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 at
Chula Vista. Am I coming into my own? I think not. I am a very wretched,
forlorn, miserable person. I seem to have lost everything. In fact I am
hardly a person -1 am more nearly an animal. All day long I am standing or
walking behind the two jackasses which are hitched to my sledge. I have no
thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a
nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive and healthy that I am like the luscious
deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun
and I will be rotten. "Pourri avant d'etre muri!"
Is it really me that is rotting in this bright California sunshine? Is
there nothing left of me, of all that I was up to this moment? Let me think
a bit... There was Arizona. I remember now that it was already night when I
first set foot on Arizona soil. Just light enough to catch the last glimpse
of a fading mesa. I am walking through the main street of a little town
whose name is lost. What am I doing here on this street, in this town? Why,
I am in love with Arizona, an Arizona of the mind which I search for in vain
with my two good eyes. In the train there was still with me the Arizona
which I had brought from New York - even after we had crossed the state
line. Was there not a bridge over a canyon which had startled me out of my
reverie? A bridge such as I had never seen before, a natural bridge created
by a cataclysmic eruption thousands of years ago? And over this bridge I had
seen a man crossing, a man who looked like an Indian, and he was riding a
horse and there was a long saddle-bag hanging beside the stirrup. A natural
millenary bridge which in the dying sun with air so clear looked like the
youngest, newest bridge imaginable. And over that bridge so strong, so
durable, there passed, praise be to God, just a man and a horse, nothing
more. This then was Arizona, and Arizona was not a figment of the
imagination but the imagination itself dressed as a horse and rider. And
this was even more than the imagination itself because there was no aura of
ambiguity but only sharply and dead isolate the thing itself which was the
dream and the dreamer himself seated on horseback. And as the train stops I
put my foot down and my foot has put a deep hole in the dream: I am in the
Arizona town which is listed in the timetable and it is only the
geographical Arizona which anybody can visit who has the money. I am walking
along the main street with a valise and I see hamburger sandwiches and real
estate offices. I feel so terribly deceived and I begin to weep. It is dark
now and I stand at the end of a street, where the desert begins, and I weep
like a fool. Which me is this weeping? Why it is the new little me which had
begun to germinate back in Brooklyn and which is now in the midst of a vast
desert and doomed to perish. Now, Roy Hamilton, I need you! I need you for
one moment, just one little moment, while I am falling apart. I need you
because I was not quite ready to do what I have done. And do I not remember
your telling me that it was unnecessary to make the trip, but to do it if I
must? Why didn't you persuade me not to go? Ah, to persuade was never his
way. And to ask advice was never my way. So here I am, bankrupt in the
desert, and the bridge which was real is behind me and what is unreal is
before me and Christ only knows I am so puzzled and bewildered that if I
could sink into the earth and disappear I would do so.
I look back rapidly and I see another man who was left to perish
quietly in the bosom of his family - my father. I understand better what
happened to him if I go back very, very far and think of such streets as
Maujer, Conselyea, Humboldt... Humboldt particularly. These streets belonged
to a neighbourhood which was not far removed from our neighbourhood but
which was different, more glamorous, more mysterious. I had been on Humboldt
Street only once as a child and I no longer remember the reason for that
excursion unless it was to visit some sick relative languishing in a German
hospital. But the street itself made a most lasting impression upon me: why
I have not the faintest idea. It remains in my memory as the most mysterious
and the most promising street that ever I have seen. Perhaps when we were
making ready to go my mother had, as usual, promised something spectacular
as a reward for accompanying her. I was always being promised things which
never materialized. Perhaps then, when I got to Humboldt Street and looked
upon this new world with astonishment, perhaps I forgot completely what had
been promised me and the street itself became the reward. I remember that it
was very wide and that there were high stoops, such as I had never seen
before, on either side of the street. I remember too that in a dressmaker's
shop on the first floor of one of these strange houses there was a bust in
the window with a tape measure slung around the neck and I know that I was
greatly moved by this sight. There was snow on the ground but the sun was
out strong and I recall vividly how about the bottoms of the ash barrels
which had been frozen into the ice there was then a little pool of water
left by the melting snow. The whole street seemed to be melting in the
radiant winter's sun. On the bannisters of the high stoops the mounds of
snow which had formed such beautiful white pads were now beginning to slide,
to disintegrate, leaving dark patches of the brown stone which was then much
in vogue. The little glass signs of the dentists and physicians, tucked away
in the comers of the windows, gleamed brilliantly in the noonday sun and
gave me the feeling for the first time that these offices were perhaps not
the torture chambers which I knew them to be. I imagined, in my childish
way, that here in this neighbourhood, in this street particularly, people
were more friendly, more expansive, and of course infinitely more wealthy. I
must have expanded greatly myself though only a tot, because for the first
time I was looking upon a street which seemed devoid of terror. It was the
sort of street, ample, luxurious, gleaming, melting which later, when I
began reading Dostoievski, I associated with the thaws of St. Petersburg.
Even the churches here were of a different style of architecture; there was
something semi-Oriental about them, something grandiose and warm at the same
time, which both frightened me and intrigued me. On this broad, spacious
street I saw that the houses were set well back from the sidewalk, reposing
in quiet and dignity, and unmarred by the intercalation of shops and
factories and veterinary stables. I saw a street composed of nothing but
residences and I was filled with awe and admiration. All this I remember and
no doubt it influenced me greatly, yet none of this is sufficient to account
for the strange power and attraction which the very mention of Humboldt
Street still evokes in me. Some years later I went back in the night to look
at this street again, and I was even more stirred than when I had looked
upon it for the first time. The aspect of the street of course had changed,
but it was night and the night is always less cruel than the day. Again I
experienced the strange delight of spadousness of that luxuriousness which
was now somewhat faded but still redolent, still assertive in a patchy way
as once the brown stone bannisters had asserted themselves through the
melting snow. Most distinct of all, however, was the almost voluptuous
sensation of being on the verge of a discovery. Again I was strongly aware
of my mother's presence, of the big puffy sleeves of her fur coat, of the
cruel swiftness with which she had whisked me through the street years ago
and of the stubborn tenacity with which I had feasted my eyes on all that
was new and strange. On the occasion of this second visit I seemed to dimly
recall another character out of my childhood, the old housekeeper whom they
called by the outlandish name of Mrs. Kicking. I could not recall her being
taken ill but I did seem to recall the fact that we were paying her a visit
at the hospital where she was dying and that this hospital must have been
near Humboldt Street which was not dying but which was radiant in the
melting snow of a winter's noon. What then had my mother promised me that I
have never since been able to recall? Capable as she was of promising
anything, perhaps that day, in a fit of abstraction, she had promised
something so preposterous that even I with all my childish credulence could
not quite swallow it. And yet, if she had promised me the moon, though I
knew it was out of the question, I would have struggled to invest her
promise with a crumb of faith. I wanted desperately everything that was
promised me, and if, upon reflection I realized that it was dearly
impossible, I nevertheless tried in my own way to grope for a means of
making these promises realizable. That people could make promises without
ever having the least intention of fulfilling them was something
unimaginable to me. Even when I was most cruelly deceived I still believed;
I found that something extraordinary and quite beyond the other person's
power had intervened to make the promise null and void.
This question of belief, this old promise that was never fulfilled, is
what makes me think of my father who was deserted at the moment of his
greatest need. Up to the time of his illness neither my father nor my mother
had ever shown any religious inclinations. Though always upholding the
church to others, they themselves never set foot in a church from the time
that they were married. Those who attended church too regularly they looked
upon as being a bit daffy. The very way they said -"so and so is religious"
- was enough to convey the scorn and contempt, or else the pity, which they
felt for such individuals. If now and then, because of us children, the
pastor called at the house unexpectedly, he was treated as one to whom they
were obliged to defer out of ordinary politeness but whom they had nothing
in common with, whom they were a little suspicious of, in fact as
representative of a species midway between a fool and a charlatan. To us,
for example, they would say "a lovely man", but when their cronies came
round and the gossip began to fly, then one would hear an entirely different
brand of comment, accompanied usually by peals of scornful laughter and sly
mimicry.
My father fell mortally ill as a result of swearing off too abruptly.
All his life he had been a jolly hail fellow well met: he had put on a
rather becoming paunch, his cheeks were well filled out and red as a beet,
his manners were easy and indolent, and he seemed destined to live on into a
ripe old age, sound and healthy as a nut. But beneath this smooth and jolly
exterior things were not at all well. His affairs were in bad shape, the
debts were piling up, and already some of his older friends were beginning
to drop him. My mother's attitude was what worried him most. She saw things
in a black light and she took no trouble to conceal it. Now and then she
became hysterical and went at him hammer and tongs, swearing at him in the
vilest language and smashing the dishes and threatening to run away for
good. The upshot of it was that he arose one morning determined never to
touch another drop. Nobody believed that he meant it seriously: there had
been others in the family who swore off, who went on the water wagon, as
they used to say, but who quickly tumbled off again. No one in the family,
and they had all tried at different times, had ever become a successful
teetotaler. But my old rnan was different. Where or how he got the strength
to maintain his resolution. God only knows. It seems incredible to me,
because had I been in his boots myself I would have drunk myself to death.
Not the old man, however. This was the first time in his life he had ever
shown any resolution about anything. My mother was so astounded that, idiot
that she was, she began to make fun of him, to quip him about his strength
of will which had heretofore been so lamentably weak. Still he stuck to his
guns. His drinking pals faded away rather quickly. In short, he soon found
himself almost completely isolated. That must have cut him to the quick, for
before very many weeks had passed, he became deathly ill and a consultation
was held. He recovered a bit, enough to get out of bed and walk about, but
still a very sick man. He was supposed to be suffering from ulcers of the
stomach, though nobody was quite sure exactly what ailed him. Everybody
understood, however, that he had made a mistake in swearing off so abruptly.
It was too late, however, to return to a temperate mode of living. His
stomach was so weak that it wouldn't even hold a plate of soup. In a couple
of months he was almost a skeleton. And old. He looked like Lazarus raised
from the grave.
One day my mother took me aside and with tears in her eyes begged me to
go visit the family doctor and learn the truth about my father's condition.
Dr. Rausch had been the family physician for years. He was a typical
"Dutchman" of the old school, rather weary and crochety now after years of
practising and yet unable to tear himself completely away from his patients.
In his stupid Teutonic way he tried to scare the less serious patients away,
tried to argue them into health, as it were. When you walked into his office
he didn't even bother to look up at you, but kept on writing or whatever it
might be that he was doing while firing random questions at you in a
perfunctory and insulting manner. He behaved so rudely, so suspiciously,
that ridiculous as it may sound, it almost appeared as though he expected
his patients to bring with them not only their ailments, but the proof of
their ailments. He made one feel that there was not only something wrong
physically but that there was also something wrong mentally. "You only
imagine it," was his favourite phrase which he flung out with a nasty,
leering gibe. Knowing him as I did, and detesting him heartily, I came
prepared, that is, with the laboratory analysis of my father's stool. I had
also analysis of his urine in my overcoat pocket, should he demand further
proof.
When I was a boy Dr. Rausch had shown some affection for me, but ever
since the day I went to him with a dose of clap he had lost confidence in me
and always showed a sour puss when I stuck my head through the door. Like
father like son was his motto, and I was therefore not at all surprised
when, instead of giving me the information which I demanded, he began to
lecture me and the old man at the same time for our way of living. "You
can't go against Nature," he said with a wry, solemn face, not looking at me
as he uttered the words but making some useless notation in his big ledger.
I walked quietly up to his desk, stood beside him a moment without making a
sound, and then, when he looked up with his usual aggrieved, irritated
expression, I said - "I didn't come here for moral instruction ... I want to
know what's the matter with my father." At this he jumped up and turning to
me with his most severe look, he said, like the stupid, brutal Dutchman that
he was: "Your father hasn't a chance of recovering; he'll be dead in less
than six months." I said "Thank you, that's all I wanted to know," and I
made for the door. Then, as though he felt that he had committed a blunder,
he strode after me heavily and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he tried to
modify the statement by hemming and hawing and saying I don't mean that it
is absolutely certain he will die, etc., which I cut short by opening the
door and yelling at him, at the top of my lungs, so that his patients in the
anteroom would hear it - "I think you're a goddamned old fart and I hope you
croak, good-night!"
When I got home I modified the doctor's report somewhat by saying that
my father's condition was very serious but that if he took good care of
himself he would pull through all right. This seemed to cheer the old man up
considerably. Of his own accord he took to a diet of milk and Zwieback
which, whether it was the best thing or not, certainly did him no
harm. He remained a sort of semi-invalid for about a year, becoming more and
more calm inwardly as time went on and apparently determined to let nothing,
disturb his peace of mind, nothing, no matter if everything went to hell. As
he grew stronger he took to making a daily promenade to the cemetery which
was nearby. There he would sit on a bench in the sun and watch the old
people potter around the graves. The proximity to the grave, instead of
rendering him morbid, seemed to cheer him up. He seemed, if anything, to
have become reconciled to the idea of eventual death, a fact which no doubt
he had heretofore refused to look in the face. Often he came home with
flowers which he had picked in the cemetery, his face beaming with a quiet
serene joy, and seating himself in the armchair he would recount the
conversation which he had had that morning with one of the other
valetudinarians who frequented the cemetery. It was obvious after a time
that he was really enjoying his sequestration, or rather not just enjoying
it, but profiting deeply from the experience in a way that was beyond my
mother's intelligence to fathom. He was getting lazy, was the way she
expressed it. Sometimes she put it even more extremely, tapping her head
with her forefinger as she spoke of him, but not saying anything overfly
because of my sister who was without question a little wrong in the head.
And then one day, through the courtesy of an old widow who used to
visit her son's grave every day and was, as my mother would say, "religious"
he made the acquaintance of a minister belonging to one of the neighbouring
churches. This was a momentous event in the old man's life. Suddenly he
blossomed forth and that little sponge of a soul which had almost atrophied
through lack of nourishment took on such astounding proportions that he was
almost unrecognizable. The man who was responsible for this extraordinary
change in the old man was in no way unusual himself; he was a
Congregationalist minister attached to a modest little parish which adjoined
our neighbour- hood. His one virtue was that he kept his religion in the
background. The old man quickly fell into a sort of boyish idolatry; he
talked of nothing but this minister whom he considered his friend. As he had
never looked at the Bible in his life, nor any other book for that matter,
it was rather startling, to say the least, to hear him say a little prayer
before eating. He performed this little ceremony in a strange way, much the
way one takes a tonic, for example. If he recommended me to read a certain
chapter of the Bible he would add very seriously - "it will do you good." It
was a new medicine which he had discovered, a sort of quack remedy which was
guaranteed to cure all ills and which one might even take if he had no ills,
because in any case it could certainly do no harm. He attended all the
services, all the functions which were held at the church, and between
times, when out for a stroll, for example, he would stop off at the
minister's home and have a little chat with him. If the minister said that
the president was a good soul and should be re-elected the old man would
repeat to every one exactly what the minister had said and urge them to vote
for the president's re-election. Whatever the minister said was right and
just and nobody could gainsay him. There's no doubt that it was an education
for the old man. If the minister had mentioned the pyramids in the course of
his sermon the old man immediately began to inform himself about the
pyramids. He would talk about the pyramids as though every one owed it to
himself to become acquainted with the subject. The minister had said that
the pyramids were one of the crowning glories of man, ergo not to know about
the pyramids was to be disgracefully ignorant, almost sinful. Fortunately
the minister didn't dwell much on the subject of sin: he was of the modem
type of preacher who prevailed on his flock more by arousing their curiosity
than by appealing to their conscience. His sermons were more like a night
school extension course and for such as the old man, therefore, highly
entertaining and stimulating. Every now and then the male members of the
congregation were invited to a little blow-out which was intended to
demonstrate that the good pastor was just an ordinary man like themselves
and could, on occasion, enjoy a hearty meal and even a glass of beer.
Moreover it was observed that he even sang - not religious hymns, but jolly
little songs of the popular variety. Putting two and two together one might
even infer from such jolly behaviour that now and then he enjoyed getting a
little piece of tail - always in moderation, to be sure. That was the word
that was balsam to the old man's lacerated soul - "moderation". It was like
discovering a new sign in the zodiac. And though he was still too ill to
attempt a return to even a moderate way of living, nevertheless it did his
soul good. And so, when Uncle Ned, who was continually going on the
water-waggon and continually falling off it again, came round to the house
one evening the old man delivered him a little lecture on the virtue of
moderation. Uncle Ned was, at that moment, on the water-waggon and so, when
the old man, moved by his own words, suddenly went to the sideboard to fetch
a decanter of wine every one was shocked. No one had ever dared invite Uncle
Ned to drink when he had sworn off; to venture such a thing constituted a
serious breach of loyalty. But the old man did it with such conviction that
no one could take offence, and the result was that Uncle Ned took a small
glass of wine and went home that evening without stopping off at a saloon to
quench his thirst. It was an extraordinary happening and there was much talk
about it for days after. In fact. Uncle Ned began to act a bit queer from
that day on. It seems that he went the next day to the wine store and bought
a bottle of Sherry which he emptied into the decanter. He placed the
decanter on the sideboard, just as he had seen the old man do, and, instead
of polishing it off in one swoop, he contented himself with a glassful at a
time - "just a thimbleful", as he put it. His behaviour was so remarkable
that my aunt, who was unable to quite believe her eyes, came one day to the
house and held a long conversation with the old man. She asked him, among
other things, to invite the minister to the house some evening so that Uncle
Ned might have the opportunity of falling under his beneficient influence.
The long and short of it was ħat 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 some one observed the regularity and the frequency with which
he was running to the beer keg. It was then too late. Once in that condition
he was unmanageable. Even the minister could do nothing with him. Ned broke
away from the picnic quietly and went on a little rampage which lasted for
three days and nights. Perhaps it would have lasted longer had he not gotten
into a fist fight down at the waterfront where he was found lying
unconscious by the night watchman. He was taken to the hospital with a
concussion of the brain from which he never recovered. Returning from the
funeral the old man said with a dry eye - "Ned didn't know what it was to be
temperate. It was his own fault. Anyway, he's better off now ..."
And as though to prove to the minister that he was not made of the same
stuff as Uncle Ned he became even more assiduous in his churchly duties. He
had gotten himself promoted to the position of "elder", an office of which
he was extremely proud and by grace of which he was permitted during the
Sunday services to aid in taking up the collection. To think of my old man
marching up the aisle of a Congregationalist church with a collection box in
his hand; to think of him standing reverently before the altar with this
collection box while the minister blessed the offering, seems to me now
something so incredible that I scarcely know what to say of it. I like to
think, by contrast, of the man he was when I was just a kid and I would meet
him at the ferry house of a Saturday noon. Surrounding the entrance to the
ferry house there were then three saloons which of a Saturday noon were
filled with men who had stopped off for a little bite at the free lunch
counter and a schooner of beer. I can see the old man, as he stood in his
thirtieth year, a healthy, genial soul with a smile for every one and a
pleasant quip to pass the time of day, see him with his arm resting on the
bar, his straw hat tipped on the back of his head, his left hand raised to
down the foaming suds. My eye was then on about a level with his heavy gold
chain which was spread cross-wise over his vest; I remember the shepherd
plaid suit which he wore in mid-summer and the distinction it gave him among
the other men at the bar who were not lucky enough to have been born
tailors. I remember the way he would dip his hand into the big glass bowl on
the free lunch counter and hand me a few pretzels, saying at the same time
that I ought to go and have a look at the scoreboard in the window of the
Brooklyn Times nearby. And, perhaps, as I ran out of the saloon to see who
was winning a string of cyclists would pass close to the curb, holding to
the little strip of asphalt which had been laid down expressly for them.
Perhaps the ferry-boat was just coming into the dock and I would stop a
moment to watch the men in uniform as they pulled away at the big wooden
wheels to which the chains were attached. As the gates were thrown open and
the planks laid down a mob would rush through the shed and make for the
saloons which adorned the nearest comers. Those were the days when the old
man knew the meaning of "moderation", when he drank because he was truly
thirsty, and to down a schooner of beer by the ferry house was a man's
prerogative. Then it was as Melville has so well said: "Feed all things with
food convenient for them - that is, if the food be procurable. The food of
thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food
of the body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters;
and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be." Yes,
then it seems to me that the old man's soul had not yet shrivelled up, that
it was endlessly bounded by light and space and that his body, heedless of
the resurrection, was feeding on all that was convenient and procurable - if
not champagne and oysters, at least good lager beer and pretzels. Then his
body had not been condemned, nor his way of living, nor his absence of
faith. Nor was he yet surrounded by vultures, but only by good comrades,
ordinary mortals like himself who looked neither high nor low but straight
ahead, the eye always fixed on the horizon and content with the sight
thereof.
And now, as a battered wreck, he has made himself into an elder of the
church and he stands before the altar, grey and bent and withered, while the
minister gives his blessing to the measly collection which will go to make a
new bowling alley. Perhaps it was necessary for him to experience the birth
of the soul, to feed this sponge-like growth with that light and space which
the Congregational church offered. But what a poor substitute for a man who
had known the joys of that food which the body craved and which, without the
pangs of conscience, had flooded even his sponge-like soul with a light and
space that was ungodly but radiant and terrestrial. I think again of his
seemly little "corporation" over which the thick gold chain was strung and I
think that with that death of his paunch there was left to survive only the
sponge of a soul, a sort of appendix to his own bodily death. I think of the
minister who had swallowed him up as a sort of inhuman sponge-eater, the
keeper of a wigwam hung with spiritual scalps. I think of what subsequently
ensued as a kind of tragedy in sponges, for though he promised light and
space, no sooner had he passed out of my father's life than the whole airy
edifice came tumbling down.
It all came about in the most ordinary lifelike way. One evening, after
the customary men's meeting, the old man came home with a sorrowful
countenance. They had been informed that evening that the minister was
taking leave of them. He had been offered a more advantageous position in
the township of New Rochelle and, despite his great reluctance to desert his
flock, he had decided to accept the oner. He had of course accepted it only
after much meditation - as a duty, in other words. It would mean a better
income, to be sure, but that was nothing compared to the grave
responsibilities which he was about to assume. They had need of him in New
Rochelle and he was obeying the voice of his conscience. All this the old
man related with the same unctuousness that the minister had given to his
words. But it was immediately apparent that the old man was hurt. He
couldn't see why New Rochelle could not find another minister. He said it
wasn't fair to tempt the minister with a bigger salary. We need him here, he
said ruefully, with such sadness that I almost felt like weeping. He added,
that he was going to have a heart to heart talk with the minister that if
anybody could persuade him to remain it was he. In the days that followed he
certainly did his best, no doubt much to the minister's discomfiture. It was
distressing to see the blank look in his face when he returned from these
conferences. He had the expression of a man who was trying to grasp at a
straw to keep from drowning. Naturally the minister remained adamant. Even
when the old man broke down and wept before him he could not be moved to
change his mind. That was the turning point. From that moment on the old man
underwent a radical change. He seemed to grow bitter and querulous. He not
only forgot to say grace at the table but he abstained from going to church.
He resumed his old habit of going to the cemetery and basking on a bench. He
became morose, then melancholy, and finally there grew into his face an
expression of permanent sadness, a sadness encrusted with disillusionment,
with despair, with futility. He never again mentioned the man's name, nor
the church, nor any of the elders with whom he had once associated. If he
happened to pass them in the street he bade them the time of day without
stopping to shake hands. He read the newspapers diligently, from back to
front, without comment. Even the ads he read, every one, as though trying to
block up a huge hole which was constantly before his eyes. I never heard him
laugh again. At the most he would give us a sort of weary, hopeless smile, a
smile which faded instantly and left us with the spectacle of a life
extinct. He was dead as a crater, dead beyond all hope of resurrection. And
not even had he been given a new stomach, or a tough new intestinal tract,
would it have been possible to restore him to life again. He had passed
beyond the lure of champagne and oysters, beyond the need of light and
space. He was like the dodo which buries its head in the sand and whistles
out of its ass-hole. When he went to sleep in the Morris-chair his lower jaw
dropped like a hinge that has become unloosened; he had always been a good
snorer but now he snored louder than ever, like a man who was in truth dead
to the world. His snores, in fact, were very much like the death rattle,
except that they were punctuated by an intermittent long-drawn-out whistling
of the peanut stand variety. He seemed, when he snored, to be chopping the
whole universe to bits so that we who succeeded him would have enough
kindling wood to last a lifetime. It was the most horrible and fascinating
snoring that I have ever listened to: it was sterterous and stentorian,
morbid and grotesque; at times it was like an accordion collapsing, at other
times like a frog croaking in the swamps; after a prolonged whistle there
sometimes followed a frightful wheeze as if he were giving up the ghost,
then it would settle back again into a regular rise and fall, a steady
hollow chopping as though he stood stripped to the waist, with axe in hand,
before the accumulated madness of all the bric-a-brac of this world. What
gave these performances a slightly crazy quality was the mummy-like
expression of the face in which the big blubber lips alone came to life;
they were like the gills of a shark snoozing on the surface of the still
ocean. Blissfully he snored away on the bosom of the deep, never disturbed
by a dream or a draught, never fitful, never plagued by an unsatisfied
desire; when he closed his eyes and collapsed, the light of the world went
out and he was alone as before birth, a cosmos gnashing itself to bits. He
sat there in his Morris-chair as Jonah must have sat in the body of the
whale, secure in the last refuge of a black hole, expecting nothing,
desiring nothing, not dead but buried alive, swallowed whole and unscathed,
the big blubber lips gently flapping with the flux and reflux of the white
breath of emptiness. He was in the land of Nod searching for Cain and Abel
but encountering no living soul, no word, no sign. He dove with the whale
and scraped the icy black bottom; he covered furlongs at top speed, guided
only by the fleecy manes of undersea beasts. He was the smoke that curled
out of the chimney-tops, the heavy layers of cloud that obscured the moon,
the thick slime that made the slippery linoleum floor of the ocean depths.
He was deader than dead because alive and empty, beyond all hope of
resurrection in that he had travelled beyond the limits of light and space
and securely nestled himself in the black hole of nothingness. He was more
to be envied than pitied, for his sleep was not a lull or an interval but
sleep itself which is the deep and hence sleeping ever deepening, deeper and
deeper in sleep sleeping, the sleep of the deep in deepest sleep, at the
nethermost depth full slept, the deepest and sleepest sleep of sleep's sweet
sleep. He was asleep. He is asleep. He will be asleep. Sleep. Sleep. Father,
sleep, I beg you, for we who are awake are boiling in horror . . .
With the world fluttering away on the last wings of a hollow snore I
see the door opening to admit Grover Watrous. "Christ be with you!" he says,
dragging his club foot along. He is quite a young man now and he has found
God. There is only one God and Grover Watrous has found Him and so there is
nothing more to say except that everything has to be said over again in
Grover Watrous' new God-language. This bright new language which God
invented especially for Grover Watrous intrigues me enormously, first
because I had always considered Grover to be a hopeless dunce, second
because I notice that there are no longer any tobacco stains on his agile
fingers. When we were boys Grover lived next door to us. He would visit me
from time to time in order to practise a duet with me. Though he was only
fourteen or fifteen he smoked like a trooper. His mother could do nothing
against it because Grover was a genius and a genius had to have a little
liberty, particularly when he was also unfortunate enough to have been born
with a club foot. Grover was the kind of genius who thrives on dirt. He not
only had nicotine stains on his fingers but he had filthy black nails which
would break under hours of practising, imposing upon young Grover the
ravishing obligation of tearing them off with his teeth. Grover used to spit
out broken nails along with bits of tobacco which got caught in his teeth.
It was delightful and stimulating. The cigarettes burned holes into the
piano and, as my mother critically observed, also tarnished the keys. When
Grover took leave the parlour stank like the backroom of an undertaker's
establishment. It stank of dead cigarettes, sweat, dirty linen, Grover's
oaths and the dry heat left by the dying notes of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt and
Co. It stank too of Grover's running ear and of his decaying teeth. It stank
of his mother's pampering and whimpering. His own home was a stable divinely
suited to his genius, but the parlour of our home was like the waiting room
of a mortician's office and Grover was a lout who didn't even know enough to
wipe his feet. In the winter time his nose ran like a sewer and Grover,
being too engrossed in his music to bother wiping his nose, the cold snot
was left to trickle down until it reached his lips where it was sucked in by
a very long white tongue. To the flatulent music of Weber, Berlioz, Liszt
and Co. it added a piquant sauce which made those empty devils palatable.
Every other word from Grover's lips was an oath, his favourite expression
being - "I can't get the fucking thing right!" Sometimes he grew so annoyed
that he would take his fists and pound the piano like a madman. It was his
genius coming out the wrong way. His mother, in fact, used to attach a great
deal of importance to these fits of anger; they convinced her that he had
something in him. Other people simply said that Grover was impossible. Much
was forgiven, however, because of his club foot. Grover was sly enough to
exploit this bad foot; whenever he wanted anything badly he developed pains
in the foot. Only the piano seemed to have no respect for this maimed
member. The piano therefore was an object to be cursed and kicked and
pounded to bits. If he were in good form, on the other hand, Grover would
remain at the piano for hours on end; in fact, you couldn't drag him away.
On such occasions his mother would go stand in the grass plot in front of
the house and waylay the neighbours in order to squeeze a few words of
praise out of them. She would be so carried away by her son's "divine"
playing that she would forget to cook the evening meal. The old man, who
worked in the sewers, usually came home grumpy and famished. Sometimes he
would march directly upstairs to the parlour and yank Grover off the piano
stool. He had a rather foul vocabulary himself and when he let loose on his
genius of a son there wasn't much left for Grover to say. In the old man's
opinion Grover was just a lazy son of a bitch who could make a lot of noise.
Now and then he threatened to chuck the fucking piano out of the window -
and Grover with it. If the mother were rash enough to interfere during these
scenes he would give her a clout and tell her to go piss up the end of a
rope. He had his moments of weakness too, of course, and in such a mood he
might ask Grover what the hell he was rattling away at, and if the latter
said, for example, "why the Sonata Pathetique", the old buzzard would say -
"what the hell does that mean? Why, in Christ's name don't they put it down
in plain English?" The old man's ignorance was even harder for Grover to
bear than his brutality. He was heartily ashamed of his old man and when the
latter was out of sight he would ridicule him unmercifully. When he got a
little older he used to insinuate that he wouldn't have been born with a
club foot if the old man hadn't been such a mean bastard. He said that the
old man must have kicked his mother in the belly when she was pregnant. This
alleged kick in the belly must have affected Grover in diverse ways, for
when he had grown up to be quite a young man, as I was saying, he suddenly
took to God with such a passion that there was no blowing your nose before
him without first asking God's permission.
Grover's conversion followed right upon the old man's deflation, which
is why I am reminded of it. Nobody had seen the Watrouses for a number of
years and then, right in the midst of a bloody snore, you might say, in
pranced Grover scattering benedictions and calling upon God as his witness
as he rolled up his sleeves to deliver us from evil. What I noted first in
him was the change in his personal appearance; he had been washed dean in
the blood of the Lamb. He was so immaculate, indeed, that there was almost a
perfume emanating from him. His speech too had been cleaned up, instead of
wild oaths there were now nothing but blessings and invocations. It was not
a conversation which he held with us but a monologue in which, if there were
any questions, he answered them himself. As he took the chair which was
offered him he said with the nimbleness of a jack-rabbit that God had
given his only beloved Son in order that we might enjoy life everlasting.
Did we really want this life everlasting - or were we simply going to wallow
in the joys of the flesh and die without knowing salvation? The incongruity
of mentioning the "joys of the flesh" to an aged couple, one of whom was
sound asleep and snoring, never struck him, to be sure. He was so alive and
jubilant in the first flush of God's merciful grace that he must have
forgotten that my sister was dippy, for, without even inquiring how she had
been, he began to harangue her in this new-found spiritual palaver to which
she was entirely impervious because, as I say, she was minus so many buttons
that if he had been talking about chopped spinach it would have been just as
meaningful to her. A phrase like "the pleasures of the flesh" meant to her
something like a beautiful day with a red parasol. I could see by the way
she sat on the edge of her chair and bobbed her head that she was only
waiting for him to catch his breath in order to inform him that the pastor -
her pastor, who was an Episcopalian - had just returned from Europe and that
they were going to have a fair in the basement of the church where she would
have a little booth fitted up with doylies from the five-and-ten cent store.
In fact, no sooner had he paused a moment than she let loose - about the
canals of Venice, the snow in the Alps, the dog carts in Brussels, the
beautiful Uverwurst in Munich. She was not only religious, my sister, but
she was clean daffy. Grover had just slipped in something about having seen
a new heaven and a new earth... for the first heaven and the first earth
were passed away, he said, mumbling the words in a sort of hysterical
glissando in order to unburden himself of an oracular message about the New
Jerusalem which God had established on earth and in which he, Grover
Watrous, once foul of speech and marred by a twisted foot, had found the
peace and the calm of the righteous. "There shall be no more death ..." he
started to shout when my sister leaned forward and asked him very innocently
if he liked to bowl because the pastor had just installed a beautiful new
bowling alley in the basement of the church and she knew he would be pleased
to see Grover because he was a lovely man and he was kind to the poor.
Grover said that it was a sin to bowl and that he belonged to no church
because the churches were godless: he had even given up playing the piano
because God needed him for higher things. "He that overcometh shall inherit
all things," he added "and I will be his God, and he shall be my son." He
paused again to blow his nose in a beautiful white handkerchief, whereupon
my sister took the occasion to remind him that in the old days he always had
a running nose but that he never wiped it. Grover listened to her very
solemnly and then remarked that he had been cured of many evil ways. At this
point the old man woke up and, seeing Grover sitting beside him large as
life, he was quite startled and for a moment or two he was not sure, it
seemed, whether Grover was a morbid phenomenon of dream or an hallucination,
but the sight of the clean handkerchief brought him quickly to his wits.
"Oh, it's you!" he exclaimed. "The Watrous boy, what? Well, what in the name
of all that's holy are you doing here?"
"I came in the name of the Holy of Holies," said Grover unabashed. "I
have been purified by the death on Calvary and I am here in Christ's sweet
name that ye maybe redeemed and walk in light and power and glory."
The old man looked dazed. "Well, what's come over you?" he said, giving
Grover a feeble, consolatory smile. My mother had just come in from the
kitchen and had taken a stand behind Grover's chair. By making a wry grimace
with her mouth she was trying to convey to the old man that Grover was
cracked. Even my sister seemed to realize that there was something wrong
with him, especially when he had refused to visit the new bowling alley
which her lovely pastor had expressly installed for young men such as Grover
and his likes.
What was the matter with Grover? Nothing, except that his feet were
solidly planted on the fifth foundation of the great wall of the Holy City
of Jerusalem, the fifth foundation made entirely of sardonyx, whence he
commanded a view of a pure river of water of life issuing from the throne of
God. And the sight of this river of life was to Grover like the bite of a
thousand fleas in his lower colon. Not until he had run at least seven times
around the earth would he be able to sit quietly on his ass and observe the
blindness and the indifference of men with something like equanimity. He was
alive and purged, and though to the eyes of the sluggish, sluttish spirits
who are sane he was "cracked", to me he seemed infinitely better off this
way than before. He was a pest who could do you no harm. If you listened to
him long enough you became somewhat purged yourself, though perhaps
unconvinced. Grover's bright new language always caught me in the midriff
and through inordi- nate laughter cleansed me of the dross accumulated by
the sluggish sanity about me. He was alive as Ponce de Leon had hoped to be
alive; alive as only a few men have ever been. And being unnaturally alive
he didn't mind in the least if you laughed in his face, nor would he have
minded if you had stolen the few possessions which were his. He was alive
and empty, which is so close to Godhood that it is crazy.
With his feet solidly planted on the great wall of the New Jerusalem
Grover knew a joy which is incommensurable. Perhaps if he had not been born
with a club foot he would not have known this incredible joy. Perhaps it was
well that his father had kicked the mother in the belly while Grover was
still in the womb. Perhaps it was that kick in the belly which had sent
Grover soaring, which made him so thoroughly alive and awake that even in
his sleep he was delivering God's messages. The harder he laboured the less
he was fatigued. He had no more worries, no regrets, no clawing memories. He
recognized no duties, no obligations, except to God. And what did God expect
of him? Nothing, nothing ... except to sing His praises. God only asked of
Grover Watrous that he reveal himself alive in the flesh. He only asked of
him to be more and more alive. And when fully alive Grover was a voice and
this voice was a flood which made all dead things into chaos and this chaos
in turn became the mouth of the world in the very centre of which was the
verb to be. In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. So God; was this strange little infinitive which is
all there is - and is it not enough? For Grover it was more than enough: it
was everything. Starting from this Verb what difference did it make which
road he travelled? To leave the Verb was to travel away from the centre, to
erect a Babel. Perhaps God had deliberately maimed Grover Watrous in order
to hold him to the centre, to the Verb. By an invisible cord God held Grover
Watrous to his stake which ran through the heart of the world and Grover
became the fat goose which laid a golden egg every day . . .
Why do I write of Grover Watrous? Because I have met thousands of
people and none of them were alive in the way that Grover was. Most of them
were more intelligent, many of them were brilliant, some of them were even
famous, but none were alive and empty as Grover was. Grover was
inexhaustible. He was like a bit of radium which, even if buried under a
mountain does not lose its power to give off energy. I had seen plenty of
so-called energetic people before - is not America filled with them? - but
never, in the shape of a human being, a reservoir of energy. And what
created this inexhaustible reservoir of energy? An illumination. Yes, it
happened in the twinkling of an eye, which is the only way that anything
important ever does happen. Overnight all Grover's preconceived values were
thrown overboard. Suddenly, just like that, he ceased moving as other people
move. He put the brakes on and he kept the motor running. If once, like
other people, he had thought it was necessary to get somewhere now he knew
that somewhere was anywhere and therefore right here and so why move? Why
not park the car and keep the motor running? Meanwhile the earth itself is
turning and Grover knew it was turning and knew that he was turning with it.
Is the earth getting anywhere? Grover must undoubtedly have asked himself
this question and must undoubtedly have satisfied himself that it was not
getting anywhere. Who, then, had said that we must get somewhere? Grover
would inquire of this one and that where they were heading for and the
strange thing was that although they were all heading for their individual
destinations none of them ever stopped to reflect that the one inevitable
destination for all alike was the grave. This puzzled Grover because nobody
could convince him that death was not a certainty, whereas nobody could
convince anybody else that any other destination was an uncertainty.
Convinced of the dead certainty of death Grover suddenly became tremendously
and overwhelmingly alive. For the first time in his life he began to live,
and at the same time the dub foot dropped completely out of his
consciousness. This is a strange thing, too, when you come to think of it,
because the dub foot, just like death, was another ineluctable fact. Yet the
dub foot dropped out of mind, or, what is more important, all that had been
attached to the club foot. In the same way, having accepted death, death too
dropped out of Grover's mind. Having seized on the single certainty of death
all the uncertain- ties vanished. The rest of the world was now limping
along with dub-footed uncertainties and Grover Watrous alone was free and
unimpeded. Grover Watrous was the personification of certainty. He may have
been wrong, but he was certain. And what good does it do to be right if one
has to limp along with a club foot? Only a few men have ever realized the
truth of this and their names have become very great names. Grover Watrous
will probably never be known, but he is very great just the same. This is
probably the reason why I write about him - just the fact that I had enough
sense to realize that Grover had achieved greatness even though nobody else
will admit it. At the time I simply thought that Grover was a harmless
fanatic, yes, a little "cracked", as my mother insinuated. But every man who
has caught the truth of certitude was a little cracked and it is only these
men who have accomplished anything for the world. Other men, other great
men, have destroyed a little here and there, but these few whom I speak of,
and among whom I include Grover Watrous, were capable of destroying
everything in order that the truth might live. Usually these men were born
with an impediment, with a dub foot, so to speak, and by a strange irony it
is only the club foot which men remember. If a man like Grover becomes
depossessed of his club foot, the world says that he has become "possessed".
This is the logic of incertitude and its fruit is misery. Grover was the
only truly joyous being I ever met in my life and this, therefore, is a
little monument which I am erecting in his memory, in the memory of his
joyous certitude. It is a pity that he had to use Christ for a crutch, but
then what does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces
upon it and lives by it?
AN INTERLUDE
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not
understood. I like to dwell on this period when things were taking shape
because the order, if it were understood, must have been dazzling. In the
first place there was Hymie, Hymie the bull-frog, and there were also his
wife's ovaries which had been rotting away for a considerable time. Hymie
was completely wrapped up in his wife's rotting ovaries. It was the daily
topic of conversation; it took precedence now over the cathartic pills and
the coated tongue. Hymie dealt in "sexual proverbs", as he called them.
Everything he said began from or led up to the ovaries. Despite everything
he was still nicking it off with the wife - prolonged snake-life copulations
in which he would smoke a cigarette or two before un-cunting. He would
endeavour to explain to me how the pus from the rotting ovaries put her in
heat. She had always been a good fuck, but now she was better than ever.
Once the ovaries were ripped out there'd be no telling how she'd take it.
She seemed to realize that too. Ergo, fuck away! Every night, after the
dishes were cleared away, they'd strip down in their little bird-like
apartment and lay together like a couple of snakes. He tried to describe it
to me on a number of occasions - the ways she fucked. It was like an oyster
inside, an oyster with soft teeth that nibbled away at him. Sometimes it
felt as though he were right inside her womb, so soft and fluffy it was, and
those soft teeth biting away at his pecker and making him delirious. They
used to lie scissors-fashion and look up at the ceiling. To keep from coming
he would think about the office, about the little worries which plagued him
and kept his bowels tied up in a knot. In between orgasms he would let his
mind dwell on some one else, so that when she'd start working on him again
he might imagine he was having a brand new fuck with a brand new cunt. He
used to arrange it so that he could look out of the window while it was
going on. He was getting so adept at it that he could undress a woman on the
boulevard there under his window and transport her to the bed; not only
that, but he could actually make her change places with his wife, all
without un-cunting. Sometimes he'd fuck away like that for a couple of hours
and never bother to shoot off. Why waste it! he would say.
Steve Romero, on the other hand, had a hell of a time holding it in.
Steve was built like a bull and he scattered his seed freely. We used to
compare notes sometimes sitting in the Chop Suey joint around the comer from
the office. It was a strange atmosphere. Maybe it was because there was no
wine. Maybe it was the funny little black mushrooms they served us. Anyway
it wasn't difficult to get started on the subject. By the time Steve met us
he would already have had his workout, a shower and a rubdown. He was dean
inside and out. Almost a perfect specimen of a man. Not very bright, to be
sure, but a good egg, a companion. Hymie, on the other hand, was like a
toad. He seemed to come to the table direct from the swamps where he had
passed a mucky day. Filth rolled off his lips like honey. In fact, you
couldn't call it filth, in his case, because there wasn't any other
ingredient with which you might compare it. It was all one fluid, a slimy,
sticky substance made entirely of sex. When he looked at his food he saw it
as potential sperm; if the weather were warm he would say it was good for
the balls; if he took a trolley ride he knew in advance that the rhythmic
movement of the trolley would stimulate his appetite, would give him a slow,
"personal" hard-on, as he put it. Why "personal" I never found out, but that
was his expression. He liked to go out with us because we were always
reasonably sure of picking up something decent. Left to himself he didn't
always fare so well. With us he got a change of meat - Gentile cunt, as he
put it He liked Gentile cunt. Smelled sweeter, he said. Laughed easier
too... Sometimes in the very midst of things. The one thing he couldn't
tolerate was dark meat. It amazed and disgusted him to see me travelling
around with Valeska. Once he asked me if she didn't smell kind of extra
strong like. I told him I liked it that way - strong and smelly, with lots
of gravy around it. He almost blushed at that. Amazing how delicate he could
be about some things. Food, for example. Very finicky about his food.
Perhaps a racial trait. Immaculate about his person, too. Couldn't stand the
sight of a spot on his dean cuffs. Constantly brushing himself off,
constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there were any food
between his teeth. If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the
napkin and extract it with his pearlhandled toothpick. The ovaries of course
he couldn't see. Nor could he smell them either, because his wife too was an
immaculate bitch. Douching herself all day long in preparation for the
evening nuptials. It was tragic, the importance she gave to her ovaries.
l62
Up until the day she was taken to the hospital she was a regular
fucking block. The thought of never being able to fuck again frightened the
wits out of her. Hymie of course told her it wouldn't make any difference to
him one way or the other. Glued to her like a snake, a cigarette in his
mouth, the girls passing below on the boulevard, it was hard for him to
imagine a woman not being able to fuck any more. He was sure the operation
would be successful. Successful! That's to say that she'd fuck even better
than before. He used to tell her that, lying on his back looking up at the
ceiling. "You know I'll always love you," he would say. "Move over just a
little bit, will you ... there, like that... that's it. What was I saying?
Oh yes... why sure, why should you worry about things like that? Of course
I'll be true to you. Listen, pull away just a little bit... yeah, that's
it... that's fine." He used to tell us about it in the Chop Suey joint.
Steve would laugh like hell. Steve couldn't do a thing like that. He was too
honest - especially with women. That's why he never had any luck. Little
Curiey, for example -Steve hated Curiey - would always get what he wanted...
He was a born liar, a born deceiver. Hymie didn't like Curiey much either.
He said he was dishonest, meaning of course dishonest in money matters.
About such things Hymie was scrupulous. What he disliked especially was the
way Curiey talked about his aunt. It was bad enough, in Hymie's opinion,
that he should be screwing the sister of his own mother, but to make her out
to be nothing but a piece of stale cheese, that was too much for Hymie. One
ought to have a bit of respect for a woman, provided she's not a whore. If
she's a whore that's different. Whores are not women. Whores are whores.
That was how Hymie looked at things.
The real reason for his dislike, however, was that whenever they went
out together Curiey always got the best choice. And not only that, but it
was usually with Hymie's money that Curiey managed it. Even the way Curiey
asked for money irritated Hymie - it was like extortion, he said. He thought
it was partly my fault, that I was too lenient with the kid. "He's got no
moral character," Hymie would say. "And what about you, your moral
character?" I would ask. "Oh me I Shit, I'm too old to have any moral
character. But Curley's only a kid." "You're jealous, that's what," Steve
would say. "Me ? Me jealous of him ?" And he'd try to smother the idea with
a scornful little laugh. It made him wince, a jab like that "Listen," he
would say, turning to me, "did I ever act jealous towards you? Didn't I
always turn a girl over to you if you asked me? What about that redhaired
girl in S.U. office... yon remember ... the one with the big teats? Wasn't
that a nice piece of ass to turn over to a friend? But I did it, didn't I? I
did it because you said you liked big teats. But I wouldn't do it for
Curiey. He's a little crook. Let him do his own digging."
As a matter of fact, Curley was digging away very industriously. He
must have had five or six on the string at one time, from what I could
gather. There was Valeska, for example - he had made himself pretty solid
with her. She was so damned pleased to have some one fuck her without
blushing that when it came to sharing him with her cousin and then with the
midget she didn't put up the least objection. What she liked best was to get
in the tub and let him fuck her under water. It was fine until the midget
got wise to it. Then there was a nice rumpus which was finally ironed out on
the parlour floor. To listen to Curiey talk he did everything but climb the
chandeliers. And always plenty of pocket money to boot. Valeska was
generous, but the cousin was a softy. If she came within a foot of a stiff
prick she was like putty. An unbuttoned fly was enough to put her in a
trance. It was almost shameful the things Curiey made her do. He took
pleasure in degrading her. I could scarcely blame him for it, she was such a
prim, priggish bitch in her street clothes. You'd almost swear she didn't
own a cunt, the way she carried herself in the street. Naturally, when he
got her alone he made her pay for her high-falutin' ways. He went at it
cold-bloodedly. "Pish 'it out!" he'd say opening his fly a little. "Fish it
out with your tongue!" (He had it in for the whole bunch because, as he put
it, they were sucking one another off behind his back.) Anyway, once she got
the taste of it in her mouth you could do anything with her. Sometimes he'd
stand her on her hands and push her around the room that way, like a
wheelbarrow. Or else he'd do it dog fashion, and while she groaned and
squirmed he'd nonchalantly light a cigarette and blow the smoke between her
legs. Once he played her a dirty little trick doing it that way. He had
worked her up to such a state that she was beside herself. Anyway, after he
had almost polished the ass off her with his back-scuttling he pulled out
for a second, as though to cool his cock off, and then very slowly and
gently he shoved a big long carrot up her twat. "That, Miss Abercrombie," he
said, "is a sort of Doppelganger to my regular cock," and with that he
unhitches himself and yanks up his pants. Cousin Abercrombie was so
bewildered by it all that she let a tremendous fart and out tumbled the
carrot. At least, that's how Curley related it to me. He was an outrageous
liar, to be sure, and there may not be a grain of truth in the yam, but
there's no denying that he had a flair for such tricks. As for Miss
Abercrombie and her high-tone Narragansett ways, well, with a cunt like that
one can always imagine the worst. By comparison Hymie was a purist. Somehow
Hymie and his fat circumcised dick were two different things. When he got a
personal hard-on, as he said, he really meant that he was irresponsible. He
meant that Nature was asserting itself - through his, Hymie Laubscher's fat,
circumcised dick. It was the same with his wife's cunt. It was something she
wore between her legs, like an ornament. It was a part of Mrs. Laubscher but
it wasn't Mrs. Laubscher personally, if you get what I mean.
Well, all this is simply by way of leading up to the general sexual
confusion which prevailed at this time. It was like taking a flat in the
Land of Fuck. The girl upstairs, for instance... she used to come down now
and then, when the wife was giving a recital, to look after the kid. She was
so obviously a simpleton that I didn't give her any notice at first. But
like all the others she had a cunt too, a sort of impersonal personal cunt
which she was unconsciously conscious of. The oftener she came down the more
conscious she got, in her unconscious way. One night, when she was in the
bathroom, after she had been in there a suspiciously long while, she got me
to thinking of things. I decided to take a peep through the key-hole and see
for myself what was what. Lo and behold, if she isn't standing in front of
the mirror stroking and petting her little pussy. Almost talking to it, she
was. I was so excited I didn't know what to do first. I went back into the
big room, turned out the lights, and lay there on the couch waiting for her
to come out. As I lay there I could still see that bushy cunt others and the
fingers strumming it like. I opened my fly to let my pecker twitch about in
the cool of the dark, I tried to mesmerize her from the couch, or at least I
tried letting my pecker mesmerize her. "Come here, you bitch," I kept saying
to myself, "come here and spread that cunt over me." She must have caught
the message immediately, for in a jiffy she had opened the door and was
groping about in the dark to find the couch. I didn't say a word, I didn't
make a move. I just kept my mind riveted on her cunt moving quietly in the
dark like a crab. Finally she was standing beside the couch. She didn't say
a word either. She just stood there quietly and as I slid my hand up her
legs she moved one foot a little to open her crotch a bit more. I don't
think I ever put my hand into such a juicy crotch in all my life. It was
like paste running down her legs, and if there had been any billboards handy
I could have plastered up a dozen or more. After a few moments, just as
naturally as a cow lowering its head to graze, she bent over and put it in
her mouth. I had my whole four fingers inside her, whipping it up to a
froth. Her mouth was stuffed full and the juice pouring down her legs. Not a
word out of us, as I say. Just a couple of quiet maniacs working away in the
dark like gravediggers. It was a fucking Paradise and I knew it, and I was
ready and willing to fuck my brains away if necessary. She was probably the
best fuck I ever had. She never once opened her trap - not diat night, nor
the next night, nor any night. She'd steal down like diat in the dark, soon
as she smelted me there alone, and plaster her cunt all over me. It was an
enormous cunt, too, when I think back on it. A dark, subterranean labyrinth
fitted up widi divans and cosy comers and rubber teedi and syringeas and
soft nestles and eiderdown and mulberry leaves. I used to nose in like the
solitary worm and bury myself in a little cranny where it was absolutely
silent, and so soft and restful diat I lay like a dolphin on the
oyster-banks. A slight twitch and I'd be in the Pullman reading a newspaper
or else up an impasse where there were mossy round cobblestones
l66
and little wicker gates which opened and shut automatically. Sometimes
it was like riding the shoot-the-shoots, a steep plunge and then a spray of
tingling sea-crabs, the bulrushes swaying feverishly and the gills of tiny
fishes lapping against me like harmonica stops. In the immense black grotto
there was a silk-and-soap organ playing a predaceous black music. When she
pitched herself high, when she turned the juice on full, it made a
violaceous purple, a deep mulberry stain like twilight, a ventiloqual
twilight such as dwarfs and cretins enjoy when they menstruate. It made me
think of cannibals chewing flowers, of Bantus running amok, of wild unicorns
rutting in rhododendron beds. Everything was anonymous and unformulated,
John Doe and his wife Emmy Doe: above us the gas tanks and below the marine
life. Above the belt, as I say, she was batty. Yes, absolutely cuckoo,
though still abroad and afloat. Perhaps that was what made her cunt so
marvellously impersonal. It was one cunt out of a million, a regular Pearl
of the Antilles, such as Dick Osborn discovered when reading Joseph Conrad.
In the broad Pacific of sex she lay, a gleaming silver reef surrounded with
human anemones, human starfish, human madrepores. Only an Osborn could have
discovered her, given the proper latitude and longitude of cunt. Meeting her
in the daytime, watching her slowly going daft, it was like trapping a
weasel when night came on. All I had to do was to lie down in the dark with
my fly open and wait. She was like Ophelia suddenly resurrected among the
Kaffirs. Not a word of any language could she remember, especially not
English. She was a deaf-mute who had lost her memory, and with the loss of
memory she had lost her frigidaire, her curling-irons, her tweezers and
handbag. She was even more naked than a fish, except for the tuft of hair
between her legs. And she was even slippier than a fish because after all a
fish has scales and she had none. It was dubious at times whether I was in
her or she in me. It was open warfare, the new-fangled Pancrace, with each
one biting his own ass. Love among the newts and the cut-out wide open. Love
without gender and without lysol. Incubational love, such as the wolverines
practise above the tree line. On the one side the Arctic Ocean, on the other
the Gulf of Mexico. And though we never referred to it openly there was
always with us King Kong, King Kong asleep in the wrecked hull of the
Titanic among the phosphorescent bones of millionaires and lampreys. No
logic could drive King Kong away. He was the giant truss that supports the
soul's fleeting anguish. He was the wedding cake with hairy legs and arms a
mile long. He was the revolving screen on which the news passes away. He was
the muzzle of the revolver that never went on, the leper armed with
sawed-off gonococci.
It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via
the penis. There was first of all the binomial theorem, a phrase which had
always puzzled me; I put it under the magnifying glass and studied it from X
to Z, There was Logos, which somehow I had always identified with breath; I
found that on the contrary it was a sort of obsessional stasis, a machine
which went on grinding corn long after the granaries had been filled and the
Jews driven out of Egypt. There was Bucephalus, more fascinating to me
perhaps than any word in my whole vocabulary: I would trot it out whenever I
was in a quandary, and with it of course Alexander and his entire purple
retinue. What a horse! Sired in the Indian Ocean, the last of the line, and
never once mated, except to the Queen of the Amazons during the Mesopotamian
adventure. There was the Scotch Gambit! An amazing expression which had
nothing to do with chess. It came to me always in the shape of a man on
stilts, page 2498 of Punk and Wagnall's Unabridged Dictionary. A gambit was
a sort of leap in the dark with mechanical legs. A leap for no purpose -
hence gambit! Clear as a bell and perfectly simple, once you grasped it.
Then there was Andromeda, and the Gorgon Medusa, and Castor and Pollux of
heavenly origin, mythological twins eternally fixed in the ephemeral
stardust. There was lucubration, a word distinctly sexual and yet suggesting
such cerebral connotations as to make me uneasy. Always "midnight
lucubrations", the midnight being ominously significant. And then arras.
Somebody some time or other had been stabbed "behind the arras". I saw an
altar-cloth made of asbestos and in it was a grievous rent such as Caesar
himself might have made.
l68
It was very quiet thinking, as I say, the kind that the men of the Old
Stone Age must have indulged in. Things were neither absurd nor explicable.
It was a jig-saw puzzle which, when you grew tired of, you could push away
with two feet. Anything could be put aside with ease, even the Himalaya
Mountains. It was just the opposite kind of thinking from Mahomet's. It led
absolutely nowhere and was hence enjoyable. The grand edifice which you
might construct throughout the course of a long fuck could be toppled over
in the twinkling of an eye. It was the fuck that counted and not the
construction work. It was like living in the Ark during the Flood,
everything provided for down to a screw-driver. What need to commit murder,
rape or incest when all that was demanded of you was to kill time? Rain,
rain, rain, but inside the Ark everything dry and toasty, a pair of every
kind and in the larder fine Westphalian hams, fresh eggs, olives, pickled
onions, Worcestershire Sauce and other delicacies. God had chosen me, Noah,
to establish a new heaven and a new earth. He had given me a stout boat with
all seams caulked and properly dried. He had given me also the knowledge to
sail the stormy seas. Maybe when it stopped raining there would be other
kinds of knowledge to acquire, but for the present a nautical knowledge
sufficed. The rest was chess in the Cafe Royal, Second Avenue, except that I
had to imagine a partner, a clever Jewish mind that would make the game last
until the rains ceased. But, as I said before, I had no time to be bored:
there were my old friends. Logos, Bucephalus, arras, lucubration and so on.
Why play chess?
Locked up like that for days and nights on end I began to realize that
thinking, when it is not masturbative, is lenitive, healing, pleasurable.
The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere: all other thinking
is done on tracks and no matter how long the stretch, in the end there is
always the depot or the round-house. In the end there is always a red
lantern which says STOP! But when the penis gets to thinking there is no
stop and no let: it is a perpetual holiday, the bait fresh and the fish
always nibbling at the line. Which reminds me of another cunt, Veronica
something or other, who always got me thinking the wrong way. With Veronica
it was always a tussle in the vestibule. On the dance floor you'd think she
was going to make you a permanent present of her ovaries, but as soon as she
hit the air she'd start thinking, thinking other hat, of her purse, of her
aunt who was waiting up for her, of the letter she forgot to mail, of the
job she was going to lose - all kinds of crazy, irrelevant thoughts which
had nothing to do with the thing in hand. It was like she had suddenly
switched her brain to her cunt - the most alert and canny cunt imaginable.
It was almost a metaphysical cunt, so to speak. It was a cunt which thought
out problems, and not only that, but a special kind of thinking it was, with
a metronome going. For this species of displaced rhythmic lucubration a
peculiar dim light was essential. It had to be just about dark enough for a
bat and yet light enough to find a button if one happened to come undone and
roll on the floor of the vestibule. You can see what I mean. A vague yet
meticulous precision, a steely awareness that simulated absent-mindedness.
And fluttery and fluky at the same time, so that you could never determine
whether it was fish or fowl. What is this I hold in my hand? Fine or
super-fine? The answer was always duck soup. If you grabbed her by the
boobies she would squawk like a parrot; if you got under her dress she would
wriggle like an eel: if you held her too tight she would bite like a ferret.
She lingered and lingered and lingered. Why? What was she after? Would she
give in after an hour or two? Not a chance in a million. She was like a
pigeon trying to fly with its legs caught in a steel trap. She pretended she
had no legs. But if you made a move to set her free she would threaten to
moult on you.
Because she had such a marvellous ass and because it was also so damned
inaccessible I used to think of her as the Pons Asinorum. Every schoolboy
knows that the Pons Asinorum is not to be crossed except by two white
donkeys led by a blind man. I don't know why it is so, but that's the rule
as it was laid down by old Euclid. He was so full of knowledge, the old
buzzard, that one day -1 suppose purely to amuse himself - he built a bridge
which no living mortal could ever cross. He called it the Pons Asinorum
because he was the owner of a pair of beautiful white donkeys, and so
attached was he to these don- keys that he would let nobody take possession
of them. And so he conjured a dream in which he, the blind man, would one
day lead the donkeys over the bridge and into the happy hunting grounds for
donkeys. Well, Veronica was very much in the same boat. She thought so much
of her beautiful white ass that she wouldn't part with it for anything. She
wanted to take it with her to Paradise when the time came. As for her cunt,
which by the way she never referred to it all - as for her cunt, I say, well
that was just an accessory to be brought along. In the dim light of the
vestibule, without ever referring overtly to her two problems, she somehow
made you uncomfortably aware of them. That is, she made you aware in the
manner of a prestidigitator. You were to take a look or a feel only to be
finally deceived, only to be shown that you had not seen and had not felt.
It was a very subtle sexual algebra, the midnight lucubration which would
earn you an A or a B next day, but nothing more. You passed your
examinations, you got your diploma, and then you were turned loose. In the
meantime you used your ass to sit down and your cunt to make water with.
Between the textbook and the lavatory there was an intermediate zone which
you were never to enter because it was labelled fuck. You might diddle and
piddle, but you must not fuck. The light was never completely shut off, the
sun never streamed in. Always just light or dark enough to distinguish a
bat. And just that little eerie flicker of light was what kept the mind
alert, on the look-out, as it were, for bags, pencils, buttons, keys, et
cetera. You couldn't really think because your mind was already engaged. The
mind was kept in readiness, like a vacant seat at the theatre on which the
owner had left his opera hat.
Veronica, as I say, had a talking cunt, which was bad because its sole
function seemed to be to talk one out of a fuck. Evelyn, on the other hand,
had a laughing cunt. She lived upstairs too, only in another house. She was
always trotting in at meal times to tell us a new joke. A comedienne of the
first water, the only really funny woman I ever met in my life. Everything
was a joke, fuck included. She could even make a stiff prick laugh, which is
saying a good deal. They say a stiff prick has no conscience, but a stiff
prick that laughs too is phenomenal. The only way I can describe it is to
say that when she got hot and bothered, Evelyn, she put on a ventriloqual
act with her cunt. You'd be ready to slip it in when suddenly the dummy
between her legs would let out a guffaw. At the same time it would reach out
for you and give you a playful little tug and squeeze. It could sing too,
this dummy of a cunt. In fact it behaved just like a trained seal.
Nothing is more difficult than to make love in a circus. Putting on the
trained seal act all the time made her more inaccessible than if she had
been trussed up with iron thongs. She could break down the most "personal"
hard-on in the world. Break it down with laughter. At the same time it
wasn't quite as humiliating as one might be inclined to imagine. There was
something sympathetic about this vaginal laughter. The whole world seemed to
unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence. You could
visualize yourself as a dog, or a weasel, or a white rabbit. Love was
something on the side, a dish of caviar, say, or a wax heliotrope. You could
see the ventriloquist in you talking about caviar or heliotropes, but the
real person was always a weasel or a white rabbit. Evelyn was always lying
in the cabbage patch with her legs spread open offering a bright green leaf
to the first-comer. But if you made a move to nibble it the cabbage patch
would explode with laughter, a bright, dewy, vaginal laughter such as Jesus
H. Christ and Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant never dreamed of, because if they had
the world would not be what it is today and besides there would have been no
Kant and no Christ Almighty. The female seldom laughs, but when she does
it's volcanic. When the female laughs the male had better scoot to the
cyclone cellar. Nothing will stand up under that vaginating chortle, not
even ferroconcrete. The female, when her risibility is once aroused, can
laugh down the hyena or the jackal or the wild-cat. Now and then one hears
it at a lynching bee, for example. It means that the lid is off, that
everything goes. It means that she will forage for herself- and watch out
that you don't get your balls cut off! It means that if the pest is coming
SHE is coming first, and with huge spiked thongs that will flay the living
hide off you. It means that she will lay not only with Tom, Dick and Harry,
but with Cholera, Meningitis, Leprosy: it means that she will lay herself
down on the altar like a mare in rut and take on all comers, including the
Holy Ghost. It means that what it took the poor male, with his logarithmic
cunning, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand years to build, she
will pull it down in a night. She will pull it down and pee on it, and
nobody will stop her once she starts laughing in earnest. And when I said
about Veronica that her laugh would break down the most "personal" hard-on
imaginable I meant it; she would break down the personal erection and hand
you back an impersonal one that was like a red-hot ramrod. You might not get
very far with Veronica herself, but with what she had to give you could
travel far and no mistake about it. Once you came within earshot of her it
was like you had gotten an overdose of Spanish fly. Nothing on earth could
bring it down again, unless you put it under a sledge-hammer.
It was going on this way all the time, even though every word I say is
a lie. It was a personal tour in the impersonal world, a man with a tiny
trowel in his hand digging a tunnel through the earth to get to the other
side. The idea was to tunnel through and find at last the Culebra Cut, the
nec plus ultra, of the honeymoon of flesh. And of course there was no end to
the digging. The best I might hope for was to get stuck in the dead centre
of the earth, where the pressure was strongest and most even all around, and
stay stuck there forever. That would give me the feeling of Ixion on the
wheel, which is one sort of salvation and not entirely to be sneezed at. On
the other hand I was a metaphysician of the instinctivist sort; it was
impossible for me to stay stuck anywhere, even in the dead centre of the
earth. It was most imperative to find and enjoy the metaphysical fuck, and
for that I would be obliged to come out on to a wholly new tableland, a mesa
of sweet alfalfa and polished monoliths, where the eagles and the vultures
flew at random.
Sometimes sitting in a park of an evening, especially a park littered
with papers and bits of food, I would see one pass by, one that seemed to be
going towards Tibet, and I would follow her with the round eye, hoping that
suddenly she would begin to fly, for if she did that, if she would begin to
fly, I knew I would be able to fly also, and that would mean an end to the
digging and the wallowing. Sometimes, probably because of twilight or other
disturbances, it seemed as though she actually did fly on rounding a comer.
That is, she would suddenly be lifted from the ground for the space of a few
feet, like a plane too heavily loaded; but just that sudden involuntary
lift, whether real or imaginary it didn't matter, gave me hope, gave me
courage to keep the still round eye riveted on the spot.
There were megaphones inside which yelled "Go on, keep going, stick it
out," and all that nonsense. But why? To what end? Whither? Whence? I would
set the alarm dock in order to be up and about at a certain hour, but why up
and about? Why get up at all? With that little trowel in my hand I was
working like a galley slave and not the slightest hope of reward involved.
Were I to continue straight on I would dig the deepest hole any man had ever
dug. On the other hand, if I had truly wanted to get to the other side of
the earth, wouldn't it have been much simpler to throw away the trowel and
just board an aeroplane for China? But the body follows after the mind. The
simplest thing for the body is not always easy for the mind. And when it
gels particularly difficult and embarrassing is that moment when the two
start going in opposite directions.
Labouring with the trowel was bliss; it left the mind completely free
and yet there was never the slightest danger of the two being separated. If
the she-animal suddenly began groaning with pleasure, if the she-animal
suddenly began to throw a pleasurable conniption fit, the jaws moving like
old shoe laces, the chest wheezing and the ribs creaking, if the she-bugger
suddenly started to fall apart on the floor, to the collapse of joy and
overexasperation, just at the moment, not a second this side or that, the
promised tableland would hove in sight like a ship coming up out of a fog
and there would be nothing to do but plant the stars and stripes on it and
claim it in the name of Uncle Sam and all that's holy. These misadventures
happened so frequently that it was impossible not to believe in the reality
of a realm which was called Fuck, because that was the only name which might
be given to it, and yet it was more than fuck and by fucking one only began
to approach it Everybody had at one time or another planted the flag in this
territory, and yet nobody was able to lay claim to it permanently. It
disappeared overnight - sometimes in the twinkling of an eye. It was No
Man's Land and it stank with the Utter of invisible deaths. If a truce were
declared you met in this terrain and shook hands or swapped tobacco. But the
truces never lasted very long. The only thing that seemed to have permanency
was the "zone between" idea. Here the bullet flew and the corpses piled up:
then it would rain and finally there would be nothing left but a
stench.
This is all a figurative way of speaking about what is unmentionable.
What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt; it must be mentioned only
in de luxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart What holds the
world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual
intercourse. But fuck, the real thing, cunt, the real thing, seems to
contain some unidentified element which is far more dangerous than
nitroglycerine. To get an idea of the real thing you must consult a
Sears-Roebuck catalogue endorsed by the Anglican Church. On page 23 you will
find a picture of Priapus juggling a corkscrew on the end of his weeny; he
is standing in the shadow of the Parthenon by mistake; he is naked except
for a perforated jock-strap which was loaned for the occasion by the Holy
Rollers of Oregon and Saskatchewan. Long distance is on the wire demanding
to know if they should sell short or long. He says go fuck yourself and
hangs up the receiver. In the background Rembrandt is studying the anatomy
of our Lord Jesus Christ who, if you remember, was crucified by the Jews and
then taken to Abysinnia to be pounded with quoits and other objects. The
weather seems to be fair and warmer, as usual, except for a slight mist
rising up out of the Ionian; this is the sweat of Neptune's balls which were
castrated by the early monks, or perhaps it was by the Manicheans in the
time of the Pentecostal plague. Long strips of horse meat are hanging out to
dry and the flies are everywhere, just as Homer describes it in ancient
times. Hard by is a McCormick threshing machine, a reaper and binder with a
thirty-six horse-power engine and no cutout. The harvest is in and the
workers are counting their wages in the distant fields. This is the flush of
dawn on the first day of sexual intercourse in the old Hellenistic world,
now faithfully reproduced for us in colour thanks to the Zeiss Brothers and
other patient zealots of industry. But this is not the way it looked to the
men of Homer's time who were on the spot. Nobody knows how the god Priapus
looked when he was reduced to the ignominy of balancing a corkscrew on the
end of his weeny. Standing that way in the shadow of the Parthenon he
undoubtedly fell a-dreaming of far-off cunt; he must have lost consciousness
of the corkscrew and the threshing and reaping machine; he must have grown
very silent within himself and finally he must have lost even the desire to
dream. It is my idea, and of course I am willing to be corrected if I am
wrong, that standing thus in the rising mist he suddenly heard the Angelus
peal and lo and behold there appeared before his very eyes a gorgeous green
marshland in which the Chocktaws were making merry with the Navajos: in the
air above were the white condors, their ruffs festooned with marigolds. He
saw also a huge slate on which was written the body of Christ, the body of
Absalom and the evil which is lust. He saw the sponge soaked with frogs'
blood, the eyes which Augustine had sewn into his skin, the vest which was
not big enough to cover out iniquities. He saw these things in the whilomst
moment when the Navajos were making merry with the Chocktaws and he was so
taken by surprise that suddenly a voice issued from between his legs, from
the long thinking reed which he had lost in dreaming, and it was the most
inspired, the most shrill and piercing, the most jubilant and ferocious
cacchinating sort of voice that had ever wongled up from the depths. He
began to sing through that long cock of his with such divine grace and
elegance that the white condors came down out of the sky and shat huge
purple eggs all over the green marshland. Our Lord Christ got up from his
stone bed and, marked by the quoit though he was, he danced like a mountain
goat. The fellaheen came out of Egypt in their chains, followed by the
warlike Igorotes and the snail-eating men of Zanzibar.
This is how things stood on the first day of sexual intercourse in the
old Hellenistic world. Since then things have changed a great deal. It is no
longer polite to sing through your weeny, nor is it permitted even to
condors to shit purple eggs all over the place. All this is scatological,
eschatological and ecumenical. It is forbidden. Verboten. And so the Land of
Puck becomes ever more receding; it becomes mythological. Therefore am I
constrained to speak mythologically. I speak with extreme unction, and with
precious unguents too. I put away the clashing cymbals, the tubas, the white
marigolds, the oleanders and the rhododendrons. Up with the thorns and the
manacles! Christ is dead and mangled with quoits. The fellaheen are
bleaching in the sands of Egyptis, their wrists loosely shackled. The
vultures have eaten away every decomposing crumb of flesh. All is quiet, a
million golden mice nibbling at the unseen cheese. The moon is up and the
Nile ruminates on her riparian ravages. The earth belches silently, the
stars twitch and bleat, the rivers slip their banks. It's like this ...
There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk: there are crazy,
hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous,
seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap: there are
cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow
alive: there are also masochistic cunts which dose up like the oyster and
have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside: there are dithyrambic
cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in
ecstasy: there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave
little flags at Christmas time: there are telegraphic cunts which practise
the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the
political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the
menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull
them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh
Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and
now and then dried breadcrumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are
lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter: there are
cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and
epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars
without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category
or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you
seared and branded;
there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent
and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?
And then there is the one cunt which is all, and this we shall call the
super-cunt, since it is not of this land at all but of that bright country
to which we were long ago invited to fly. Here the dew is ever sparkling and
the tall reeds bend with the wind. It is here that great father of
fornication dwells. Father Apis, the mantic bull who gored his way to heaven
and dethroned the gelded deities of right and wrong. From Apis sprang the
race of unicorns, that ridiculous beast of ancient writ whose learned brow
lengthened into a gleaming phallus, and from the unicorn by gradual stages
was derived the late-city man of which Oswald Spengler speaks. And from the
dead cock of this sad specimen arose the giant skyscraper with its express
elevators and observation towers. We are the last decimal point of sexual
calculation; the world turns like a rotten egg in its crate of straw. Now
for the aluminium wings with which to fly to that far-off place, the bright
country where Apis, the father of fornication, dwells. Everything goes
forward like oiled docks; for each minute of the dial there are a million
noiseless docks which tick off the rinds of time. We are travelling faster
than the lightning calculator, faster than starlight, faster than the
magician can think. Each second is a universe of time. And each universe of
time is but a wink of sleep in the cosmogony of speed. When speed comes to
its end we shall be there, punctual as always and blissfully undenominated.
We shall shed our wings, our docks and our mantelpieces to lean on. We will
rise up feathery and jubilant, like a column of blood, and there will be no
memory to drag us down again. This time I call the realm of the super-cunt,
for it defies speed, calculation or imagery. Nor has the penis itself a
known size or weight. There is only the sustained fed of fuck, the fugitive
in full flight, the nightmare smoking his quiet cigar. Little Nemo walks
around with a seven day hard-on and a wonderful pair of blue balls
bequeathed by Lady Bountiful. It is Sunday morning around the corner from
Evergreen Cemetery. It is Sunday morning and I am lying blissfully dead to
the world on my bed of ferro-concrete. Around the comer is the cemetery,
which is to say - the world of sexual intercourse. My balls ache with the
fucking that is going on, but it is all going on beneath my window, on the
boulevard where Hymie keeps his copulating nest. I am thinking of one woman
and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am
dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the
light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to
be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage,
threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was,
thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar
drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there on the
farthest rim of the universe. She thought it was sheer laziness that kept me
riveted to the bed. She threw the bucket of water over me: I squirmed and
shivered a bit, but I continued to lie there on my ferro-concrete bed. I was
immovable. I was a burned-out meteor adrift somewhere in the neighbourhood
of Vega.
And now I'm on the same bed and the light that's in me refuses to be
extinguished. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery
grounds. They are having sexual intercourse. God bless them, and I am alone
in the Land of Fuck. It seems to me that I hear the clanking of a great
machine, the linotype bracelets passing through the wringer of sex. Hymie
and his nymphomaniac of a wife are lying on the same level with me, only
they are across the river. The river is called Death and it has a bitter
taste. I have waded through it many times, up to the hips, but somehow I
have neither been petrified nor immortalized. I am still burning brightly
inside, though outwardly dead as a planet. From this bed I have gotten up to
dance, not once but hundreds, thousands of times. Each time I came away I
had the conviction that I had danced the skeleton dance on a terrain vague.
Perhaps I had wasted too much of my substance on suffering; perhaps I had
the crazy idea that I would be the first metallurgical bloom of the human
species; perhaps I was imbued with the notion that I was both a sub- gorilla
and a super-god. On this bed of ferro-concrete I remember everything and
everything is in rock crystal. There are never any animals, only thousands
and thousands of human beings all talking at once, and for each word they
utter I have an answer immediately, sometimes before the word is out of
their mouths. There is plenty of killing, but no blood. The murders arc
perpetrated with cleanliness, and always in silence. But even if every