for it.� It was a bad experience because it taught me how to live a lie.� It taught me to smile when I didn't want to smile, to work when I didn't believe in work, to live when I had no reason to go on living.� Even when I had forgotten her I still retained the trick of doing what I didn't believe in.

��������� It was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said.� But sometimes I got so close to the centre, to the very heart of the confusion, that it's a wonder things didn't explode around me.

��������� It is customary to blame everything on the war.� I say the war had nothing to do with me, with my life.� At a time when others were getting themselves comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another, and never enough in it to keep body and soul together.� Almost as quickly as I was hired I was fired.� I had plenty of intelligence but I inspire distrust.� Wherever I went I fomented discord - not because I was idealistic but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of everything.� Besides, I wasn't a good ass licker.� That marked me, no doubt.� People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn't give a damn whether I got it or not.� And of course I generally didn't get it.� But after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, so to speak.� I would go in and ask for most anything.� It was a way of killing time - no worse, as far as I could see, than work itself.� I was my own boss and I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my own bankruptcy.� I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a federation or a polity of nations - I was more like God, if anything.

��������� This went on from about the middle of the war until ... well, until one day I was trapped.� Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job.� I needed it.� Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy.� I walked into the employment bureau of the telegraph company - the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America - toward the close of the day, prepared to go through with it.� I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat books on economics and metaphysics.� To my great amazement I was refused the job.

��������� The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard.� He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left school.� I had even honoured myself on the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University.� Apparently that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who had turned me down.� I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I was in earnest.� Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in certain peculiar ways is rather large.� My wife of course gave me the usual leer and sneer.� I had done it as a gesture, she said.� I went to bed thinking about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on.� The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn't bother me so much; people didn't offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much I understood only too well.� No, what rankled was that they had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the lowest job in the world.� That burned me up.� I couldn't get over it.� In the morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and hotfooted it to the subway.� I went immediately to the main offices of the telegraph company ... up to the twenty-fifth floor or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles.� I asked to see the president.� Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn't I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather.� I saw the vice-president's secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful.� I did it adroitly, without too much heat, but letting him understand all the while that I wasn't to be put out of the way so easily.

��������� When he picked up the telephone and demanded the general manager I thought it was just a gag, that they were going to pass me around like that from one to the other until I'd got fed up.� But the moment I heard him talk I changed my opinion.� When I got to the general manager's office, which was in another building uptown, they were waiting for me.� I sat down in a comfortable leather chair and accepted one of the big cigars that were thrust forward.� This individual seemed at once to be vitally concerned about the matter.� He wanted me to tell him all about it, down to the last detail, his big hairy ears cocked to catch the least crumb of information which would justify something or other which was formulating itself inside his dome.� I realized that by some accident I had really been instrumental in doing him a service.� I let him wheedle it out of me to suit his fancy, observing all the time which way the wind was blowing.� And as the talk progressed I noticed that he was warming up to me more and more.� At last someone was showing a little confidence in me!� That was all I required to get started on one of my favourite lines.� For, after years of job hunting I had naturally become quite adept: I knew not only what not to say, but I knew also what to imply, what to insinuate.� Soon the assistant general manager was called in and asked to listen to my story.� By this time I knew what the story was.� I understood that Hymie - "that little kike", as the general manager called him - had no business pretending that he was the employment manager.� Hymie had usurped his prerogative, that much was clear.� It was also clear that Hymie was a Jew and that Jews were not in good odour with the general manager, nor with Mr. Twilliger, the vice-president, who was a thorn in the general manager's side.

��������� Perhaps it was Hymie, "the dirty little kike", who was responsible for the high percentage of Jews on the messenger force.� Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the employment office - at Sunset Place, they called it.� It was an excellent opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to talk down a certain Mr. Burns who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job.

��������� The conference lasted several hours.� Before it was terminated Mr. Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss of the works.� Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me as a special favour, and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand me in good stead, to work as a special messenger.� I would receive the salary of employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account.� In short I was to float from office to office and observe the way affairs were conducted by all and sundry.� I was to make a little report from time to time as to how things were going.� And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the conditions in the hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in New York City.� In other words I was to be a spy for a few months and after that I was to have the run of the joint.� Maybe they'd make me a general manager too one day, or a vice-president.� It was a tempting offer, even if it was wrapped in a lot of horseshit.� I said Yes.

��������� In a few months I was sitting at Sunset Place hiring and firing like a demon.� It was a slaughterhouse, so help me God.� The thing was senseless from the bottom up.� A waste of men, material and effort.� A hideous farce against a backdrop of sweat and misery.� But just as I had accepted the spying, so I accepted the hiring and firing and all that went with it.� I said Yes to everything.� If the vice-president decreed that no cripples were to be hired I hired no cripples.� If the vice-president said that all messengers over forty-five were to be fired without notice I fired them without notice.� I did everything they instructed me to do, but in such a way that they had to pay for it.� When there was a strike I folded my arms and waited for it to blow over.� But I first saw to it that it cost them a good penny.� The whole system was so rotten, so inhuman, so lousy, so hopelessly corrupt and complicated, that it would have taken a genius to put any sense or order into it, to say nothing of human kindness or consideration.� I was up against the whole system of American labour, which is rotten at both ends.� I was the fifth wheel on the wagon and neither side had any use for me, except to exploit me.� In fact, everybody was being exploited - the president and his gang by the unseen powers, the employees by the officials, and so on and around, in and out and through the whole works.� From my little perch at Sunset Place I had a bird's eye view of the whole American society.� It was like a page out of the telephone book.� Alphabetically, numerically, statistically, it made sense.� But when you looked at it up close, when you examined the pages separately, or the parts separately, when you examined one lone individual and what constituted him, examined the air he breathed, the life he led, the chances he risked, you saw something so foul and degrading, so low, so miserable, so utterly hopeless and senseless, that it was worse than looking into a volcano.� You could see the whole American life - economically, politically, morally, spiritually, artistically, statistically, pathologically.� It looked like a grand chancre on a worn-out cock.� It looked worse than that, really, because you couldn't see anything resembling a cock any more.� Maybe in the past this thing had life, did produce something, did at least give a moment's pleasure, a moment's thrill.� But looking at it from where I sat it looked rottener than the wormiest cheese.� The wonder was that the stench of it didn't carry 'em off.... I'm using the past tense all the time, but of course it's the same now, maybe even a bit worse.� At least now we're getting it full stink.

��������� By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps of messengers.� My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it stank like one.� I had dug myself into the first-line trench and I was getting it from all directions at once.� To begin with, the man I had ousted died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival.� He held out just long enough to break me in and then he croaked.� Things happened so fast that I didn't have a chance to feel guilty.� From the moment I arrived at the office it was one long uninterrupted pandemonium.� An hour before my arrival - I was always late - the place was already jammed with applicants.� I had to elbow my way up the stairs and literally force my way in to get to my desk.� Before I could take my hat off I had to answer a dozen telephone calls.� There were three telephones on my desk and they all rang at once.� They were bawling the piss out of me before I had even sat down to work.� There wasn't even time to take a crap - until five or six in the afternoon.� Hymie was worse off than I because he was tied to the switchboard.� He sat there from eight in the morning until six, moving waybills around.� A waybill was a messenger loaned by one office to another office for the day or a part of the day.� None of the hundred and one offices even had a full staff; Hymie had to play chess with the waybills while I worked like a madman to plug up the gaps.� If by a miracle I succeeded of a day in filling all the vacancies, the next morning would find the situation exactly the same - or worse.� Perhaps twenty per cent of the force was steady; the rest was driftwood.� The steady ones drove the new ones away.� The steady ones earned forty to fifty dollars a week, sometimes sixty or seventy-five, sometimes as much as a hundred dollars a week, which is to say that they earned far more than the clerks and often more than their own managers.� As for the new ones, they found it difficult to earn ten dollars a week.� Some of them worked an hour and quit, often throwing a batch of telegrams in the garbage can or down the sewer.� And whenever they quit they wanted their pay immediately, which was impossible, because in the complicated bookkeeping which ruled no-one could say what a messenger had earned until at least ten days later.� In the beginning I invited the applicant to sit down beside me and I explained everything to him in detail.� I did that until I lost my voice.� Soon I learned to save my strength for the grilling that was necessary.� In the first place, every other boy was a born liar, if not a crook to boot.� Many of them had already been hired and fired a number of times.� Some found it an excellent way to find another job, because their duty brought them to hundreds of offices which normally they would never have set foot in.� Fortunately McGovern, the old trusty who guarded the door and handed out the application blanks, had a camera eye.� And then there were the big ledgers behind me, in which there was a record of every applicant who had ever passed through the mill.� The ledgers were very much like a police record; they were full of red ink marks, signifying this or that delinquency.� To judge from the evidence I was in a tough spot.� Every other name involved a theft, a fraud, a brawl, or dementia or perversion or idiocy.� "Be careful - so-and-so is an epileptic!"� "Don't hire this man - he's a nigger!"� "Watch out - X has been in Dannemora - or else in Sing Sing."

��������� If I had been a stickler for etiquette nobody would ever have been hired.� I had to learn quickly, and not from the records or from those about me, but from experience.� There were a thousand and one details by which to judge an applicant: I had to take them all in at once, and quickly, because in one short day, even if you are as fast as Jack Robinson, you can only fire so many and no more.� And no matter how many I hired it was never enough.� The next day it would begin all over again.� Some I knew would last only a day, but I had to hire them just the same.� The system was wrong from start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the system.� It was mine to hire and fire.� I was in the centre of a revolving disk which was whirling so fast that nothing could stay put.� What was needed was a mechanic, but according to the logic of the higher-ups there was nothing wrong with the mechanism, everything was fine and dandy except that things were temporarily out of order.� And things being temporarily out of order brought on epilepsy, theft, vandalism, perversion, niggers, Jews, whores and whatnot - sometimes strikes and lockouts.� Whereupon, according to this logic, you took a big broom and you swept the stable clean, or you took clubs and guns and you beat sense into the poor idiots who were suffering from the illusion that things were fundamentally wrong.� It was good now and then to talk of God, or to have a little community sing - maybe even a bonus was justifiable now and then, that is when things were getting too terribly bad for words.� But on the whole, the important thing was to keep hiring and firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep mopping up the trenches.� Meanwhile Hymie kept taking cathartic pills - enough to blow out his rear end if he had had a rear end, but he hadn't one any more, he only imagined he was taking a crap, he only imagined he was shitting on his can.� Actually the poor bugger was in a trance.� There were a hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never.� Some of them got lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the elevated lines.� Some of them started for Staten Island and ended up in Canarsie, or else were brought back in a coma by a cop.� Some forgot where they lived and disappeared completely.� Some whom we hired for New York turned up in Philadelphia a month later, as though it were normal and according to Hoyle.� Some would start for their destination and on the way decide that it was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them, in the uniform we had given them, until they were picked up.� Some went straight to the observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct.

��������� When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he explained to me later, if he didn't sharpen the pencils first things off the bat they would never get sharpened.� The next thing was to take a glance out the window and see what the weather was like.� Then, with a freshly sharpened pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside him and in it he gave the weather report.� This, he also informed me, often turned out to be a useful alibi.� If the snow were a foot thick or the ground covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no?� But why he didn't take a crap first instead of plugging in on the switchboard soon as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me.� That too he explained to me later.� Anyway, the day always broke with confusion, complaints, constipation and vacancies.� It also began with loud smelly farts, with bad breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with meningitis, with low wages, with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out shoes, with corns and bunions, with flat feet and broken arches, with pocketbooks missing and fountain pens lost or stolen, with telegrams floating in the sewer, with threats from the vice-president and advice from the managers, with wrangles and disputes, with cloudbursts and broken telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency and old ones that had been discarded, with hope for better times and a prayer for the bonus which never came.� The new messengers were going over the top and getting machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and deeper, like rats in a cheese.� It took ten minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it might take a year to get the message to the man whom it was intended for - or it might never reach him.

��������� The Y.M.C.A., eager to improve the morale of working boys everywhere in America, was holding meetings at noon hour and wouldn't I like to send a few spruce-looking boys to hear William Carnegie Asterbilt Junior give a five-minute talk on service.� Mr. Mallory of the Welfare League would like to know if I could spare a few minutes some time to tell me about the model prisoners who were on parole and who would be glad to serve in any capacity, even as messengers.� Mrs. Guggenhoffer of the Jewish Charities would be very grateful if I would aid her in maintaining some broken-down homes which had broken down because everybody was either infirm, crippled or disabled in the family.� Mr. Haggerty of the Runaway Home for Boys was sure he had just the right youngsters for me, if only I would give them a chance; all of them had been mistreated by their stepfathers or stepmothers.� The Mayor of New York would appreciate it if I would give my personal attention to the bearer of said letter whom he could vouch for in every way - but why the hell he didn't give said bearer a job himself was a mystery.� Man leaning over my shoulder hands me a slip of paper on which he has just written - "Me understand everything but me no hear the voices."� Luther Winifred is standing beside him, his tattered coat fastened together with safety pins.� Luther is two-sevenths pure Indian and five-sevenths German-American, so he explains.� On the Indian side he is a Crow, one of the Crows from Montana.� His last job was putting up window shades, but there is no ass in his pants and he is ashamed to climb a ladder in front of a lady.� He got out of the hospital the other day and so he is still a little weak, but he is not too weak to carry messages, so he thinks.

��������� And then there is Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him?� He has been waiting in line all morning to get a word with me.� I never answered the letters he sent me.� Was that just? he asks me blandly.� Of course not.� I remember vaguely the last letter which he sent me from the Cat and Dog Hospital on the Grand Concourse, where he was an attendant.� He said he repented that he had resigned his post "but it was on account of his father being too strict over him, not giving him any recreation or outside pleasure."� "I'm twenty-five now," he wrote, "and I don't think I should ought to be sleeping no more with my father, do you?� I know you are said to be a very fine gentleman and I am now self-dependent, so I hope ...� McGovern, the old trusty, is standing by Ferdinand's side waiting for me to give him the sign.� He wants to give Ferdinand the bum's rush - he remembers him from five years ago when Ferdinand lay down on the sidewalk in front of the main office in full uniform and threw an epileptic fit.� No, shit, I can't do it!� I'm going to give him a chance, the poor bastard.� Maybe I'll send him to Chinatown where things are fairly quiet.� Meanwhile, while Ferdinand is changing into a uniform in the back room, I'm getting an earful from an orphan boy who wants to "help make the company a success."� He says that if I give him a chance he'll pray for me every Sunday when he goes to church, except the Sundays when he has to report to his parole officer.� He didn't do nothing, it appears.� He just pushed the fellow and the fellow fell on his head and got killed.� Next: an ex-consul from Gibraltar.� Writes a beautiful hand - too beautiful.� I ask him to see me at the end of the day - something fishy about him.� Meanwhile Ferdinand's thrown a fit in the dressing room.� Lucky break!� If it had happened in the subway, with a number on his hat and everything, I'd have been canned.� Next: a guy with one arm and mad as hell because McGovern is showing him the door.� "What the hell!� I'm strong and healthy, ain't I?" he shouts, and to prove it he picks up a chair with his good arm and smashes it to bits.� I get back to the desk and there's a telegram lying there for me.� I open it.� It's from George Blasini, ex-manager No. 2459 of S.W. office.� "I am sorry that I had to quit so soon, but the job was not fitted for my character idleness and I am a true lover of labour and frugality but many a time we be unable to control or subdue our personal pride."� Shit!

��������� In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the clamps below.� I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the vice-president or not.� Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and lectured for having "too big a heart."� I never had any money in my pocket but I used other people's money freely.� As long as I was the boss I had credit.� I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes away and my linen, my books, everything that was superfluous.� If I had had the power I would have given the company away to the poor buggers who pestered me.� If I was asked for a dime I gave a half dollar, if I was asked for a dollar I gave five.� I didn't give a fuck how much I gave away, because it was easier to borrow and give than to refuse the poor devils.� I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I'll never see it again.� Men are poor everywhere - they always have been and they always will be.� And beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it is almost invisible.� But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on it it can become a conflagration.� I was constantly urged not to be too lenient, not to be too sentimental, not to be too charitable.� Be firm!� Be hard! they cautioned me.� Fuck that! I said to myself, I'll be generous, pliant, forgiving, tolerant, tender.� In the beginning I heard every man to the end; if I couldn't give him a job I gave him money, and if I had no money I gave him cigarettes or I gave him courage.� But I gave!� The effect was dizzying.� Nobody can estimate the results of a good deed, of a kind word.� I was swamped with gratitude, with good wishes, with invitations, with pathetic, tender little gifts.� If I had had real power instead of being the fifth wheel on a wagon, God knows what I might not have accomplished.� I could have used the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America as a base to bring all humanity to God; I could have transformed North and South America alike, and the Dominion of Canada too.� I had the secret in my hand: it was to be generous, to be kind, to be patient.� I did the work of five men.� I hardly slept for three years.� I didn't own a whole shirt and often I was so ashamed of borrowing from my wife, or robbing the kid's bank, that to the carfare to go to work in the morning I would swindle the blind newspaperman at the subway station.� I owed so much money all around that if I were to work for twenty years I would not have been able to pay it back.� I took from those who had and I gave to those who needed, and it was the right thing to do, and I would do it all over again if I were in the same position.

��������� I even accomplished the miracle of stopping the crazy turnover, something that nobody had dared to hope for.� Instead of supporting my efforts they undermined me.� According to the logic of the higher-ups the turnover had ceased because the wages were too high.� So they cut the wages.� It was like kicking the bottom out of a bucket.� The whole edifice tumbled, collapsed on my hands.� And, just as though nothing had happened they insisted that the gaps be plugged up immediately.� To soften the blow a bit they intimated that I might even increase the percentage of Jews, I might take on a cripple now and then, if he were capable, I might do this and that, all of which they had informed me previously was against the code.� I was so furious that I took on anything and everything; I would have taken on broncos and gorillas if I could have imbued them with the modicum of intelligence which was necessary to deliver messages.� A few days previously there had been only five or six vacancies at closing time.� Now there were three hundred, four hundred, five hundred - they were running out like sand.� It was marvellous.� I sat there and without asking a question I took them on in carload lots - niggers, Jews, paralytics, cripples, ex-convicts, whores, maniacs, perverts, idiots, any fucking bastard who could stand on two legs and hold a telegram in his hand.� The managers of the hundred and one offices were frightened to death.� I laughed.� I laughed all day long thinking what a fine stinking mess I was making of it.� Complaints were pouring in from all parts of the city.� The service was crippled, constipated, strangulated.� A mule could have gotten there faster than some of the idiots I put into harness.

��������� The best thing about the new day was the introduction of female messengers.� It changes the whole atmosphere of the joint.� For Hymie especially it was a godsend.� He moved his switchboard around so that he could watch me while juggling the waybills back and forth.� Despite the added work he had a permanent erection.� He came to work with a smile and he smiled all day long.� He was in heaven.� At the end of the day I always had a list of five or six who were worth trying out.� The game was to keep them on the string, to promise them a job but to get a free fuck first.� Usually it was only necessary to throw a feed into them in order to bring them back to the office at night and lay them out on the zinc-covered table in the dressing room.� If they had a cosy apartment, as they sometimes did, we took them home and finished it in bed.� If they liked to drink Hymie would bring a bottle along.� If they were any good and really needed some dough Hymie would flash his roll and peel off a five spot or a ten spot, as the case might be.� It makes my mouth water when I think of that roll he carried about with him.� Where he got it from I never knew, because he was the lowest-paid man in the joint.� But it was always there, and no matter what I asked for I got.� And once it happened that we did get a bonus and I paid Hymie back to the last penny - which so amazed him that he took me out that night to Delmonico's and spent a fortune on me.� Not only that, but the next day he insisted on buying me a hat and shirts and gloves.� He even insinuated that I might come home and fuck his wife, if I liked, though he warned me that she was having a little trouble at present with her ovaries.

��������� In addition to Hymie and McGovern I had as assistants a pair of beautiful blondes who often accompanied us to dinner in the evening.� And there was O'Mara, an old friend of mine who had just returned from the Philippines and whom I made my chief assistant.� There was also Steve Romero, a prize bull whom I kept around in case of trouble.� And O'Rourke, the company detective, who reported to me at the close of the day when he began his work.� Finally I added another man to the staff - Kronski, a young medical student, who was diabolically interested in the pathological cases of which we had plenty.� We were a merry crew, united in our desire to fuck the company at all costs.� And while fucking the company we fucked everything in sight that we could get hold of, O'Rourke excepted, as he had a certain dignity to maintain, and besides he had trouble with his prostate and had lost all interest in fucking.� But O'Rourke was a prince of a man, and generous beyond words.� It was O'Rourke who often invited us to dinner in the evening and it was O'Rourke we went to when we were in trouble.

 

��������� That was how it stood at Sunset Place after a couple of years had rolled by.� I was saturated with humanity, with experiences of one kind and another.� In my sober moments I made notes which I intended to make use of later if ever I should have a chance to record my experiences.� I was waiting for a breathing spell.� And then by chance one day, when I had been put on the carpet for some wanton piece of negligence, the vice-president let drop a phrase which stuck in my crop.� He had said that he would like to see some one write a sort of Horatio Alger book about the messengers; he hinted that perhaps I might be the one to do such a job.� I was furious to think what a ninny he was and delighted at the same time because secretly I was itching to get the thing off my chest.� I thought to myself - you poor old futzer, you, just wait until I get it off my chest.... I'll give you an Horatio Alger book ... just you wait!� My head was in a whirl leaving his office.� I saw the army of men, women and children that had passed through my hands, saw them weeping, begging, beseeching, imploring, cursing, spitting, fuming, threatening.� I saw the tracks they left on the highways, the freight trains lying on the floor, the parents in rags, the coal box empty, the sink running over, the walls sweating and between the cold beads of sweat the cockroaches running like mad; I saw them hobbling along like twisted gnomes or falling backwards in the epileptic frenzy, the mouth twitching, the slaver pouring from the lips, the limbs writhing; I saw the walls giving way and the pest pouring out like a winged fluid, and the men higher up with their ironclad logic, waiting for it to blow over, waiting for everything to be patched up, waiting contentedly, smugly, with big cigars in their mouths and their feet on the desk, saying things were temporarily out of order.� I saw the Horatio Alger hero, the dream of a sick America, mounting higher and higher, first messenger, then operator, then manager, then chief, then superintendent, then vice-president, then president, then trust magnate, then beer baron, then Lord of all the Americas, the money god, the god of gods, the clay of clay, nullity on high, zero with ninety-seven thousand decimals fore and aft.� You shits, I said to myself, I will give you the picture of twelve little men, zeros without decimals, ciphers, digits, the twelve uncrushable worms who are hollowing out the base of your rotten edifice.� I will give you Horatio Alger as he looks the day after the Apocalypse, when all the stink has cleared away.

��������� From all over the earth they had come to me to be succoured.� Except for the primitives there was scarcely a race which wasn't represented on the force.� Except for the Ainus, the Maoris, the Papuans, the Veddas, the Lapps, the Zulus, the Patagonians, the Igorots, the Hottentots, the Tuaregs, except for the lost Tasmanians, the lost Grimaldi men, the lost Atlanteans, I had a representative of almost every species under the sun.� I had two brothers who were still sun-worshippers, two Nestorians from the old Assyrian world; I had two Maltese twins from Malta and a descendant of the Mayas from Yucatan; I had a few of our little brown brothers from the Philippines and some Ethiopians from Abyssinia; I had men from the pampas of Argentina and stranded cowboys from Montana; I had Greeks, Letts, Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Ruthenians, Czechs, Spaniards, Welshmen, Finns, Swedes, Russians, Danes, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Uruguayans, Brazilians, Australians, Persians, Japs, Chinese, Javanese, Egyptians, Africans from the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast, Hindus, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Germans, Irish, English, Canadians - and plenty of Italians and plenty of Jews.� I had only one Frenchman that I can recall and he lasted about three hours.� I had a few American Indians, Cherokees mostly, but no Tibetans, and no Eskimos: I saw names I could never have imagined and handwriting which ranged from cuneiform to the sophisticated and astoundingly beautiful calligraphy of the Chinese.� I heard men beg for work who had been Egyptologists, botanists, surgeons, gold miners, professors of Oriental languages, musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists, mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison wardens, cowpunchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters, dentists, painters, sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope peddlers, abortionists, white slavers, sea divers, steeplejacks, farmers, cloak and suit salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps, aldermen, senators, every bloody thing under the sun, and all of them down and out, begging for work, for cigarettes, for carfare, for a chance, Christ Almighty, just another chance!� I saw and got to know men who were saints, if there are saints in this world; I saw and spoke to savants, crapulous and uncrapulous ones; I listened to men who had the divine fire in their bowels, who could have convinced God Almighty that they were worthy of another chance, but not the vice-president of the Cosmococcic Telegraphy Company.� I sat riveted to my desk and I travelled around the world at lightning speed, and I learned that everywhere it is the same - hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, greed, extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to man: the fetters, the harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs.� The finer the calibre the worse off the man.� Men were walking the streets of New York in that bloody, degrading outfit, the despised, the lowest of the low, walking around like auks, like penguins, like oxen, like trained seals, like patient donkeys, like bug jackasses, like crazy gorillas, like docile maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like guinea pigs, like squirrels, like rabbits, and many and many a one was fit to govern the world, to write the greatest book every written.� When I think of some of the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness, I spit on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug, self-satisfied French.� The earth is one great sentient being, a planet saturated through and through with man, a live planet expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly; it is not the home of the white race or the black race or the yellow race or the lost blue race, but the home of man and all men are equal before God and will have their chance, if not now then a million years hence.� The little brown brothers of the Philippines may bloom again one day and the murdered Indians of America north and south may also come alive one day to ride the plains where now the cities stand belching fire and pestilence.� Who has the last say?� Man!� The earth is his because he is the earth, its fire, its water, its air, its mineral and vegetable matter, its spirit which is cosmic, which is imperishable, which is the spirit of all the planets, which transforms itself through him, through endless signs and symbols, through endless manifestations.� Wait, you cosmococcic telegraphic shits, you demons on high waiting for the plumbing to be repaired, wait, you dirty white conquerors who have sullied the earth with your cloven hoofs, your instruments, your weapons, your disease germs, wait, all you who are sitting in clover and counting your coppers, it is not the end.� The last man will have his say before it is finished.� Down to the last sentient molecule justice must be done - and will be done!� Nobody is getting away with anything, least of all the cosmococcic shits of North America.

��������� When it came time for my vacation - I hadn't taken one for three years, I was so eager to make the company a success! - I took three weeks instead of two and I wrote the book about the twelve little men.� I wrote it straight off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day.� I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day.� I thought he must say everything all at once - in one book - and collapse afterwards.� I didn't know a thing about writing.� I was scared shitless.� But I was determined to wipe Horatio Alger out of the North American consciousness.� I suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written.� It was a colossal tome and faulty from start to finish.� But it was my first book and I was in love with it.� If I had had the money, as Gide had, I would have published it at my own expense.� If I had had the courage that Whitman had, I would have peddled it from door to door.� Everybody I showed it to said it was terrible.� I was urged to give up the idea of writing.� I had to learn, as Balzac did, that one must write volumes before signing one's own name.� I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.� Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe.� That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible, as they said, was only natural.� I was attempting at the start what a man of genius would have undertaken only at the end.� I wanted to say the last word at the beginning.� It was absurd and pathetic.� It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood.� I knew at least what it was to fail.� I knew what it was to attempt something big.� Today, when I think of the circumstances under which I wrote that book, when I think of the overwhelming material which I tried to put into form, when I think of what I hoped to encompass, I pat myself on the back, I give myself a double A.� I am proud of the fact that I made such a miserable failure of it; had it succeeded I would have become a monster.� Sometimes, when I look over my notebooks, when I look at the names alone of those whom I thought to write about, I am seized with vertigo.� Each man came to me with a world of his own; he came to me and unloaded it on my desk; he expected me to pick it up and put it on my shoulders.� I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back.� To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad.

��������� I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts".� To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight.� First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated.� You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again as an individual.� You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the least common denominator of the self.� You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.� One can't make a new heaven and earth with "facts".�� There are no "facts" - there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination.� Some men take the long route and some take the short route.� Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.� In my enthusiasm certain things were then inexplicable to me which are now clear.� I think, for example, of Carnahan, one of the twelve little men I had chosen to write about.� He was what is called a model messenger.� He was a graduate of a prominent university, had a sound intelligence and was of exemplary character.� He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day and earned more than any messenger on the force.� The clients whom he served wrote letters about him, praising him to the skies; he was offered good positions which he refused for one reason or another.� He lived frugally, sending the best part of his wages to his wife and children who lived in another city.� He had two vices - drink and the desire to succeed.� He could go for a year without drinking, but if he took one drop he was off.� He had cleaned up twice in Wall Street and yet, before coming to me for a job, he had gotten no further than to be a sexton of a church in some little town.� He had been fired from that job because he had broken into the sacramental wine and rung the bells all night long.� He was truthful, sincere, earnest.� I had implicit confidence in him and my confidence was proven by the record of his service which was without a blemish.� Nevertheless he shot his wife and children in cold blood and then he shot himself.� Fortunately none of them died; they all lay in the hospital together and they all recovered.� I went to see his wife, after they had transferred him to jail, to get her help.� She refused categorically.� She said he was the meanest, cruellest son of a bitch that ever walked on two legs - she wanted to see him hanged.� I pleaded with her for two days, but she was adamant.� I went to the jail and talked to him through the mesh.� I found that he had already made himself popular with the authorities, had already been granted special privileges.� He wasn't at all dejected.� On the contrary, he was looking forward to making the best of his time in prison by "studying up" on salesmanship.� He was going to be the best salesman in America after his release.� I might almost say that he seemed happy.� He said not to worry about him, he would get along all right.� He said everybody was swell to him and that he had nothing to complain about.� I left him somewhat in a daze.� I went to a nearby beach and decided to take a swim.� I saw everything with new eyes.� I almost forgot to return home, so absorbed had I become in my speculations about this chap.� Who could say that everything that happened to him had not happened for the best?� Perhaps he might leave the prison a full-fledged evangelist instead of a salesman.� Nobody could predict what he might do.� And nobody could aid him because he was working out his destiny in his own private way.

��������� There was another chap, a Hindu named Guptal.� He was not only a model of good behaviour - he was a saint.� He had a passion for the flute which he played all by himself in his miserable little room.� One day he was found naked, his throat slit from ear to ear, and beside him on the bed was his flute.� At the funeral there were a dozen women who wept passionate tears, including the wife of the janitor who had murdered him.� I could write a book about this young man who was the gentlest and the holiest man I ever met, who had never offended anybody and never taken anything from anybody, but who had made the cardinal mistake of coming to America to spread peace and love.

��������� There was David Olinski, another faithful, industrious messenger who thought of nothing but work.� He had one fatal weakness - he talked too much. �When he came to me he had already been around the globe several times and what he hadn't done to make a living isn't worth telling about.� He knew about twelve languages and he was rather proud of his linguistic ability.� He was one of those men whose very willingness and enthusiasm is their undoing.� He wanted to help everybody along, show everybody how to succeed.� He wanted more work than we could give him - he was a glutton for work.� Perhaps I should have warned him, when I sent him to his office on the East Side, that he was going to work in a tough neighbourhood, but he pretended to know so much and he was so insistent in working in that locality (because of his linguistic ability) that I said nothing.� I thought to myself - you'll find out quickly enough for yourself.� And sure enough, he was only there a short time when he got into trouble.� A tough Jewboy from the neighbourhood walked in one day and asked for a blank.� Dave, the messenger, was behind the desk.� He didn't like the way the man asked for the blank.� He told him he ought to be more polite.� For that he got a box in the ears.� That made him wag his tongue some more, whereupon he got such a wallop that his teeth flew down his throat and his jawbone was broken in three places.� Still he didn't know enough to hold his trap.� Like the damned fool he was he goes to the police station and registers a complaint.� A week later, while he's sitting on a bench snoozing, a gang of roughnecks break into the place and beat him to a pulp.� His head was so battered that his brains looked like an omelette.� For good measure they emptied the safe and turned it upside down.� Dave died on the way to the hospital.� They found five hundred dollars hidden away in the toe of his sock.... Then there was Clausen and his wife Lena.� They came in together when he applied for the job.� Lena had a baby in her arms and he had two little ones by the hand.� They were sent to me by some relief agency.� I put him on as a night messenger so that he'd have a fixed salary.� In a few days I had a letter from him, a batty letter in which he asked me to excuse him for being absent as he had to report to his parole officer.� Then another letter saying that his wife had refused to sleep with him because she didn't want any more babies and would I please come to see them and try to persuade her to sleep with him.� I went to his home - a cellar in the Italian quarter.� It looked like a bughouse.� Lena was pregnant again, about seven months under way, and on the verge of idiocy.� She had taken to sleeping on the roof because it was too hot in the cellar, also because she didn't want him to touch her any more.� When I said it wouldn't make any difference now she just looked at me and grinned.� Clausen had been in the war and maybe the gas had made him a bit goofy - at any rate he was foaming at the mouth.� He said he would brain her if she didn't stay off that roof.� He insinuated that she was sleeping up there in order to carry on with the coal man who lived in the attic.� At this Lena smiled again with that mirthless batrachian grin.� Clausen lost his temper and gave her a swift kick in the ass.� She went out in a huff taking the brats with her.� He told her to stay out for good.� Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a big Colt.� He was keeping it in case he needed it some time, he said.� He showed me a few knives, too, and a sort of blackjack which he had made himself.� Then he began to weep.� He said his wife was making a fool of him.� He said he was sick of working for her because she was sleeping with everybody in the neighbourhood.� The kids weren't his because he couldn't make a kid any more even if he wanted to.� The very next day, while Lena was out marketing, he took the kids up to the roof and with the blackjack he had shown me he beat their brains out.� Then he jumped off the roof head first.� When Lena came home and saw what happened she went off her nut.� They had to put her in a strait jacket and call for the ambulance....� There was Schuldig, the rat who had spent twenty years in prison for a crime he had never committed.� He had been beaten almost to death before he confessed; then solitary confinement, starvation, torture, perversion, dope.� When they finally released him he was no longer a human being.� He described to me one night his last thirty days in jail, the agony of waiting to be released.� I have never heard anything like it; I didn't think a human being could survive such anguish.� Freed, he was haunted by the fear that he might be obliged to commit a crime and be sent back to prison again.� He complained of being followed, spied on, perpetually tracked.� He said "they" were tempting him to do things he had no desire to do.� "They" were the dicks who were on his trail, who were paid to bring him back again.� At night, when he was asleep, they whispered in his ear.� He was powerless against them because they mesmerized him first.� Sometimes they placed dope under his pillow, and with it a revolver or a knife.� They wanted him to kill some innocent person so that they would have a solid case against him this time.� He got worse and worse.� One night, after he had walked around for hours with a batch of telegrams in his pocket, he went up to a cop and asked to be locked up.� He couldn't remember his name or address or even the office he was working for.� He had completely lost his identity.� He repeated over and over - "I'm innocent.... I'm innocent."� Again they gave him the third degree.� Suddenly he jumped up and shouted like a madman - "I'll confess ... I'll confess" - and with that he began to reel off one crime after another.� He kept it up for three hours.� Suddenly, in the midst of a harrowing confession, he stopped short, gave a quick look about, like a man who has suddenly come to, and then, with the rapidity and the force which only a madman can summon, he made a tremendous leap across the room and crashed his skull against the stone wall.... I relate these incidents briefly and hurriedly as they flash through my mind; my memory is packed with thousands of such details, with a myriad faces, gestures, tales, confessions all entwined and interlaced like the stupendous reeling fa�ade of some Hindu temple made not of stone but of the experience of human flesh, a monstrous dream edifice built entirely of reality and yet not reality itself but merely the vessel in which the mystery of the human being is contained.� My mind wanders to the clinic where in ignorance and good will I brought some of the younger ones to be cured.� I can think of no more evocative image to convey the atmosphere of this place than the painting by Hieronymus Bosch in which the magician, after the manner of a dentist extracting a live nerve, is represented as the deliverer of insanity.� All the trumpery and quackery of our scientific practitioners came to apotheosis in the person of the suave sadist who operated this clinic with the full concurrence and connivance of the law.� He was a ringer for Caligary, except that he was minus the dunce cap.� Pretending that he understood the secret regulations of the glands, invested with the power of a medieval monarch, oblivious of the pain he inflicted, ignorant of everything but his medical knowledge, he went to work on the human organism like a plumber sets to work on the underground drainpipes.� In addition to the poisons he threw into the patient's system he had recourse to his fists or his knees as the case might be.� Anything justified a "reaction".� If the victim were lethargic he shouted at him, slapped him in the face, pinched his arm, cuffed him, kicked him.� If on the contrary the victim were too energetic he employed the same methods, only with redoubled zest.� The feelings of his subject were of no importance to him; whatever reaction he succeeded in obtaining was merely a demonstration or manifestation of the laws regulating the operation of the internal glands of secretion.� The purpose of his treatment was to render the subject fit for society.� But no matter how fast he worked, no matter whether he was successful or not successful, society was turning out more and more misfits.� Some of them were so marvellously maladapted that when, in order to get the proverbial reaction, he slapped them vigorously on the cheek they responded with an uppercut or a kick in the balls.� It's true, most of his subjects were exactly what he described them to be - incipient criminals.� The whole continent was on the slide - is still on the slide - and not only the glands needs regulating but the ball bearings, the armature, the skeletal structure, the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the coccyx, the larynx, the pancreas, the liver, the upper intestine and the lower intestine, the heart, the kidneys, the testicles, the womb, the Fallopian tubes, the whole goddamned works.� The whole country is lawless, violent, explosive, demoniacal.� It's in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-grandiose landscape, in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the torrential rivers that bite through the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal distances, the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits, the mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs, the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness of temperaments, principles, needs, requirements.� The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom.� The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok.� Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all.� The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair.� From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story.� Nature dominates.� Nature wins out.� Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder.� Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous.� Inwardly they are filled with worms.� A tiny spark and they blow up.

��������� Often it happens, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his shoulder.� He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon.� Nine times out of ten he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everyone liked.� But when the rage came on nothing could stop him.� He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot.� It always happens that way with peaceable people.� One day they run amok.� In America they're constantly running amok.� What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their blood lust.� Europe is bled regularly by war.� America is pacifistic and cannibalistic.� Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it's a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbour and sucking the juice from his bones.� Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it's a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling the flesh.� Nobody knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content.� That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell.� The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place.

��������� Nobody can have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this nightmare.� The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in my ears.� Like my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic.� The millions who were put away in the carnage passed away in a cloud, much like the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the Red Indians and the buffaloes.� People pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren't.� They were simply tossing fitfully in their sleep.� No-one lost his appetite, no-one got up and rang the fire alarm.� The day I first realized that there had been a war was about six months or so after the armistice.� It was on a street car on the 14th Street crosstown line.� One of our heroes, a Texas lad with a string of medals across his chest, happened to see an officer passing on the sidewalk.� The sight of the officer enraged him.� He was a sergeant himself and he probably had good reason to be sore.� Anyway, the sight of the officer enraged him so that he got up from his seat and began to bawl the shit out of the government, the army, the civilians, the passengers in the car, everybody and everything.� He said if there was ever another war they couldn't drag him to it with a twenty-mule team.� He said he'd see every son of a bitch killed before he'd go again himself; he said he didn't give a fuck about the medals they had decorated him with and to show that he meant it he ripped them of and threw them out the window; he said if he was ever in a trench with an officer again he'd shoot him in the back like a dirty dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general.� He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he'd picked up over there, and nobody opened his trap to gainsay him.� And when he� got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you and all.� And the second time I experienced the reality of war was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night messengers, flew off the handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the railway stations.� They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn't have the heart to fire him.� He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction that I felt more like hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ he would go up to the twenty-fifth floor, or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang.� But in the name of discipline, and to uphold the bloody farce it was, I had to do something to punish him or be punished for it myself, and so not knowing what less I could do I took him off the commission basis and put him back on a salary basis.� He took it pretty badly, not realizing exactly where I stood, either for him or against him, and so I got a letter from him pronto, saying that he was going to pay me a visit in a day or two and that I'd better watch out because he was going to take it out of my hide.� He said he'd come up after office hours and that if I was afraid I'd better have some strong-arm men around to look after me.� I knew he meant every word he said and I felt pretty damned quaky when I put the letter down.� I waited in for him alone, however, feeling that it would be even more cowardly to ask for protection.� It was a strange experience.� He must have realized the moment he laid eyes on me that I was a son of a bitch and a lying, stinking hypocrite, as he had called me in his letter.� I was only that because he was what he was, which wasn't a hell of a lot better.� He must have realized immediately that we were both in the same boat and that the bloody boat was leaking pretty badly.� I could see something like that going on in him as he strode forward, outwardly still furious, still foaming at the mouth, but inwardly all spent, all soft and feathery.� As for myself, what fear I had vanished the moment I saw him enter.� Just being there quiet and alone, and being less strong, less capable of defending myself, gave me the drop on him.� Not that I wanted to have the drop on him either.� But it had turned out that way and I took advantage of it, naturally.� The moment he sat down he went soft as putty.� He wasn't a man any more, but just a big child.� There must have been millions of them like him, big children with machine guns who could ripe out whole regiments without batting an eyelash; but back in the work trenches, without a weapon, without a clear, visible enemy, they were helpless as ants.� Everything revolved about the question of food.� The food and the rent - that was all there was to fight about - but there was no way, no clear, visible way, to fight for it.� It was like seeing an army strong and well equipped, capable of licking anything in sight, and yet ordered to retreat every day, to retreat and retreat and retreat because that was the strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing ground, losing guns, losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, losing life itself finally.� Wherever there were men fighting for food and rent there was this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no earthly reason except that it was the strategic thing to do.� It was eating the heart out of him.� To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an army of ghosts.� All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped off, one after the other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it.� He was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk.� And while he's sobbing like that suddenly the telephone rings and it's the vice-president's office - never the vice-president himself, but always his office - and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up.� I don't say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids.� And when I leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody's going to pay for it - any anyway I want to know first where the order comes from and why.� And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president's office in the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask - and why?� And before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don't like it and can't take it - and if you don't like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass - and like that I walk out on him.� I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual.� I expect, of course, that I'll get the sack before the day's over.� But nothing of the kind.� No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don't do anything hasty, we'll look into it, etc.� I guess they're still looking into it because Griswold went on working just as always - in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt.� But that's what happens to a guy when he's just a hero in his sleep.� Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president.� It's all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish.� I know it as I was in it, because I woke up.� And when I woke up I walked out on it.� I walked out by the same door that I had walked in - without as much as a by-your-leave, sir!

��������� Things take place instantaneously, but there's a long process to be gone through first.� What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark.� But everything happens according to law - and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos.� Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed.� After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish.� All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms.� I never had a moment to myself.� If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me.� Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn't seem to make much difference whether I came or not.� Each set of friends I made despised the other set.� Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot.� Ulric too was rather scornful of the others.� He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years.� We hadn't seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street.� That day was an important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I had often dreamed about but never hoped to see.� I remember vividly that we were standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street toward dusk.� I remember it because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man talking about Mt. Etna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and Paris on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street, Manhattan.� I remember the way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn't quite realized what he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in returning.� His eyes seemed to be saying all the time - this has no value, no value whatever.� He didn't say that, however, but just this over and over: "I'm sure you'd like it!� I'm sure it's just the place for you."� When he left me I was in a daze.� I couldn't get hold of him again quickly enough.� I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail.� Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account from my friend's own lips.� It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that we had sprung out of the same environment. �He had managed it because he had rich friends - and because he knew how to save his money.� I had never known anyone who was rich, who had travelled, who had money in the bank.� All my friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for the future.� O'Mara, yes, he had travelled a bit, almost all over the world - but as a bum, or else in the army, which was even worse than being a bum.� My friend Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met who I could truly say had travelled.� And he knew how to talk about his experiences.

 

��������� As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently thereafter, for a period of several months.� He used to call for me in the evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby.� What a thirst I had!� Every slightest detail about the other world fascinated me.� Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, still real.� Sometimes, after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre, of the Sacr� Coeur, through the Rue Lafitte, in the last flush of twilight.� Just a Brooklyn Boy!� That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately.� And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men.� But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens that I meet anyone who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has seen and felt.� Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are responsible, more than anything else, for my being here today.� Most of the places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall perhaps never see.� But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our rambles through the park.

��������� Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence's work.� Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas.� Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence's words.� Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did.� Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged.� Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface.� Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris.� And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.

��������� My friend Kronski used to twit me about my "euphorias".� It was a sly way he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow would find me depressed.� It was true.� I had nothing but ups and downs.� Long stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety, of trancelike inspiration.� Never a level in which I was myself.� It sounds strange to say so, yet I was never myself.� I was either anonymous or the person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree.� In the latter mood, for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a trolley car.� Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good employment manager.� I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night when I was in one of my states of "euphoria".� We had bordered the trolley at the Brooklyn Bridge to go to some flat in Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were waiting to receive us.� Hymie had started to talk to me in his usual way about his wife's ovaries.� In the first place he didn't know precisely what ovaries meant and so I was explaining to him in crude and simple fashion.� In the midst of my explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and ridiculous that Hymie shouldn't know what ovaries were that I became drunk, as drunk I mean as if I had had a quart of whisky under my belt.� From the idea of diseased ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of tropical growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and ends in the midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might say, were Dante and Shakespeare.� At the same instant I also suddenly recalled my whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word "ovaries" had broken. �I realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word "ovaries" had sieved through me like sand.� What I had begun, in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, usually when walking to my father's shop, a performance which was repeated day in and day out as if in a trance.� What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a ferocious activity.� Not for years had I thought of this book which I used to write every day on my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill.� But going over the bridge, the sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers, the remembrance of the past set in ... remembrance of going back and forth over the bridge, going to a job which was death, returning to a home which was a morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into the cemetery, spitting into the cemetery from the elevated train, the same guard on the platform every morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles reading their newspapers, new skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in and die in, the boats passing below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day Line, why I am going to work, what will I do tonight, the warm cunt beside me and can I work my knuckles into her groin, run away and become a cowboy, try Alaska, the gold mines, get off and turn around, don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew, head and shoulders in the mud, legs free; fish will come and bite, tomorrow a new life, where, anywhere, why begin again, the same thing everywhere, death, death is the solution, but don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, a new face, a new friend, millions of chances, you're too young yet, you're melancholy, you don't die yet, wait another day, a stroke of luck, fuck anyway, and so on over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody glued together, worms, ants, crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts crawling out the same way.... Maybe, being up high between the two shores, suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side of the high tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, flowing on like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself; anyway each time I passed on high I was truly alone and whenever that happened the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never admitted.� If this then was the true self it was marvellous, and what's more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it.� From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence.� My thoughts too led an independent existence.� Suddenly, looking at Hymie and thinking of that strange word "ovaries", now stranger than any word in my whole vocabulary, this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside me was a bullfrog, absolutely a bullfrog and nothing more.� I was jumping from the bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs clear and waiting for a bite; like that, Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the solid core of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell.� I was walking through the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order to fall on me and slay me.� I was walking again in Dreamland and a man was walking above me on a tightrope and above him a man was sitting in an airplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky.� The woman hanging on my arm was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside her would be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a package a day.� In the womb nails formed on every finger, every toe; you could stop right there, at a toenail, the tiniest toenail imaginable, and you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out.� On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, indecipherable script.� the bullfrog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat; they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze.� Each collar button was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting for a bite.� Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in his work.� Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless reverie of rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes.� A glaucous frost of non-comprehension swept clear by gales of laughter.� From the hub of the bullfrog's eye radiated clean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bullfrog was an ovarian spud generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; for him men sat upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for him the anaesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the big Bertha which could destroy what the eyes could not see; for him the molecule was broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each night the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth photographed in the act of gestation; for him the barriers of time and space were set at nought and all movement, be it the flight of birds or the revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the high priests of the dispossessed cosmos.� Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time.� I could see it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying "death" but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but this life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the death something still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating endless movement.� Through love this might happen, or sorrow, or being born with a club foot; the cause nothing, the event everything.� In the beginning was the Word.... Whatever this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe.� Any word contained all words - for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause.� In every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which expressed itself in beginning and end.� So, on the ovarian trolley there was this voyage of man and bullfrog composed of identical stuff, neither better nor less than Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely the meaning of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of everything, hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings, finally to be deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be carried back into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust molls with twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.

��������� What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me.� Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing.� It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter.� Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature.� To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature.� I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society.� I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.

��������� Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I attached myself to the old.� In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed my attention.� I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object.� Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, attracted and endeared it to me.� If this was perverse it was also healthy, considering that I was not destined to belong to this world which was springing up about me.� Soon I too would become like these objects which I venerated, a thing apart, a non-useful member of society.� I was definitely dated, that was certain.� And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish.� But never to be accepted, in a genuine way.� When I wished to, when I had the itch, I could single out any man, in any stratum of society, and make him listen to me.� I could hold him spellbound, if I chose, but, like a magician, or a sorcerer, only as long as the spirit was in me.� At bottom I sensed in others a distrust, an uneasiness, an antagonism which, because it was instinctive, was irremediable.� I should have been a clown; it would have afforded me the widest range of expression.� But I underestimated the profession.� Had I become a clown, or even a vaudeville entertainer, I would have been famous.� People would have appreciated me precisely because they would not have understood; but they would have understood that I was not to be understood.� That would have been a relief, to say the least.

��������� It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could become riled just listening to me talk.� Perhaps my speech was somewhat extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in with main force.� The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came to my lips, the allusions to subjects which were taboo - everything conspired to set me� off as an outlaw, as an enemy of society.� No matter how well things began sooner or later they smelled me out.� If I were modest and humble, for example, then I was too modest, too humble.� If I were gay and spontaneous, bold and reckless, then I was too free, too gay.� I could never get myself quite au point with the individual I happened to be talking to.� If it were not a question of life and death - everything was life and death to me then - if it was merely a question of passing a pleasant evening at the home of some acquaintance, it was the same thing.� There were vibrations emanating from me, overtones and undertones, which charged the atmosphere unpleasantly.� Perhaps the whole evening they had been amused by my stories, perhaps I had them in stitches, as it often happened, and everything seemed to auger well.� But sure as fate something was bound to happen before the evening came to a close, some vibration set loose which made the chandelier ring or which reminded some sensitive soul of the pisspot under the bed.� Even while the laughter was still dying off the venom was beginning to make itself felt.� "Hope to see you again some time," they would say, but the wet, limp hand which was extended would belie the words.

��������� Persona non grata!� Jesus, how clear it seems to me now!� No pick and choice possible: I had to take what was to hand and learn to like it.� I had to learn to live with the scum, to swim like a sewer rat or be drowned.� If you elect to join the herd you are immune.� To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd.� You may dream, if you dream alike.� But if you dream something different you are not in America, of America American, but a Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee.� The moment you have a "different" thought you cease to be an American.� And the moment you become something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.

��������� Am I saying this with rancour, with envy, with malice?� Perhaps.� Perhaps I regret not having been able to become an American.� Perhaps.� In my zeal now, which is again American, I am about to give birth to a monstrous edifice, a skyscraper, which will last undoubtedly long after the other skyscrapers have vanished, but which will vanish too when that which produced it disappears.� Everything American will disappear one day, more completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian.� This is one of the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream where, buffaloes all, we once grazed in peace.� An idea that has caused me infinite sorrow, for not to belong to something enduring is the last agony.� But I am not a buffalo and I have no desire to be one, I am not even a spiritual buffalo.� I have slipped away to rejoin an older stream of consciousness, a race antecedent to the buffaloes, a race that will survive the buffalo.

��������� All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are veined with ineradicable traits.� What is me is ineradicable, because it is different.� This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the usual skyscraper � l'am�ricaine.� In this skyscraper there are no elevators, no seventy-third-storey windows to jump from.� If you get tired of climbing you are shit out of luck.� There is no slot directory in the main lobby.� If you are searching for somebody you will have to search.� If you want a drink you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths.� All the other skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want, what I like.� And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and we're going to get to her when the spirit moves me.� For the time being she's all right, Valeska, seeing as how she's six feet under and by now perhaps picked clean by the worms.� When she was in the flesh she was picked clean too, by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a different tint, a different odour.

��������� The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in her veins.� It was depressing for everybody around her.� She made you aware of it whether you wished to be or no.� The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact that her mother was a trollop.� The mother was white, of course.� Who the father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.

��������� Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little Jew from the vice-president's office happened to espy her.� He was horrified, so he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured person as my secretary.� He spoke as though she might contaminate the messengers.� The next day I was put on the carpet.� It was exactly as though I had committed sacrilege.� Of course I pretended that I hadn't observed anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and extremely capable.� Finally the president himself stepped in.� There was a short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically proposed to give her a better position in Havana.� No talk of the blood taint.� Simply that her services had been altogether remarkable and that they would like to promote her - to Havana.� Valeska came back to the office in a rage.� When she was angry she was magnificent.� She said she wouldn't budge.� Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time and we all went out to dinner together.� During the course of the evening we got a bit tight.� Valeska's tongue was wagging.� On the way home she told me that she was going to put up a fight; she wanted to know if it would endanger my job.� I told her quietly that if she were fired I would quit too.� She pretended not to believe it at first.� I said I meant it, that I didn't care what happened.� She seemed to be unduly impressed; she took me by the two hands and she held them very gently, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

��������� That was the beginning of things.� I think it was the very next day that I slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her.� She read the note sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the eye and said she didn't believe it.� But we went to dinner again that night and we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she pressed herself against me lasciviously.� It was just the time, as luck would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion.� I was telling Valeska about it as we danced.� On the way home she suddenly said - "Why don't you let me lend you a hundred dollars?"� The next thing I brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars.� I was amazed how well the two of them got along.� Before the evening was over it was agreed upon that Valeska would come to the house the day of the abortion and take care of the kid.� The day came and I gave Valeska the afternoon off.� About an hour after she had left I suddenly decided that I would take the afternoon off also.� I started toward the burlesque on Fourteenth Street.� When I was about a block from the theatre I suddenly changed my mind.� It was just the thought that if anything happened - if the wife were to kick off - I wouldn't feel so damned good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque.� I walked around a bit, in and out of the penny arcades, and then I started homeward.�

��������� It's strange how things turn out.� Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child.� You take the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently pull the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come to the edge of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall onto the floor.� We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got so sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep.� The dominoes were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too.� Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down my throat, my hand between her legs.� As I laid her back on the table she twined her legs around me.� I could fell one of the dominoes under my feet - I thought of my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one day that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his eyes as he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought of the attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture of Teddy charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I used to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship "Maine" that floated over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of Admiral Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy Yard which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered that we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the doctor's office I didn't have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human beings.... We had hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife coming home from the slaughterhouse.� I was still buttoning my fly as I went through the hall to open the gate.� She was as white as flour.� She looked as though she'd never be able to go through another one.� We put her to bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on the table.� Just the other night in a bistro, as I was going to the toilet, I happened to pass two old fellows playing dominoes.� I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino.� The feeling of it immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made when they fell on the floor.� And with the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith in human beings gone.� So that every time I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and looked down toward the Navy Yard I felt as though my guts were dropping out.� Way up there, suspended between the two shores, I felt always as though I were hanging over a void; up there everything that had ever happened to me seemed unreal, and worse than unreal - unnecessary.� Instead of joining me to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge seemed to break all connections.� If I walked toward the one shore or the other it made no difference: either way was hell.� Somehow I had managed to sever my connection with the world that human hands and human minds were creating.� Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud by the books I read.� But it is ages since books have claimed me.� For a long time now I have practically ceased to read.� But the taint is still there.� Now people are books to me.� I read them from cover to cover and toss them aside.� I devour them, one after the other.� And the more I read, the more insatiable I become.� There is no limit to it.� There could be no end, and there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form which united me again with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.

��������� A terrible sense of desolation.� It hung over me for years.� If I were to believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under the reign of Saturn.� Everything that happened to me happened too late to mean much to me.� It was even so with my birth.� Slated for Christmas I was born a half hour too late.� It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the sort of individual that one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the 25th day of December.� Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus Christ ... perhaps Krishnamurti too, for all I know.� Anyway that's the sort of guy I was intended to be.� But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another configuration - with a bad setup in other words. �They say - the astrologers, I mean - that it will get better and better for me as I go on; the future, in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious.� But what do I care about the future?� It would have been better if my mother had tripped on the stairs the morning of the 25th December and broken her neck: that would have given me a fair start!� When I try to think, therefore, of where the break occurred I keep putting it back further and further, until there is no other way of accounting for it than by the retarded hour of birth.� Even my mother, with her caustic tongue, seemed to understand it somewhat.� "Always dragging behind, like a cow's tail" - that's how she characterized me.� But is it my fault that she held me locked inside her until the hour had passed?� Destiny had prepared me to be such and such a person; the stars were in the right conjunction and I was right with the stars and kicking to get out.� But I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me.� Perhaps I was lucky not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances.� One thing seems clear, however - and this is a hangover from the 25th - that I was born with a crucifixion complex.� That is, to be more precise, I was born a fanatic.� Fanatic!� I remember that word being hurled at me from early childhood on.� By my parents especially.� What is a fanatic?� One who believes passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes.� I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble.� The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed.� I believed - and the rest of the world did not!� If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that.� Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet.� It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind.� Treachery is understandable and combatable.� No, it is something worse, something less than treachery.� It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself.� You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself.� You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss.� It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love.� The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats.� Nobody wants real love, real hatred.� Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice.� While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there's no such thing as blood and no such thing as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh.� Keep of the grass!� That's the motto by which people live.

��������� If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right yourself.� Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an unnatural gaiety, I might say.� There are only two peoples in the world today who understand the meaning of such a statement - the Jews and the Chinese.� If it happens that you are neither of these you find yourself in a strange predicament.� You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable.� But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live.� That means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time.� It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead.� In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most abnormal conditions.� Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so.� You no longer believe in reality but in thinking.� And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.

��������� In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead end.� At the moment when he was tottering and swaying, as if by a great recoil, the negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death.� The whole negative impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible.� There was a resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny.� The earth rolls on, the stars roll on, but men, the great body of men which makes up the world, are caught in the image of the one and only one.

��������� If one isn't crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and beyond the sense of desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens.� It's as though one had actually died and actually been resurrected again; one lives a supernormal life, life the Chinese.� That is to say, one is unnaturally gay, unnaturally healthy, unnaturally indifferent.� The tragic sense is gone: one lives on like a flower, a rock, a tree, one with Nature and against Nature at the same time.� If your best friend dies you don't even bother to go to the funeral; if a man is run down by a streetcar right before your eyes you keep on walking just as though nothing had happened; if a war breaks out you let your friends go to the front but you yourself take no interest in the slaughter.� And so on and so on.� Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show.� Loneliness is abolished, because all values, your own included, are destroyed.� Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy - it is something monstrous and evil.� You care so little that you can afford to sacrifice yourself for anybody or anything.� At the same time your interest, your curiosity, develops at an outrageous pace.� This too is suspect, since it is capable of attaching you to a collar button just as well as to a cause.� There is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable.� The surface of your being is constantly crumbling; within however you grow hard as a diamond.� And perhaps it is this hard, magnetic core inside you which attracts others to you willy-nilly.� One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is your inalienably.� You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you.

��������� Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time that I was going through the great change.� Everything I endured was in the nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one evening, I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and sought the woman who was to liberate me from a living death.� In the light of this I look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of New York, the white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in which I was born as one sees things in a mirage.� Often it was O'Rourke, the company detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets.� Often the snow was on the ground and the air chill and frosty.� And O'Rourke talking interminably about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, about the Golden Age.� He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a subject, of stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his heavy foot between mine so that I couldn't budge.� And then, seizing the lapel of my coat, he would bring his face to mine and talk into my eyes, each word boring in like the turn of a gimlet.� I can see again the two of us standing in the middle of the street at four in the morning, the wind howling, the snow blowing down, and O'Rourke oblivious of everything but the story he had to get off his chest.� Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings out of the corner of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the two of us standing in Yorkville or on Allen Street or on Broadway.� Always it seemed a little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his banal murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture that man had ever created.� While he was talking about fingerprints I might be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just back of his black hat; I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had been installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made it so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we had passed from the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on, beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and woman.� It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to sit and listen to other people's stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment.� If, as it happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out his tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and "receive", it was only natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had to harden my heart.� The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me; I could chew on it and digest it for days and weeks.� Yet I was obliged to sit there and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to sleep listening, to dream listening.� They streamed in from all over the world, from every stratum of society, speaking a thousand different tongues, worshipping different gods, obeying different laws and customs.� The tale of the poorest among them was a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the Ten Commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like the Lord's Prayer.� Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint.� The greatest delight, and it was a rare one, was to walk the streets alone ... to walk the streets at night when no-one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded me.� Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide open and nothing but snores emanating from them.� Walking amidst the craziest architecture every invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an army of men itching to unravel their tale of misery.� In a year, reckoning it modestly, I received twenty-five thousand tales; in two years fifty thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand; in ten years I would be stark mad.� Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized town.� What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together!� Would they want skyscrapers?� Would they want museums?� Would they want libraries?� Would they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories?� Would they make the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum, from Battery Park to the Golden Bay?� I doubt it.� Only the lash of hunger could stir them.� The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the fear, the fear of worse, driving them on.� One after the other, all the same, all goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, making the finest steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware.� Walking with O'Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony.� And just as one can whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with,, so, listening to O'Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would stop talking and say "what'll you have to eat?"� In the midst of the most gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure to get at a certain place farther up the line, and wonder too what sort of vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I would order pie afterwards or a custard pudding.� It was the same when I slept with my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had the bad habit of letting things slide - the important things, I mean.� Fresh coffee was important - and fresh bacon with the eggs.� If she were knocked up again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more important than that was fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs.� I could put up with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing, something appetizing.� I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he had been taken down from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh.� I am sure that the shock of crucifixion would have been so great that he would have suffered a complete amnesia as regards humanity.� I am certain that after his wounds had healed he wouldn't have given a damn about the tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it.

��������� Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy.� And this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which eventually vitiates the whole world.� Whatever is created beyond the normal limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction.� At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of Christ.� When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel.� No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy.� One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full.� The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void.

��������� In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a sandwich, or a collar button.� I could study a cornice or a coping with the greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe.� I can remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who designed them.� I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind, standing at a certain corner; the tale that accompanied it is gone.� I can remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell you what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use?� There was one man in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances; there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast of the field.� Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death, so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death.� I was walking around in a stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended someone, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering.� Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning.� Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos but this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely peripheral, the tangential shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer concerns me.� Only a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New York looking about me as years ago I had looked about me; again I found myself studying the architecture, studying the minute details which only the dislocated eye takes in.� But this time it was like coming down from Mars.� What race of men is this, I asked myself.� What does it mean?� And there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was snuffed out in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and incomprehensible world, a world so removed from me that I had the sensation of belonging to another planet.� From the top of the Empire State Building I looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below: there they were, in true perspective, the human ants which whom I had crawled, the human lice with whom I had struggled.� They were moving along at a snail's pace, each one doubtless fulfilling his microcosmic destiny.� In their fruitless desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and boast.� And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their senseless warble.� At the very summit of their ambition there were these little spots of beings warbling away for dear life.� In a hundred years, I thought to myself, perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay, demented ones, who would sing about the world to come.� Perhaps they would breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked.� Perhaps in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life below might flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling creaking chaos of null and void.� In a thousand years they might all be demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has happened again and again.� Another thousand years, or five thousand, or ten thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a little boy may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this life now passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on closing the book will think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a marvellous life there had once been on this continent which he is now inhabiting.� But no race to come, except perhaps the race of blind poets, will ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this future history was composed.

��������� Chaos!� A howling chaos!� No need to choose a particular day.� And day of my life - back there - would suit.� Every day of my life, my tiny, microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos.� Let me think back.... At seven-thirty the alarm went off.� I didn't bounce out of bed.� I lay there till eight-thirty, trying the gain a little more sleep.� Sleep - how could I sleep?� In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already due.� I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room.� Why get up and repeat yesterday's song and dance?� As fast as I hired them they dropped out.� Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear.� Mondays I got my allowance from the wife - carfare and lunch money.� I was always in debt to her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on.� I couldn't be bothered shaving - there wasn't time enough.� I put on the torn shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway.� If she were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the subway.� I get to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an applicant.� While I make one call there are three other calls waiting to be answered.� I use two telephones at once.� The switchboard is buzzing.� Hymie is sharpening his pencils between calls.� McGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook, who is trying to sneak back under a false name.� Behind me the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine.� The bad ones are starred in red ink; some of them have six aliases after their names.� Meanwhile the room is crawling like a hive.� The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms, camphor, Lysol, bad breaths.� Half of them will have to be turned away - not that we don't need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just won't do.� The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City.� He's seventy now and would be glad to take anything.� He has wonderful letters of recommendation, but we can't take anyone over forty-five years of age.� Forty-five in New York is the deadline.� The telephone rings and it's a smooth secretary from the Y.M.C.A.� Wouldn't I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into his office - a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so.� What did he do?� He tried to rape his sister.� An Italian, of course.� O'Mara, my assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree.� He suspects him of being an epileptic.� Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy throws a fit right there in the office.� One of the women faints.� A beautiful looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to persuade me to take her on.� She's a whore clean through and I know if I put her on there'll be hell to pay.� She wants to work in a certain building uptown - because it is near home, she says.� Nearing lunch time and a few cronies are beginning to drop in.� They sit around watching me work, as if it were a vaudeville performance.� Kronski, the medical student, arrives; he says one of the boys I've just hired has Parkinson's disease.� I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to go to the toilet.� All the telegraph operators, all the managers, suffer from haemorrhoids, so O'Rourke tells me.� He's been having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works.� Lunch time and there are six of us at the table.� Some one will have to pay for me, as usual.� We gulp it down and rush back.� More calls to make, more applicants to interview.� The vice-president is raising hell because we can't keep the force up to normal.� Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New York carries long ads demanding help.� All the schools have been canvassed for part-time messengers.� All the charity bureaus and relief societies have been invoked.� They drop out like flies.� Some of them don't even last an hour.� It's a human flour mill.� And the saddest thing about it is that it's totally unnecessary.� But that's not my concern.� Mine is to do or die, as Kipling says.� I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting bigger and bigger.� Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, experience, etc.� All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then chronologically.� Names and dates.� Fingerprints too, if we had the time for it.� So that what?� So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be apprised immediately, that is to say, within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can.� Twenty million Christmas blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and maybe the telegram reads "Mother dying, come at once," but the clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages, spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same.� The clerk, of course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a messenger's job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the brats to thank the general manager, or perhaps the vice-president himself, for the kindness and consideration shown.� And then one day everybody will be heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O'Rourke will be asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him down even if it costs ten thousand dollars.� And then the vice-president will issue an order that no more Jews are to be hired, but after three or four days he will let up a bit because there are nothing but Jews coming for the job.� And because it's getting so very tough and the timber so damned scarce I'm on the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would have hired him if he hadn't broken down and confessed that he was a she.� And to make it worse Valeska takes "it" under her wing, takes "it" home that night and under pretence of sympathy gives "it" a thorough examination, including a vaginal exploration with the index finger of the right hand.� And the midget becomes very amorous and finally very jealous.� It's a trying day and on the way home I bump into the sister of one of my friends and she insists on taking me to dinner.� After dinner we go to a movie and in the dark we begin to play with each other and finally it gets to such a point that we leave the movie and go back to the office where I lay her on the zinc-covered table in the dressing room.� And when I get home, a little after midnight, there's a telephone call from Valeska and she wants me to hop into the subway immediately and come to her house, it's very urgent.� It's an hour's ride and I'm dead weary, but she said it was urgent and so I'm on the way.� And when I get there I meet her cousin, a rather attractive young woman, who, according to her own story, has just had an affair with a strange man because she was tired of being a virgin.� And what was all the fuss about?� Why this, that in her eagerness she had forgotten to take the usual precautions, and maybe now she was pregnant and then what?� They wanted to know what I thought should be done and I said: "Nothing."� And then Valeska takes me aside and she asks me if I wouldn't care to sleep with her cousin, to break her in, as it were, so that there wouldn't be a repetition of that sort of thing.

��������� The whole thing was cockeyed and we were all laughing hysterically and then we began to drink - the only thing they had in the house was k�mmel and it didn't take much to put us under.� And then it got more cockeyed because the two of them began to paw me and neither one would let the other do anything.� The result was I undressed them both and put them to bed and they fell asleep in each other's arms.� And when I walked out, toward 5 A.M., I discovered I didn't have a cent in my pocket and I tried to bum a nickel from a taxi driver but nothing doing so finally I took off my furlined overcoat and I gave it to him - for a nickel.� When I got home my wife was awake and sore as hell because I had stayed out so long.� We had a hot discussion and finally I lost my temper and I clouted her and she fell on the floor and began to weep and sob and then the kid woke up and hearing the wife bawling she got frightened and began to scream at the top of her lungs.� The girl upstairs came running down to see what was the matter.� She was in her kimono and her hair was hanging down her back.� In the excitement she got close to me and things happened without either of us intending anything to happen.� We put the wife to bed with a wet towel around her forehead and while the girl upstairs was bending over I stood behind her and lifting her kimono I got it into her and she stood there a long time talking a lot of foolish, soothing nonsense.� Finally I climbed into bed with the wife and to my utter amazement she began to cuddle up to me and without saying a word we locked horns and we stayed that way until dawn.� I should have been worn out, but instead I was wide-awake, and I lay there beside her planning to take the day off and look up the whore with the beautiful fur whom I was talking to earlier in the day.� After that I began to think about another woman, the wife of one of my friends who always twitted me about my indifference.� And then I began to think about one after the other - all those whom I had passed up for one reason or another - until finally I fell sound asleep and in the midst of it I had a wet dream.� At seven-thirty the alarm went off as usual and as usual I looked at my torn shirt hanging over the chair and I said to myself what's the use and I turned over.� At eight o'clock the telephone rang and it was Hymie.� Better get over quickly, he said, because there's a strike on.� And that's how it went, day after day, and there was no reason for it, except that the whole country was cockeyed and what I relate was going on everywhere, either on a smaller scale or a larger scale, but the same thing everywhere, because it was all chaos and all meaningless.

��������� It went on and on that way, day in and day out for almost five solid years.� The continent itself perpetually wracked by cyclones, tornadoes, tidal waves, droughts, blizzards, heat waves, pests, strikes, hold-ups, assassinations, suicides ... a continuous fever and torment, an eruption, a whirlpool.� I was like a man sitting in a lighthouse: below me the wild waves, the rocks, the reefs, the debris of shipwrecked fleets.� I could give the danger signal but I was powerless to avert catastrophe.� I breathed danger and catastrophe.� At times the sensation of it was so strong that it belched like fire from my nostrils.� I longed to be free of it all and yet I was irresistibly attracted.� I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time.� I was like the lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent sea.� Beneath me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the towering skyscrapers were reared.� My foundations went deep into the earth and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts.� Above all I was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly.� This eye so wide-awake seemed to have made all my other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the effort to see, to take in the drama of the world.

��������� If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished.� I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea.� I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer.� I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn.� I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea.� I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight.� I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires.� I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget.� I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited.� I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea.� I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation.� I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system.� I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death.� I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets.� To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time.� Never more to speak or to listen or to think.� To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time.� No more pity, no more tenderness.� To be human only terrestrially, like a planet or a worm or a brook.� To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.

 

 

 

It was just about a week before Valeska committed suicide that I ran into Mara.� The week or two preceding that event was a veritable nightmare.� A series of sudden deaths and strange encounters with women.� First of all there was Pauline Janowski, a little Jewess of sixteen or seventeen who was without a home and without friends or relatives.� She came to the office looking for a job.� It was toward closing time and I didn't have the heart to turn her down cold.� For some reason or other I took it into my head to bring her home for dinner and if possible try to persuade the wife to put her up for a while.� What attracted me to he was her passion for Balzac.� All the way home she was talking to me about Lost Illusions.� The car was packed and we were jammed so tight together that it didn't make any difference what we were talking about because we were both thinking of only one thing.� My wife of course was stupefied to see me standing at the door with a beautiful young girl.� She was polite and courteous in her frigid way but I could see immediately that it was no use asking her to put the girl up.� It was about all she could do to sit through the dinner with us.� As soon as we had finished she excused herself and went to the movies.� The girl started to weep.� We were still sitting at the table, the dishes piled up in front of us.� I went over to her and I put my arms around her.� I felt genuinely sorry for her and I was perplexed as to what to do for her.� Suddenly she threw her arms around my neck and she kissed me passionately.� We stood there a long while embracing each other and then I thought to myself no, it's a crime, and besides maybe the wife didn't go to the movies at all, maybe she'll be ducking back any minute.� I told the kid to pull herself together, that we'd take a trolley ride somewhere.� I say the child's bank lying on the mantelpiece and I took it to the toilet and emptied it silently.� There was only about seventy-five cents in it.� We got on a trolley and went to the beach.� Finally we found a deserted spot and we lay down in the sand.� She was hysterically passionate and there was nothing to do but to do it.� I thought she would reproach me afterwards, but she didn't.� We lay there a while and she began talking about Balzac again.� It seems she had ambitions to be a writer herself.� I asked her what she was going to do.� She said she hadn't the least idea.� When we got up to go she asked me to put her on the highway.� Said she thought she would go to Cleveland or some place.� It was after midnight when I left her standing in front of a gas station.� She had about thirty-five cents in her pocketbook.� As I started homeward I began cursing my wife for the mean bitch that she was.� I wished to Christ it was she whom I had left standing on the highway with no place to go to.� I knew that when I got back she wouldn't even mention the girl's name.

��������� I got back and she was waiting up for me.� I thought she was going to give me hell again.� But no, she had waited up because there was an important message from O'Rourke.� I was to telephone him soon as I got home.� However, I decided not to telephone.� I decided to get undressed and go to bed.� Just when I had gotten comfortably settled the telephone rang.� It was O'Rourke.� There was a telegram for me at the office - he wanted to know if he should open it and read it to me.� I said of course.� The telegram was signed Monica.� It was from Buffalo.� Said she was arriving at the Grand Central in the morning with her mother's body.� I thanked him and went back to bed.� No questions from the wife.� I lay there wondering what to do.� If I were to comply with the request that would mean starting things all over again.� I had just been thanking my stars that I had gotten rid of Monica.� And now she was coming back with her mother's corpse.� Tears and reconciliation.� No, I didn't like the prospect at all.� Supposing I didn't show up?� What then?� There was always somebody around to take care of a corpse.� Especially if the bereaved were an attractive young blonde with sparkling blue eyes.� I wondered if she'd go back to her job in the restaurant.� If she hadn't known Greek and Latin I would never have been mixed up with her.� But my curiosity got the better of me.� And then she was so goddamned poor, that too got me.� Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if her hands hadn't smelled greasy.� That was the fly in the ointment - the greasy hands.� I remember the first night I met her and we strolled through the park.� She was ravishing to look at, and she was alert and intelligent.� It was just the time when women were wearing short skirts and she wore them to advantage.� I used to go to the restaurant night after night just to watch her moving around, watch her bending over to serve or stopping down to pick up a fork.� And with the beautiful legs and the bewitching eyes a marvellous line about Homer, with the pork and sauerkraut a verse of Sappho's, the Latin conjugations, the odes of Pindar, with the dessert perhaps The Rubaiyat or Cynara.� But the greasy hands and the frowsy bed in the boarding house opposite the marketplace - Whew!� I couldn't stomach it.� The more I shunned her the more clinging she became.� Ten-page letters about love with footnotes on Thus Spake Zarathustra.� And then suddenly silence and me congratulating myself heartily.� No, I couldn't bring myself to go to the Grand Central Station in the morning.� I rolled over and I fell sound asleep.� In the morning I would get the wife to telephone the office and say I was ill.� I hadn't been ill now for over a week - it was coming to me.

��������� At noon I find Kronski waiting for me outside the office.� He wants me to have lunch with him ... there's an Egyptian girl he wants me to meet.� The girl turns out to be a Jewess, but she came from Egypt and she looks like an Egyptian.� She's hot stuff and the two of us are working on her at once.� As I was supposed to be ill I decided not to return to the office but to take a stroll through the East Side.� Kronski was going back to cover me up.� We shook hands with the girl and we each went our separate ways.� I headed toward the river where it was cool, having forgotten about the girl almost immediately.� I sat on the edge of the pier with my legs dangling over the stringpiece.� A scow passed with a load of red bricks.� Suddenly Monica came to my mind.� Monica arriving at the Grand Central Station with a corpse.� A corpse f.o.b.� New York!� It seemed so incongruous and ridiculous that I burst out laughing.� What had she done with it?� Had she checked it or had she left it on a siding?� No doubt she was cursing me out roundly.� I wondered what she would really think if she could have imagined me sitting there at the dock with my legs dangling over the stringpiece.� It was warm and sultry despite the breeze that was blowing off the river.� I began to snooze.� As I dozed off Pauline came to my mind.� I imagined her walking along the highway with her hand up.� She was a brave kid, no doubt about it.� Funny that she didn't seem to worry about getting knocked up.� Maybe she was so desperate she didn't care.� And Balzac!� Well, that was her affair.� Anyway she'd had enough to eat with, until she met another guy.� But a kind like that thinking about becoming a writer!� Well, why not?� Everybody had illusions of one sort or another.� Monica too wanted to be a writer.� Everybody was becoming a writer.� A writer!� Jesus, how futile it seemed!

 

��������� I dozed off ... When I woke up I had an erection.� The sun seemed to be burning right into my fly.� I got up and I washed my face at the drinking fountain.� It was still as hot and sultry as ever.� The asphalt was soft as mush, the flies were biting, the garbage was rotting in the gutter.� I walked about between the pushcarts and looked at things with an empty eye.� I had a sort of lingering hard-on all the while, but no definite object in mind.� It was only when I got back to Second Avenue that I suddenly remembered the Egyptian Jewess from lunch time.� I remembered her saying that she lived over the Russian restaurant near Twelfth Street.� When I got abreast of the Russian restaurant I paused a moment and then I ran up the stairs three at a time.� The hall door was open.� I climbed up a couple of flights scanning the names on the doors.� She was on the top floor and there was a man's name under hers.� I knocked softly.� No answer.� I knocked again, a little harder.� This time I heard someone moving about.� Then a voice close to the door, asking who it is and at the same time the knob turning.� I pushed the door open and stumbled into the darkened room.� Stumbled right into her arms and felt her naked under the half-opened kimono.� She must have come out of a sound sleep and only half realized who was holding her in her arms.� When she realized it was me she tried to break away but I had her tight and I began kissing her passionately and at the same time backing her up toward the couch near the window.� She mumbled something about the door being open but I wasn't taking any chance of letting her slip out of my arms.� So I made a slight detour and little by little I edged her toward the door and made her shove it to with her ass.� I locked it with my one free hand and then I moved her into the centre of the room and with the free hand I unbuttoned my fly and got my pecker out and into position.� She was so drugged with sleep that it was almost like working on an automaton.� I could see too that she was enjoying the idea of being fucked half asleep.� The only thing was that every time I made a lunge she grew more wide-awake.� And as she grew more conscious she became more frightened.� It was difficult to know how to put her to sleep again without losing a good fuck.� I managed to tumble her on to the couch without losing ground and she was hot as hell now, twisting and squirming like an eel.� From the time I had started to maul her I don't think she had opened her eyes once.� I kept saying to myself - "an Egyptian fuck ... an Egyptian fuck" - and so as not to shoot off immediately I deliberately began thinking about the corpse that Monica had dragged to the Grand Central Station and about the thirty-five cents that I had left with Pauline on the highway.� Then bango!� A loud knock on the door and with that she opens her eyes wide and looks at me in utmost terror.� I started to pull away quickly but to my surprise she held me tight.� "Don't move," she whispered in my ear.� "Wait!"� There was another loud knock and then I heard Kronski's voice saying "It's me, Thelma ... it's me, Izzy."� At that I almost burst out laughing.� We slumped back again into a natural position and as her eyes softly closed I moved it around inside her, gently, so as not to wake her up again.� It was one of the most wonderful fucks I ever had in my life.� I thought it was going to last forever.� Whenever I felt in danger of going off I would stop moving and think - think for example of where I would like to spend my vacation, if I got one, or think of the shirts lying in the bureau drawer, or the patch in the bedroom carpet just as the foot of the bed.� Kronski was still standing at the door - I could hear him changing about from one position to another.� Every� time I became aware of him standing there I jibbed her a little for good measure and in her half sleep she answered back, humorously, as though she understood what I meant by this put-and-take language.� I didn't dare to think what she might be thinking or I'd have come immediately.� Sometime I skirted dangerously close to it, but the saving trick was always Monica and the corpse at the Grand Central Station.� The thought of that, the humorousness of it, I mean, acted like a cold douche.

��������� When it was all over she opened her eyes wide and stared at me, as though she were taking me in for the first time.� I hadn't a word to say to her; the only thought in my head was to get out as quickly as possible.� As we were washing up I noticed a note on the floor near the door.� It was from Kronski.� His wife had just been taken to the hospital - he wanted her to meet him at the hospital.� I felt relieved!� It meant that I could break away without wasting any words.

��������� The next day I had a telephone call from Kronski.� His wife had died on the operating table.� That evening I went home for dinner; we were still at the table when the bell rang.� There was Kronski standing at the gate looking absolutely sunk.� It was always difficult for me to offer words of condolence; with him it was absolutely impossible.� I listened to my wife uttering her trite words of sympathy and I felt more than ever disgusted with her.� "Let's get out of here," I said.

��������� We walked along in absolute silence for a while.� At the park we turned in and headed for the meadows.� There was a heavy mist which made it impossible to see a yard ahead.� Suddenly, as we were swimming along, he began to sob.� I stopped and turned my head away.� When I thought he had finished I looked around and there he was staring at me with a strange smile.� "It's funny," he said, "how hard it is to accept death."� I smiled too now and put my hand on his shoulder.� "Go on," I said "talk your head off.� Get it off your chest."� We started walking again, up and down over the meadows, as though we were walking under the sea.� The mist had become so thick that I could just barely discern his features.� He was talking quietly and madly.� "I knew it would happen," he said.� "It was too beautiful to last."� The night before she was taken ill he had had a dream.� He dreamt that he had lost his identity.� "I was stumbling around in the dark calling my own name.� I remember coming to a bridge, and looking down into the water I saw myself drowning.� I jumped off the bridge head first and when I came up I saw Yetta floating under the bridge.� She was dead."� And then suddenly he added: "You were there yesterday when I knocked at the door, weren't you?� I knew you were and I couldn't go away.� I knew too that Yetta was dying and I wanted to be with her, but I was afraid to go alone."� I said nothing and he rambled on.� "The first girl I ever loved died in the same way.� I was only a kid and I couldn't get over it.� Every night I used to go to the cemetery and sit by her grave.� People thought I was out of my mind.� I guess I was out of my mind.� Yesterday, when I was standing at the door, it all came back to me.� I was back in Trenton, at the grave, and the sister of the girl I loved was sitting beside me.� She said it couldn't go on that way much longer, that I would go mad.� I thought to myself that I really was mad and to prove it to myself I decided to do something mad and so I said to her it isn't her I love, it's you, and I pulled her over me and we lay there kissing each other and finally I screwed her, right beside the grave.� And I think that cured me because I never went back there again and I never thought about her any more - until yesterday when I was standing at the door.� If I could have gotten hold of you yesterday I would have strangled you.� I don't know why I felt that way but it seemed to me that you had opened up a tomb, that you were violating the dead body of the girl I loved.� That's crazy, isn't it?� And why did I come to see you tonight?� Maybe it's because you're absolutely indifferent to me ... because you're not a Jew and I can talk to you ... because you don't give a damn, and you're right.... Did you ever read The Revolt of the Angels?"

��������� We had just arrived at the bicycle path which encircles the park.� The lights of the boulevard were swimming in the mist.� I took a good look at him and I saw that he was out of his head.� I wondered if I could make him laugh.� I was afraid, too, that if he once got started laughing he would never stop.� So I began to talk at random, about Anatole France at first, and then about other writers, and finally, when I felt that I was losing him, I suddenly switched to General Ivolgin, and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, like a rooster with its head on the block.� It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible, heartrending sobs.� "I knew you would do me good," he blurted out, as the last outbreak died away.� "I always said you were a crazy son of a bitch.... You're a Jew bastard yourself, only you don't know it.... Now tell me, you bastard, how was it yesterday?� Did you get your end in?� Didn't I tell you she was a good lay?� And do you know who she's living with?� Jesus, you were lucky you didn't get caught.� She's living with a Russian poet - you know the guy, too.� I introduced you to him once in the Caf� Royal.� Better not let him get wind of it.� He'll beat your brains out ... and then he'll write a beautiful poem about it and send it to her with a bunch of roses.� Sure, I knew him out in Stelton, in the anarchist colony.� His old man was a Nihilist.� The whole family's crazy.� By the way, you'd better take care of yourself.� I meant to tell you that the other day, but I didn't think you would act so quickly.� You know she may have syphilis.� I'm not trying to scare you.� I'm just telling you for your own good...."

��������� This outburst seemed to really assuage him.� He was trying to tell me in his twisted Jewish way that he liked me.� To do so he had to first destroy everything around me - the wife, the job, my friends, the "nigger wench", as he called Valeska, and so on.� "I think some day you're going to be a great writer," he said.� "But," he added maliciously, "first you'll have to suffer a bit.� I mean really suffer, because you don't know what the word means yet.� You only think you've suffered.� You've got to fall in love first.� That nigger wench now ... you don't really suppose that you're in love with her, do you?� Did you ever take a good look at her ass ... how it's spreading, I mean?� In five years she'll look like Aunt Jemima.� You'll make a swell couple walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies trailing behind you.� Jesus, I'd rather see you marry a Jewish girl.� You wouldn't appreciate her, of course, but she'd be good for you.� You need something to steady yourself.� You're scattering your energies.� Listen, why do you run around with all these dumb bastards you pick up?� You seem to have a genius for picking up the wrong people.� Why don't you throw yourself into something useful?� You don't belong in that job - you could be a big guy somewhere.� Maybe a labour leader ... I don't know what exactly.� But first you've got to get rid of that hatchet-faced wife of yours.� Ugh! when I look at her I could spit in her face.� I don't see how a guy like you could ever have married a bitch like that.� What was it - just a pair of steaming ovaries?� Listen, that's what's the matter with you - you've got nothing but sex on the brain.... No, I don't mean that either.� You've got a mind and you've got passion and enthusiasm ... but you don't seem to give a damn what you do or what happens to you.� If you weren't such a romantic bastard I'd almost swear that you were a Jew.� It's different with me - I never had anything to look forward to.� But you've got something in you - only you're too damned lazy to bring it out.� Listen, when I hear you talk sometimes I think to myself - if only that guy would put it down on paper!� Why you could write a book that would make a guy like Dreiser hang his head.� You're different from the Americans I know; somehow you don't belong, and it's a damned good thing you don't.� You're a little cracked, too -I suppose you know that.� But in a good way.� Listen, a little while ago, if it had been anybody else who talked to me that way I'd have murdered him.� I think I like you better because you didn't try to give me any sympathy.� I know better than to expect sympathy from you.� If you had said one false word tonight I'd really have gone mad.� I know it.� I was on the very edge.� When you started in about General Ivolgin I thought for a minute it was all up with me.� That's what makes me think you've got something in you ... that was real cunning!� And now let me tell you something ... if you don't pull yourself together soon you're going to be screwy.� You've got something inside you that's eating you up.� I don't know what it is, but you can't put it over on me.� I know you from the bottom up.� I know there's something griping you - and it's not just your wife, nor your job, nor even the nigger wench whom you think you're in love with.� Sometimes I think you were born in the wrong time.� Listen, I don't want you to think I'm making an idol of you but there's something to what I say ... if you had just a little more confidence in yourself you could be the biggest man in the world today.� You wouldn't even have to be a writer.� You might become another Jesus Christ for all I know.� Don't laugh - I mean it.� You haven't the slightest idea of your possibilities ... you're absolutely blind to everything except your own desires.� You don't know what you want.� You don't know because you never stop to think.� You're letting people use you up.� You're a damned fool, an idiot.� If I had a tenth of what you've got I could turn the world upside down.� You think that's crazy, eh?� Well, listen to me ... I was never more sane in my life.� When I came to see you tonight I thought I was about ready to commit suicide.� It doesn't make much difference whether I do or not.� But anyway, I don't see much point in doing it now.� That won't bring her back to me.� I was born unlucky.� Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster.� But I don't want to kick off yet ... I want to do some good in the world first.� That may sound silly to you, but it's true.� I'd like to do something for others...."

��������� He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile.� It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to hope for, he was powerless to kill himself.� That hopelessness was something quite alien to me.� I thought to myself - if only we could change skins!� Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle!� And what got me more than anything was the thought that he wouldn't even enjoy the funeral - his own wife's funeral!� God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, but there was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good obscene jokes and some hearty belly laughs.� Maybe I was too young to appreciate the sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they howled and wept.� But that never meant much to me because after the funeral, sitting in the beer garden next to the cemetery, there was always an atmosphere of good cheer despite the black garments and the crepes and the wreaths.� It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were really trying to establish some sort of communion with the dead person.� Something almost Egyptian-like, when I think back on it.� Once upon a time I thought they were just a bunch of hypocrites.� But they weren't.� They were just stupid, healthy Germans with a lust for life.� Death was something outside their ken, strange to say, because if you went only by what they said you would imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts.� But they really didn't grasp it at all - not the way the Jew does, for example.� They talked about the life hereafter but they never really believed in it.� And if anyone were so bereaved as to pine away they looked upon that person suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane person.� There were limits to sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the impression they gave me.� And at the extreme limits there was always the stomach which had to be filled - with limburger sandwiches and beer and k�mmel and turkey legs if there were any about.� They wept in their beer, like children.� And the next minute they were laughing, laughing over some curious quirk in the dead person's character.� Even the way they used the past tense had a curious effect upon me.� An hour after he was shovelled under they were saying of the defunct - "he was always so good-natured" - as though the person in mind were dead a thousand years, a character in history, or a personage out of the Nibelungenlied.� The thing was that he was dead, definitely dead for all time, and they, the living, were cut off from him now and forever, and today as well as tomorrow must be lived through, the clothes washed, the dinner prepared, and when the next one was struck down there would be a coffin to select and a squabble about the will, but it would be all in the daily routine and to take time off to grieve and sorrow was sinful because God, if there was a God, had ordained it that way and we on earth had nothing to say about it.� To go beyond the ordained limits of joy or grief was wicked.� To threaten madness was the high sin.� They had a terrific animal sense of adjustment, marvellous to behold if it had been truly animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more than dull German torpor, insensitivity.� 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 clean 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 dumb goy like myself and it was a pity to waste it on the likes of them as knew all about it and didn't need it anyway.� I got so damned intoxicated with the idea of dying that in my drunken stupor I was mumbling to the God above to kill me this night, kill me, God, and let me know what it's all about.� I tried my stinking best to imagine what it was like, giving up the ghost, but it was no go.� The best I could do was to imitate a death rattle, but on that I nearly choked, and then I got so damned frightened that I almost shit in my pants.� That wasn't death, anyway.� That was just choking.� Death was more like what we went through in the park: two people walking side by side in the mist, rubbing against trees and bushes, and not a word between them.� It was something emptier than the name itself and yet right and peaceful, dignified, if you like.� It was not a continuation of life, but a leap in the dark and no possibility of ever coming back, not even as a grain of dust.� And that was right and beautiful, I said to myself, because why would one want to come back.� To taste it once is to taste it forever - life or death.� Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes.� Sure, it's tough to choke on your own spittle - it's disagreeable more than anything else.� And besides, one doesn't always die choking to death.� Sometimes one goes off in his sleep, peaceful and quiet as a lamb.� The Lord comes and gathers you up into the fold, as they say.� Anyway, you stop breathing.� And why the hell should one want to go on breathing forever?� Anything that would have to be done interminably would be torture.� The poor human bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that somebody devised a way out.� We don't quibble about going to sleep.� A third of our lives we snore away like drunken rats.� What about that?� Is that tragic?� Well then, say three-thirds of drunken ratlike 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 Dostoyevsky's limburger cheese, his own private brand.� That means a certain flavour, a certain label.� So people recognize it when they smell it, taste it.� But what made this General Ivolgin limburger cheese?� Why, whatever made limburger cheese, which is x and therefore unknowable.� And so therefore?� Therefore nothing ... nothing at all.� Full stop - or else 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 puss 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 clap 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 but lucky goy.� I yawned.� It was all so much goddamned 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 onanism.� They had all had a crush on Sister Antolina at one time or another.� And Arline with the chocolate eclair mug wasn't the first of the little group to go to the insane asylum.� I don't say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere of the convent had something to do with it.� They were all spoiled in the egg.

��������� Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in.� He arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, though he was hardly past thirty.� When I told him about Arline he seemed to liven up a bit.� He said he always knew there was something wrong with her.� Why?� Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep hysterically.� It wasn't the weeping as much as what she said.� She said she had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life of continence.� Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless way.� "I said to her - well you don't need to do it if you don't want ... just hold it in your hand.� Jesus, when I said that I thought she'd go clean off her nut.� She said I was trying to soil her innocence - that's the way she put it.� And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted.� Weeping all the while, too.� And still harping on the Holy Ghost and her 'innocence', I remembered what you told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw.� It worked like magic.� She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced.� Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman?� It's something to experience.� From the instant I got it in she started talking a blue streak.� I can't describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she didn't know I was fucking her.� Listen, I don't know whether you've ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it ... well, you can imagine how that affects you.� This one was a thousand times worse.� It got on my nerves so that I began to think I was a little queer myself.... And now here's something you'll hardly believe, but I'm telling you the truth.� You know what she did when we got through?� She put her arms around me and she thanked me.... Wait, that isn't all.� Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and offered up a prayer for my soul.� Jesus, I remember that so well.� 'Please make Mac a better Christian,' she said.� And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her.� I didn't know whether I was dreaming or what.� 'Please make Mac a better Christian!'� Can you beat that?"

��������� "What are you doing tonight?" 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 stars 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 speakeasy 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 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 let him out of my sight until the drinks were paid for.

��������� The first drink or two always plunged him into reminiscence.� Reminiscences of cunt to be sure.� His reminiscences were reminiscent of a story he had told me once and which made an indelible impression upon me.� It was about a Scotchman on his deathbed.� Just as he was about to pass away his wife, seeing him struggling to say something, bends over him tenderly and says - "What is it, Jock, what is it ye're trying to say?"� And Jock, with a last effort, raises himself wearily and says: "Just cunt ... cunt ... cunt."

��������� That was always the opening theme, and the ending theme, with MacGregor.� It was his way of saying - futility.� The leitmotif was disease, because between fucks, as it were, he worried his head off, or rather he worried the head off his cock.� It was the most natural thing in the world, at the end of an evening, for him to say - "come on upstairs a minute, I want to show you my cock."� From taking it out and looking at it and washing it and scrubbing it a dozen times a day naturally his cock was always swollen and inflamed.� Every now and then he went to the doctor and he had it sounded.� Or, just to relieve him, the doctor would give him a little box of salve and tell him not to drink so much.� This would cause no end of debate, because as he would say to me, "if the salve is any good why do I have to stop drinking?"� Or, "if I stopped drinking altogether do you think I would need to use the salve?"� Of course, whatever I recommended went in one ear and out the other.� He had to worry about something and the penis was certainly good food for worry.� Sometimes he worried about his scalp.� He had dandruff, as most everybody has, and when his cock was in good condition he forgot about that and he worried about his scalp.� Or else his chest.� The moment he thought about his chest he would start to cough.� And such coughing!� As though he were in the last stages of consumption.� And when he was running after a woman he was as nervous and irritable as a cat.� He couldn't get her quickly enough.� The moment he had her he was worrying about how to get rid of her.� They all had something wrong with them, some trivial little thing, usually, which took the edge off his appetite.

��������� He was rehearsing all this as we sat in the gloom of the back room.� After a couple of drinks he got up, as usual, to go to the toilet, and on his way he dropped a coin in the slot machine and the jiggers began to jiggle and with that he perked up and pointing to the glasses he said: "Order another round."� He came back from the toilet looking extraordinarily complacent, whether because he had relieved his bladder or because he had run into a girl in the hallway, I don't know.� Anyhow, as he sat down, he started in on another tack - very composed now and very serene, almost like a philosopher.� "You know, Henry, we're getting on in years.� You and I oughtn't to be frittering our time away like this.� If we're ever going to amount to anything it's high time we started in...."� I had been hearing this line for years now and I knew what the upshot would be.� This was just a little parenthesis while he calmly glanced about the room and decided which bimbo was the least sottish-looking.� While he discoursed about the miserable failure of our lives his feet were dancing and his eyes were getting brighter and brighter.� It would happen as it always happened that just as he was saying - "Now you take Woodruff, for instance.� He'll never get ahead because he's just a natural means 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 his 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 ninety-eight cents apiece.� Every other joint a food emporium.

��������� Every time I hit that runway toward dinner hour a fever of expectancy seized me.� It's only a stretch of a few blocks, from Times Square to Fiftieth Street, and when one says Broadway that's all that's really meant and it's really nothing, just a chicken run and a lousy one at that, but at seven in the evening when everybody's rushing for a table there's a sort of electrical crackle in the air and your hair stands on end like antennae and if you're receptive you not only get every flash 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 above and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through a 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 your 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, not 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 only to be used by snakes and lizards, by the horned 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 cuntlike cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy centre of Manhatten Island.� From Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas Aquinas forgot to include in his magnum opus is here included, which is to say, among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot machines, grey bowlers, typewriter ribbons, orange sticks, free toilets, sanitary napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doilies, manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sourballs, cellophane, cord tyres, magnetos, horse liniment, cough drops, feenament, 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 lawgiver, nor will murder cease, nor theft, nor rape, and yet ... and yet one expects something, something terrifying 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 false 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, cuntlike cleft intended to dazzle and awe the savage, the yokel, the alien, but nobody dazzled or awed, this one hungry, that one lecherous, all one and the same and no different� from the savage, the yokel, the alien, except for odds and ends, bric-�-brac, the soapsuds of thought, the sawdust of the mind.� In the same cunty cleft, 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 bounded 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 hypergastric region, the umbilical and the postpineal 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, clean 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 temporarily.� 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 a 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 cleft 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 balls devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the twenty-four-carat sparkle and fall in with the theatre pack.� This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man with an accordion.� Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria.� At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy.� The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a part of life too, like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera House.� Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life.� When is it life, I ask myself, and why not now?� The blind man wanders on and I remain sitting on the stoop.� The meat balls were rotten, the coffee was lousy, the butter was rancid.� Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid.� The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next.� At the corner the blind man stops again and plays "Home to Our Mountains".� I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket - I 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 - I 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, flophouses, screens, toilet paper, everything.� Everything could just as well not be and not only nothing lost but 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 said to him suddenly: "Why do you go on living the way you do?"� He would probably call a cop.� I ask myself - does anyone 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 lay will clean your ballbearings 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�s 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 in 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 he'll 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 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!� Only 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 yet 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 Pompeii they probably hung a phallus up.� This is the American way.� It means the same thing.� I mustn't think about Pompeii 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 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 precipitated 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 it would make!� My friend MacGregor standing at the sink scrubbing his cock ... the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed ... the nuns lying in bed and masturbating one another ... the auctioneer with an alarm clock in his hand ... the telephone girls at the switchboard ... J.P. Morganana sitting on the toilet bowl placidly wiping his ass ... 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 practise 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 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 headcheese.� The Jewboys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Canarsie, Brownsville, opening and closing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the sausage machine, clogging 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 every one 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 in 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 gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical epoch, like maturating in a black box, a negative tickled with acid 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 golden marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten hoofs, 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 gasoline, 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, Canarsie and intermediate points.� The octopus is dancing like a rubber dick - the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil in�dit.� 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 out.� Nothing goes to waste - not the least spit of a fart.� In the golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance of the sodden piss and gasoline, 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, popeyed 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 liked 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 Petrarch seated in a taxi, each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then cauterized.� Laura the basilisk make entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a mouth full of gum.� Hunky-dory is the word on her lips.� The heavy fluted lips of the seashell, Laura's lips, the lips of lost Uranian love.� All floating shadowward 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 Petrarchs, slowly fading on the brink of sleep.� Not grey the world, but lacklustre, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed innocence.

��������� And this 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 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 toward 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 horseshit 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 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 half-witted 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 though 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 meal 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, suggest 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 a 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 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 him immediately, especially the women.� He became the pet of the office.� Before long, however, I realized that he was incorrigible, 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 reply 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 cunt.� 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 for him, he confessed, because the three of them were hot on his 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 shows 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 clean 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 the same time.� But she likes to be diddled just the same?� Does 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 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 clear 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 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 the 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'll 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 clear 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."

��������� "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?� Wouldn'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 a 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 they dinner interrupted.� As I was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I became aware of 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 O 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 anyone 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 reverently 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 straightened myself up.� Then I took Maxie by the arm and returned to the kitchen were 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 corner, by the lamppost, 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, Curley 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 had 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 he 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 overwhelming meaninglessness 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 programs, 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 defect, but they are flawless and impermeable in their 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 clear to me, clear 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 eye of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates.� It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyage.� 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 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 corners 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 tries 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 city 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 of 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 city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun.� The city 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 city in order to become again a man.� Therefore I close 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 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 imperfectible.� 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 judgements, 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.� Or even if there be a revolution brewing, I shall make no answer.� There will always be a cunt or a revolution around the corner, but the mother who bore me turned many a corner 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 toward 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 while they are still frantically rushing to turn the corner.

��������� I'm thinking now about the rock fight one summer's afternoon 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 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 had 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 Kasselbaum.� 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 dress 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 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 had forgotten that it was he who had killed the boy; he remembered the boy's death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I 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 drowned 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 addressed 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 close 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 arms 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 represented 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 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 afternoon, 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 not 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 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 plays 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 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 distinguished 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 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 quivering 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 Ab�lard 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 office was filled with blood and in the wintertime 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 corner was Paul Sauer's place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in the street; they stank frightfully too.� And then the acid odour coming from the tin factory behind the house - like the smell of modern 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 strange medley of smells - the smell of earth just turned up, of rotten 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 stationary shop owned by two daffy old maids who were religious; here there was the almost sickeningly sweet smell of toffee, of Spanish peanuts, of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of Sweet Corporal cigarettes.� The stationary store was like a beautiful cave, always cool, always full of intriguing objects; where the soda fountain was, which gave of another distinct odour, ran a thick marble slab which turned sour in the summertime 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 the 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 carries 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 late Sunday 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 Tillie.� 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 horsy 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 himself 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 corner 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 corner 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 a razor strop, a sight that made my blood boil.� Stanley was my best friend and his father was nothing but a drunken Polack.� One evening, however, as I was dashing out with a pitcher, I had the intense pleasure of seeing another Polack 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 were lifting him in on the stretcher, his face and neck covered with a sheet.� Sometimes it happened that Father Carroll's pet choirboy 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 schoolbooks.� He wore a sort of black alpaca coat with braided buttonholes, slippers without heels, and a pigtail.� 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 corner 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 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 corner.� 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 Polacks 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 Bjork!� 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!� 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 up unmercifully.� Willie, who had gotten free meanwhile, was on his hands and knees, gobbling up the fried bananas which had fallen to the floor.� He was stuffing them away like a billy goat, 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!� Bjork! - and suddenly everybody began to laugh.� That took the steam out of 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 billy goat 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 was 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 could only sing Bjork!� Bjork!� 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 Polacks 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 to Fillmore Place he was accosted by Joey 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 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 to 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 poor 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 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 on 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, distingu�.� 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 goodbye 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 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 had 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 raisonnable had come to acquire a wholly new significance for me.� Suddenly one day, overhearing it, 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 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 firehouse.� 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 corner 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 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 corner of the new neighbourhood where I was transplanted at about the age of ten.� Here, when the full 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.� Someone 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 sank 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 formation of precious stones, 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 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 superinfantile 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 nightrider who, under the spread of his black wings, eliminates both the beauty and the horror of the past; I want to flee toward 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 the 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 traversing 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 ever 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. I thought and spoke only of 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 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 who 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 been 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 had 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 life 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 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 his 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 anyone with the least intelligence that this 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 should elect to make me his confidant.� 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 his 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 conversations 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 his actual presence; he had given himself completely and I possessed him without being possessed.� It was the first clean, 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 toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness 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 goodbye, when he renounced Mr. 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 goodbye.� 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 alone and I am working like a slave in the orange grove as 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 - I 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'�tre m�ri!"

��������� 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 saddlebag hanging beside the stirrup.� A natural millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked 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 sharp 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 foot had 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 that I begin to weep.� It is dark now and I stand at the end of the 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 I have ever 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 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 banisters of the high stoops the mounds of snow which had formed such beautiful white pads were now beginning to slide, leaving dark patches of the brownstone which was then much in vogue.� The little glass signs of the dentists and physicians, tucked away in the corners 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 Dostoyevsky, 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 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 spaciousness, of that luxuriousness which was now somewhat faded but still redolent, still assertive in a patchy way as once the brownstone banisters 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 streets 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 credulity 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 clearly 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 believed that something 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 peels 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 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 teetotaller.� But my old man 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 crotchety 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� 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 an analysis of his urine in my overcoat pocket, should he demand further proofs.

��������� 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 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 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, but not saying anything overtly 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 neighbourhood.� 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 take even 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 everyone 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 everyone 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 modern 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 blowout which was intended to demonstrate that the good pastor was just an ordinary man like themselves and could, on occasion, 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 wagon 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 wagon and so, when the old man, moved by his own words, suddenly went to the sideboard to fetch a decanter of wine everyone 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 beneficent influence.� The long and short of it was that 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.� 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 someone 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 Congregational 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 everyone 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 crosswise over his vest; I remember the shepherd plaid suit which he wore in midsummer 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 strong 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 and mob would rush through the shed and make for the saloons which adorned the nearest corners.� 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 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 spongelike 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 spongelike 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 offer.� 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, 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 on 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 asshole.� 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 goon 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 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 stertorous 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-�-brac of this world.� What gave these performances a slightly crazed 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 drove 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 in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the nethermost depth full silent, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep's sweet sleep.� He was asleep.� He is asleep.� He will he 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 clubfoot 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 clubfoot.� 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 the 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 office and Grover was a lout who didn't even know enough to wipe his feet.� In the wintertime his nose ran like a sewer and, Grover being too engrossed in his music to bother wiping his nose, his cold not 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 clubfoot