Tropic of Capricorn
Henry Miller


INTRODUCTION
by Robert Nye

Henry Miller’s first book. Tropic of Cancer, was published in Paris in 
1934 and was immediately banned in all English-speaking countries. With its
sequel.

Tropic of Capricorn (1939), which actually covers an earlier period in 
Miller’s life, it makes up a running fictional autobiography remarkable for
its candour, gusto, and completeness. The two books have in common a 
plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy 
discovered somewhere on the far side of despair, things that their author 
was seldom to match and never to surpass in later self-unravellings.

When the ‘Tropics’ were at last made generally available in Britain and 
America in the Sixties, they were praised as works of sexual liberation. 
Since then they have sometimes been attacked as works of sexual misogyny. 
All this seems to me rather to miss the point, as does criticism of the two
books for their verbal extravagance and their lack of art. Probably it is 
no accident that nobody was ever indifferent concerning Henry Miller. There
are those who love him and there are those who hate him. His work does not 
allow of the mild alternatives of liking or disliking. A case could be made
that this itself constitutes a fault, but I prefer to

find a virtue in such passion, and an important one. The Miller that 
emerges from the books is, to my mind, an honest and lovable person, 
splendidly undefeated by experience, a man with an unquenchable appetite 
for the fundamental realities, and an infinite capacity for being surprised
by his own innocence. If there is any message extractable from his work it 
is that of someone who - against all the odds and in spite of most of the 
evidence - says ‘More’ to life. This I find honourable.

Even in the ‘Tropics’ Miller is, of course, an extraordinarily diffuse 
and uneven writer. He repeats, paraphrases, and parodies himself with an 
abandon that in a lesser spirit would be suicidal. He is sometimes brutal, 
he is often sentimental. But having said that, I have said most of what 
might be said against him. The best pages here, as in his one other great 
work. The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), are white-hot and inspired, both 
funny and terrible, a man’s attempt to tell the whole truth about the life 
that he has known. Miller is one of the few modern writers who can move a 
reader to tears, quite simply, by the pressure of his own feeling. He can 
also communicate, and induce in the reader, a delicious delight in the fact
of being alive. I never read Miller on song without feeling better, 
happier, more myself and less alone, for having done so.

On the ovarian trolley

Foreword to Historia Calamitatum
(the story of my misfortunes)

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

Peter Abelard


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

Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke. I 
had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often 
said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

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

From the very beginning I must have trained myself not to want anything 
too badly. From the very beginning I was independent, in a false way. I had
need of nobody because I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as 
my whims dictated. The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I 
balked. That was the form my independence took. I was corrupt, in other 
words, corrupt from the start. It’s as though my mother fed me a poison, 
and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when 
she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent, most children 
rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn’t give a damn, I was a 
philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on 
principle. What principle? The principle of futility.

Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I 
appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at 
bottom I didn’t give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have 
been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and 
nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had
a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that 
perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in 
which everything is offered you gratis? The earliest remembrance I have is 
of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes,
the chill of the sweaty green walls in the kitchen.

Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they
are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, 
naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never realized that 
there were “warm” countries, places where you didn’t have to sweat for a 
living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating. Wherever
there is cold there are people who work themselves to the bone and when 
they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work -which is 
nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people were entirely 
Nordic, which is to say idiots. Every wrong idea which has ever been 
expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say 
nothing of righteousness. They were painfully dean. But inwardly they 
stank.

Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once 
did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the 
dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read
it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were 
washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. 
Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only 
a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, 
and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.

In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better 
to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways. For a long while I
thought I had escaped, but as time goes on I see that I am no better, that 
I am even a little worse, because I saw more dearly than they ever did and 
yet remained powerless to alter my life. As I look back on my life it seems
to me that I never did anything of my own volition but always through the 
pressure of others.

People often think of me as an adventurous fellow; nothing could be 
farther from the truth. My adventures were always adventitious, always 
thrust on me, always endured rather than undertaken. I am of the very 
essence of that proud, boastful Nordic people who have never had the least 
sense of adventure but who nevertheless have scoured the earth, turned it 
upside down, scattering relics and ruins everywhere. Restless spirits, but 
not adventurous ones. Agonizing spirits, incapable of living in the present
Disgraceful cowards, all of them, myself included. For there is only one 
great adventure and that is inward towards the self, and for that, time nor
space nor even deeds matter.

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

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

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

Everything else is a lie - everything I ever did or said which did not 
bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life.

I was a contradiction in essence, as they say. People took me to be 
serious and high-minded, or to be gay and reckless, or to be sincere and 
earnest, or to be negligent and carefree. I was all these things at once - 
and beyond that I was something else, something which no one suspected, 
least of all myself. As a boy of six or seven I used to sit at my 
grandfather’s workbench and read to him while he sewed. I remember him 
vividly in those moments when, pressing the hot iron against the seam of a 
coat, he would stand with one hand over the other and look out of the 
window dreamily. I remember the expression on his face, as he stood there 
dreaming, better than the contents of the books I read, better than the 
conversations we had or the games which I played in the street I used to 
wonder what he was dreaming of, what it was that drew him out of himself. I
hadn’t learned yet how to dream wideawake. I was always lucid, in the 
moment, and all of a piece. His daydreaming fascinated me.

I knew that he had no connection with what he was doing, not the least 
thought for any of us, that he was alone and being alone he was free. I was
never alone, least of all when I was by myself. Always, it seems to me, I 
was accompanied: I was like a little crumb of a big cheese, which was the 
world, I suppose, though I never stopped to think about it. But I know I 
never existed separately, never thought myself the big cheese, as it were. 
So that even when I had reason to be miserable, to complain, to weep, I had
the illusion of participating in a common, a universal misery. When I wept 
the whole world was weeping -so I imagined. I wept very seldom. Mostly I 
was happy, I was laughing, I was having a good time. I had a good time 
because, as I said before, I really didn’t give a fuck about anything. If 
things were wrong with me they were wrong everywhere, I was convinced of 
it. And things were wrong usually only when one cared too much.

That impressed itself on me very early in life. For example, I remember 
the case of my young friend Jack Lawson. For a whole year he lay in bed, 
suffering the worst agonies. He was my best friend, so people said at any 
rate. Well, at first I was probably sorry for him and perhaps now and then 
I called at his house to inquire about him; but after a month or two had 
elapsed I grew quite callous about his suffering. I said to myself he ought
to die and the sooner he dies the better it will be, and having thought 
thus I acted accordingly, that is to say, I promptly forgot about him, 
abandoned him to his fate. I was only about twelve years old at the time 
and I remember being proud of my decision. I remember the funeral too - 
what a disgraceful affair it was. There they were, friends and relatives 
all congregated about the bier and all of them bawling like sick monkeys. 
The mother especially gave me a pain in the ass. She was such a rare, 
spiritual creature, a Christian Scientist, I believe, and though she didn’t
believe in disease and didn’t believe in death either, she raised such a 
stink that Christ himself would have risen from the grave. But not her 
beloved Jack! No, Jack lay there cold as ice and rigid and unbeckonable. He
was dead and there were no two ways about it. I knew it and I was glad of 
it. I didn’t waste any tears over it. I couldn’t say that he was better off
because after all the “he” had vanished. He was gone and with him the 
sufferings he had endured and the suffering he had unwittingly inflicted on
others. Amen! I said to myself, and with that, being slightly hysterical, I
let a loud fart - right beside the coffin.

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

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

It is customary to blame everything on the war. I say the war had nothing
to do with me, with my life. At a time when others were getting themselves 
comfortable berths I was taking one miserable job after another, and never 
enough in it to keep body and soul together. Almost as quickly as I was 
hired I was fired. I had plenty of intelligence but I inspired distrust. 
Whereever I went I fomented discord - not because I was idealistic but 
because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of 
everything. Besides, I wasn’t a good ass-licker. That marked me, no doubt. 
People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn’t give 
a damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn’t get it. 
But after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, 
so to speak.

I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time - 
now worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and I
had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my 
own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a 
federation or a polity of nations - I was more like God, if anything.

This went on from about the middle of the war until… well, until one day 
I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I 
needed it.

Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last 
job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of
the telegraph company - the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America
-

towards the dose of the day, prepared to go through with it. I had just 
come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat books on 
economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the job.

The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He 
seemed to take me for a college student, though it was dear enough from my 
application that I had long left school. I had even honoured myself on the 
application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently that 
passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who had 
turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I 
was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in 
certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual 
leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed 
thinking about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night
wore on. The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn’t bother me 
so much, people didn’t offer you jobs because you had a family to support, 
that much I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had 
rejected me. Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had 
asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get 
over it. In the morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best 
clothes and hot-footed it to the subway. I went immediately to the main 
offices of the telegraph company … up to the 25th floor or wherever it was 
that the president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to 
see the president. Of course the president was either out of town or too 
busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his 
secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, 
considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly, 
without too much heat, but letting him understand all the while that I 
wasn’t to be put out of the way so easily.

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

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

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

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

By the time Valeska arrived on the scene I had hired several army corps 
of messengers. My office at Sunset Place was like an open sewer, and it 
stank like one. I had dug myself into the first line trench and I was 
getting it from all directions at once. To begin with, the man I had ousted
died of a broken heart a few weeks after my arrival. He held out just long 
enough to break me in and then he croaked. Things happened so fast that I 
didn’t have a chance to feel guilty.

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

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

Some would start for their destination and on the way decide that it was 
easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them in the uniform we had 
given them, until they were picked up. Some went straight to the 
observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct.

When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he did 
this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he 
explained to me later, if he didn’t sharpen the pencils first thing off the
bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out
the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly 
sharpened pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he 
kept beside him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also 
informed me, often turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot
thick or the ground covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be 
excused for not shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the 
employment manager might also be excused for not filling up the holes on 
such days, no? But why he didn’t take a crap first instead of plugging in 
on the switchboard soon as his pencils were sharpened was a mystery to me. 
That too he explained to me later. Anyway, the day always broke with 
confusion, complaints, constipation and vacancies. It also began with loud 
smelly farts, with bad breaths, with ragged nerves, with epilepsy, with 
meningitis, with low wages, with back pay that was overdue, with worn-out 
shoes, with corns and bunions, with flat feet and broken arches, with 
pocket books missing and fountain pens lost or stolen, with telegrams 
floating in the sewer, with threats from the vice-president and advice from
the managers, with wrangles and disputes, with cloudbursts and broken 
telegraph wires, with new methods of efficiency and old ones that had been 
discarded, with hope for better times and a prayer for the bonus which 
never came. The new messengers were going over the top and getting 
machine-gunned; the old ones were digging in deeper and deeper, like rats 
in a cheese. Nobody was satisfied, especially not the public. It took ten 
minutes to reach San Francisco over the wire, but it might take a year to 
get the message to the man whom it was intended for - or it might never 
reach him.

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

And then there is Ferdinand Mish - how could I have forgotten him? He has
been waiting in line all morning to get a word with me. I never answered 
the letters he sent me. Was that just? he asks me blandly. Of course not. I
remember vaguely the last letter he sent me from the Cat and Dog Hospital 
on the Grand Concourse, where he was an attendant. He said he repented that
he had resigned his post “but it was on account of his father being too 
strict over him, not giving him any recreation or outside pleasure”. “I’m 
twenty-five now,” he wrote, “and I don’t think I should ought to be 
sleeping no more with my father, do you? I know you are said to be a very 
fine gentleman and I am now self-dependent, so I hope …” McGovem, the old 
trusty, is standing by Ferdinand’s side waiting for me to give him the 
sign. He wants to give Ferdinand the bum’s rush - he remembers him from 
five years ago when Ferdinand lay down on the sidewalk in front of the main
office in full uniform and threw an epileptic fit. No, shit, I can’t do it!
I’m going to give him a chance, the poor bastard. Maybe I’ll send him to 
Chinatown where things are fairly quiet. Meanwhile, while Ferdinand is 
changing into a uniform in the back room, I’m getting an earful from an 
orphan boy who wants to “help make the company a success”. He says that if 
I give him a chance he’ll pray for me every Sunday when he goes to church, 
except the Sundays when he has to report to his parole officer. He didn’t 
do nothing, it appears. He just pushed the fellow and the fellow fell on 
his head and got killed. Next: An ex-consul from Gibraltar. Writes a 
beautiful hand - too beautifill. I ask him to see me at the end of the day 
- something fishy about him.

Meanwhile Ferdinand’s thrown a fit in the dressing room. Lucky break! If 
it had happened in the subway, with a number on his hat and everything, I’d
have been canned. Next:

A guy with one arm and mad as hell because McGovem is showing him the 
door.

“What the hell! I’m strong and healthy, ain’t I?” he shouts, and to prove
it he picks up a chair with his good arm and smashes it to bits. I get back
to the desk and there’s a telegram lying there for me. I open it. It’s from
George Blasini, ex-messenger No. 2459 of S.W. office. “I am sorry that I 
had to quit so soon, but the job was not fitted for my character idleness 
and I am a true lover of labour and frugality but many a time we be unable 
to control or subdue our personal pride.” Shit!

In the beginning I was enthusiastic, despite the damper above and the 
clamps below. I had ideas and I executed them, whether it pleased the 
vice-president or not. Every ten days or so I was put on the carpet and 
lectured for having “too big a heart”. I never had any money in my pocket 
but I used other people’s money freely. As long as I was the boss I had 
credit. I gave money away right and left; I gave my clothes away and my 
linen, my books, everything that was superfluous. If I had had the power I 
would have given the company away to the poor buggers who pestered me. If I
was asked for a dime I gave a half dollar, if I was asked for a dollar I 
gave five. I didn’t give a fuck how much I gave away, because it was easier
to borrow and give than to refuse the poor devils. I never saw such an 
aggregation of misery in my life, and I hope I’ll never see it again. Men 
are poor everywhere - they always have been and they always will be.

And beneath the terrible poverty there is a flame, usually so low that it
is almost invisible. But it is there and if one has the courage to blow on 
it it can become a conflagration. I was constantly urged not to be too 
lenient, not to be too sentimental, not to be too charitable. Be firm! Be 
hard! they cautioned me. Fuck that! I said to myself, I’ll be generous, 
pliant, forgiving, tolerant, tender. In the beginning I heard every man to 
the end; if I couldn’t give him a job I gave him money, and if I had no 
money I gave him cigarettes or I gave him courage. But I gave! The effect 
was dizzying. Nobody can estimate the results of a good deed, of a kind 
word. I was swamped with gratitude, with good wishes, with invitations, 
with pathetic, tender little gifts. If I had had real power, instead of 
being the fifth wheel on a wagon. God knows what I might have accomplished.
I could have used the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America as a 
base to bring all humanity to God; I could have transformed North and South
America alike, and the Dominion of Canada too. I had the secret in my hand:
it was to be generous, to be kind, to be patient. I did the work of five 
men. I hardly slept for three years. I didn’t own a whole shirt and often I
was so ashamed of borrowing from my wife, or robbing the kid’s bank, that 
to get the car fare to go to work in the morning I would swindle the blind 
newspaperman at the subway station. I owed so much money all around that if
I were to work for twenty years I would not have been able to pay it back. 
I took from those who had and I gave to those who needed, and it was the 
right thing to do, and I would do it all over again if I were in the same 
position.

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

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

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

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

From all over the earth they had come to me to be succoured. Except for 
the primitives there was scarcely a race which wasn’t represented on the 
force.

Except for the Ainus, the Maoris, the Papuans, the Veddas, the Lapps, the
Zulus, the Patagonians, the Igorotes, the Hottentots, the Touaregs, except 
for the lost Tasmanians, the lost Grimaldi men, the lost Atianteans, I had 
a representative of almost every species under the sun. I had two brothers 
who were still sun-worshippers, two Nestorians from the old Assyrian world;
I had two Maltese twins from Malta and a descendant of the Mayas from 
Yucatan; I had a few of our little brown brothers from the Philippines and 
some Ethiopians from Abyssinia; I had men from the pampas of Argentina and 
stranded cowboys from Montana; I had Greeks, Letts, Poles, Croats, 
Slovenes, Ruthenians, Czechs, Spaniards, Welshmen, Finns, Swedes, Russians,
Danes, Mexicans, Porto Ricans, Cubans, Uruguayans, Brazilians, Australians,
Persians, Japs, Chinese, Javanese, Egyptians, Africans from the Gold Coast 
and the Ivory Coast, Hindus, Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Germans, Irish, 
English, Canadians - and plenty of Italians and plenty of Jews. I had only 
one Frenchman that I can recall and he lasted about three hours. I had a 
few American Indians, Cherokees mostly, but no Tibetans, and no Eskimos: I 
saw names I could never have imagined and handwriting which ranged from 
cuneiform to the sophisticated and astoundingly beautiful calligraphy of 
the Chinese. I heard men beg for work who had been Egyptologists, 
botanists, surgeons, gold-miners, professors of Oriental languages, 
musicians, engineers, physicians, astronomers, anthropologists, chemists, 
mathematicians, mayors of cities and governors of states, prison warders, 
cow-punchers, lumberjacks, sailors, oyster pirates, stevedores, riveters, 
dentists, surgeons, painters, sculptors, plumbers, architects, dope 
peddlers, abortionists, white slavers, sea divers, steeplejacks, farmers, 
cloak and suit salesmen, trappers, lighthouse keepers, pimps, aldermen, 
senators, every bloody thing under the sun, and all of them down and out, 
begging for work for cigarettes, for carfare, for a chance, Christ 
Almighty, just another chance!

I saw and got to know men who were saints, if there are saints in this 
world; I saw and spoke to savants, crapulous and uncrapulous ones; I 
listened to men who had the divine fire in their bowels who could have 
convinced God Almighty that they were worthy of another chance, but not the
vice-president of the Cosmococcus Telegraph Company. I sat riveted to my 
desk and I travelled around the world at lightning speed, and I learned 
that everywhere it is the same -hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, 
greed, extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to 
man: the fetters, the harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs.
The finer the calibre the worse off the man.

Men were walking the streets of New York in that bloody, degrading 
outfit, the despised, the lowest of the low, walking around like auks, like
penguins, like oxen, like trained seals, like patient donkeys, like big 
jackasses, like crazy gorillas, like docile maniacs nibbling at the 
dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like guinea pigs, like squirrels, like 
rabbits, and many and many a one was fit to govern the world, to write tile
greatest book ever written. When I think of some of the Persians, the 
Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, 
their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness, I spit 
on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded
Germans, the smug self-satisfied French. The earth is one great sentient 
being, a planet saturated through and through with man, a live planet 
expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly;

it is not the home of the white race or the black race or the yellow race
or the lost blue race, but the home of man and all men are equal before God
and will have their chance, if not now then a million years hence. The 
little brown brothers of the Philippines may bloom again, one day and the 
murdered Indians of America north and south may also come alive one day to 
ride the plains where now the cities stand belching fire and pestilence. 
Who has the last say? Man! The earth is his because he is the earth, its 
fire, its water, its air, its mineral and vegetable matter, its spirit 
which is cosmic, which is imperishable, which is the spirit of all the 
planets, which transforms itself through him, through endless signs and 
symbols, through endless manifestations. Wait, you cosmococcic telegraphic 
shits, you demons on high waiting for the plumbing to be repaired, wait, 
you dirty white conquerors who have sullied the earth with your cloven 
hooves, your instruments, your weapons, your disease germs, wait, all you 
who are sitting in clover and counting your coppers, it is not the end. The
last man will have his say before it is finished. Down to the last sentient
molecule justice must be done - and will be done! Nobody is getting away 
with anything, least of all the cosmococdc shits of North America.

When it came time for my vacation - I hadn’t taken one for three years, I
was so eager to make the company a success! - I took three weeks instead of
two and I wrote the book about the twelve little men. I wrote it straight 
off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a 
man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day. I thought 
he must say everything all at once - in one book - and collapse afterwards.
I didn’t know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless. But I was 
determined to wipe Horatio Alger out of the North American consciousness. I
suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal 
tome and faulty from start to finish. But it was my first book and I was in
love with it. If I had the money, as Gide had, I would have published it at
my own expense. If I had had the courage that Whitman had, I would have 
peddled it from door to door. Everybody I showed it to said it was 
terrible. I was urged to give up the idea of writing. I had to learn, as 
Balzac did, that one must write volumes before signing one’s own name. I 
had to leam, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do 
anything else but write, that one must write and write and write, even if 
everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in 
you. Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real 
secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty,
bad, terrible, as they said, was only natural. I was attempting at the 
start what a man of genius would have undertaken only at the end. I wanted 
to say the last word at the beginning. It was absurd and pathetic.

It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in 
my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to 
attempt something big. Today, when I think of the circumstances under which
I wrote that book, when I think of the overwhelming material which I tried 
to put into form, when I think of what I hoped to encompass, I pat myself 
on the back, I give myself a double A. I am proud of the fact that I made 
such a miserable failure of it; had I succeeded I would have been a 
monster. Sometimes, when I look over my notebooks, when I look at the names
alone of those whom I thought to write about, I am seized with vertigo. 
Each man came to me with a world of his own; he came to me and unloaded it 
on my desk; he expected me to pick it up and put it on my shoulders. I had 
no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet 
on the elephant’s back and the elephant on the tortoise’s back. To inquire 
on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad. I didn’t dare to think of 
anything then except the “facts”.

To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one 
doesn’t become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have 
your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a 
human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be 
carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common 
denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from 
the very roots of your being. One can’t make a new heaven and earth with 
“facts”. There are no “facts” - there is only the fact that man, every man 
everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the 
long route and some take the short route.

Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of 
help except by being kind, generous and patient. In my enthusiasm certain 
things were then inexplicable to me which now are dear. I think, for 
example, of Carnahan, one of the twelve little men I had chosen to write 
about. He was what is called a model messenger. He was a graduate of a 
prominent university, had a sound intelligence and was of exemplary 
character. He worked eighteen and twenty hours a day and earned more than 
any messenger on the force. The clients whom he served wrote letters about 
him, praising him to the skies; he was offered good positions which he 
refused for one reason or another. He lived frugally, sending the best part
of his wages to his wife and children who lived in another city.

He had two vices - drink and the desire to succeed. He could go for a 
year without drinking, but if he took one drop he was off. He had deaned up
twice in Wall Street and yet, before coming to me for a job, he had gotten 
no further than to be a sexton of a church in some little town. He had been
fired from that job because he had broken into the sacramental wine and 
rung the bells all night long. He was truthful, sincere, earnest. I had 
implicit confidence in him and my confidence was proven by the record of 
his service which was without a blemish.

Nevertheless he shot his wife and children in cold blood and then he shot
himself. Fortunatdy none of them died; they all lay in the hospital 
together and they all recovered. I went to see his wife, after they had 
transferred him to jail, to get her help. She refused categorically. She 
said he was the meanest, cruellest son of a bitch that ever walked on two 
legs - she wanted to see him hanged. I pleaded with her for two days, but 
she was adamant. I went to the jail and talked to him through the mesh. I 
found that he had already made himself popular with the authorities, had 
already been granted special privileges. He wasn’t at all dejected. On the 
contrary, he was looking forward to making the best of his time in prison 
by “studying up” on salesmanship. He was going to be the best salesman in 
America after his release. I might almost say that he seemed happy. He said
not to worry about him, he would get along all right. He said everybody was
swell to him and that he had nothing to complain about. I left him somewhat
in a daze. I went to a nearby beach and decided to take a swim. I saw 
everything with new eyes. I almost forgot to return home, so absorbed had I
become in my speculations about this chap. Who could say that everything 
that happened to him had not happened for the best? Perhaps he might leave 
the prison a full-fledged evangelist instead of a salesman. Nobody could 
predict what he might do. And nobody could aid him because he was working 
out his destiny in his own private way.

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

There was Dave Olinski, another faithftil, industrious messenger who 
thought of nothing but work. He had one fatal weakness - he talked too 
much. When he came to me he had already been around the globe several times
and what he hadn’t done to make a living isn’t worth telling about. He knew
about twelve languages and he was rather proud of his linguistic ability. 
He was one of those men whose very willingness and enthusiasm is their 
undoing. He wanted to help everybody along, show everybody how to succeed. 
He wanted more work than we could give him - he was a glutton for work. 
Perhaps I should have warned him, when I sent him to his office on the East
Side, that he was going to work in a tough neighbourhood, but he pretended 
to know so much and he was so insistent on working in that locality 
(because of his linguistic ability) that I said nothing. I thought to 
myself - you’ll find out quickly enough for yourself. And surely enough, he
was only there a short time when he got into trouble. A tough Jew boy from 
the neighbourhood walked in one day and asked for a blank. Dave, the 
messenger, was behind the desk. He didn’t like the way the man asked for 
the blank. He told him he ought to be more polite. For that he got a box in
the ears. That made him wag his tongue some more, whereupon he got such a 
wallop that his teeth flew down his throat and his jaw-bone was broken in 
three places. Still he didn’t know enough to hold his trap. Like the damned
fool that he was he goes to the police station and registers a complaint.

A week later, while he’s sitting on a bench snoozing, a gang of 
roughnecks break into the place and beat him to a pulp. His head was so 
battered that his brains looked like an omelette. For good measure they 
emptied the safe and turned it upside down. Dave died on the way to 
hospital. They found five hundred dollars hidden away in the toe of his 
sock. … Then there was Clausen and his wife Lena. They came in together 
when he applied for the job. Lena had a baby in her arms and he had two 
little ones by the hand. They were sent to me by some relief agency. I put 
him on as a night messenger so that he’d have a fixed salary. In a few days
I had a letter from him, a batty letter in which he asked me to excuse him 
for being absent as he had to report to his parole officer. Then another 
letter saying that his wife had refused to sleep with him because she 
didn’t want any more babies and would I please come to see them and try to 
persuade her to sleep with him -. I went to his home - a cellar in the 
Italian quarter. It looked like a bughouse. Lena was pregnant again, about 
seven months under way, and on the verge of idiocy. She had taken to 
sleeping on the roof because it was too hot in the cellar, also because she
didn’t want him to touch her any more. When I said it wouldn’t make any 
difference now she just looked at me and grinned. Clausen had been in the 
war and maybe the gas had made him a bit goofy - at any rate he was foaming
at the mouth. He said he would brain her if she didn’t stay off that roof. 
He insinuated that she was sleeping up there in order to carry on with the 
coal man who lived in the attic. At this Lena smiled again with that 
mirthless batrachian grin. Clausen lost his temper and gave her a swift 
kick in the ass. She went out in a huff taking the brats with her. He told 
her to stay out for good. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a big 
Colt. He was keeping it in case he needed it some time, he said. He showed 
me a few knives too, and a sort of blackjack which he had made himself. 
Then he began to weep. He said his wife was making a fool of him. He said 
he was sick of working for her because she was sleeping with everybody in 
the neighbourhood.

The kids weren’t his because he couldn’t make a kid any more even if he 
wanted to. The very next day, while Lena was out marketing, he took the 
kids up to the roof and with the blackjack he had shown me he beat their 
brains out. Then he jumped off the roof head first. When Lena came home and
saw what happened she went off her nut. They had to put her in a 
straight-jacket and call for the ambulance… There was Schuldig the rat who 
had spent twenty years in prison for a crime he had never committed. He had
been beaten almost to death before he confessed; then solitary confinement,
starvation, torture, perversion, dope.

When they finally released him he was no longer a human being. He 
described to me one night his last thirty days in jail, the agony of 
waiting to be released.

I have never heard anything like it; I didn’t think a human being could 
survive such anguish. Freed, he was haunted by the fear that he might be 
obliged to commit a crime and be sent back to prison again. He complained 
of being followed, spied on, perpetually tracked. He said “they” were 
tempting him to do things he had no desire to do. “They” were the dicks who
were on his trail, who were paid to bring him back again. At night, when he
was asleep, they whispered in his ear. He was powerless against them 
because they mesmerized him first. Sometimes they placed dope under his 
pillow, and with it a revolver or a knife. They wanted him to kill some 
innocent person so that they would have a solid case against him this time.
He got worse and worse. One night, after he had walked around for hours 
with a batch of telegrams in his pocket, he went up to a cop and asked to 
be locked up. He couldn’t remember his name or address or even the office 
he was working for. He had completely lost his identity. He repeated over 
and over - “I’m innocent… I’m innocent.” Again they gave him the third 
degree. Suddenly he jumped up and shouted like a madman - “I’ll confess … 
I’ll confess” - and with that he began to reel off one crime after another.
He kept it up for three hours. Suddenly in the midst of a harrowing 
confession, he stopped short, gave a quick look about, like a man who has 
suddenly come to, and then, with the rapidity and the force which only a 
madman can summon he made a tremendous leap across the room and crashed his
skull against the stone wall… I relate these incidents briefly and 
hurriedly as they flash through my mind; my memory is packed with thousands
of such details, with a myriad faces, gestures, tales, confessions all 
entwined and interlaced like the stupendous reeling facade of some Hindu 
temple made not of stone but of the experience of human flesh, a monstrous 
dream edifice built entirely of reality and yet not reality itself but 
merely the vessel in which the mystery of the human being is contained. My 
mind wanders to the clinic where in ignorance and good-will I brought some 
of the younger ones to be cured. I can think of no more evocative image to 
convey the atmosphere of this place than the painting by Hieronymus Bosch 
in which the magician, after the manner of a dentist extracting a live 
nerve, is represented as the deliverer of insanity.

All the trumpery and quackery of our scientific practitioners came to 
apotheosis in the person of the suave sadist who operated this clinic with 
the full concurrence and connivance of the law. He was a ringer for 
Caligari, except that he was minus the dunce cap. Pretending that he 
understood the secret regulations of the glands, invested with the powers 
of a mediaeval monarch, oblivious of the pain he inflicted, ignorant of 
everything but his medical knowledge, he went to work on the human organism
like a plumber sets to work on the underground drainpipes. In addition to 
the poisons he threw into the patient’s system he had recourse to his fists
or his knees as the case might be. Anything justified a “reaction”. If the 
victim were lethargic he shouted at him, slapped him in the face, pinched 
his arm, cuffed him, kicked him. If on the contrary the victim were too 
energetic he employed the same methods, only with redoubled zest. The 
feelings of his subject were of no importance to him; whatever reaction he 
succeeded in obtaining was merely a demonstration or manifestation of the 
laws regulating the operation of the internal glands of secretion. The 
purpose of his treatment was to render the subject fit for society. But no 
matter how fast he worked, no matter whether he was successful or not 
successful, society was turning out more and more misfits. Some of them 
were so marvellously maladapted that when, in order to get proverbial 
reaction, he slapped them vigorously on the cheek they responded with an 
uppercut or a kick in the balls. It’s true, most of his subjects were 
exactly what he described them to be - incipient criminals. The whole 
continent was on the slide - is still on the slide - and not only the 
glands need regulating but the ballbearing, the armature, the skeletal 
structure, the cerebrum, the cerebellum, the coccyx, the larynx, the 
pancreas, the liver, the upper intestine and the lower intestine, the 
heart, the kidneys, the testicles, the womb, the Fallopian tubes, the whole
goddamned works. The whole country is lawless, violent, explosive, 
demoniacal. It’s in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-grandiose 
landscape, in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the 
torrential rivers that bite through the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal 
distances, the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous 
fruits, the mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, 
beliefs, the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness of 
temperaments, principles, needs, requirements. The continent is full of 
buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of
man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so 
electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like 
the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole 
continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a 
moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From 
Alaska to Yucatan it’s the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. 
Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. 
Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, 
courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow
up.

Often it happened, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his 
shoulder.

He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out often he 
was a good fellow, a fellow whom everybody liked. But when the rage came on
nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the
best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It always 
happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In America 
they’re constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their 
energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is 
pacifistic and cannibalistic.

Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones 
crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a 
slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbour and sucking the juice 
from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; 
actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as 
pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it 
is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where 
everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound 
asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place.

Nobody could have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this 
nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in
my ears. Like my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The 
millions who were put away in the carnage passed away in a cloud, much like
the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the red Indians and the 
buffaloes. People pretended to be profoundly moved, but they weren’t. They 
were simply tossing fitfully in their sleep. No one lost his appetite, no 
one got up and rang the fire alarm. The day I first realized that there had
been a war was about six months or so after the armistice. It was in a 
street car on the 14th Street crosstown line. One of our heroes, a Texas 
lad with a string of medals across his chest, happened to see an officer 
passing on the sidewalk. The sight of the officer enraged him. He was a 
sergeant himself and he probably had good reason to be sore. Anyway, the 
sight of the officer enraged him so that he got up from his seat and began 
to bawl the shit out of the government, the army, the civilians, the 
passengers in the. car, everybody and everything. He said if there was ever
another war they couldn’t drag him to it with a twenty mule team. He said 
he’d see every son of a bitch killed before he’d go again himself; he said 
he didn’t give a fuck about the medals they had decorated him with and to 
show that he meant it he ripped them off and threw them out the window; he 
said if he was ever in a trench with an officer again he’d shoot him in the
back like a dirty dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other
general. He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he’d picked up
over there, and nobody opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got 
through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that
the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the 
war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be 
wideawake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to 
the electric chair because he had performed his duty towards his fellow 
men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just 
and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, 
country and humanity, peace be with you all. And the second time I 
experienced the reality of war was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our 
night messengers, flew off the handle one day and smashed the office to 
bits at one of the railway stations.

They sent him to me to give him the gate, but I didn’t have the heart to 
fire him. He had performed such a beautiful piece of destruction that I 
felt more like hugging and squeezing him; I was only hoping to Christ he 
would go up the 25th floor, or wherever it was that the president and the 
vice-presidents had their offices, and mop up the whole bloody gang. But in
the name of discipline, and to uphold the bloody farce it was, I had to do 
something to punish him or be punished for it myself, and so not knowing 
what less I could do I took him off the commission basis and put him back 
on a salary basis. He took it pretty badly, not realizing exactly where I 
stood, either for him or against him and so I got a letter from him pronto,
saying that he was going to pay me a visit in a day or two and that I’d 
better watch out because he was going to take it out of my hide. He said 
he’d come up after office hours and that if I was afraid I’d better have 
some strong-arm men around to look after me. I knew he meant every word he 
said and I felt pretty damned quaky when I put the letter down. I waited in
for him alone, however, feeling that it would be even more cowardly to ask 
for protection. It was a strange experience. He must have realized the 
moment he laid eyes on me that if I was a son of a bitch and a lying, 
stinking hypocrite, as he had called me in his letter, I was only that 
because he was, which wasn’t a hell of a lot better. He must have realized 
immediately that we were both in the same boat and that the bloody boat was
leaking pretty badly. I could see something like that going on in him as he
strode forward, outwardly still furious, still foaming at the mouth, but 
inwardly all spent, all soft and feathery. As for myself, what fear I had 
vanished the moment I saw him enter. Just being there quiet and alone, and 
being less strong, less capable of defending myself, gave me the drop on 
him. Not that I wanted to have the drop on him either. But it had turned 
out that way and I took advantage of it, naturally. The moment he sat down 
he went soft as putty.

He wasn’t a man any more, but just a big child. There must have been 
millions of them like him, big children with machine guns who could wipe 
out whole regiments without batting an eyelash; but back in the work 
trenches, without a weapon, without a clear, visible enemy, they were 
helpless as ants. Everything revolved about the question of food. The food 
and the rent - that was all there was to fight about - but there was no 
way, no dear, visible way, to fight for it. It was like seeing an army 
strong and well equipped, capable of licking anything in sight, and yet 
ordered to retreat every day, to retreat and retreat and retreat because 
that was the strategic thing to do, even though it meant losing ground, 
losing guns, losing ammunition, losing food, losing sleep, losing courage, 
losing life itself finally. Wherever there were men fighting for food and 
rent there was this retreat going on, in the fog, in the night, for no 
earthly reason except that it was the strategic thing to do. It was eating 
the heart out of him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was
like fighting an army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while
you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped on, one after 
the other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing
to do about it.

He was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and 
beaten, that he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while 
he’s sobbing like that suddenly the telephone rings and it’s the 
vice-president’s office - never the vice-president himself, but always his 
office -and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes 
Sir! and I hang up. I don’t say anything to Griswold about it but I walk 
home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I 
leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody’s going 
to pay for it - and anyway I want to know first where the order comes from 
and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president’s office in
the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did you give 
the order I ask - and why? And before he has a chance to deny it, or to 
explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the 
shoulder and where he don’t like it and can’t take it - and if you don’t 
like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job 
and you can shove them up your ass - and like that I walk out on him. I go 
back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual. I expect, of 
course, that I’ll get the sack before the day’s over. But nothing of the 
kind. No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager 
saying to take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don’t 
do anything hasty, we’ll look into it, etc. I guess they’re still looking 
into it because Griswold went on working just as always - in fact, they 
even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a dirty deal, too, because as a
clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved his pride and 
it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt.

But that’s what happens to a guy when he’s just a hero in his sleep. 
Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on 
retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as 
vice-president. It’s all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, 
a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I woke up.
And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I
had walked in - without as much as a by your leave, sir!

Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone 
through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, 
and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to 
law - and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. 
Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, 
properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I 
had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a 
football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, 
made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, 
but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like 
mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, 
hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me.

Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much 
difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the 
other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was 
rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an 
absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood 
and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an 
important day in my life because it opened up a new world to me, a world I 
had often dreamed about but never hoped to see. I remember vividly that we 
were standing on the comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th Street towards dusk. I 
remember it because it seemed utterly incongruous to be listening to a man 
talking about Mt. Aetna and Vesuvius and Capri and Pompeii and Morocco and 
Paris on the comer of Sixth Avenue and 49th St., Manhattan. I remember the 
way he looked about as he talked, like a man who hadn’t quite realized what
he was in for but who vaguely sensed that he had made a horrible mistake in
returning. His eyes seemed to be saying all the time - this has no value, 
no value whatever. He didn’t say that, however, but just this over and 
over: “I’m sure you’d like it! I’m sure it’s just the place for you.” When 
he left me I was in a daze. I couldn’t get hold of him again quickly 
enough. I wanted to hear it all over again, in minute detail.

Nothing that I had read about Europe seemed to match this glowing account
from my friend’s own lips. It seemed all the more miraculous to me in that 
we had sprung out of the same environment. He had managed it because he had
rich friends - and because he knew how to save his money. I had never known
any one who was rich, who had travelled, who had money in the bank. All my 
friends were like myself, drifting from day to day, and never a thought for
the future.

O’Mara, yes, he had travelled a bit, almost all over the world - but as a
bum, or eke in the army, which was even worse than being a bum. My friend 
Ulric was the first fellow I had ever met whom I could truly say had 
travelled. And he knew how to talk about his experiences.

As a result of that chance encounter on the street we met frequently 
thereafter, for a period of several months. He used to call for me in the 
evening after dinner and we would stroll through the park which was nearby.
What a thirst I had! Every slightest detail about the other world 
fascinated me. Even now, years and years since, even now, when I know Paris
like a book, his picture of Paris is still before my eyes, still vivid, 
still real. Sometimes after a rain, riding swiftly through the city in a 
taxi, I catch fleeting glimpses of this Paris he described; just momentary 
snatches, as in passing the Tuileries, perhaps, or a glimpse of Montmartre,
of the Sacre Coeur, through the Rue Laffite, in the last flush of twilight.
Just a Brooklyn boy! That was an expression he used sometimes when he felt 
ashamed of his inability to express himself more adequately. And I was just
a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men.

But as I wander about, rubbing elbows with the world, seldom it happens 
that I meet any one who can describe so lovingly and faithfully what he has
seen and felt. Those nights in Prospect Park with my old friend Ulric are 
responsible, more than anything else, for my being here to-day. Most of the
places he described for me I have still to see; some of them I shall 
perhaps never see.

But they live inside me, warm and vivid, just as he created them in our 
rambles through the park.

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

My friend Kronski used to twit me about my “euphorias”. It was a sly way 
he had of reminding me, when I was extraordinarily gay, that the morrow 
would find me depressed. It was true. I had nothing but ups and downs. Long
stretches of gloom and melancholy followed by extravagant bursts of gaiety,
of trancelike inspiration. Never a level in which I was myself. It sounds 
strange to say so, yet I was never myself. I was either anonymous or the 
person called Henry Miller raised to the nth degree. In the latter mood, 
for instance, I could spill out a whole book to Hymie while riding a 
trolleycar. Hymie, who never suspected me of being anything but a good 
employment manager. I can see his eyes now as he looked at me one night 
when I was in one of my states of “euphoria”.

We had boarded the trolley at the Brooklyn Bridge to go to some flat in 
Greenpoint where a couple of trollops were waiting to receive us. Hymie had
started to talk to me in his usual way about his wife’s ovaries. In the 
first place he didn’t know precisely what ovaries meant and so I was 
explaining it to him in crude and simple fashion. In the midst of my 
explanation it suddenly seemed so profoundly tragic and ridiculous that 
Hymie shouldn’t know what ovaries were that I became drunk, as drunk I mean
as if I had a quart of whisky under my belt. From the idea of diseased 
ovaries there germinated in one lightning-like flash a sort of tropical 
growth made up of the most heterogeneous assortment of odds and ends in the
midst of which, securely lodged, tenaciously lodged, I might say, were 
Dante and Shakespeare. At the same instant I also suddenly recalled my 
whole private train of thought which had begun about the middle of the 
Brooklyn Bridge and which suddenly the word “ovaries” had broken.

I realized that everything Hymie had said up till the word “ovaries”, had
sieved through me like sand. What I had begun, in the middle of the 
Brooklyn Bridge, was what I had begun time and time again in the past, 
usually when walking to my father’s shop, a performance which was repeated 
day in and day out as if in a trance. What I had begun, in brief, was a 
book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of a 
ferocious activity. Not for years had I thought of this book which I used 
to write every day on my way from Delancey Street to Murray Hill. But going
over the bridge the sun setting, the skyscrapers gleaming like 
phosphorescent cadavers, the remembrance of the past set in … remembrance 
of going back and forth over the bridge, going to a job which was death, 
returning to a home which was a morgue, memorizing Faust looking down into 
the cemetery, spitting into the cemetery from the elevated train, the same 
guard on the platform every morning, an imbecile, the other imbeciles 
reading their newspapers, new skyscrapers going up, new tombs to work in 
and die in, the boats passing below, the Fall River Line, the Albany Day 
Line, why am I going to work, what will I do tonight, the warm cunt beside 
me and can I work my knuckles into her groin, run away and become a cowboy,
try Alaska, the gold mines, get off and turn around, don’t die yet, wait 
another day, a stroke of luck, river, end it, down, down, like a corkscrew,
head and shoulders in the mud, legs free, fish will come and bite, tomorrow
a new life, where, anywhere, why begin again, the same thing everywhere, 
death, death is the solution, but don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke
of luck, a new face, a new friend, millions of chances, you’re too young 
yet, you’re melancholy, you don’t die yet, wait another day, a stroke of 
luck, fuck anyway, and so on over the bridge into the glass shed, everybody
glued together, worms, ants, crawling out of a dead tree and their thoughts
crawling out the same way … Maybe, being up high between the two shores, 
suspended above the traffic, above life and death, on each side the high 
tombs, tombs blazing with dying sunlight, the river flowing heedlessly, 
flowing on like time itself, maybe each time I passed up there, something 
was tugging away at me, urging me to take it in, to announce myself, anyway
each time I passed on high I was truly alone, and whenever that happened 
the book commenced to write itself, screaming the things which I never 
breathed, the thoughts I never uttered, the conversations I never held, the
hopes, the dreams, the delusions I never admitted. If this then was the 
true self it was marvellous, and what’s more it seemed never to change but 
always to pick up from the last stop to continue in the same vein, a vein I
had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first 
time alone and there frozen in the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, 
the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I 
knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every
dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led an 
independent existence. Suddenly, looking at Hymie and thinking of that 
strange word “ovaries”, now stranger than any word in my whole vocabulary, 
this feeling of icy isolation came over me and Hymie sitting beside me was 
a bullfrog, absolutely a bullfrog and nothing more. I was jumping from the 
bridge head first, down into the primeval ooze, the legs dear and waiting 
for a bite; like that Satan had plunged through the heavens, through the 
solid core of the earth, head down and ramming through to the very hub of 
the earth, the darkest, densest, hottest pit of hell. I was walking through
the Mojave Desert and the man beside me was waiting for nightfall in order 
to fall on me and slay me. I was walking again in Dreamland and a man was 
walking above me on a tightrope and above him a man was sitting in an 
aeroplane spelling letters of smoke in the sky. The woman hanging on my arm
was pregnant and in six or seven years the thing she was carrying inside 
her would be able to read the letters in the sky and he or she or it would 
know that it was a cigarette and later would smoke the cigarette, perhaps a
package a day. In the womb nails formed on every finger, every toe; you 
could stop right there, at a toe nail, the tiniest toe nail imaginable and 
you could break your head over it, trying to figure it out.

On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such 
a hodge-podge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one 
lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the 
other side of the ledger things like toe nails, hair, teeth, blood, 
ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of 
ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. The 
bullfrog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat;
they were stuck in the cold sweat of the primeval ooze. Each collar button 
was an ovary that had come unglued, an illustration out of the dictionary 
without benefit of lucubration; lacklustre in the cold yellow fat of the 
eyeball each buttoned ovary produced a subterranean chill, the skating rink
of hell where men stood upside down in the ice, the legs free and waiting 
for a bite. Here Dante walked unaccompanied, weighed down by his vision, 
and through endless circles gradually moving heavenward to be enthroned in 
his work. Here Shakespeare with smooth brow fell into the bottomless 
reverie of rage to emerge in elegant quartos and innuendoes. A glaucous 
frost of non-comprehension swept dear by gales of laughter. From the hub of
the bullfrog’s eye radiated dean white spokes of sheer lucidity not to be 
annotated or categorized, not to be numbered or defined, but revolving 
sightless in kaleidoscopic change. Hymie the bullfrog was an ovarian spud 
generated in the high passage between two shores: for him the skyscrapers 
had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the 
buffaloes exterminated; for him the twin dries had been joined by the 
Brooklyn Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; 
for him men sat upside down in the sky writing words in fire and smoke; for
him the anaesthetic was invented and the high forceps and the big Bertha 
which could destroy what the eye could not see; for him the molecule was 
broken down and the atom revealed to be without substance; for him each 
night the stars were swept with telescopes and worlds coming to birth 
photographed in the act of gestation; for him the barriers of time and 
space were set at nought and all movement, be it the flight of birds or the
revolution of the planets, expounded irrefutably and incontestably by the 
high priests of the depossessed cosmos. Then, as in the middle of the 
bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a
conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never 
done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up 
inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort 
of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself,
until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly 
asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time. I could see
it going on after death, like hair growing on a corpse, people saying 
“death” but the hair still testifying to life, and finally no death but 
this life of hair and nails, the body gone, the spirit quenched, but in the
death something still alive, expropriating space, causing time, creating 
endless movement. Through love this night happen, or sorrow, or being born 
with a dub foot; the cause nothing, the event everything. In the beginning 
was the Word… Whatever this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was 
still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, 
outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe.

Any word contained all words - for him who had become detached through 
love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word the current ran back to
the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since 
there was neither beginning nor end but only that which expressed itself in
beginning and end. So, on the ovarian trolley there was this voyage of man 
and bullfrog composed of identical stuff, neither better nor less than 
Dante but infinitely different, the one not knowing precisely the meaning 
of anything, the other knowing too precisely the meaning of everything, 
hence both lost and confused through beginnings and endings, finally to be 
deposited at Java or India Street, Greenpoint, there to be carried back 
into the current of life, so-called, by a couple of sawdust moils with 
twitching ovaries of the well-known gastropod variety.

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

Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new I 
attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle 
which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the 
blemish, for the grain of ugliness which to me constituted the sole beauty 
of the object.

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

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

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

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

All things, all objects animate or inanimate that are different, are 
veined with ineradicable traits. What is me is ineradicable, because it is 
different. This is a skyscraper, as I said, but it is different from the 
usual skyscraper a l’americaine. In this sky” scraper there are no 
elevators, no 73rd story windows to jump from. If you get tired of climbing
you are shit out of luck. There is no slot directory in the main lobby. If 
you are searching for somebody you will have to search. If you want a drink
you will have to go out and get it; there are no soda fountains in this 
building, and no cigar stores, and no telephone booths. All the other 
skyscrapers have what you want! this one contains nothing but what I want, 
what I like. And somewhere in this skyscraper Valeska has her being, and 
we’re going to get to her when the spirit moves me. For the time being 
she’s all right, Valeska, seeing as how she’s six feet under and by now 
perhaps picked dean by the worms. When she was in the flesh she was picked 
dean too, by the human worms who have no respect for anything which has a 
different tint, a different odour.

The sad thing about Valeska was the fact that she had nigger blood in her
veins.

It was depressing for everybody around her. She made you aware of it 
whether you wished to be or not. The nigger blood, as I say, and the fact 
that her mother was a trollop. The mother was white of course. Who the 
father was nobody knew, not even Valeska herself.

Everything was going along smoothly until the day an officious little Jew
from the vice-president’s office happened to espy her. He was horrified, so
he informed me confidentially, to think that I had employed a coloured 
person as my secretary. He spoke as though she might contaminate the 
messengers. The next day I was put on the carpet. It was exactly as though 
I had committed sacrilege. Of course, I pretended that I hadn’t observed 
anything unusual about her, except that she was extremely intelligent and 
extremely capable. Finally the president himself stepped in. There was a 
short interview between him and Valeska during which he very diplomatically
proposed to give her a better position in Havana.

No talk of the blood taint. Simply that her services had been altogether 
remarkable and that they would like to promote her - to Havana. Valeska 
came back to the office in a rage. When she was angry she was magnificent. 
She said she wouldn’t budge. Steve Romero and Hymie were there at the time 
and we all went out to dinner together. During the course of the evening we
got a bit tight. Valeska’s tongue was wagging. On the way home she told me 
that she was going to put up a fight; she wanted to know if it would 
endanger my job. I told her quietly that if she were fired I would quit 
too. She pretended not to believe it at first. I said I meant it, that I 
didn’t care what happened. She seemed to be unduly impressed, she took me 
by the two hands and she held them very gently, the tears rolling down her 
cheeks.

That was the beginning of things. I think it was the very next day that I
slipped her a note saying that I was crazy about her. She read the note 
sitting opposite me and when she was through she looked me square in the 
eye and said she didn’t believe it. But we went to dinner again that night 
and we had more to drink and we danced and while we were dancing she 
pressed herself against me lasciviously. It was just the time, as luck 
would have it, that my wife was getting ready to have another abortion. I 
was telling Valeska about it as we danced. On the way home she suddenly 
said - “why don’t you let me lend you a hundred dollars?” The next night I 
brought her home to dinner and I let her hand the wife the hundred dollars.
I was amazed how well the two of them got along.

Before the evening was over it was agreed upon that Valeska would come to
the house the day of the abortion and take care of the kid. The day came 
and I gave Valeska the afternoon off. About an hour after she had left I 
suddenly decided that I would take the afternoon off also. I started 
towards the burlesque on Fourteenth Street. When I was about a block from 
the theatre I suddenly changed my mind. It was just the thought that if 
anything happened - if the wife were to kick-off- I wouldn’t feel so damned
good having spent the afternoon at the burlesque. I walked around a bit, in
and out of the penny arcades, and then I started homeward.

It’s strange how things turn out. Trying to amuse the kid I suddenly 
remembered a trick my grandfather had shown me when I was a child. You take
the dominoes and you make tall battleships out of them; then you gently 
pull the tablecloth on which the battleships are floating until they come 
to the edge of the table when suddenly you give a brisk tug and they fall 
on to the floor.

We tried it over and over again, the three of us, until the kid got so 
sleepy that she toddled off to the next room and fell asleep. The dominoes 
were lying all over the floor and the tablecloth was on the floor too. 
Suddenly Valeska was leaning against the table, her tongue halfway down my 
throat, my hand between her legs. As I laid her back on the table she 
twined her legs around me. I could feel one of the dominoes under my feet -
part of the fleet that we had destroyed a dozen times or more. I thought of
my grandfather sitting on the bench, the way he had warned my mother one 
day that I was too young to be reading so much, the pensive look in his 
eyes as he pressed the hot iron against the wet seam of a coat; I thought 
of the attack on San Juan Hill which the Rough Riders had made, the picture
of: Teddy.charging at the head of his volunteers in the big book which I 
used to read beside the workbench; I thought of the battleship Maine that 
floated over my bed in the little room with the iron-barred window, and of 
Admiral Dewey and of Schley and Sampson; I thought of the trip to the Navy 
Yard which I never made because on the way my father suddenly remembered 
that we had to call on the doctor that afternoon and when I left the 
doctor’s office I didn’t have any more tonsils nor any more faith in human 
beings … We had hardly finished when the bell rang and it was my wife 
coming home from the slaughter house. I was still buttoning my fly as I 
went through the hall to open the gate. She was as white as flour. She 
looked as though she’d never be able to go through another one. We put her 
to bed and then we gathered up the dominoes and put the tablecloth back on 
the table. Just the other night in a bistrot, as I was going to the toilet,
I happened to pass two old fellows playing dominoes.

I had to stop a moment and pick up a domino. The feeling of it 
immediately brought back the battleships, the clatter they made when they 
fell on the floor.

And with the battleships my lost tonsils and my faith in human beings 
gone. So that every time I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and looked down 
towards the Navy Yard I felt as though my guts were dropping out. Way up 
there, suspended between the two shores, I felt always as though I were 
hanging over a void; up there everything that had ever happened to me 
seemed unreal, and worse than unreal - unnecessary. Instead of joining me 
to life, to men, to the activity of men, the bridge seemed to break all 
connections. If I walked towards the one shore or the other it made no 
difference: either way was hell. Somehow I had managed to sever my 
connection with the world that human hands and human minds were creating. 
Perhaps my grandfather was right, perhaps I was spoiled in the bud by the 
books I read. But it is ages since books have claimed me. For a long time 
now I have practically ceased to read. But the taint is still there. Now 
people are books to me. I read them from cover to cover and toss them 
aside. I devour them, one after the other. And the more I read, the more 
insatiable I become. There is no limit to it. There could be no end, and 
there was none, until inside me a bridge began to form which united me 
again with the current of life from which as a child I had been separated.

A terrible sense of desolation. It hung over me for years. If I were to 
believe in the stars I should have to believe that I was completely under 
the reign of Saturn. Everything that happened to me happened too late to 
mean much to me. It was even so with my birth. Slated for Christmas I was 
born a half hour too late.

It always seemed to me that I was meant to be the sort of individual that
one is destined to be by virtue of being born on the 25th day of December. 
Admiral Dewey was born on that day and so was Jesus Christ … perhaps 
Krishnamurti too, for all I know. Anyway that’s the sort of guy I was 
intended to be. But due to the fact that my mother had a clutching womb, 
that she held me in her grip like an octopus, I came out under another 
configuration - with a bad set-up, in other words. They say - the 
astrologers, I mean -that it will get better and better for me as I go on; 
the future in fact, is supposed to be quite glorious.

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

If you continue this balancing at the edge of the abyss long enough you 
become very very adept: no matter which way you are pushed you always right
yourself.

Being in constant trim you develop a ferocious gaiety, an unnatural 
gaiety, I might say. There are only two peoples in the world to-day who 
understand the meaning of such a statement - the Jews and the Chinese. If 
it happens that you are neither of these you find yourself in a strange 
predicament. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are 
considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and 
durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep 
then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live. That 
means to be right and to get the worst of it at the same time.

It means to be dead while you are alive and alive only when you are dead.
In this company the world always wears a normal aspect, even under the most
abnormal conditions. Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. 
You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed 
off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.

In a way, in a profound way, I mean, Christ was never pushed off the dead
end.

At the moment when he was tottering and swaying as if by a great recoil, 
this negative backwash rolled up and stayed his death. The whole negative 
impulse of humanity seemed to coil up into a monstrous inert mass to create
the human integer, the figure one, one and indivisible. There was a 
resurrection which is inexplicable unless we accept the fact that men have 
always been willing and ready to deny their own destiny. The earth rolls 
on, the stars roll on, but men: the great body of men which makes up the 
world, are caught in the image of the one and only one.

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

Nothing of this which I am now recording was known to me at the time that
I was going through the great change. Everything I endured was in the 
nature of a preparation for that moment when, putting on my hat one 
evening, I walked out of the office, out of my hitherto private life, and 
sought the woman who was to liberate me from a living death. In the light 
of this I look back now upon my nocturnal rambles through the streets of 
New York, the white nights when I walked in my sleep and saw the city in 
which I was born as one sees things in a mirage. Often it was O’Rourke, the
company detective, whom I accompanied through the silent streets. Often the
snow was on the ground and the air chill frost. And O’Rourke talking 
interminably about thefts, about murders, about love, about human nature, 
about the Golden Age. He had a habit, when he was well launched upon a 
subject of stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and planting his 
heavy foot between mine so that I couldn’t budge. And then, seizing the 
lapel of my coat, he would bring his face dose to mine and talk into my 
eyes, each word boring in like the turn of a gimlet. I can see again the 
two of us standing in the middle of a street at four in the morning, the 
wind howling, the snow blowing down, and O’Rourke oblivious of everything 
but the story he had to get off his chest.

Always as he talked I remember taking in the surroundings out of the 
comer of my eye, being aware not of what he was saying but of the two of us
standing in Yorkville or on Alien Street or on Broadway. Always it seemed a
little crazy to me, the earnestness with which he recounted his banal 
murder stories in the midst of the greatest muddle of architecture that man
had ever created. While he was talking about fingerprints I might be taking
stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just back of 
his black hat, I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had been 
installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made it 
so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we passed from the
East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on, beyond 
New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the 
Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and 
woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to 
sit and listen to other people’s stories, the banal tragedies of poverty 
and distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it
happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out 
his tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and “receive”, it was
only natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had 
to harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me, I 
could chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit
there and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to 
sleep listening, to dream listening. They streamed in from all over the 
world, from every strata of society, speaking a thousand different tongues,
worshipping different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of
the poorest among them with a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were
written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the ten 
commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like
the Lord’s Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover
the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to 
listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it 
was a rare one, was to walk the streets alone … to walk the streets at 
night when no one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded 
me. Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide 
open and nothing but snores emanating from them.

Walking amidst the craziest architecture ever invented, wondering why and
to what end, if every day from these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces
there had to stream forth an army of men itching to unravel their tale of 
misery. In a year, reckoning it modestly, I received twenty-five thousand 
tales; in two years fifty thousand; in four years it would be a hundred 
thousand; in ten years I would be stark mad. Already I knew enough people 
to populate a good-sized town.

What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would 
they want skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? 
Would they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would 
they make the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad 
infinitum, from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt it. Only the lash 
of hunger could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the 
fear, the fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the 
same, all goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger 
building the loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, 
making the finest steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware. 
Walking with O’Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide 
was like listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And just as 
one can whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep
with, so, listening to O’Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he 
would stop talking and say “what’ll you have to eat?” In the midst of the 
most gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be
sure to get at a certain place farther up the line and wonder too what sort
of vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I 
would order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I 
slept with my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I 
might be wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, 
because she had the bad habit of letting things slide - the important 
things, I mean. Fresh coffee was important - and fresh bacon with eggs. If 
she were knocked up again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more 
important than that was fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon 
and eggs. I could put up with heartbreaks and abortions and busted 
romances, but I had to have something under my belt to carry on, and I 
wanted something nourishing, something appetizing. I felt exactly like 
Jesus Christ would have felt if he had been taken down from the cross and 
not permitted to die in the flesh. I am sure that the shock of crucifixion 
would have been so great that he would have suffered a complete amnesia as 
regards humanity. I am certain that after his wounds had healed he wouldn’t
have given a damn about the tribulations of mankind but would have fallen 
with the greatest relish upon a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, 
assuming he could have had it.

Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of 
his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And 
this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which 
eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal 
limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about 
destruction. At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and 
death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost 
silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of 
such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone 
was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance 
or joy.

One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, 
and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half 
full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they
smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty 
belly which are null and void.

In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a 
sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the 
greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can
remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who
designed them. I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind,
standing at a certain comer; the tale that accompanied it is gone. I can 
remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell 
you what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one
man in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances; there
was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be me, myself, 
but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast of the 
field.

Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to 
earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was 
constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest 
the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in the very 
heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I 
befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all 
stone, and all hopeless and bewildering. Until the time when I would 
encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no
life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would 
have meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of 
chaos but this is written from a live centre and what is chaotic is merely 
peripheral, the tangental shreds, as it were, of a world which no longer 
concerns me. Only a few months ago I was standing in the streets of New 
York looking about me as years ago I had looked about me; again I found 
myself studying the architecture, studying the minute details which only 
the dislocated eye takes in. But this time it was like coming down from 
Mars. What race of men is this, I asked myself. What does it mean? And 
there was no remembrance of suffering or of the life that was snuffed out 
in the gutter, only that I was looking upon a strange and incomprehensible 
world, a world so removed from me that I had the sensation of belonging to 
another planet. From the top of the Empire State Building I looked down one
night upon the city which I knew from below: there they were, in true 
perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human lice with 
whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail’s pace, each one 
doubtless fulfilling his microcosmic destiny. In their fruitless 
desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and
boast. And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had 
suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their 
senseless warble. At the very summit of their ambition there were these 
little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I 
thought to myself perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay, 
demented ones who would sing about the world to come. Perhaps they would 
breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked.

Perhaps in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life 
below might flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a 
rippling creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might 
all be demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin 
as has happened again and again. Another thousand years, or five thousand, 
or ten thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a 
little boy may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this 
life now passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never 
experienced, a life with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, 
and the boy on dosing the book will think to himself what a great race the 
Americans were, what a marvellous life there had once been on this 
continent which he is now inhabiting. No race to come, except perhaps the 
race of blind poets, will ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of
which this future history was composed.

Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day. Any day of my
life - back there - would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny, microcosmic 
life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back … At 
seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn’t bounce out of bed. I lay there 
till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep - how could I 
sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was 
already due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard 
already buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide 
wooden stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why 
get up and repeat yesterday’s song and dance? As fast as I hired them they 
dropped out. Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear. 
Mondays I got my allowance from the wife -carfare and lunch money. I was 
always in debt to her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the 
landlord, and so on. I couldn’t be bothered shaving - there wasn’t time 
enough. I put on the torn shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a 
nickel for the subway. If she were in a bad mood I would swindle the money 
from the newsdealer at the subway. I got to the office out of breath, an 
hour behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an 
applicant. While I make one call there are three other calls waiting to be 
answered. I use two telephones at once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie 
is sharpening his pencils between calls. MacGovern the doorman is standing 
at my elbow to give me a word of advice about one of the applicants, 
probably a crook who is trying to sneak back under a false name. Behind me 
are the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had 
ever passed through the machine. The bad ones are starred in red ink;

some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is 
crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms,
camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away - not
that we don’t need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just
won’t do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied 
hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He’s seventy now 
and would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of 
recommendation, but we can’t take any one over forty-five years of age. 
Forty-five in New York is the dead line. The telephone rings and it’s a 
smooth secretary from the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn’t I make an exception for a boy 
who has just walked into his office - a boy who was in the reformatory for 
a year or so. What did he do? He tried to rape his sister. An Italian, of 
course.

O’Mara, my assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. 
He suspects him of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good 
measure the boy throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women 
faints. A beautiful looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck
is trying to persuade me to take her on. She’s a whore clean through and I 
know if I put her on there’ll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a 
certain building uptown - because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch 
time and a few cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching 
me work, as if it were a vaudeville performance.

Kronski, the medical student arrives; he says one of the boys I’ve just 
hired has Parkinson’s disease. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to 
go to the toilet. All the telegraph operators, all the managers, suffer 
from haemorrhoids, so O’Rourke tells me. He’s been having electrical 
massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch time and there 
are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me, as usual. We 
gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants to 
interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can’t keep the 
force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside 
New York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been 
canvassed for part time messengers. All the charity bureaux and relief 
societies have been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don’t 
even last an hour. It’s a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it 
is that it’s totally unnecessary. But that’s not my concern. Mine is to do 
or die, as Kipling says. I plug on, through one victim after another, the 
telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the 
holes getting bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a 
crust of bread; I have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, 
experience, etc.

All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then 
chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for 
it.

So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of 
communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly,
so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be 
appraised immediately, that is to say within an hour, unless the messenger 
to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the
whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can. Twenty million Christmas 
blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the 
directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph 
Company, and maybe the telegram reads “Mother dying, come at once”, but the
clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages, 
spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet 
such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you 
will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of
course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a 
messenger’s job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the
docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the 
brats to thank the general manager, or perhaps the vice-president himself, 
for the kindness and consideration shown. And then one day everybody will 
be heartily surprised that said messenger robbed the till and O’Rourke will
be asked to take the night train for Cleveland or Detroit and to track him 
down if it cost ten thousand dollars. And then the vice-president will 
issue an order that no more Jews are to be hired, but after three or four 
days he will let up a bit because there are nothing but Jews coming for the
job. And because it’s getting so very tough and the timber so damned scarce
I’m on the point of hiring a midget from the circus and I probably would 
have hired him if he hadn’t broken down and confessed that he was a she. 
And to make it worse Valeska takes “it” under her wing, takes “it” home 
that night and under pretense of sympathy gives “it” a thorough 
examination, including a vaginal exploration with the index finger of the 
right hand. And the nostrils. I longed to be free of it all and yet I was 
irresistibly attracted. I was violent and phlegmatic at the same time. I 
was like the lighthouse itself - secure in the midst of the most turbulent 
sea. Beneath me was solid rock, the same shelf of rock on which the 
towering skyscrapers were reared. My foundations went deep into the earth 
and the armature of my body was made of steel riveted with hot bolts. Above
all I was an eye, a huge searchlight which scoured far and wide, which 
revolved ceaselessly, pitilessly. This eye so wide awake seemed to have 
made all my other faculties dormant; all my powers were used up in the 
effort to see, to take in the drama of the world.

If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be 
extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature 
which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a
change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, 
to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city 
buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and 
read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a
change to know my own body, my own desires.

I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I 
had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the 
earth which was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the 
human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and 
absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into 
my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and
the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep
well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of 
death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a 
night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so 
frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same 
time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and 
encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity,
no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm 
or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the 
molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.

It was just about a week before Valeska committed suicide that I ran into
Mara.

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

I got back and she was waiting up for me. I thought she was going to give
me hell again. But no, she had waited up because there was an important 
message from O’Rourke. I was to telephone him soon as I got home. However, 
I decided not to telephone. I decided to get undressed and go to bed. Just 
when I had gotten comfortably settled the telephone rang. It was O’Rourke. 
There was a telegram for me at the office - he wanted to know if he should 
open it and read it to me.

I said of course. Thetelegram was signed Monica. It was from Buffalo. 
Said she was arriving at the Grand Central in the morning with her mother’s
body. I thanked him and went back to bed. No questions from the wife. I lay
there wondering what to do. If I were to comply with the request that would
mean starting things all over again. I had just been thanking my stars that
I had gotten rid of Monica. And now she was coming back with her mother’s 
corpse.

Tears and reconciliation. No, I didn’t like the prospect at all. 
Supposing I didn’t show up? What then? There was always somebody around to 
take care of a corpse. Especially if the bereaved were an attractive young 
blonde with sparkling blue eyes. I wondered if she’d go back to her job in 
the restaurant.

If she hadn’t known Greek and Latin I would never have been mixed up with
her.

But my curiosity got the better of me. And then she was so goddamn poor, 
that too got me. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if her hands hadn’t 
smelled greasy. That was the fly in the ointment - the greasy hands. I 
remember the first night I met her and we strolled through the park. She 
was ravishing to look at, and she was alert and intelligent. It was just 
the time when women were wearing short skirts and she wore them to 
advantage. I used to go to the restaurant night after night just to watch 
her moving around, watch her bending over to serve or stooping down to pick
up a fork. And with the beautiful legs and the bewitching eyes a marvellous
line about Homer, with the pork and sauerkraut a verse of Sapho’s, the 
Latin conjugations, the Odes of Pindar, with the dessert perhaps the 
Rubaiyat or Cynara. But the greasy hands and the frowsy bed in the boarding
house opposite the market place - Whew! I couldn’t stomach it. The more I 
shunned her the more clinging she became. Ten page letters about love with 
footnotes on Thus Spake Zarathustra. And then suddenly silence and me 
congratulating myself heartily. No, I couldn’t bring myself to go to the 
Grand Central Station in the morning. I rolled over and I fell sound 
asleep. In the morning I would get the wife to telephone the office and say
I was ill. I hadn’t been ill now for over a week ~ it was coming to me.

At noon I find Kronski waiting for me outside the office. He wants me to 
have lunch with him … there’s an Egyptian girl he wants me to meet. The 
girl turns out to be a Jewess, but she came from Egypt and she looks like 
an Egyptian.

She’s hot stuff and the two of us are working on her at once. As I was 
supposed to be ill I decided not to return to the office but to take a 
stroll through the East Side. Kronski was going back to cover me up. We 
shook hands with the girl and we each went our separate ways. I headed 
towards the river where it was cool, having forgotten about the girl almost
immediately. I sat on the edge of a pier with my legs dangling over the 
stringpiece. A scow passed with a load of red bricks. Suddenly Monica came 
to my mind. Monica arriving at the Grand Central Station with a corpse. A 
corpse f.o.b. New York! It seemed so incongruous and ridiculous that I 
burst out laughing. What had she done with it?

Had she checked it or had she left it on a siding? No doubt she was 
cursing me out roundly. I wondered what she would really think if she could
have imagined me sitting there at the dock with my legs dangling over the 
stringpiece. It was warm and sultry despite the breeze that was blowing off
the river. I began to snooze. As I dozed off Pauline came to my mind. I 
imagined her walking along the highway with her hand up. She was a brave 
kid, no doubt about it. Funny that she didn’t seem to worry about getting 
knocked up. Maybe she was so desperate she didn’t care. And Balzac! That 
too was highly incongruous. Why Balzac? Well, that was her affair. Anyway 
she’d have enough to eat with, until she met another guy. But a kid like 
that thinking about becoming a writer! Well, why not? Everybody had 
illusions of one sort or another. Monica too wanted to be a writer. 
Everybody was becoming a writer. A writer! Jesus, how futile it seemed!

I dozed off… When I woke up I had an erection. The sun seemed to be 
burning right into my fly. I got up and I washed my face at a drinking 
fountain. It was still as hot and sultry as ever. The asphalt was soft as 
mush, the flies were biting, the garbage was rotting in the gutter. I 
walked about between the pushcarts and looked at things with an empty eye. 
I had a sort of lingering hard-on all the while, but no definite object in 
mind. It was only when I got back to Second Avenue that I suddenly 
remembered the Egyptian Jewess from lunch time. I remembered her saying 
that she lived over the Russian Restaurant near Twelfth Street. Still I 
hadn’t any definite idea of what I was going to do. Just browsing about, 
killing time. My feet nevertheless were dragging me northward, towards 
Fourteenth Street. When I got abreast of the Russian restaurant I paused a 
moment and then I ran up the stairs three at a time. The hall door was 
open. I climbed up a couple of flights scanning the names on the doors. She
was on the top floor and there was a man’s name under hers. I knocked 
softly. No answer. I knocked again, a little harder. This time I heard some
one moving about. Then a voice dose to the door asking who is it and at the
same time the knob turning. I pushed the door open and stumbled into the 
darkened room. Stumbled right into her arms and felt her naked under the 
half-opened kimono. She must have come out of a sound sleep and only half 
realized who was holding her in his arms.

When she realized it was me she tried to break away but I had her tight 
and I began kissing her passionately and at the same time backing her up 
towards the couch near the window. She mumbled something about the door 
being open but I wasn’t taking any chance on letting her slip out of my 
arms. So I made a slight detour and little by little I edged her towards 
the door and made her shove it with her ass. I locked it with my one free 
hand and then I moved her into the centre of the room and with the free 
hand I unbuttoned my fly and got my pecker out and into position. She was 
so drugged with sleep that it was almost like working on an automation. I 
could see too that she was enjoying the idea of being fucked half asleep. 
The only thing was that every time I made a lunge she grew more wide awake.
And as she grew more conscious she became more frightened.

It was difficult to know how to put her to sleep again without losing a 
good fuck. I managed to tumble her on to the couch without losing ground 
and she was hot as hell now, twisting and squirming like an eel. From the 
time I had started to maul her I don’t think she had opened her eyes once. 
I kept saying to myself- “an Egyptian fuck … an Egyptian fuck” - and so as 
not to shoot off immediately I deliberately began thinking about the corpse
that Monica had dragged to the Grand Central Station and about the 
thirty-five cents that I had left with Pauline on the highway. Then bango! 
a loud knock on the door and with that she opens her eyes and looks at me 
in utmost terror. I started to pull away quickly but to my surprise she 
held me tight. “Don’t move”, she whispered in my ear.

“Wait!” There was another loud knock and then I heard Kronski’s voice 
saying “It’s me, Thelma … it’s me Izzy.” At that I almost burst out 
laughing. We slumped back again into a natural position and as her eyes 
softly closed I moved it around inside her, gently so as not to wake her up
again. It was one of the most wonderful fucks I ever had in my life. I 
thought it was going to last forever. Whenever I felt in danger of going 
off I would stop moving and think - think for example of where I would like
to spend my vacation, if I got one, or think of the shirts lying in the 
bureau drawer, or the patch in the bedroom carpet just at the foot of the 
bed. Kronski was still standing at the door - I could hear him changing 
about from one position to another. Every time I became aware of him 
standing there I jibbed her a little for good measure and in her half sleep
she answered back, humorously, as though she understood what I meant by 
this put-and-take language. I didn’t dare to think what she might be 
thinking or I’d have come immediately. Sometimes I skirted dangerously 
close to it, but the saving trick was always Monica and the corpse at the 
Grand Central Station. The thought of that, the humorousness of it, I mean,
acted like a cold douche.

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

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

We walked along in absolute silence for a while. At the park we turned in
and headed for the meadows. There was a heavy mist which made it impossible
to see a yard ahead. Suddenly, as we were swimming along, he began to sob. 
I stopped and turned my head away. When I thought he had finished I looked 
around and there he was staring at me with a strange smile. “It’s funny”, 
he said, “how hard it is to accept death.” I smiled too now and put my hand
on his shoulder. “Go on,” I said, “talk your head off. Get it off your 
chest.” We started walking again, up and down over the meadows, as though 
we were walking under the sea. The mist had become so thick that I could 
barely discern his features. He was talking quietly and madly. “I knew it 
would happen,” he said. “It was too beautiful to last.” The night before 
she was taken ill he had had a dream. He dreamt that he had lost his 
identity. “I was stumbling around in the dark calling my own name. I 
remember coming to a bridge, and looking down into the water I saw myself 
drowning. I jumped off the bridge head first and when I came up I saw Yetta
floating under the bridge. She was dead.” And then suddenly he added: “You 
were there yesterday when I knocked at the door, weren’t you? I knew you 
were there and I couldn’t go away. I knew too that Yetta was dying and I 
wanted to be with her, but I was afraid to go alone.”

I said nothing and he rambled on. “The first girl I ever loved died in 
the same way. I was only a kid and I couldn’t get over it. Every night I 
used to go to the cemetery and sit by her grave. People thought I was out 
of my mind. I guess I was out of my mind. Yesterday; when I was standing at
the door, it all came back to me. I was back in Trenton, at the grave, and 
the sister of the girl I loved was sitting beside me. She said it couldn’t 
go on that way much longer, that I would go mad. I thought to myself that I
really was mad and to prove it to myself I decided to do something mad and 
so I said to her it isn’t her I love, It’s you, and I pulled her over me 
and we lay there kissing each other and finally I screwed her, right beside
the grave. And I think that cured me because I never went back there again 
and I never thought about her any more -until yesterday when I was standing
at the door. If I could have gotten hold of you yesterday I would have 
strangled you. I don’t know why I felt that way but it seemed to me that 
you had opened up a tomb, that you were violating the dead body of the girl
I loved. That’s crazy isn’t it? And why did I come to see you tonight? 
Maybe it’s because you’re absolutely indifferent to me … because you’re not
a Jew and I can talk to you… because you don’t give a damn, and you’re 
right… Did you ever read The Revolt of the Angels?”

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

This outburst seemed to really assuage him. He was trying to tell me in 
his twisted Jewish way that he liked me. To do so he had to first destroy 
everything around me - the wife, the job, my friends, the “nigger wench”, 
as he called Valeska, and so on. “I think some day you’re going to be a 
great writer,” he said. “But,” he added maliciously, “first you’ll have to 
suffer a bit. I mean really suffer, because you don’t know what the word 
means yet. You only think you’ve suffered. You’ve got to fall in love 
first. That nigger wench now… you don’t really suppose that you’re in love 
with her, do you? Did you ever take a good look at her ass … how it’s 
spreading, I mean? In five years she’ll look like Aunt Jemima. You’ll make 
a swell couple walking down the avenue with a string of pickaninnies 
trailing behind you. Jesus, I’d rather see you marry a Jewish girl. You 
wouldn’t appreciate her, of course, but she’d be good for you. You need 
something to steady yourself. You’re scattering your energies. Listen, why 
do you run around with all these dumb bastards you pick up? You seem to 
have a genius for picking up the wrong people. Why don’t you throw yourself
into something useful? You don’t belong in that job - you could be a big 
guy somewhere. Maybe a labour leader … I don’t know what exactly. But first
you’ve got to get rid of that hatchet-faced wife of yours. Ugh! when I look
at her I could spit in her face. I don’t see how a guy like you could ever 
have married a bitch like that. What was it - just a pair of streaming 
ovaries?

Listen, that’s what’s the matter with you -you’ve got nothing but sex on 
the brain… No, I don’t mean that either. You’ve got a mind and you’ve got 
passion and enthusiasm … but you don’t seem to give a damn what you do or 
what happens to you. If you weren’t such a romantic bastard I’d almost 
swear that you were a Jew. It’s different with me - I never had anything to
look forward to. But you’ve got something in you - only you’re too damned 
lazy to bring it out. Listen, when I hear you talk sometimes I think to 
myself - if only that guy would put it down on paper! Why you could write a
book that would make a guy like Dreiser hang his head. You’re different 
from the Americans I know; somehow you don’t belong, and it’s a damned good
thing you don’t. You’re a little cracked, too - I suppose you know that. 
But in a good way. Listen a little while ago, if it had been anybody else 
who talked to me that way I’d have murdered him. I think I like you better 
because you didn’t try to give me any sympathy. I know better than to 
expect sympathy from you. If you had said one false word tonight I’d have 
really gone mad. I know it. I was on the very edge. When you started in 
about General Ivolgin I thought for a minute it was all up with me. That’s 
what makes me think you’ve got something in you … that was real cunning! 
And now let me tell you something … if you don’t pull yourself together 
soon you’re going to be screwy. You’ve got something inside you that’s 
eating you up. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t put it over on me. I 
know you from the bottom up. I know there’s something griping you - and 
it’s not just your wife, nor your job, nor even that nigger wench whom you 
think you’re in love with. Sometimes I think you were born in the wrong 
time. Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m making an idol of you but 
there’s something to what I say… if you had just a little more confidence 
in yourself you could be the biggest man in the world to-day. You wouldn’t 
even have to be a writer. You might become another Jesus Christ for all I 
know. Don’t laugh - I mean it. You haven’t the slightest idea of your own 
possibilities … you’re absolutely blind to everything except your own 
desires.

You don’t know what you want. You don’t know because you never stop to 
think.

You’re letting people use you up. You’re a damned fool, an idiot. If I 
had a tenth of what you’ve got I could turn the world upside down. You 
think that’s crazy, eh? Well, listen to me… I was never more sane in my 
life. When I came to see you tonight I thought I was about ready to commit 
suicide. It doesn’t make much difference whether I do it or not. But 
anyway, I don’t see much point in doing it now. That won’t bring her back 
to me. I was born unlucky. Wherever I go I seem to bring disaster. But I 
don’t want to sick off yet… I want to do some good in the world first. That
may sound silly to you, but it’s true. I’d like to do something for others 
…”

He stopped abruptly and looked at me again with that strange wan smile. 
It was the look of a hopeless Jew in whom, as with all his race, the life 
instinct was so strong that, even though there was absolutely nothing to 
hope for, he was powerless to kill himself. That hopelessness was something
quite alien to me. I thought to myself - if only we could change skins! 
Why, I could kill myself for a bagatelle! And what got me more than 
anything was the thought that he wouldn’t even enjoy the funeral - his own 
wife’s funeral! God knows, the funerals we had were sorry enough affairs, 
but there was always a bit of food and drink afterwards, and some good 
obscene jokes and some hearty belly laughs. Maybe I was too young to 
appreciate die sorrowful aspects, though I saw plainly enough how they 
howled and wept. But that never meant much to me because after the funeral 
sitting in the beer garden next to the cemetery, there was always an 
atmosphere of good cheer despite the black garments and the crepes and the 
wreaths. It seemed to me, as a kid then, that they were really trying to 
establish some sort of communion with the dead person. Something almost 
Egyptian-like, when I think back on it. Once upon a time I thought they 
were just a bunch of hypocrites. But they weren’t. They were just stupid, 
healthy Germans with a lust for life. Death was something outside their 
ken, strange to say, because if you went only by what they said you would 
imagine that it occupied a good deal of their thoughts. But they really 
didn’t grasp it at all - not the way the Jew does, for example. They talked
about the life hereafter but they never really believed in it. And if any 
one were so bereaved as to pine away they looked upon that person 
suspiciously, as you would look upon an insane person. There were limits to
sorrow as there were limits to joy, that was the impression they gave me. 
And at the extreme limits there was always the stomach which had to be 
filled - with limburger sandwiches and beer and Kummel and turkey legs if 
there were any about. They wept in their beer, like Children. And the next 
minute they were laughing, laughing over some curious quirk in the dead 
person’s character. Even the way they used the past tense had a curious 
effect upon me. An hour after he was shovelled under they were saying of 
the defunct - “he was always so good-natured” - as though the person in 
mind were dead a thousand years, a character of history, or a personage out
of Nibelungen Lied. The thing was that he was dead, definitely dead for all
time, and they, the living, were cut off from him now and forever, and 
to-day as well as tomorrow must be lived through, the clothes washed, the 
dinner prepared, and when the next one was struck down there would be a 
coffin to select and a squabble about the will, but it would be all in the 
daily routine and to take time off to grieve and sorrow was sinful because 
God, if there was a God, had ordained it that way and we on earth had 
nothing to say about it. To go beyond the ordained limits of joy or grief 
was wicked. To threaten madness was the high sin. They had a terrific 
animal sense of adjustment, marvellous to behold if it had been truly 
animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more than
dull German torpor, insensirivity. And yet, somehow, I preferred these 
animated stomachs to the hydra-headed sorrow of the Jew. At bottom I 
couldn’t feel sorry for Kronski - I would have to feel sorry for his whole 
tribe. The death of his wife was only an item, a trifle, in the history of 
his calamities.

As he himself had said, he was born unlucky. He was born to see things go
wrong - because for five thousand years things had been going wrong in the 
blood of the race. They came into the world with that sunken, hopeless leer
on their faces and they would go out of the world the same way. They left a
bad smell behind them - a poison, a vomit of sorrow. The stink they were 
trying to take out of the world was the stink they themselves had brought 
into the world. I reflected on all this as I listened to him. I felt so 
well and dean inside that when we parted, after I had turned down a side 
street, I began to whistle and hum. And then a terrible thirst came upon me
and I says to meself in me best Irish brogue - shure and it’s a bit of a 
drink ye should be having now, me lad - and saying it I stumbled into a 
hole in the wall and I ordered a big foaming stein of beer and a thick 
hamburger sandwich with plenty of. onions. I had another mug of beer and 
then a drop of brandy and I thought to myself in my callous way - if the 
poor bastard hasn’t got brains enough to enjoy his own wife’s funeral then 
I’ll enjoy it for him. And the more I thought about it, the happier I grew,
and if there was the least bit of grief or envy it was only for the fact 
that I couldn’t change places with her, the poor dead Jewish soul, because 
death was something absolutely beyond the grip and comprehension of a bum 
guy like myself arid it was a pity to waste it on the likes of them as knew
all about it and didn’t need it anyway. I got so damned intoxicated with 
the idea of dying that in my drunken stupor I was mumbling to the God above
to kill me this night, kill me. God, and let me know what it’s all about. I
tried my stinking best to imagine what it was like, giving up the ghost, 
but it was no go. The best I could do was to imitate a death rattle, but on
that I nearly choked, and then I got so damned frightened that I almost 
shit in my pants. That wasn’t death, anyway. That was just choking. Death 
was more like what we went through in the park: two people walking side by 
side in the mist, rubbing against trees and bushes, and not a word between 
them. It was something emptier than the name itself and yet right and 
peaceful, dignified, if you like. It was not a continuation of life, but a 
leap in the dark and no possibility of ever coming back, not even as a 
grain of dust. And that was right and beautiful, I said to myself, because 
why would one want to come back. To taste it once is to taste it forever - 
life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold 
no stakes. Sure, it’s tough to choke on your own spittle - it’s 
disagreeable more than anything else. And besides, one doesn’t always die 
choking to death. Sometimes one goes off in his sleep, peaceful and quiet 
as a lamb. The Lord comes and gathers you up into the fold, as they say. 
Anyway, you stop breathing. And why the hell should one want to go on 
breathing forever? Anything that would have to be done interminably would 
be torture. The poor human bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that 
somebody devised a way out. We don’t quibble about going to sleep. A third 
of our lives we snore away like drunken rats. What about that? Is that 
tragic? Well then, say three-thirds of drunken rat-like sleep. Jesus, if we
had any sense we’d be dancing with glee at the thought of it! We could all 
die in bed tomorrow, without pain, without suffering - if we had the sense 
to take advantage of our remedies. We don’t want to die, that’s the trouble
with us.

That’s why God and the whole shooting match upstairs in our crazy 
dustbins.

General Ivolgin! That got a cackle out of him… and a few dry sobs. I 
might as well have said limburger cheese. But General Ivolgin means 
something to him … something crazy. Limburger cheese would be too sober, 
too banal. It’s all limburger cheese, however, including General Ivolgin, 
the poor drunken sap.

General Ivolgin was evolved out of Dostoievski’s limburger cheese, his 
own private brand. Thatmeans a certain flavour, a certain label. So people 
recognize it when they smell it, taste it. But what made this General 
Ivolgin limburger cheese? Why, whatever made limburger cheese, which is x 
and therefore unknowable. And so therefore?

Therefore nothing… nothing at all. Full stop - or eke a leap in the dark 
and no coming back.

As I was taking my pants off I suddenly remembered what the bastard had 
told me.

I looked at my cock and it looked just as innocent as ever. “Don’t tell 
me you’ve got the syph,” I said, holding it in my hand and squeezing it a 
bit as though I might see a bit of pus squirting out. No, I didn’t think 
there was much chance of having the syph. I wasn’t born under that kind of 
star. The clap, yes, that was possible. Everybody had the dap sometime or 
other. But not syph! I knew he’d wish it on me if he could, just to make me
realize what suffering was. But I couldn’t be bothered obliging him. I was 
born a dumb and lucky guy. I yawned.

It was all so much goddamned limburger cheese that syph or no syph, I 
thought to myself, if she’s up to it I’ll tear off another piece and call 
it a day. But evidently she wasn’t up to it. She was for turning her ass on
me. So I just lay there with a stiff prick up against her ass and I gave it
to her by mental telepathy. And by Jesus, she must have gotten the message 
sound asleep though she was, because it wasn’t any trouble going in by the 
stable door and besides I didn’t have to look at her face which was one 
hell of a relief. I thought to myself, as I gave her the last hook and 
whistle - “me lad it’s limburger cheese and now you can turn over and snore
…”

It seemed as if it would go on forever, the sex and death chant. The very
next afternoon at the office I received a telephone call from my wife 
saying that her friend Arline had just been taken to the insane asylum. 
They were friends from the convent school in Canada where they had both 
studied music and the art of masturbation. I had met the whole flock of 
them little by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and who 
apparently was the high priestess of the cult of Fonanism. They had all had
a crush on Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the 
chocolate eclair mug wasn’t the first of the little group to go to the 
insane asylum. I don’t say it was masturbation that drove them there but 
certainly the atmosphere of the convent had something to do with it. They 
were all spoiled in the egg.

Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He 
arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, 
though he was hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to
liven up a bit. He said he always knew there was something wrong with her. 
Why? Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep 
hysterically. It wasn’t the weeping so much as what she said. She said she 
had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a 
life of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his 
mirthless way. “I said to her -well you don’t need to do it if you don’t 
want… just hold it in your hand. Jesus, when I said that I thought she’d go
clean off her nut. She said I was trying to soil her innocence - that’s the
way she put it. And at the same time she took it in her hand and she 
squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And 
still harping on the Holy Ghost and her ‘innocence’. I remembered what you 
told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like 
magic. She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then 
the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman? It’s 
something to experience. From the instant I got it in she started talking a
blue streak. I can’t describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as 
though she didn’t know I was fucking her. Listen, I don’t know whether 
you’ve ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it… well, you can
imagine how that affects you.

This one was a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so that I began 
to think I was a little queer myself … And now here’s something you’ll 
hardly believe, but I’m telling you the truth. You know what she did when 
we got through? She put her arms around me and she thanked me … Wait, that 
isn’t all.

Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and offered up a prayer for my
soul.

Jesus, I remember that so well. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian,’ she
said.

And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her. I didn’t know 
whether I was dreaming or what. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian!’ Can 
you beat that?

“What are you doing tonight?” he added cheerfully.

“Nothing special,” I said.

“Then come along with me. I’ve got a gal I want you to meet… Paula, I 
picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She’s not crazy - she’s 
just a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It’ll be a treat… 
just to watch you. Listen, if you don’t shoot off in your pants when she 
starts wiggling, well then I’m a son of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. 
What’s the use of farting around in this place?”

There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went 
to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it 
was a French joint; now it was a speak-easy run by a couple of wops. There 
was a tiny bar near the door and in the back a little room with a sawdust 
floor and a slot machine for music. The idea was that we were to have a 
couple of drinks and then eat. That was the idea. Knowing him as I did, 
however, I wasn’t at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland 
together. If a woman should come along who pleased his fancy - and for that
she didn’t have to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb - I knew 
he’d leave me in the lurch and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, 
when I was with him, was to make sure in advance that he had enough money 
to pay for the drinks we ordered. And, of course, never to let him out of 
my sight until the drinks were paid for.

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

“Just cunt… cunt… cunt.”

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

He was rehearsing all this as we sat in the gloom of the back room. After
a couple of drinks he got up, as usual, to go to the toilet, and on his way
he dropped a coin in the slot machine and the jiggers began to jiggle and 
with that he perked up and pointing to the glasses he said: “Order another 
round!” He came back from the toilet looking extraordinarily complacent, 
whether because he had relieved his bladder or because he had run into a 
girl in the hallway, I don’t know. Anyhow, as he sat down, he started in on
another tack - very composed now and very serene, almost like a 
philosopher. “You know, Henry, we’re getting on in years. You and I 
oughtn’t to be frittering our time away like this. If we’re ever going to 
amount to anything it’s high time we started in…” I had been hearing this 
line for years now and I knew what the upshot would be. This was just a 
little parenthesis while he calmly glanced about the room and decided which
bimbo was the least sottish-looking. While he discoursed about the 
miserable failure of our lives his feet were dancing and his eyes were 
getting brighter and brighter. It would happen as it always happened, that 
just as he was saying - “Now you take Woodruff, for instance. He’ll never 
get ahead because he’s just a natural mean scrounging son of a bitch…” - 
just at such a moment, as I say it would happen that some drunken cow in 
passing the table would catch his eye and without the slightest pause he 
would interrupt his narrative to say “hello kid, why don’t you sit down and
have a drink with us?” And as a drunken bitch like that never travels 
alone, but always in pairs, why she’d respond with a “Certainly, can I 
bring my friend over?” And MacGregor, as though he were the most gallant 
chap in the world, would say “Why sure, why not? What’s her name?”

And then, tugging at my sleeve, he’d bend over and whisper: “Don’t you 
beat it on me, do you hear? We’ll give ‘em one drink and get rid of them, 
see?”

And, as it always happened, one drink led to another and the bill was 
getting too high and he couldn’t see why he should waste his money on a 
couple of bums so you go out first, Henry, and pretend you’re buying some 
medicine and I’ll follow in a few minutes … but wait for me, you son of a 
bitch, don’t leave me in the lurch like you did the last time. And like I 
always did, when I got outside I walked away as fast as my legs would carry
me, laughing to myself and thanking my lucky stars that I had gotten away 
from him as easily as I had. With all those drinks under my belt it didn’t 
matter much where my feet were dragging me. Broadway lit up just as crazy 
as ever and the crowd thick as molasses. Just fling yourself into it like 
an ant and let yourself get pushed along. Everybody doing it, some for a 
good reason and some for no reason at all. All this push and movement 
representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes or fancy 
shirts, the new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every 
other joint a food emporium.

Every time I hit that runway towards dinner hour a fever of expectancy 
seized me. It’s only a stretch of a few blocks from Times Square to 
Fiftieth Street, and when one says Broadway that’s all that’s really meant 
and it’s really nothing, just a chicken run and a lousy one at that, but at
seven in the evening when everybody’s rushing for a table there’s a sort of
electric crackle in the air and your hair stands on end like an antennae 
and if you’re receptive you not only get every bash and flicker but you get
the statistical itch, the quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial, 
ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which 
compose the Milky Way, only this is the Gay White Way, the top of the world
with no roof and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through
and say it’s a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch 
of warm human delirium which makes you run forward like a blind nag and wag
your delirious ears. Every one is so utterly, confoundedly not himself that
you become automatically the personification of the whole human race, 
shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand 
different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, 
soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, 
cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so 
forth. You are all the men who ever lived up to Moses, and beyond that you 
are a woman buying a hat, or a bird cage, or just a mouse trap.

You can lie in wait in a show-window, like a fourteen carat gold ring, or
you can climb the side of a building like a human fly, but nothing will 
stop the procession, not even umbrellas flying at lightning speed, nor 
double-decked walruses marching calmly to the oyster banks. Broadway, such 
as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was 
conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant 
originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the homed toad and the
red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind 
wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, 
ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the 
Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy centre of 
Manhattan Island. From Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas 
Aquinas forgot to include in his magnum opus is here included, which is to 
say among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, 
slot machines, grey bowlers, typewriter ribbons, oranges sticks, free 
toilets, sanitary napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, 
crinkled doylies, manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sour-balls, 
cellophane, cord tyres, magnetos, horse liniment, cough drops, feenamint, 
and that feline opacity of the hysterically endowed eunuch who marches to 
the soda fountain with a sawed off shotgun between his legs. The 
before-dinner atmosphere, the blend of patchouli, warm pitchblende, iced 
electricity, sugared sweat and powdered urine drives one on to a fever of 
delirious expectancy. Christ will never more come down to earth nor will 
there be any law-giver, nor will murder cease nor theft, nor rape, and yet…
and yet one expects something, something terrifyingly marvellous and 
absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an 
invention, like the electric light, like television, only more devastating,
more soul rending, an invention unthinkable that will bring a shattering 
calm and void, not the calm and void of death but of life such as the monks
dreamed, such as is dreamed still in the Himalayas, in Tibet, in Lahore, in
the Aleutian Islands, in Polynesia, in Easter Island, the dream of men 
before the flood, before the word was written, the dream of cave men and 
anthropophagists, of those with double sex and short tails, of those who 
are said to be crazy and have no way of defending themselves because they 
are outnumbered by those who are not crazy. Cold energy trapped by cunning 
brutes and then set free like explosive rockets, wheels, intricately 
interwheeled to give the illusion of force and speed some for light, some 
for power, some for motion, words wired by maniacs and mounted like fake 
teeth, perfect, and repulsive as lepers, ingratiating, soft, slippery, 
nonsensical movement, vertical, horizontal, circular, between walls and 
through walls, for pleasure, for barter, for crime; for sex; all light, 
movement, power impersonally conceived, generated, and distributed 
throughout a choked, cunt-like deft intended to dazzle and awe the savage, 
the yokel, the alien, but nobody dazzled or awed, this one hungry, that one
lecherous, all one and the same and no different from the savage, the 
yokel, the alien, except for odds and ends, bric-a-brac, the soapsuds of 
thought, the sawdust of the mind. In the same cunty deft, trapped and 
undazzled, millions have walked before me, among them one, Blaise Cendrars,
who afterwards flew to the moon, thence back to earth and up the Orinoco 
impersonating a wild man but actually sound as a button, though no longer 
vulnerable, no longer mortal, a splendiferous hulk of a poem dedicated to 
the archipelago of insomnia. Of those with fever few hatched, among them 
myself still unhatched, but pervious and maculate, knowing with quiet 
ferocity the ennui of ceaseless drift and movement. Before dinner the slat 
and chink of sky light softly percolating through the boned grey dome, the 
vagrant hemispheres spored with blue-egged nuclei coagulating, ramifying, 
in the one basket lobsters, in the other the germination of a world 
antiseptically personal and absolute. Out of the manholes, grey with the 
underground life, men of the future world saturated with shit, the iced 
electricity biting into them like rats, the day done in and darkness coming
on like the cool, refreshing shadows of the sewers. Like a soft prick 
slipping out of an overheated cunt I, the still unhatched, making a few 
abortive wriggles, but either not dead and soft enough or else sperm-free 
and skating ad astra, for it is still not dinner and a peristaltic frenzy 
takes possession of the upper colon, the hypo-gastric region, the umbilical
and the post-pineal lobe. Boiled alive, the lobsters swim in ice, giving no
quarter and asking no quarter, simply motionless and unmotivated in the 
ice-watered ennui of death, life drifting by the show-window muffled in 
desolation, a sorrowful scurvy eaten away by ptomaine, the frozen glass of 
the window cutting like a jack-knife, dean and no remainder.

Life drifting by the show-window … I too as much a part of life as the 
lobster, the fourteen carat ring, the horse liniment, but very difficult to
establish the fact, the fact being that life is merchandise with a bill of 
lading attached, what I choose to eat being more important than I the 
eater, each one eating the other and consequently eating, the verb ruler of
the roost.

In the act of eating the host is violated and justice defeated 
temporarily. The plate and what’s on it, through the predatory power of the
intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first 
hypnotizing it, then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then 
absorbing it. The spiritual part of the being passes off like a scum, 
leaves absolutely no evidence or trace of its passage, vanishes, vanishes 
even more completely than a point in space after a mathematical discourse. 
The fever, which may return tomorrow, bears the same relation to life as 
the mercury in a thermometer bears to heat. Fever will not make life heat, 
which is what was to have been proved and thus consecrates the meat balls 
and spaghetti. To chew while thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, 
gives the necessary social cast from which you look out the window and see 
that even human kind can be slaughtered justly, or maimed, or starved, or 
tortured because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair 
with clothes on, wiping the mouth with napkin, enables you to comprehend, 
what the wisest men have never been able to comprehend, namely that there 
is no other way of life possible, said wise men often, disdaining to use 
chair, clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying through a cunty deft of a 
street called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of this or 
that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of 
mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof
is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those
who establish the facts.

The meat balk devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, 
belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the 24 
carat sparkle and with the theatre pack. This time I wander through the 
side streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on
a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here
in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. 
The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is
a part of life too like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the 
Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but 
when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When 
is it life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders on and I 
remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten: the coffee was 
lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, 
rancid. The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and 
the next and the next. At the comer the blind man stops again and plays 
“Home to Our Mountains”. I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket - I 
chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing.

There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it were to make a 
decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and nobody is 
bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I belong 
and I don’t belong.

I sit on the stoop for an hour or so, mooning. I come to the same 
conclusions I always come to when I have a minute to think for myself. 
Either I must go home immediately and start to write or I must run away and
start a wholly new life.

The thought of beginning a book terrifies me: there is so much to tell 
that I don’t know where or how to begin. The thought of running away and 
beginning all over again is equally terrifying: it means working like a 
nigger to keep body and soul together. For a man of my temperament, the 
world being what it is, there is absolutely no hope, no solution. Even if I
could write the book I want to write nobody would take it - I know my 
compatriots only too well. Even if I could begin again it would be no use, 
because fundamentally I have no desire to work and no desire to become a 
useful member of society. I sit there staring at the house across the way. 
It seems not only ugly and senseless, like all the other houses on the 
street, but from staring at it so intently, it has suddenly become absurd. 
The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that particular way strikes 
me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me as a piece of the 
highest insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated lines, slot 
machines, newspapers, telephones, cops, doorknobs, flop houses, screens, 
toilet paper, everything. Everything could just as well not be and not only
nothing lost by a whole universe gained. I look at the people brushing by 
me to see if by chance one of them might agree with me. Supposing I 
intercepted one of them and just asked him a simple question. Supposing I 
just said to him suddenly: “Why do you go on living the way you do?” He 
would probably call a cop. I ask myself - does any one ever talk to himself
the way I do? I ask myself if there isn’t something wrong with me. The only
conclusion I can come to is that I am different. And that’s a very grave 
matter, view it how you will. Henry, I say to myself, rising slowly from 
the stoop, stretching myself, brushing my trousers and spitting out the 
gum. Henry, I say to myself, you are young yet, you are just a spring 
chicken and if you let them get you by the balls you’re an idiot because 
you’re a better man than any of them only you need to get rid of your false
notions about humanity. You have to realize Henry me boy, that you’re 
dealing with cut-throats, with cannibals, only they’re dressed-up, shaved, 
perfumed, but that’s all they are - cut-throats, cannibals.

The best thing for you to do now. Henry, is to go and get yourself a 
frosted chocolate and when you sit at the soda fountain keep your eyes 
peeled and forget about the destiny of man because you might still find 
yourself a nice lay and a good dean lay will dean your ballbearing out and 
leave a good taste in your mouth whereas this only brings on dyspepsia, 
dandruff, halitosis, encephalitis.

And while I’m soothing myself thus a guy comes up to me to bum a dime and
I hand him a quarter for good measure thinking to myself that if I had had 
a little more sense I’d have had a juicy pork chop with that instead of the
lousy meat balls but what the difference now it’s all food and food makes 
energy and energy is what makes the world go round. Instead of the frosted 
chocolate I keep walking and soon I’m exactly where I intended to be all 
the time, which is front of the ticket window of the Roseland. And now. 
Henry, says I to myself, if you’re lucky your old pal MacGregor will be 
here and first hell bawl the shit out of you for running away and then 
he’ll lend you a five-spot, and if you just hold your breath while climbing
the stairs maybe you’ll see the nymphomaniac too and you’ll get a dry fuck.
Enter very calmly. Henry, and keep your eyes peeled!

And I enter as per instructions on velvet toes, checking my hat and 
urinating a little as a matter of course, then slowly redescending the 
stairs and sizing up the taxi girls all diaphanously gowned, powdered, 
perfumed, looking fresh and alert but probably bored as hell and leg weary.
Into each and every one of them, as I shuffle about, I throw an imaginary 
fuck. The place is just plastered with cunt and fuck and that’s why I’m 
reasonably sure to find my old friend MacGregor here. The way I no longer 
think about the condition of the world is marvellous. I mention it because 
for a moment, just while I was studying a juicy ass, I had a relapse. I 
almost went into a trance again. I was thinking, Christ help me, that maybe
I ought to beat it and go home and begin the book. A terrifying thought! 
Once I spent a whole evening sitting in a chair and saw nothing and heard 
nothing. I must have written a good sized book before I woke up. Better not
to sit down.

Better to keep circulating. Henry, what you ought to do is to come here 
some time with a lot of dough and just see how far it’ll take you. I mean a
hundred or two hundred bucks, and spend it like water and say yes to 
everything. The haughty looking one with the statuesque figure, I bet she’d
squirm like an eel if her palm were well greased. Supposing she said - 
twenty bucks! and you could say Sure! Supposing you could say - Listen, 
I’ve got a car downstairs … let’s run down to Atlantic City for a few days.
Henry, there ain’t no car and there ain’t no twenty bucks. Don’t sit down …
keep moving.

At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing 
around.

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

the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed … the nuns laying in 
bed and masturbating one another … the auctioneer with an alarm in his hand
…

the telephone girls at the switchboard … J. P. Morganana sitting on the 
toilet bowl placidly wiping his ass … the dicks with rubber hoses giving 
the third degree … strippers giving the last strip and tease…

Standing knee-deep in the lava beds and my eyes choked with sperm; J. P.

Morganana is placidly wiping his ass while the telephone girls plug the 
switchboards, while dicks with rubber hoses practice the third degree, 
while my old friend MacGregor scrubs the germs out of his cock and sweetens
it and examines it under the microscope. Everybody is caught with his pants
down, including the strip teasers who wear no pants, no beards, no 
moustaches, just a little patch to cover their twinkling little cunts. 
Sister Antolina lying in the convent bed, her guts trussed up, her arms 
akimbo and waiting for the Resurrection, waiting, waiting for life without 
hernia, without intercourse, without sin, without evil, meanwhile nibbling 
a few animal crackers, a pimento, some fancy olives, a little head cheese. 
The Jewboys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Carnarsie, Bronville, 
opening and dosing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the 
sausage machine, dogging up the drains, working like fury for cash down and
if you let a peep out of you out you go.

With eleven hundred tickets in my pocket and a Rolls Royce waiting for me
downstairs I could have the most excruciatingly marvellous time, throwing a
fuck into each and everyone respectively regardless of age, sex, race, 
religion, nationality, birth or breeding. There is no solution for a man 
like myself, I being what I am and the world being what it is. The world is
divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti 
and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. The haughty one with the 
statuesque figure is probably a cold turkey fuck, a sort of con anonyme 
plastered with gold leaf and tin foil.

Beyond despair and disillusionment there is always the absence of worse 
things and the emoluments of ennui. Nothing is lousier and emptier than the
midst of bright gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical 
epoch, life maturating in a black box, a negative tickled with add and 
yielding a momentaneous simulacrum of nothingness. At the outermost limit 
of this momentaneous nothingness my friend MacGregor arrives and is 
standing by my side and with him is the one he was talking about, the 
nymphomaniac called Paula. She has the loose, jaunty swing and perch of the
double-barrelled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in
equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist, and clutch, the eyes 
going tic-toc, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a 
lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of 
sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac’s arms. I watch the two of them 
as they move spasmodically inch by inch around the floor; they move like an
octopus working up a rut. Between the dangling tentacles the music shimmers
and flashes, now breaks in a cascade of sperm and rose water, forms again 
into an oily spout, a column standing erect without feet, collapses again 
like chalk, leaving the upper part of the leg phosphorescent, a zebra 
standing in a pool of golden marshmallow, one leg striped, the other 
molten. A gold marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten hooves, 
its sex undone and twisted into a knot. On the sea floor the oysters are 
doing the St. Vitus dance, some with lockjaw, some with double-jointed 
knees. The music is sprinkled with rat poison, with the rattlesnake’s 
venom, with the fetid breath of the gardenia, the spittle of the sacred 
yak, the bolloxed sweat of the musk-rat, the leper’s sugar-coated 
nostalgia. The music is a diarrhoea, a lake of gasolene, stagnant with 
cockroaches and stale horse piss. The drooling notes are the foam and 
dribble of the epileptic, the night sweat of the fornicating nigger frigged
by the Jew. All America is in the trombone’s smear, that frazzled 
brokendown whinny of the gangrened sea cows stationed off Point Loma, 
Pawtucket, Cape Hatteras, Labrador, Camarsie and intermediate points. The 
octopus is dancing like a rubber dick - the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil 
inedit. Laura the nympho is doing the rhumba, her sex exfoliated and 
twisted like a cow’s tail. In the belly of the trombone lies the American 
soul farting its contented heart out. Nothing goes to waste - not the least
spit of a fart. In the golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance 
of sodden piss and gasolene, the great soul of the American continent 
gallops like an octopus, all the sails unfurled, the hatches down, the 
engine whirring like a dynamo. The great dynamic soul caught in the click 
of the camera’s eye, in the heat of rut, bloodless as a fish, slippery as 
mucus, the soul of the people miscegenating on the sea floor, pop-eyed with
longing, harrowed with lust. The dance of Saturday night, of cantaloupes 
rotting in the garbage pail, of fresh green snot and slimy unguents for the
tender parts. The dance of the slot-machine and the monsters who invent 
them. The dance of the gat and the slugs who use them. The dance of the 
blackjack and the pricks who batter brains to a polypous pulp. The dance of
the magneto world, the spark that unsparks, the soft purr of the perfect 
mechanism, the velocity race on a turntable, the dollar at par and the 
forests dead and mutilated. The Saturday night of the soul’s hollow dance, 
each jumping jigger a functional unit in the St. Vitus’ dance of the 
ringworm’s dream. Laura the nympho brandishing her cunt, her sweet 
rose-petal lips toothed with ballbearing clutches, her ass balled and 
socketed. Inch by inch, millimetre by.millimetre they shove the copulating 
corpse around. And then crash! Like pulling a switch the music suddenly 
stops and with the stoppage the dancers come apart, arms and legs intact, 
like tea leaves dropping to the bottom of the cup. Now the air is blue with
words, a slow sizzle as of fish on the griddle. The chaff of the empty soul
rising like monkey chatter in the topmost branches of the trees. The air 
blue with words passing out through the ventilators, coming back again in 
sleep through corrugated funnels and smokestacks, winged like the antelope,
striped like the zebra, now lying quiet as the mollusc, now spitting flame.
Laura the nympho cold as a statue, her parts eaten away, her hair musically
enraptured. On the brink of sleep Laura stands with muted lips, her words 
falling like pollen through a fog. The Laura of Petrarque seated in a taxi,
each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then 
cauterized. Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the 
fiery stake with a mouth full of gum. Hunkydory is the word on her lips. 
The heavy fluted Ups of the sea-shell. Laura’s lips, the lips of lost 
Uranian love. All floating shadow-ward through the slanting fog. Last 
murmuring dregs of shell-like lips slipping off the Labrador coast, oozing 
eastward with the mud tides, easing starward in the iodine drift. Lost 
Laura, last of the Petrarques, slowly fading on the brink of sleep. Not 
grey the world, but lustlack, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed 
innocence.

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

Sunday morning the telephone wakes me up. It’s my friend Maxie Schnadig 
announcing the death of our friend Luke Ralston. Maxie has assumed a truly 
sorrowful tone of voice which rubs me the wrong way. He says Luke was such 
a swell guy. That too sounds the wrong note for me because while Luke was 
all right, he was only so-so, not precisely what you might call a swell 
guy. Luke was an ingrown fairy and finally, when I got to know him 
intimately, a big pain in the ass. I told Maxie that over the telephone: I 
could tell from the way he answered me that he didn’t like it very much. He
said Luke had always been a friend to me. It was true enough, but it wasn’t
enough. The truth was that I was really glad Luke had kicked off at the 
opportune moment: it meant that I could forget about the hundred and fifty 
dollars which I owed him In fact, as I hung up the receiver I really felt 
joyous. It was a tremendous relief not to have to pay that debt. As for 
Luke’s demise, that didn’t disturb me in the least. On the contrary, it 
would enable me to pay a visit to his sister, Lottie, whom I always wanted 
to lay but never could for one reason or another. Now I could see myself 
going up there in the middle of the day and offering her my condolences. 
Her husband would be at the office and there would be nothing to interfere.
I saw myself putting my arms around her and comforting her; nothing like 
tackling a woman when she is in sorrow. I could see her opening her eyes 
wide -she had beautiful, large grey eyes - as I moved her towards the 
couch. She was the sort of woman who would give you a fuck while pretending
to be talking music or some such thing. She didn’t like the naked reality, 
the bare facts, so to speak. At the same time she’d have enough presence of
mind to slip a towel under her so as not to stain the couch. I knew her 
inside out. I knew that the best time to get her was now, now while she was
running up a little fever of emotion over dear dead Luke -whom she didn’t 
think much of, by the way. Unfortunately it was Sunday and the husband 
would be sure to be home. I went back to bed and I lay there thinking first
about Luke and all that he had done for me and then about her, Lottie. 
Lottie Somers was her name - it always seemed a beautiful name to me. It 
matched her perfectly. Luke was stiff as a poker, with a sort of skull and 
bones face, and impeccable and just beyond words. She was just the opposite
- soft, round, spoke with a drawl, caressed her words, moved languidly, 
used her eyes effectively. One would never take them for brother and 
sister. I got so worked up thinking about her that I tried to tackle the 
wife. But that poor bastard, with her Puritanical complex, pretended to be 
horrified. She liked Luke. She wouldn’t say that he was a swell guy, 
because that wasn’t like her, but she insisted that he was genuine, loyal, 
a true friend, etc. I had so many loyal, genuine, true friends that that 
was all horse shit to me. Finally we got into such an argument over Luke 
that she got an hysterical attack and began to weep and sob - in bed, mind 
you. That made me hungry. The idea of weeping before breakfast seemed 
monstrous to me. I went downstairs and I fixed myself a wonderful 
breakfast, and as I put it away I was laughing to myself, about Luke, about
the hundred and fifty bucks that his sudden death had wiped off the slate, 
about Lottie and the way she would look at me when the moment came … and 
finally, the most absurd of all, I thought of Maxie, Maxie Schnadig, the 
faithful friend of Luke, standing at the grave with a big wreath and 
perhaps throwing a handful of earth on the coffin just as they were 
lowering it. Somehow that seemed just too stupid for words. I don’t know 
why it should seem so ridiculous, but it did.

Maxie was a simpleton. I tolerated him only because he was good for a 
touch now and then. And then too there was his sister Rita. I used to let 
him invite me to his home occasionally, pretending that I was interested in
his brother who was deranged. It was always a good meal and the halfwitted 
brother was real entertainment. He looked like a chimpanzee and he talked 
like one too. Maxie was too simple to suspect that I was merely enjoying 
myself; he thought I took a genuine interest in his brother.

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

What I liked about Curley was, that although only a kid of seventeen, he 
had absolutely no moral sense, no scruples, no shame. He had come to me as 
a boy of fourteen looking for a job as messenger. His parents, who were 
then in South America, had shipped him to New York in care of an aunt who 
seduced him almost immediately. He had never been to school because the 
parents were always travelling; they were carnival people who worked “the 
griffs and the grinds”, as he put it. The father HENKY MILLER had been in 
prison several times. He was not his real father, by the way.

Anyway, Curley came to me as a mere lad who was in need of help, in need 
of a friend more than anything. At first I thought I could do something for
him.

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

It wasn’t at all surprising to me, consequently, to learn that afternoon 
that he had been tinkering with Valeska. After Valeska he tackled the 
cousin who had already been deflowered and who was in need of some male 
whom she could rely upon. And from her finally to the midget who had made 
herself a pretty little nest at Valeska’s. The midget interested him 
because she had a perfectly normal cant. He hadn’t intended to do anything 
with her because, as he said, she was a repulsive little Lesbian, but one 
day he happened to walk in on her as she was taking a bath, and that 
started things off. It was getting to be too much for him, he confessed, 
because the three of them were hot on bis trail. He liked the cousin best 
because she had some dough and she wasn’t reluctant to part with it. 
Valeska was too cagey, and besides she smelled a little too strong. In 
fact, he was getting sick of women. He said it was his Aunt Sophie’s fault.
She gave him a bad start. While relating this he busies himself going 
through the bureau drawers. The father is a mean son of a bitch who ought 
to be hanged, he says, not finding anything immediately. He showed me a 
revolver with a pearl handle…

what would it fetch? A gun was too good to use on the old man … he’d like
to dynamite him. Trying to find out why he hated the old man so it 
developed that the kid was really stuck on his mother. He couldn’t bear the
thought of the old man going to bed with her. You don’t mean to say that 
you’re jealous of your old man, I ask. Yes, he’s jealous. If I wanted to 
know the truth it’s that he wouldn’t mind sleeping with his mother. Why 
not? That’s why he had permitted his Aunt Sophie to seduce him… he was 
thinking of his mother all the time. But don’t you feel bad when you go 
through her pocketbook, I asked. He laughed. It’s not her money he said, 
it’s his. And what have they done for me? They were always farming me out. 
The first thing they taught me was how to cheat people.

That’s a hell of a way to raise a kid…

There’s not a red cent in the house. Curley’s idea of a way out is to go 
with me to the office where he works and while I engage the manager in 
conversation go through the wardrobe and dean out all the loose change. Or,
if I’m not afraid of taking a chance, he will go through the cash drawer. 
They’ll never suspect us, he says. Had he ever done that before, I ask. Of 
course … a dozen or more times, right under the manager’s nose. And wasn’t 
there any stink about it? To be sure … they had fired a few clerks. Why 
don’t you borrow something from your Aunt Sophie, I suggest. That’s easy 
enough, only it means a quick diddle and he doesn’t want to diddle her any 
more. She stinks. Aunt Sophie. What do you mean, she stinks? Just that … 
she doesn’t wash herself regularly. Why, what’s the matter with her? 
Nothing, just religious. And getting fat and greasy at die same time. But 
she likes to be diddled just the same? Does she? She’s crazier than ever 
about it. It’s disgusting. It’s like going to bed with a sow. What does 
your mother think about her? Her? She’s as sore as hell at her. She thinks 
Sophie’s trying to seduce the old man. Well, maybe she is! No, the old 
man’s got something else. I caught him red-handed one night, in the movies,
mushing it up with a young girl. She’s a manicurist from the Astor Hotel. 
He’s probably trying to squeeze a little dough out of her. That’s the only 
reason he ever makes a woman. He’s a dirty, mean son of a bitch and I’d 
like to see him get the chair some day! You’ll get the chair yourself some 
day if you don’t watch out. Who, me? Not me ! I’m too clever. You’re clever
enough but you’ve got a loose tongue. I’d be a little more tight-lipped if 
I were you.

You know, I added, to give him an extra jolt, O’Rourke is wise to you; if
you ever fall out with O’Rourke it’s all up with you … Well, why doesn’t he
say something if he’s so wise? I don’t believe you.

I explain to him at some length that O’Rourke is one of those people, and
there are damned few in the world, who prefer not to make trouble for 
another person if they can help it. O’Rourke, I say, has the detective’s 
instinct only in that he likes to know what’s going on around him: people’s
characters are plotted out in his head, and filed there permanently, just 
as the enemy’s terrain is fixed in the minds of army leaders. People think 
that O’Rourke goes around snooping and spying, that he derives a special 
pleasure in performing this dirty work for the company. Not so. O’Rourke is
a born student of human nature. He picks things up without effort, due, to 
be sure, to his peculiar way of looking at the world.

Now about you … I have no doubt that he knows everything about you. I 
never asked him, I admit, but I imagine so from the questions he poses now 
and then.

Perhaps he’s just giving you plenty of rope. Some night he’ll run into 
you accidentally and perhaps he’ll ask you to stop off somewhere and have a
bite to eat with him. And out of a dear sky he’ll suddenly say - you 
remember, Curley, when you were working up in SA office, the time that 
little Jewish clerk was fired for tapping the till? I think you were 
working overtime that night, weren’t you? An interesting case, that. You 
know, they never discovered whether the clerk stole the money or not. They 
had to fire him, of course, for negligence, but we can’t say for certain 
that he really stole the money. I’ve been thinking about that little affair
now for quite some time. I have a hunch as to who took that money, but I’m 
not absolutely sure … And then he’ll probably give you a beady eye and 
abruptly change the conversation to something else. He’ll probably tell you
a little story about a crook he knew who thought he was very smart and 
getting away with it. He’ll draw that story out for you until you feel as 
though you were sitting on hot coals. By that time you’ll be wanting to 
beat it, but just when you’re ready to go he’ll suddenly be reminded of 
another very interesting little case and he’ll ask you to wait just a 
little longer while he orders another dessert. And he’ll go on like that 
for three or four hours at a stretch, never making the least overt 
insinuation, but studying you closely all the time, and finally, when you 
think you’re free, just when you’re shaking hands with him and breathing a 
sigh of relief, he’ll step in front of you and, planting his big square 
feet between your legs, he’ll grab you by the lapel and, looking straight 
through you, he’ll say in a soft winsome voice - now look here, my lad, 
don’t you think you had better come clean? And if you think he’s only 
trying to browbeat you and that you can pretend innocence and walk away, 
you’re mistaken.

Because at that point, when he asks you to come clean, he means business 
and nothing on earth is going to stop him. When it gets to that point I’d 
recommend you to make a clean sweep of it, down to the last penny. He won’t
ask me to fire you and he won’t threaten you with jail - he’ll just quietly
suggest that you put aside a little bit each week and turn it over to him. 
Nobody will be the wiser. He probably won’t even tell me. No, he’s very 
delicate about these things, you see.”

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

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

“But you did let me do it!”

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

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

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

They were just sitting down to dinner when I walked in, looking as sad as
I could possibly make myself look. Maxie was there and almost shocked by my
sudden appearance. Lottie had gone already. That helped me to keep up the 
sad look. I asked to be alone with Luke a few minutes, but Maxie insisted 
on accompanying me. The others were relieved, I imagine, as they had been 
conducting the mourners to the bier all afternoon. And like the good 
Germans they were they didn’t like having their dinner interrupted. As I 
was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I
became aware of Maxie’s eyes fixed on me inquisitively. I looked up and 
smiled at him in my usual way. He seemed absolutely nonplussed at this. 
“Listen, Maxie,” I said, “are you sure they won’t hear us?” He looked still
more puzzled and grieved, but nodded reassuringly. “It’s like this, Maxie… 
I came up here purposely to see you … to borrow a few bucks. I know it 
seems lousy but you can imagine how desperate I must be to do a thing like 
this.” He was shaking his head solemnly as I spit this out, his mouth 
forming a big O as if he were trying to frighten the spirits away. “Listen,
Maxie,” I went on rapidly and trying to keep my voice down sad and low, 
“this is no time to give me a sermon. If you want to do something for me 
lend me ten bucks now, right away… slip it to me right here while I look at
Luke. You know, I really liked Luke. I didn’t mean all that over the 
telephone. You got me at a bad moment. The wife was tearing her hair out.

We’re in a mess, Maxie, and I’m counting on you to do something. Come out
with me if you can and I’ll tell you more about it…’ Maxie, as I had 
expected, couldn’t come out with me. He wouldn’t think of deserting them at
such a moment…” Well, give it to me now,” I said, almost savagely. “I’ll 
explain the whole thing to you tomorrow. I’ll have lunch with you 
downtown.”

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

“For Christ’s sake,” I muttered, bending over Luke more closely so that 
if any one walked in on us they would never suspect what I was up to … “for
Christ’s sake, don’t argue about it now… hand it over and be done with it… 
I’m desperate, do you hear me?” Maxie was so confused and flustered that he
couldn’t disengage a bill without pulling the wad out of his pocket. 
Leaning over the coffin reverendy I peeled off the topmost bill from the 
wad which was peeping out of his pocket. I couldn’t tell whether it was a 
single or a ten-spot. I didn’t stop to examine it but tucked it away as 
rapidly as possible and straightened myself up. Then I took Maxie by the 
arm and returned to the kitchen where the family were eating solemnly but 
heartily. They wanted me to stay for a bite, and it was awkward to refuse, 
but I refused as best I could and beat it, my face twitching now with 
hysterical laughter.

At the comer, by the lamp post, Curley was waiting for me. By this time I
couldn’t restrain myself any longer. I grabbed Curley by the arm and 
rushing him down the street I began to laugh, to laugh as I have seldom 
laughed in my life.

I thought it would never stop. Every time I opened my mouth to start 
explaining the incident I had an attack. Finally I got frightened. I 
thought maybe I might laugh myself to death. After I had managed to quiet 
down a bit, in the midst of a long silence. Cur-ley suddenly says: “Did you
get it?” That precipitated another attack, even more violent than before. I
had to lean against a rail and hold my guts. I had a terrific pain in the 
guts but a pleasurable pain.

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

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

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

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

In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no 
redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and 
every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I 
feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as
the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the 
eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and 
legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region 
unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, 
just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by 
yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in 
space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and 
backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; 
this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the 
line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the 
lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of 
perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was 
divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the 
cusp of the event, a wall with many windows, but the house gone. I must 
shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to 
rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through 
the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and 
arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the 
mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the 
wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as
the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of 
sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream’s substantiality. I verify by 
flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

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

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

Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a 
park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away 
the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring
only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness. I shall be a buffer 
between the white louse and the red corpuscle.

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

Out of such a wild mania for perfection naturally no one would have 
expected an evolution to a wild park, not even I myself, but it is 
infinitely better, while attending death, to live in a state of grace and 
natural bewilderment.

Infinitely better, as life moves towards a deathly perfection, to be just
a bit of breathing space, a stretch of green, a little fresh air, a pool of
water.

Better also to receive men silently and to enfold them, for there is no 
answer to make them while they are still frantically rushing to turn the 
corner.

I’m thinking now about the rock fight one summer’s afternoon long long 
ago when I was staying with my Aunt Caroline up near Hell Gate. My Cousin 
Gene and I had been corralled by a gang of boys while we were playing in 
the park. We didn’t know which side we were fighting for but we were 
fighting in dead earnest amidst the rock pile by the river bank. We had to 
show even more courage than the other boys because we were suspected of 
being sissies. That’s how it happened that we killed one of the rival gang.
Just as they were charging us my cousin Gene let go at the ringleader and 
caught him in the guts with a handsome-sized rock. I let go almost at the 
same instant and my rock caught him in the temple and when he went down he 
lay there for good and not a peep out of him. A few minutes later the cops 
came and the boy was found dead. He was eight or nine years old, about the 
same age as us. What they would have done to us if they caught us I don’t 
know. Anyway, so as not to arouse any suspicion we hurried home: we had 
cleaned up a bit on the way and had combed our hair. We walked in looking 
almost as immaculate as when we had left the house.

Aunt Caroline gave us our usual two big slices of sour rye with fresh 
butter and a little sugar over it and we sat there at the kitchen table 
listening to her with an angelic smile. It was an extremely hot day and she
thought we had better stay in the house, in the big front room where the 
blinds had been pulled down, and play marbles with our little friend Joey 
Resselbaum. Joey had the reputation of being a little backward and 
ordinarily we would have trimmed him, but that afternoon, by a sort of mute
understanding. Gene and I allowed him to win everything we had. Joey was so
happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up 
her dresses and show us what was underneath. Weesie, they called her, and I
remember that she was stuck on me instantly. I came from another part of 
the city, so far away it seemed to them that it was almost like coming from
another country. They even seemed to think that I talked differently from 
them. Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress 
up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do 
it any more for the other boys - we were in love with her and we wanted her
to go straight.

When I left my cousin at the end of the summer I didn’t see him again for
twenty years or more. When we did meet what deeply impressed me was the 
look of innocence he wore - the same expression as the day of the rock 
fight. When I spoke to him about the fight I was still more amazed to 
discover that he had forgotten that it was we who had lolled the boy: he 
remembered the boy’s death but he spoke of it as though neither he nor I 
had had any part in it. When I mentioned Weesie’s name he had difficulty in
placing her. Don’t you remember the cellar next door…Joey Kesselbaum? At 
this a faint smile passed over his face. He thought it extraordinary that I
should remember such things. He was already married, a father, and working 
in a factory making fancy pipe cases. He considered it extraordinary to 
remember events that had happened so far back in the past.

On leaving him that evening I felt terribly despondent. It was as though 
he had attempted to eradicate a precious part of my life, and himself with 
it He seemed more attached to the tropical fish which he was collecting 
than to the wonderful past. As for me I recollect everything, everything 
that happened that summer, and particularly the day of the rock fight. 
There are times, in fact, when the taste of that big slice of sour rye 
which his mother handed me that afternoon is stronger in my mouth than the 
food I am actually tasting. And the sight of Weesie’s little bud almost 
stronger than the actual feel of what is in my hand.

The way the boy lay there, after we downed him, far far more impressive 
than the history of the World War. The whole long summer, in fact, seems 
like an idyll out of the Arthurian legends. I often wonder what it was 
about this particular summer which makes it so vivid in my memory. I have 
only to close my eyes a moment in order to relive each day. The death of 
the boy certainly caused me no anguish - it was forgotten before a week had
elapsed. The sight of Weesie standing in the gloom of the cellar with her 
dress lifted up, that too passed easily away. Strangely enough, the thick 
slice of rye bread which his mother handed me each day seems to possess 
more potency than any other image of that period. I wonder about it… wonder
deeply. Perhaps it is that whenever she handed me the slice of bread it was
with a tenderness and a sympathy that I had never known before. She was a 
very homely woman, my Aunt Caroline. Her face was marked by the pox, but it
was a kind, winsome face which no disfigurement could mar. She was 
enormously stout and she had a very soft, a very caressing voice.

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

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

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

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

My cousin Gene became an absolute nonentity: Stanley became a first-rate 
failure. Besides these two boys, for whom I had the greatest affection, 
there was another, Joey, who has since become a letter carrier. I could 
weep when I think of what life has made them. As boys they were perfect, 
Stanley least of all because Stanley was more temperamental. Stanley went 
into violent rages now and then and there was no telling how you stood with
him from day to day. But Joey and Gene were the essence of goodness: they 
were friends in the old meaning of the word. I think of Joey often when I 
go out into the country because he was what is called a country boy. That 
meant, for one thing, that he was more loyal, more sincere, more tender, 
than the boys we knew. I can see Joey now coming to meet me: he was always 
running with arms wide open and ready to embrace me, always breathless with
adventures that he was planning for my participation, always loaded with 
gifts which he had saved for my coming. Joey received me like the monarchs 
of old received their guests. Everything I looked at was mine. We had 
innumerable things to tell each other and nothing was dull or boring. The 
difference between our respective worlds was enormous. Though I was of the 
city too, still, when I visited my cousin Gene, I became aware of an even 
greater city, a city of New York proper in which my sophistication was 
negligible.

Stanley knew no excursions from his own neighbourhood, but Stanley had 
come from a strange land over the sea, Poland, and there was always between
us the mark of the voyage. The fact that he spoke another tongue also 
increased our admiration for him. Each one was surrounded by a 
distinguishing aura, by a well-defined identity which was preserved 
inviolate. With the entrance into life these traits of difference fell away
and we all became more or less alike and, of course, most unlike our own 
selves. And it is this loss of the peculiar self, of the perhaps 
unimportant individuality, which saddens me and makes the rye bread stand 
out glowingly. The wonderful sour rye went into the making of our 
individual selves: it was like the communion loaf in which all participate 
but from which each one receives only according to his peculiar state of 
grace. Now we are eating of the same bread, but without benefit of 
communion, without grace. We are eating to fill our bellies and our hearts 
are cold and empty. We are separate but not individual. There was another 
thing about the sour rye and that was that we often ate a raw onion with 
it. I remember standing with Stanley in the late afternoons, a sandwich in 
hand, in front of the veterinary’s which was just opposite my home. It 
always seemed to be late afternoon when Dr. McKinney elected to castrate a 
stallion, an operation which was done in public and which always gathered a
small crowd. I remember the smell of the hot iron and the quiver of the 
horse’s legs. Dr. McKinney’s goatee, the taste of the raw onion and the 
smell of the sewer gas just behind us where they were laying in a new gas 
main. It was an olfactory performance through and through and, as Abelard 
so well describes it, practically painless. Not knowing the reason for the 
operation we used to hold long discussions afterwards which usually ended 
in a brawl. Nobody liked Dr. McKinney either: there was a smell of iodoform
about him and of stale horse piss. Sometimes the gutter in front of his own
office was filled with blood and in the winter time the blood froze into 
the ice and gave a strange look to his sidewalk. Now and then the big 
two-wheeled cart came, an open cart which smelled like the devil, and they 
whisked a dead horse into it.

Rather it was hoisted in, the carcass, by a long chain which made a 
creaking noise like the dropping of an anchor. The smell of a bloated dead 
horse is a foul smell and our street was full of foul smells. On the comer 
was Paul Sauer’s place where raw hides and trimmed hides were stacked up in
the street: they stank frightfully too. And then the acrid odour coming 
from the tin factory behind the house - like the smell of modem progress. 
The smell of a dead horse, which is almost unbearable, is still a thousand 
times better than the smell of burning chemicals. And the sight of a dead 
horse with a bullet hole in the temple, his head lying in a pool of blood 
and his asshole bursting with the last spasmic evacuation, is still a 
better sight than that of a group of men in blue aprons coming out of the 
arched doorway of the tin factory with a hand-truck loaded with bales of 
fresh-made tin. Fortunately for us there was a bakery opposite the tin 
factory and from the back door of the bakery, which was only a grill, we 
could watch the bakers at work and get the sweet, irresistible odour of 
bread and cake. And if, as I say, the gas mains were being laid there was 
another strange medley of smells - the smell of earth just turned up, of 
rotted iron pipes, of sewer gas, and of the onion sandwiches which the 
Italian labourers ate whilst reclining against the mounds of upturned 
earth. There were other smells too, of course, but less striking: such, for
instance, as the smell of Silverstein’s tailor shop where there was always 
a great deal of pressing going on. This was a hot, fetid stench which can 
be best apprehended by imagining that Silverstein, who was a lean, smelly 
Jew himself, was cleaning out the farts which his customers had left behind
in their pants. Next door was the candy and stationery shop owned by two 
daffy old maids who were religious: here there was the almost sickeningly 
sweet smell of taffy, of Spanish peanuts, of jujubes and Sen-Sen and of 
Sweet Caporal cigarettes. The stationery store was like a beautiful cave, 
always cool, always full of intriguing objects: where the soda fountain 
was, which gave off another distinct odour, ran a thick marble slab which 
turned sour in the summer time and yet mingled pleasantly, the sourness, 
with the slightly ticklish, dry smell of the carbonated water when it was 
fizzed into the glass of ice cream.

With the refinements that come with maturity the smells faded out, to be 
replaced by only one other distinctly memorable, distinctly pleasurable 
smell - the odour of cunt. More particularly the odour that lingers on the 
fingers after playing with a woman, for, if it has not been noticed before,
this smell is even more enjoyable, perhaps because it already carried with 
it the perfume already carried with it the perfume of the past tense, than 
the odour of the cunt itself. But this odour, which belongs to maturity, is
but a faint odour compared with the odours attaching to childhood.

It is an odour which evaporates, almost as quickly in the mind’s 
imagination, as in reality. One can remember many things about the woman 
one has loved but it is hard to remember the smell of her cunt - with 
anything like certitude. The smell of wet hair, on the other hand, a 
woman’s wet hair, is much more powerful and lasting - why, I don’t know. I 
can remember even now, after almost forty years, the smell of my Aunt 
Tillie’s hair after she had taken a shampoo. This shampoo was performed in 
the kitchen which was always overheated. Usually it was a late Saturday 
afternoon, in preparation for a ball which meant again another singular 
thing - that there would appear a cavalry sergeant with very beautiful 
yellow stripes, a singularly handsome sergeant who even to my eyes was far 
too gracious, manly and intelligent for an imbecile such as my Aunt Tulle. 
But anyway, there she sat on a little stool by the kitchen table drying her
hair with a towel. Beside her was a little lamp with a smoked chimney and 
beside the lamp two curling irons the very sight of which filled me with an
inexplicable loathing. Generally she had a little mirror propped up on the 
table: I can see her now making wry faces at herself as she squeezed the 
blackheads out of her nose. She was a stringy, ugly, imbecilic creature 
with two enormous buck teeth which gave her a horsey look whenever her lips
drew back in a smile. She smelled sweaty, too, even after a bath. But the 
smell of her hair - that smell I can never forget, because somehow the 
smell is associated with my hatred and contempt for her. This smell, when 
the hair was just drying, was like the smell that comes up from the bottom 
of a marsh. There were two smells - one of the wet hair and another of the 
same hair when she threw it into the stove and it burst into flame. There 
were always curled knots of hair which came from her comb, and they were 
mixed with dandruff and the sweat of her scalp which was greasy and dirty. 
I used to stand by her side and watch her, wondering what the ball would be
like and wondering how she would behave at the ball. When she was all 
primped up she would ask me if she didn’t look beautiful and if I didn’t 
love her, and of course I would tell her yes. But in the water closet 
later, which was in the hall just next to the kitchen, I would sit in the 
flickering light of the burning taper which was placed on the window ledge,
and I would say to myself that she looked crazy. After she was gone I would
pick up the curling irons and smell them and squeeze them. They were 
revolting and fascinating - like spiders.

Everything about this kitchen was fascinating to me. Familiar as I was 
with it I never conquered it. It was at once so public and so intimate. 
Here I was given my bath, in the big tin tub, on Saturdays. Here the three 
sisters washed themselves and primped themselves. Here my grandfather stood
at the sink and washed himself to the waist and later handed me his shoes 
to be shined. Here I stood at the window in the winter time and watched the
snow fall, watched it dully, vacantly, as if I were in the womb and 
listening to the water running while my mother sat on the toilet. It was in
the kitchen where the secret confabulations were held, frightening, odious 
sessions from which they always reappeared with long, grave faces or eyes 
red with weeping. Why they ran to the kitchen I don’t know. But it was 
often while they stood thus in secret conference, haggling about a will or 
deciding how to dispense with some poor relative, that the door was 
suddenly opened and a visitor would arrive, whereupon the atmosphere 
immediately changed. Changed violently, I mean, as though they were 
relieved that some outside force had intervened to spare them the horrors 
of a protracted secret session. I remember now that, seeing that door open 
and the face of an unexpected visitor peering in, my heart would leap with 
joy. Soon I would be given a big glass pitcher and asked to run to the 
comer saloon where I would hand the pitcher in, through the little window 
at the family entrance, and wait until it was returned brimming with foamy 
suds. This little run to the comer for a pitcher of beer was an expedition 
of absolutely incalculable proportions.

First of all there was the barber shop just below us, where Stanley’s 
father practised his profession. Time and again, just as I was dashing out 
for something, I would see the father giving Stanley a drubbing with the 
razor strop, a sight that made my blood boil. Stanley was my best friend 
and his father was nothing but a drunken Polak. One evening, however, as I 
was dashing out with the pitcher, I had the intense pleasure of seeing 
another Polak go for Stanley’s old man with a razor. I saw his old man 
coming through the door backwards, the blood running down his neck, his 
face white as a sheet He fell on the sidewalk in front of the shop, 
twitching and moaning, and I remember looking at him for a minute or two 
and walking on feeling absolutely contented and happy about it. Stanley had
sneaked out during the scrimmage and was accompanying me to the saloon 
door. He was glad too, though he was a bit frightened. When we got back the
ambulance was there in front of the door and they were lifting him on the 
stretcher, his face and neck covered with a sheet.

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

Stanley was especially fond of the rotten bananas as his aunt used to fry
them for him. The fried bananas were considered a delicacy in Stanley’s 
home. Once, on his birthday, there was a party given for Stanley and the 
whole neighbourhood was invited. Everything went beautifully until it came 
to the fried bananas.

Somehow nobody wanted to touch the bananas, as this was a dish known only
to Polaks like Stanley’s parents. It was considered disgusting to eat fried
bananas. In the midst of the embarrassment some bright youngster suggested 
that crazy Willie Maine should be given the fried bananas. Willie Maine was
older than any of us but unable to talk. He said nothing but Bjark I Bjork!
He said this to everything. So when the bananas were passed to him he said 
Bjork! and he reached for them with two hands. But his brother George was 
there and George felt insulted that they should have palmed off the rotten 
bananas on his crazy brother. So George started a fight and Willie, seeing 
his brother attacked, began to fight also, screaming Bjork! Bjork I Not 
only did he strike out at the other boys but at the girls too, which 
created a pandemonium. Finally Stanley’s old man, hearing the noise, came 
up from the barber shop with a strop in his hand. He took crazy Willie 
Maine by the scruff of the neck and began to lambast him. Meanwhile his 
brother George had sneaked off to call Mr. Maine senior. The latter, who 
was also a bit of a drunkard, arrived in his shirt sleeves and seeing poor 
Willie being beaten by the drunken barber, he went for him with two stout 
fists and beat him unmercifully. Willie, who had gotten free meanwhile, was
on his hands and knees, gobbling up the fried bananas which had fallen on 
the floor. He was stuffing them away like a nannygoat, fast as he could 
find them. When the old man saw him there chewing away like a goat he 
became furious and picking up the strop he went after Willie with a 
vengeance. Now Willie began to howl - Bjork! Bjark I - and suddenly 
everybody began to laugh. That took the steam out of Mr. Maine and he 
relented. Finally he sat down and Stanley’s aunt brought him a glass of 
wine. Hearing the racket some of the other neighbours came in and there was
more wine and then beer and then schnapps and soon everybody was happy and 
singing and whistling and even the kids got drunk and then crazy Willie got
drunk and again he got down on the floor like a nannygoat and he yelled 
Bjork!

Bjork! and Alfie Betcha, who was very drunk though only eight years old, 
bit crazy Willie Maine in the backside and then Willie bit him and then we 
all started biting each other and the parents stood by laughing and 
screaming with glee and it was very very merry and there were more fried 
bananas and everybody ate them this time and then there were speeches and 
more bumpers downed and crazy Willie Maine tried to sing for us but he 
could only sing Bjork! Bjark! It was a stupendous success, the birthday 
party, and for a week or more no one talked of anything but the party and 
what good Polaks Stanley’s people were. The fried bananas, too, were a 
success and for a time it was hard to get any rotten bananas from Louis 
Pirossa’s old man because they were so much in demand. And then an event 
occurred which cast a pall over the entire neighbourhood - the defeat of 
Joe Gerhardt at the hands of Joey Silverstein. The latter was the tailor’s 
son: he was a lad of fifteen or sixteen, rather quiet and studious looking,
who was shunned by the other older boys because he was a Jew. One day as he
was delivering a pair of pants on Fillmore Place he was accosted by Joe 
Gerhardt who was about the same age and who considered himself a rather 
superior being. There was an exchange of words and then Joe Gerhardt pulled
the pants away from the Silverstein boy and threw them in the gutter. 
Nobody had ever imagined that young Silverstein would reply to such an 
insult by recourse to his fists and so when he struck out at Joe Gerhardt 
and cracked him square in the jaw everybody was taken aback, most of all 
Joe Gerhardt himself. There was a fight which lasted about twenty minutes 
and at the end Joe Gerhardt lay on the sidewalk unable to get up. Whereupon
the Silverstein boy gathered up the pair of pants and walked quietly and 
proudly back to his father’s shop. Nobody said a word to him. The affair 
was regarded as a calamity. Who had ever heard of a Jew beating up a 
Gentile? It was something inconceivable, and yet it had happened, right 
before everyone’s eyes. Night after night, sitting on the curb as we used 
to, the situation was discussed from every angle, but without any solution 
until… well until Joe Gerhardt’s younger brother, Johnny, became so wrought
up about it that he decided to settle the matter himself. Johnny, though 
younger and smaller than his brother, was as tough and invincible as a 
young puma. He was typical of the shanty Irish who made up the 
neighbourhood. His idea of getting even with young Silverstein was to lie 
in wait for him one evening as the latter was stepping out of the store and
trip him up. When he tripped him up that evening he had provided himself in
advance with two little rocks which he concealed in his fists and when poor
Silverstein went down he pounced on him and then with the two handsome 
little rocks he pounded poor Silverstein’s temples.

To his amazement Silverstein offered no resistance: even when he got up 
and gave him a chance to get on his feet Silverstein never so much as 
budged. Then Johnny got frightened and ran away. He must have been 
thoroughly frightened because he never came back again: the next that was 
heard of him was that he had been picked, up out West somewhere and sent to
a reformatory. His mother, who was a slatternly, jolly Irish bitch, said 
that it served him right and she hoped to God she’d never lay eyes on him 
again. When the boy Silverstein recovered he was not the same any more: 
people said the beating had affected his brain, that he was a little daffy.
Joe Gerhardt, on the other hand, rose to prominence again.

It seems that he had gone to see the Silverstein boy while he lay in bed 
and had made a deep apology to him. This again was something that had never
been heard of before. It was something so strange, so unusual, that Joe 
Gerhardt was looked upon almost as a knight errant. Nobody had approved of 
the way Johnny behaved, and yet nobody would have thought of going to young
Silverstein and apologizing to him. That was an act of such delicacy, such 
elegance, that Joe Gerhardt was looked upon as a real gentleman - the first
and only gentleman in the neighbourhood. It was a word that had never been 
used among us and now it was on everybody’s lips and it was considered a 
distinction to be a gentleman. This sudden transformation of the defeated 
Joe Gerhardt into a gentleman I remember made a deep impression upon me. A 
few years later, when I moved into another neighbourhood and encountered 
Claude de Lorraine, a French boy, I was prepared to understand and accept 
“a gentleman”. This Claude was a boy such as I had never laid eyes on 
before. In the old neighbourhood he would have been regarded as a sissy: 
for one thing he spoke too well, too correctly, too politely, and for 
another thing he was too considerate, too gentle, too gallant. And then, 
while playing with him, to hear him suddenly break into French as his 
mother or father came along, provided us with something like a shock. 
German we had heard and German was a permissible transgression, but French!
Why to talk French, or even to understand it, was to be thoroughly alien, 
thoroughly aristocratic, rotten, distingue. And yet Claude was one of us, 
as good as us in every way, even a little bit better, we had to admit 
secretly. But there was a blemish - his French! It antagonized us. He had 
no right to be living in our neighbourhood, no right to be as capable and 
manly as he was. Often, when his mother called him in and we had said 
goodbye to him, we got together in the lot and we discussed the Lorraine 
family backwards and forwards. We wondered what they ate, for example, 
because being French they must have different customs than ours. No one had
ever set foot in Claude de Lorraine’s home either - that was another 
suspicious and repugnant fact. Why? What were they concealing? Yet when 
they passed us in the street they were always very cordial, always smiled, 
always spoke in English and a most excellent English it was. They used to 
make us feel rather ashamed of ourselves - they were superior, that’s what 
it was.

And there was still another baffling thing - with the other boys a direct
question brought a direct answer, but with Claude de Lorraine there was 
never any direct answer. He always smiled very charmingly before replying 
and he was very cool, collected, employing an irony and a mockery which was
beyond us. He was a thorn in our side, Claude de Lorraine, and when finally
he moved out of the neighbourhood we all breathed a sigh of relief. As for 
myself, it was only maybe ten or fifteen years later that I thought about 
this boy and his strange elegant behaviour. And it was then that I felt I 
had made a bad blunder. For suddenly one day it occurred to me that Claude 
de Lorraine had come up to me on a certain occasion obviously to win my 
friendship and I had treated him rather cavalierly. At the time I thought 
of this incident it suddenly dawned on me that Claude de Lorraine must have
seen something different in me and that he had meant to honour me by 
extending the hand of friendship.

But back in those days I bad a code of honour, such as it was, and that 
was to run with the herd. Had I become a bosom friend of Claude de Lorraine
I would have been betraying the other boys. No matter what advantages lay 
in the wake of such a friendship they were not for me, I was one of the 
gang and it was my duty to remain aloof from such as Claude de Lorraine. I 
remembered this incident once again, I must say, after a still greater 
interval - after I had been in France a few months and the word 
“raisomiable” had come to acquire a wholly new significance for me. 
Suddenly one day, overhearing, I thought of Claude de Lorraine’s overtures 
on the street in front of his house. I recalled vividly that he had used 
the word reasonable. He had probably asked me to be reasonable, a word 
which then would never have crossed my lips as there was no need for it in 
my vocabulary. It was a word, like gentleman, which was rarely brought out 
and then only with great discretion and circumspection. It was a word which
might cause others to laugh at you. There were lots of words like that - 
really, for example. No one I knew had ever used the word really - until 
Jack Lawson came along. He used it because his parents were English and, 
though we made fun of him, we forgave him for it. Really was a word which 
reminded me immediately of little Carl Ragner from the old neighbourhood. 
Carl Ragner was the only son of a politician who lived on the rather 
distinguished little street called Fillmore Place. He lived near the end of
the street in a little red brick house which was always beautifully kept. I
remember the house because passing it on my way to school I used to remark 
how beautifully the brass knobs on the door were polished. In fact, nobody 
else had brass knobs on their doors. Anyway, little Carl Ragner was one of 
those boys who was not allowed to associate with other boys. He was rarely 
seen, as a matter of fact. Usually it was a Sunday that we caught a glimpse
of him walking with his father. Had his father not been a powerful figure 
in the neighbourhood Carl would have been stoned to death. He was really 
impossible, in his Sunday garb.

Not only did he wear long pants and patent leather shoes, but he sported 
a derby and a cane. At six years of age a boy who would allow himself to be
dressed up in this fashion must be a ninny - that was the consensus of 
opinion. Some said he was sickly, as though that were an excuse for his 
eccentric dress. The strange thing is that I never once heard him speak. He
was so elegant, so refined, that perhaps he had imagined it was bad manners
to speak in public. At any rate, I used to lie in wait for him Sunday 
mornings just to see him pass with his old man. I watched him with the same
avid curiosity that I would watch the firemen cleaning the engines in the 
fire house. Sometimes on the way home he would be carrying a little box of 
ice cream, the smallest size they had, probably just enough for him, for 
his dessert. Dessert was another word which had somehow become familiar to 
us and which we used derogatorily when referring to the likes of little 
Carl Ragner and his family. We could spend hours wondering what these 
people ate for dessert, our pleasure consisting principally in bandying 
about this new-found word, dessert, which had probably been smuggled out of
the Ragner household. It must also have been about this time that Santos 
Dumont came into fame. For us there was something grotesque about the name 
Santos Dumont. About his exploits we were not much concerned - just the 
name.

For most of us it smelled of sugar, of Cuban plantations, of the strange 
Cuban flag which had a star in the comer and which was always highly 
regarded by those who saved the little cards which were given away with 
Sweet Caporal cigarettes and on which there were represented either the 
flags of the different nations or the leading soubrettes of the stage or 
the famous pugilists. Santos Dumont, then, was something delightfully 
foreign, in contradistinction to the usual foreign person or object, such 
as the Chinese laundry, or Claude de Lorraine’s haughty French family. 
Santos Dumont was a magical word which suggested a beautiful flowing 
moustache, a sombrero, spurs, something airy, delicate, humorous, quixotic.
Sometimes it brought up the aroma of coffee beans and of straw mats, or, 
because it was so thoroughly outlandish and quixotic, it would entail a 
digression concerning the life of the Hottentots. For there were among us 
older boys who were beginning to read and who would entertain us by the 
hour with fantastic tales which they had gleaned from books such as Ayesha 
or Ouida’s Under Two Flags. The real flavour of knowledge is most 
definitely associated in my mind with the vacant lot at the comer of the 
new neighbourhood where I was transplanted at about the age often. Here, 
when the fall days came on and we stood about the bonfire roasting chippies
and raw potatoes in the little cans which we carried, there ensued a new 
type of discussion which differed from the old discussions I had known in 
that the origins were always bookish. Some one had just read a book of 
adventure, or a book of science, and forthwith the whole street became 
animated by the introduction of a hitherto unknown subject. It might be 
that one of these-boys had just discovered that there was such a thing as 
the Japanese current and he would try to explain to us how the Japanese 
current came into existence and what the purpose of it was. This was the 
only way we learned things - against the fence, as it were, while roasting 
chippies and raw potatoes. These bits of knowledge sunk deep - so deep, in 
fact, that later, confronted with a more accurate knowledge it was often 
difficult to dislodge the older knowledge. In this way it was explained to 
us one day by an older boy that the Egyptians had known about the 
circulation of the blood, something which seemed so natural to us that it 
was hard later to swallow the story of the discovery of the circulation of 
the blood by an Englishman named Harvey. Nor does it seem strange to me now
that in those days most of our conversation was about remote places, such 
as China, Peru, Egypt, Africa, Iceland, Greenland. We talked about ghosts, 
about God, about the transmigration of souls, about Hell, about astronomy, 
about strange birds and fish, about the formation of precious stone, about 
rubber plantations, about methods of torture, about the Aztecs and the 
Incas, about marine life, about volcanoes and earthquakes, about burial 
rites and wedding ceremonies in various parts of the earth, about 
languages, about the origin of the American Indian, about the buffaloes 
dying out, about strange diseases, about cannibalism, about wizardry, about
trips to the moon and what it was like there, about murderers and 
highwaymen, about the miracles in the Bible, about the manufacture of 
pottery, about a thousand and one subjects which were never mentioned at 
home or in school and which were vital to us because we were starved and 
the world was full of wonder and mystery and it was only when we stood 
shivering in the vacant lot that we got to talking seriously and felt a 
need for communication which was at once pleasurable and terrifying.

The wonder and the mystery of life - which is throttled in us as we 
become responsible members of society! Until we were pushed out to work the
world was very small and we were living on the fringe of it, on the 
frontier, as it were, of the unknown. A small Greek world which was 
nevertheless deep enough to provide all manner of variation, all manner of 
adventure and speculation. Not so very small either, since it held in 
reserve the most boundless potentialities. I have gained nothing by the 
enlargement of my world: on the contrary, I have lost. I want to become 
more and more childish and to pass beyond childhood in the opposite 
direction. I want to go exactly contrary to the normal line of development,
pass into a super-infantile realm of being which will be absolutely crazy 
and chaotic but not crazy and chaotic as the world about me. I have been an
adult and a father and a responsible member of society. I have earned my 
daily bread. I have adapted myself to a world which never was mine. I want 
to break through this enlarged world and stand again on the frontier of an 
unknown world which will throw this pale, unilateral world into shadow. I 
want to pass beyond the responsibility of fatherhood to the 
irresponsibility of the anarchic man who cannot be coerced nor wheedled nor
cajoled nor bribed nor traduced. I want to take as my guide Oberon the 
night-rider who, under the spread of his black wings, eliminates both the 
beauty and the horror of the past: I want to flee towards a perpetual dawn 
with a swiftness and relentlessness that leaves no room for remorse, 
regret, or repentance. I want to outstrip the inventive man who is a curse 
to an earth in order to stand once again before an impassable deep which 
not even the strongest wings will enable me to traverse. Even if I must 
become a wild and natural park inhabited only by idle dreamers I must not 
stop to rest here in the ordered fatuity of responsible, adult life. I must
do this in remembrance of a life beyond all comparison with the life which 
was promised me, in remembrance of the life of a child who was strangled 
and stifled by the mutual consent of those who had surrendered. Everything 
which the fathers and the mothers created I disown. I am going back to a 
world even smaller than the old Hellenic world, going back to a world which
I can always touch with outstretched arms, the world of what I know and see
and recognize from moment to moment. Any other world is meaningless to me, 
and alien and hostile. In retraversing the first bright world which I knew 
as a child I wish not to rest there but to muscle back to a still brighter 
world from which I must have escaped. What this world is like I do not 
know, nor am I even sure that I will find it, but it is my world and 
nothing else intrigues me.

The first glimpse, the first realization, of the bright new world came 
through my meeting Roy Hamilton. I was in my twenty-first year, probably 
the worst year of my whole life. I was in such a state of despair that I 
had decided to leave home but thought and spoke only of the California 
where I had planned to go to start a new life. So violently did I dream of 
this new promised land that later, when I had returned from California, I 
scarcely remembered the California I had seen but thought and spoke only of
the California, which I had known in my dreams. It was just prior to my 
leave-taking that I met Hamilton. He was a dubious half-brother to my old 
friend MacGregor: they had only recently made each other’s acquaintance, as
Roy, who had lived most of his life in California, had been under the 
impression all along that his real father was Mr. Hamilton and not Mr. 
MacGregor. As a matter of fact it was in order to disentangle the mystery 
surrounding his parentage that he had come East. Living with the MacGregors
had apparently brought him no nearer to a solution of the mystery. Indeed 
he seemed to be more perplexed than ever after getting acquainted with the 
man whom he had concluded must be his legitimate father. He was perplexed, 
as he later admitted to me, because in neither man could he find any 
resemblance to the man he considered himself to be. It was probably this 
harassing problem of deciding whom to take for a father which had 
stimulated the development of his own character. I say this, because 
immediately upon being introduced to him, I felt that I was in the presence
of a being such as I had never known before. I had prepared, through 
MacGregor’s description of him, to meet a rather “strange” individual, 
“strange” in MacGregor’s mouth meaning slightly cracked. He was indeed 
strange, but so sharply sane that I at once felt exalted. For the first 
time I was talking to a man who got behind the meaning of words and went to
the very essence of things.

I felt that I was talking to a philosopher, not a philosopher such as I 
had encountered through books, but a man who philosophized constantly - and
who lived this philosophy which he expounded. That is to say, he had no 
theory at all, except to penetrate to the very essence of things and, in 
the light of each fresh revelation to so live his life that there would be 
a minimum of discord between the truths which were revealed to him and the 
exemplification of these truths in action. Naturally his behaviour was 
strange to those about him. It had not, however, been strange to those who 
knew him out on the Coast where, as he said, he was in his own element. 
There apparently he was regarded as a superior being and was listened to 
with the utmost respect, even with awe.

I came upon him in the midst of a struggle which I only appreciated many 
years later. At the time I couldn’t see the importance which he attached to
finding his real father: in fact, I used to joke about it because the role 
of the father meant little to me, or the role of the mother, for that 
matter. In Roy Hamilton I saw the ironic struggle of a man who had already 
emancipated himself and yet was seeking to establish a solid biological 
link for which he had absolutely no need. This conflict over the real 
father had, paradoxically, made him a superfather. He was a teacher and an 
exemplar: he had only to open his mouth for me to realize that I was 
listening to a wisdom which was utterly different from anything which I had
heretofore associated with that word. It would be easy to dismiss him as a 
mystic, for a mystic he undoubtedly was, but he was the first mystic I had 
ever encountered who also knew how to keep his feet on the ground. He was a
mystic who knew how to invent practical things, among them a drill such as 
was badly needed for the oil industry and from which he later made a 
fortune. Because of his strange metaphysical talk, however, nobody at the 
time gave much heed to his very practical invention. It was regarded as 
another one of his cracked ideas.

He was continually talking about himself and his relation to the world 
about, a quality which created the unfortunate impression that he was 
simply a blatant egotist. It was even said, which was true enough as far as
it went, that he seemed more concerned about the truth of Mr. MacGregor’s 
fatherhood than about Mr. MacGregor, the father. The implication was that 
he had no real love for his new-found father but was simply deriving a 
strong personal gratification from the truth of the discovery, that he was 
exploiting this discovery in his usual self-aggrandizing way. It was deeply
true, of course, because Mr. MacGregor in the flesh was infinitely less 
than Mr. MacGregor as symbol of the lost father.

But the MacGregors knew nothing about symbols and would never have 
understood even had it been explained to them. They were making a 
contradictory effort to at once embrace the long lost son and at the same 
time reduce him to an understandable level on which they could seize him 
not as the “long lost” but simply as the son. Whereas it was obvious to any
one with the least intelligence that his son was not a son at all but a 
sort of spiritual father, a sort of Christ, I might say, who was making a 
most valiant effort to accept as blood and flesh what he had already all 
too clearly freed himself from.

I was surprised and flattered, therefore, that this strange individual 
whom I looked upon with the warmest admiration should elect to make me his 
confident. By comparison I was very bookish, intellectual, and worldly in a
wrong way. But almost immediately I discarded this side of my nature and 
allowed myself to bask in the warm, immediate light which is profound and 
natural intuition of things created. To come into his presence gave me the 
sensation of being undressed, or rather peeled, for it was much more than 
mere nakedness which he demanded of the person he was talking to.

In talking to me he addressed himself to a me whose existence I had only 
dimly suspected, the me, for example, which emerged when, suddenly, reading
a book I realized that I had been dreaming. Few books had this faculty of 
putting me into a trance, this trance of utter lucidity in which, unknown 
to oneself, one makes the deepest resolutions. Roy Hamilton’s conversation 
partook of this quality. It made me more than ever alert, preternaturally 
alert, without at the same time crumbling the fabric of dream. He was 
appealing, in other words, to the germ of the self, to the being who would 
eventually outgrow the naked personality, the synthetic individuality, and 
leave me truly alone and solitary in order to work out my own proper 
destiny.

Our talk was like a secret language in the midst of which the others went
to sleep or faded away like ghosts. For my friend MacGregor it was baffling
and irritating: he knew me more intimately than any of the other fellows 
but he had never found anything in me to correspond to the character which 
I now presented him with. He spoke of Roy Hamilton as a bad influence, 
which again was deeply true since this unexpected meeting with his 
half-brother served more than anything else to alienate us. Hamilton opened
my eyes and gave me new values, and though later I was to lose the vision 
which he had bequeathed me, nevertheless I could never again see the world,
or my friends, as I had seen them prior to his coming. Hamilton altered me 
profoundly, as only a rare book, a rare personality, a rare experience, can
alter one. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to 
experience a vital friendship and yet not to feel enslaved or attached 
because of the experience. Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of 
his actual presence: he had given himself completely and I possessed him 
without being possessed. It was the first dean, whole experience of 
friendship, and it was never duplicated by any other friend. Hamilton was 
friendship itself, rather than a friend. He was the symbol personified and 
consequently entirely satisfactory hence no longer necessary to me. He 
himself understood this thoroughly. Perhaps it was the fact of having no 
father that pushed him along the road towards the discovery of the self, 
which is the final process of identification with the world and the 
realization consequently of the useless-ness of ties. Certainly, as he 
stood then, in the full plenitude of self-realization, no one was necessary
to him, least of all the father of flesh and blood whom he vainly sought in
Mr. MacGregor. It must have been in the nature of a last test for him, his 
coming East and seeking out his real father, for when he said goodbye, when
he renounced Air. MacGregor and Mr. Hamilton also, he was like a man who 
had purified himself of all dross. Never have I seen a man look so single, 
so utterly alone and alive and confident of the future as Roy Hamilton 
looked when he said goodbye. And never have I seen such confusion and 
misunderstanding as he left behind with the MacGregor family. It was as 
though he had died in their midst, had been resurrected, and was taking 
leave of them as an utterly new, unknown individual. I can see them now 
standing in the areaway, their hands sort of foolishly, helplessly empty, 
weeping they knew not why, unless it was because they were bereft of 
something they had never possessed. I like to think of it in just this way.
They were bewildered and bereft, and vaguely, so very vaguely aware that 
somehow a great opportunity had been offered them which they had not the 
strength or the imagination to seize.

It was this which the foolish, empty fluttering of the hands indicated to
me: it was a gesture more painful to witness than anything I can imagine. 
It gave me the feeling of the horrible inadequacy of the world when brought
face to face with truth. It gave me the feeling of the stupidity of the 
blood tie and of the love which is not spiritually imbued. I look back 
rapidly and I see myself again in California. I am alone and I am working 
like a slave in the orange grove 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 - I am more nearly an animal.
All day long I am standing or walking behind the two jackasses which are 
hitched to my sledge. I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am 
thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive 
and healthy that I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the 
Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. “Pourri avant 
d’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, goodnight!”

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 neighbourhood. His one virtue was that he kept his religion in
the background. The old man quickly fell into a sort of boyish idolatry; he
talked of nothing but this minister whom he considered his friend. As he 
had never looked at the Bible in his life, nor any other book for that 
matter, it was rather startling, to say the least, to hear him say a little
prayer before eating. He performed this little ceremony in a strange way, 
much the way one takes a tonic, for example.

If he recommended me to read a certain chapter of the Bible he would add 
very seriously - “it will do you good.” It was a new medicine which he had 
discovered, a sort of quack remedy which was guaranteed to cure all ills 
and which one might 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 reelected 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 ąat 
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 asshole. 
When he went to sleep in the Morris-chair his lower jaw dropped like a 
hinge that has become unloosened; he had always been a 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 inordinate 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 
uncertainties 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 bullfrog, 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.

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 keyhole 
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 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.

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 absentmindedness.

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 - I 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 donkeys 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 horsepower 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 ferroconcrete. 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 ferroconcrete 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 ferroconcrete 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 one were killed 
there would still be conversation, and the conversation would be at once 
intricate and easy to follow. Because it is I who create it! I know it, and
that is why it never drives me mad. I have conversations which may take 
place only twenty years hence, when I meet the right person, the one whom I
shall create, let us say, when the proper time comes. All these talks take 
place in a vacant lot which is attached to my bed like a mattress. Once I 
gave it a name, this terrain vague: I called it Ubiguchi, but somehow 
Ubiguchi never satisfied me, it was too intelligible, too full of meaning. 
It would be better to keep it just “terrain vague”, which is what I intend 
to do. People think that vacuity is nothingness, but it is not so. Vacuity 
is a discordant fulness, a crowded ghostly world in which the soul goes 
reconnoitering. As a boy I remember standing in the vacant lot as if I were
a very lively soul standing naked in a pair of shoes. The body had been 
stolen from me because I had no particular need of it. I could exist with 
or without a body then. If I killed a little bird and roasted it over the 
fire and ate it, it was not because I was hungry but because I wanted to 
know about Timbuctoo or Tierra del Fuego. I had to stand in the vacant lot 
and eat dead birds in order to create a desire for that bright land which 
later I would inhabit alone and people with nostalgia. I expected ultimate 
things of this place, but I was deplorably deceived. I went as far as one 
could go in a state of complete deadness, and then by a law, which must be 
the law of creation, I suppose, I suddenly flared up and began to live 
inexhaustibly, like a star whose light is unquenchable. Here began the real
cannibalistic excursions which have meant so much to me; no more dead 
chippies picked from the bonfire, but live human meat, tender, succulent 
human flesh, secrets like fresh bloody livers, confidences like swollen 
tumors that have been kept on ice. I learned not to wait for my victim to 
die, but to eat into him while talking to me. Often when I walked away from
an unfinished meal I discovered that it was nothing more than an old friend
minus an arm or a leg. I sometimes left him standing there - a trunk full 
of stinking intestines.

Being of the city, of the only city in the world and no place like 
Broadway anywhere, I used to walk up and down staring at the floodlit hams 
and other delicacies. I was a schizerino from the sole of my boots to the 
tips of my hair.

I lived exclusively in the gerundive, which I understood only in Latin. 
Long before I had read other in the Black Book I was cohabiting with Hilda,
the giant cauliflower of my dreams. We traversed all the morganatic 
diseases together and a few which were ex cathedra. We dwelt in the carcass
of the instincts and were nourished by ganglionic memories. There was never
a universe, but millions and billions of universes, all of them put 
together no bigger than a pinhead. It was a vegetal sleep in the wilderness
of the mind. It was the past, which alone comprises eternity. Amidst the 
fauna and flora of my dreams I would hear long distance calling. Messages 
were dropped on my table by the deformed and the epileptic. Hans Castorp 
would call sometimes and together we would commit innocent crimes. Or, if 
it were a bright freezing day. I would do a turn in the velodrome with my 
Presto bike from Chemnitz, Bohemia.

Best of all was the skeleton dance. I would first wash all my parts at 
the sink, change my linen, shave, powder, comb my hair, don my dancing 
pumps. Feeling abnormally light inside and out I would wind in and out of 
the crowd for a time to get the proper human rhythm, the weight and 
substance of flesh. Then I would make a beeline for the dance floor, grab a
hunk of giddy flesh and begin the autumnal pirouette. It was like that I 
walked into the hairy Greek’s place one night and ran smack into her. She 
seemed blue-black, white as chalk, ageless.

There was not just the flow to and from, but the endless chute, the 
voluptuousness of intrinsic restlessness. She was mercurial and at the same
time of a savoury weight. She had the marmoreal stare of a faun embedded in
lava. The time has come, I thought, to wander back from the periphery. I 
made a move towards the centre, only to find the ground shifting from under
my feet.

The earth slid rapidly beneath my bewildered feet. I moved again out of 
the earth belt and behold, my hands were full of meteoric flowers. I 
reached for her with two flaming hands but she was more elusive than sand. 
I thought of my favourite nightmares, but she was unlike anything which had
made me sweat and gibber. In my delirium I began to prance and neigh. I 
bought frogs and mated them with toads. I thought of the easiest thing to 
do, which is to die, but I did nothing. I stood still and began to petrify 
at the extremities. That was so wonderful, so healing, so eminently 
sensible, that I began to laugh way down inside the viscera, like a hyena 
crazed with rut. Maybe I would turn into a rosetta stone! I just stood 
still and waited. Spring came and Fall, and then Winter. I renewed my 
insurance policy automatically. I ate grass and the roots of deciduous 
trees. I sat for days on end looking at the same film. Now and then I 
brushed my teeth. If you fired an automatic at me the bullets glanced off 
and made a queer tat-a-tat ricocheting against the walls. Once up a dark 
street, felled by a thug, I felt a knife go clean through me. It felt like 
a spritz bath. Strange to say, the knife left no holes in my skin. The 
experience was so novel that I went home and stuck knives into all parts of
my body. More needle baths. I sat down, pulled all the knives out, and 
again I marvelled that there was no trace of blood, no holes, no pain. I 
was just about to bite into my arm when the telephone rang. It was long 
distance calling. I never knew who put in the calls because no one ever 
came to the phone. However the skeleton dance …

Life is drifting by the show-window. I lie there like a floodlit ham 
waiting for the axe to fall. As a matter of fact, there is nothing to fear,
because everything is cut neatly into fine little slices and wrapped in 
cellophane.

Suddenly all the lights of the city are extinguished and the sirens sound
their warning. The city is enveloped in poison gas, bombs are bursting, 
mangled bodies flying through the air. There is electricity everywhere, and
blood and splinters and loudspeakers. The men in the air are full of glee; 
those below are screaming and bellowing. When the gas and the flames have 
eaten all the flesh away the skeleton dance begins. I watch from the 
show-window which is now dark. It is better than the sack of Rome because 
there is more to destroy.

Why do the skeletons dance so ecstatically, I wonder. Is it the fall of 
the world? Is it the dance of death which has been so often heralded? To 
see millions of skeletons dancing in the snow while the city founders is an
awesome sight. Will anything ever grow again? Will babes come out of the 
womb? Will there be food and wine? There are the men in the air, to be 
sure. They will come down to plunder. There will be cholera and dysentery 
and those who were above and triumphant will perish like the rest. I have 
the sure feeling that I will be the last man on earth. I will emerge from 
the show-window when it is all over and walk calmly amidst the ruins. I 
will have the whole earth myself.

Long distance calling! To inform me that I am not utterly alone. Then the
destruction was not complete? It’s discouraging. Man is not even able to 
destroy himself; he can only destroy others. I am disgusted. What a 
malicious cripple!

What cruel delusions! So there are more of the species about and they 
will tidy up the mess and begin again. God will come down again in flesh 
and blood and take up the burden of guilt. They will make music and build 
things in stone and write it all down in little books. Pfui! What blind 
tenacity, what clumsy ambitions!

I am on the bed again. The old Greek world, the dawn of sexual 
intercourse - and Hymie! Hymie Laubscher always on the same level, looking 
down on the boulevard across the river. There is a lull in the nuptial 
feast and the clam fritters are brought in. Move over just a little, he 
says. There, like that, that’s it hear frogs croaking in the swamp outside 
my window. Big cemetery frogs nourished by the dead. They are all huddled 
together in sexual intercourse; they are croaking with sexual glee.

I realize now how Hymie was conceived and brought into being. Hymie the 
bullfrog! His mother was at the bottom of the pack and Hymie, then an 
embryo, was hidden away in her sac. It was in the early days of sexual 
intercourse and there were no Marquis of Queensbury rules to hinder. It was
fuck and be fucked - and the devil take the hindmost. It had been that way 
ever since the Greeks - a blind fuck in the mud and then a quick spawn and 
then death. People are fucking on different levels but it’s always in a 
swamp and the litter is always destined for the same end.

When the house is torn down the bed is left standing: the cosmosexual 
altar.

I was polluting the bed with dreams. Stretched out taut on the 
ferroconcrete my soul would leave its body and roam from place to place on 
a little trolley such as is used in department stores for making change. I 
made ideological changes and excursions; I was a vagabond in the country of
the brain. Everything was absolutely clear to me because done in rock 
crystal; at every egress there was written in big letters ANNIHILATION. The
fright of extinction solidified me; the body became itself a piece of 
ferroconcrete. It was ornamented by a permanent erection in the best taste.
I had achieved that state of vacuum so earnestly desired by certain devout 
members of esoteric cults. I was no more. I was not even a personal 
hard-on.

It was about this time, adopting the pseudonym Samson Lackawanna, that I 
began my depredations. The criminal instinct in me had gotten the upper 
hand. Whereas heretofore I had been only an errant soul, a sort of Gentile 
Dybbuk, now I became a flesh-filled ghost. I had taken the name which 
pleased me and I had only to act instinctively. In Hong Kong, for instance,
I made my entry as a book-agent. I carried a leather purse filled with 
Mexican dollars and I visited religiously all those Chinese who were in 
need of further education. At the hotel I rang for women like you would 
ring for whiskey and soda. Morning I studied Tibetan in order to prepare 
for the journey to Lhasa. I already spoke Jewish fluently, and Hebrew too. 
I could count two rows of figures at once. It was so easy to swindle the 
Chinese that I went back to Manila in disgust. There I took a Mr. Rico in 
hand and taught him the art of selling books with no handling charges. All 
the profit came from ocean freight rates, but it was sufficient to keep me 
in luxury while it lasted.

The breath had become as much a trick as breathing. Things were not dual 
merely, but multiple. I had become a cage of mirrors reflecting vacuity. 
But vacuity once stoutly posited I was at home and what is called creation 
was merely a job of filling up holes. The trolley conveniently carried me 
about from place to place and in each little side pocket of the great 
vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of annihilation. I had
ever before me boundless vistas. I began to live in the vista, like a 
microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope. There was no night in 
which to rest. It was perpetual starlight on the arid surface of dead 
planets. Now and then a lake black as marble in which I saw myself walking 
amidst brilliant orbs of lights. So low hung the stars and so dazzling was 
the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only about to 
be born. What rendered the impression stronger was that I was alone; not 
only were there no animals, no trees, no other beings, but there was not 
even a blade of grass, not even a dead root. In that violet incandescent 
light witihout even the suggestion of a shadow motion itself seemed to be 
absent. It was like a blaze of pure consciousness, thought become God. And 
God, for the first time in my knowledge, was dean-shaven. I was also 
clean-shaven, flawless, deadly accurate. I saw my image in the marble black
lakes and it was diapered with stars. Stars, stars… like a clout between 
the eyes and all remembrance fast run out. I was Samson and I was 
Lackawanna and I was dying as one being in the ecstasy of full 
consciousness.

And now here I am, sailing down the river in my little canoe. Anything 
you would like to have me do I will do for you - gratis. This is the Land 
of Fuck, in which there are no animals, no trees, no stars, no problems. 
Here the spermatazoon reigns supreme. Nothing is determined in advance, the
future is absolutely uncertain, the past is nonexistent. For every million 
born 999,999 are doomed to die and never again be born. But the one that 
makes a home run is assured of life eternal. Life is squeezed into a seed, 
which is a soul.

Everything has soul, including minerals, plants, lakes, mountains, rocks.
Everything is sentient, even at the lowest stage of consciousness.

Once this fact is grasped there can be no more despair. At the very 
bottom of the ladder, chez the spermatozoa, there is the same condition of 
bliss as at the top, chez God. God is the summation of all the spermatozoa 
come to full consciousness. Between the bottom and the top there is no 
stop, no halfway station. The river starts somewhere in the mountains and 
flows on into the sea.

On this river that leads to God the canoe is as serviceable as the 
dreadnought.

From the very start the journey is homeward.

Sailing down the river… Slow as the hook-worm, but tiny enough to make 
every bend. And slippery as an eel withal. What is your name? shouts some 
one. My name? Why just call me God - God the embryo, I go sailing on. 
Somebody would like to buy me a hat. What size do you wear, imbecile! he 
shouts. What size? Why size X! (And why do they always shout at me? Am I 
supposed to be deaf?) The hat is lost at the next cataract. Tant pis - for 
the hat. Does God need a hat? God needs only to become God, more and more 
God. All this voyaging, all these pitfalls, the time that passes, the 
scenery, and against the scenery man, trillions and trillions of things 
called man, like mustard seeds. Even in embryo God has no memory. The 
backdrop of consciousness is made up of infinitesimally minute ganglia, a 
coat of hair soft as wool. The mountain goat stands alone amidst the 
Himalayas; he doesn’t question how he got to the summit. He grazes quietly 
amidst the decor; when the time comes he will travel down again. He keeps 
his muzzle to the ground, grubbing for the sparse nourishment which the 
mountain peaks afford. In this strange capricornian condition of embryosis 
God the he-goat ruminates in stolid bliss among the mountain peaks. The 
high altitudes nourish the germ of separation which will one day estrange 
him completely from the soul of man, which will make him a desolate, 
rock-like father dwelling forever apart in a void which is unthinkable. But
first come the morganatic diseases, of which we must now speak…

There is a condition of misery which is irremediable - because its origin
is lost in obscurity. Bloomingdale’s, for example, can bring about this 
condition. All department stores are symbols of sickness and emptiness, but
Bloomingdale’s is my special sickness, my incurable obscure malady. In the 
chaos of Bloomingdale’s there is an order, but this order is absolutely 
crazy to me, it is the order which I would find on the head of a pin if I 
were to put it under the microscope. It is the order of an accidental 
series of accidents accidentally conceived. This order has, above all, an 
odour - and it is the odour of Bloomingdale’s which strikes terror into my 
heart. In Bloomingdale’s I fall apart completely: I dribble on to the 
floor, a helpless mess of guts and bones and cartilage. There is the smell,
not of decomposition, but of mis-alliance. Man, the miserable alchemist, 
has welded together in a million forms and shapes, substances and essences 
which have nothing in common.

Because in his mind there is a tumor which is eating him away insatiably;
he has left the little canoe which was taking him blissfully down the river
in order to construct a bigger, safer boat in which there may be room for 
every one. His labours take him so far afield that he has lost all 
remembrance of why he left the little canoe. The ark is so full of 
bric-a-brac that it has become a stationary building above a subway in 
which the smell of linoleum prevails and predominates. Gather together all 
the significance hidden away in the interstital miscellany of 
Bloomingdale’s and put it on the head of a pin and you will have left a 
universe in which the grand constellations move without the slightest 
danger of collision. It is this microscopic chaos which brings on my 
morganatic ailments. In the street I begin to stab horses at random, or I 
lift a skirt here and there looking for a letter-box, or I put a postage 
stamp across a mouth, an eye, a vagina. Or I suddenly decide to climb a 
tall building, like a fly, and once having reached the roof I do fly with 
real wings and I fly and fly and fly, covering towns like Weehawken, 
Hoboken, Hackensack, Canarsie, Bergen Beach in the twinkling of an eye. 
Once you become a real schizerino flying is the easiest thing in the world;
the trick is to fly with the etheric body, to leave behind in 
Bloomingdale’s your sack of bones, guts, blood and cartilage; to fly only 
with your immutable self which, if you stop a moment to reflect, is always 
equipped with wings. Flying this way, in full daylight, has advantages over
the ordinary night-flying which everybody indulges in. You can leave off 
from moment to moment, as quick and decisive as stepping on a brake; there 
is no difficulty in finding your other self, because the moment you leave 
off, you are your other self, which is to say, the so-called whole self. 
Only, as the Bloomingdale experience goes to prove, this whole self, about 
which so much boasting has been done, falls apart very easily. The smell of
linoleum, for some strange reason, will always make me fall apart and 
collapse on the floor. It is the smell of all the unnatural things which 
were glued together in me, which were assembled, so to say, by negative 
consent.

It is only after the third meal that the morning gifts, bequeathed by the
phony alliances of the ancestors, begin to drop away and the true rock of 
the self, the happy rock sheers up out of the muck of the soul. With 
nightfall the pinhead universe begins to expand. It expands organically, 
from an infinitesimal nuclear speck, in the way that minerals or 
star-dusters form. It eats into the surrounding chaos like a rat boring 
through store cheese. All chaos could be gathered together on a pinhead, 
but the self, microscopical at the start, works up to a universe from any 
point in space. This is not the self about which books are written, but the
ageless self whith has been fanned out through millenary ages to men with 
names and dates, the self which begins and ends as a worm, which is the 
worm in the cheese called the world. Just as the slightest breeze can set a
vast forest in motion so, by some unfathomable impulse from within, the 
rock-like self can begin to grow, and in this growth nothing can prevail 
against it. It’s like Jack Frost at work, and the whole world a 
window-pane. No hint of labour, no sound, no struggle, no rest; relentless,
remorseless, unremitting, the growth of the self goes on. Only two items on
the bill of fare: the self and the not-self. And an eternity in which to 
work it out. In this eternity, which has nothing to do with time or space, 
there are interludes in which something like a thaw sets in. The form of 
the self breaks down, but the self, like climate, remains. In the night the
amorphous matter of the self assumes the most fugitive forms: error seeps 
in through the portholes and the wanderer is unlatched from his door. This 
door which the body wears, if opened out on to the world, leads to 
annihilation. It is the door in every fable out of which the magician 
steps; nobody has ever read of him returning home through the selfsame 
door. If opened inward there are infinite doors, all resembling trapdoors: 
no horizons are visible, no airlines, no rivers, no maps, no tickets. Each 
couche is a halt for the night only, be it five minutes or ten thousand 
years. The doors have no handles and they never wear out. Most important to
note - there is no end in sight. All these halts for the night, so to 
speak, are like abortive explorations of a myth. One can feel his way 
about, take bearings, observe passing phenomena; one can even feel at home.
But there is no taking root. Just at the moment when one begins to feel 
“established” the whole terrain founders, the soil underfoot is afloat, the
constellations are shaken loose from their moorings, the whole known 
universe, including the imperishable self, starts moving silently, 
ominously, shudderingly serene and unconcerned, towards an unknown, unseen 
destination. All the doors seem to be opening at once; the pressure is so 
great that an implosion occurs and in the swift plunge the skeleton bursts 
asunder. It was some such gigantic collapse which Dante must have 
experienced when he situated himself in Hell; it was not a bottom which he 
touched, but a core, a dead centre from which time itself is reckoned. Here
the comedy begins, for here it is seen to be divine.

All this by way of saying that in going through the revolving door of the
Amarillo dance hall one night some twelve or fourteen years ago, the great 
event took place. The interlude which I think of as the Land of Fuck, a 
realm of time more than of space, is for me the equivalent of that 
Purgatory which Dante has described in nice detail. As I put my hand on the
brass rail of the revolving door to leave the Amarillo Dance Hall, all that
I had previously been, was, and about to be, foundered. There was nothing 
unreal about it; the very time in which I was born passed away, carried off
by a mightier stream. Just as I had previously been bundled out of the 
womb, so now I was shunted back to some timeless vector where the process 
of growth is kept in abeyance. I passed into the world of effects. There 
was no fear, only a feeling of fatality. My spine was socketed to the node;
I was up against the coccyx of an implacable new world. In the plunge the 
skeleton blew apart, leaving the immutable ego as helpless as a squashed 
louse.

If from this point I do not begin, it is because there is no beginning. 
If I do not fly at once to the bright land it is because wings are of no 
avail. It is zero hour and the moon is at nadir…

Why I think of Maxie Schnadig I don’t know, unless it is because of 
Dostoievski.

The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most 
important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was 
the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it 
changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock 
stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don’t know
any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my 
first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that 
Dostoievski was the first man to reveal his soul to me? Maybe I have been a
bit queer before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I 
dipped into Dostoievski I was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer. 
The ordinary waking, work-a-day world was finished for me.

Any ambition of desire I had to write was also killed - for a long time 
to come.

I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long 
under fire. Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary 
human ambitions - it was just so much shit to me.

I can visualize best my condition when I think of my relations with Maxie
and his sister Rita. At the time Maxie and I were both interested in sport.
We used to go swimming together a great deal, that I remember well. Often 
we passed the whole day and night at the beach. I had only met Maxie’s 
sister once or twice; whenever I brought up her name Maxie would rather 
frantically begin to talk about something else.

That annoyed me because I was really bored to death with Maxie’s company,
tolerating him only because he loaned me money readily and bought me things
which I needed. Every time we started for the beach I was in hopes his 
sister would turn up unexpectedly. But no, he always managed to keep her 
out of reach.

Well, one day as we were undressing in the bath house and he was showing 
me what a fine tight scrotum he had, I said to him right out of the blue - 
“listen, Maxie, that’s all right about your nuts, they’re fine and dandy, 
and there’s nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all the time, 
why don’t you bring her along some time and let me take a good look at her 
quim… yes, quim, you know what I mean.” Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had
never heard the word quim before. He was deeply shocked by my words and yet
at the same time intrigued by this new word. In a sort of daze he said to 
me - “Jesus, Henry, you oughtn’t to say a thing like that to me!” “Why 
not?” I answered. “She’s got a cunt, your sister, hasn’t she?” I was about 
to add something else when he broke into a terrific fit of laughter. That 
saved the situation, for the time being.

But Maxie didn’t like the idea at all deep down. All day long it bothered
him, though he never referred to our conversation again. No, he was very 
silent that day. The only form of revenge he could think of was to urge me 
to swim far beyond the safety zone in the hope of tiring me out and letting
me drown. I could see so clearly what was in his mind that I was possessed 
with the strength of ten men. Damned if I would go drown myself just 
because his sister like all other women happened to have a cunt.

It was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and 
eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very 
abruptly, at the comer of a street. I shook hands and said goodbye. And 
there I was! Almost instantaneously I felt alone in the world, alone as one
feels only in moments of extreme anguish. I think I was picking my teeth 
absentmindedly when this wave of loneliness hit me full on, like a tornado.
I stood there on the street comer and sort of felt myself all over to see 
if I had been hit by something. It was inexplicable, and at the same time 
it was very wonderful, very exhilarating, like a double tonic, I might say.
When I say that I was at Far Rockaway I mean that I was standing at the end
of the earth, at a place called Xanthos, if there be such a place, and 
surely there ought to be a word like this to express no place at all. If 
Rita had come along then I don’t think I would have recognized her. I had 
become an absolute stranger standing in the very midst of my own people. 
They looked crazy to me, my people, with their newly sunbumed faces and 
their flannel trousers and their dock-work stockings.

They had been bathing like myself because it was a pleasant, healthy 
recreation and now like myself they were full of sun and food and a little 
heavy with fatigue. Up until this loneliness hit me I too was a bit weary, 
but suddenly, standing there completely shut off from the world, I woke up 
with a start I became so electrified that I didn’t dare move for fear I 
would charge like a bull or start to climb the wall of a building or else 
dance and scream. Suddenly I realized that all this was because I was 
really a brother to Dostoievski, that perhaps I was the only man in all 
America who knew what he meant in writing those books. Not only that, but I
felt all the books I would one day write myself germinating inside me: they
were bursting inside like ripe cocoons. And since up to this time I had 
written nothing but fiendishly long letters about everything and nothing, 
it was difficult for me to realize that there must come a time when I 
should begin, when I should put down the first word, the first-real word. 
And this time was now! That was what dawned on me.

I used the word Xanthos a moment ago. I don’t know whether there is a 
Xanthos or not, and I really don’t care one way or another, but there must 
be a place in the world, perhaps in the Grecian islands, where you come to 
the end of the known world and you are thoroughly alone and yet you are not
frightened of it but rejoice, because at this dropping off place you can 
feel the old ancestral world which is eternally young and new and 
fecundating. You stand there, wherever the place is, like a newly hatched 
chick beside its eggshell. This place is Xanthos, or as it happened in my 
case. Far Rockaway.

There I was! It grew dark, a wind came up, the streets became deserted, 
and finally it began to pour cats and dogs. Jesus, that finished me! When 
the rain came down, and I got it smack in the face staring at the sky, I 
suddenly began to bellow with joy. I laughed and laughed and laughed, 
exactly like an insane man. Nor did I know what I was laughing about. I 
wasn’t thinking of a thing. I was just overwhelmed with joy, just crazy 
with delight in finding myself absolutely alone. If then and there a nice 
juicy quim had been handed me on a platter, if all the quims in the world 
had been afforded me for to make my choice, I wouldn’t have batted an 
eyelash. I had what no quim could give me. And just about at that point, 
thoroughly drenched but still exultant, I thought of the most irrelevant 
thing in the world - carfare! Jesus, the bastard Maxie had walked off 
without leaving me a sou. There I was with my fine budding antique world 
and not a penny in my jeans. Herr Dostoievski Junior had now to begin to 
walk here and there peering into friendly and un-friendly faces to see if 
he could pry loose a dime. He walked from one end of Far Rockaway to the 
other but nobody seemed to give a fuck about handing out carfare in the 
rain.

Walking about in that heavy animal stupor which comes with begging I got 
to thinking of Maxie the window-trimmer and how the first time I spied him 
he was standing in the show-window dressing a mannikin. And from that in a 
few minutes to Dostoievski, then the world stopped dead, and then, like a 
great rose bush opening in the night, his sister Rita’s warm, velvety 
flesh.

Now this what is rather strange … A few minutes after I thought of Rita, 
her private and extraordinary quim, I was in the train bound for New York 
and dozing off with a marvellous languid erection. And stranger still, when
I got out of the train, when I had walked but a block or two from the 
station, whom should I bump into rounding a comer but Rita herself. And as 
though she had been informed telepathically of what was going on in my 
brain, Rita too was hot under the whiskers. Soon we were sitting in a chop 
suey joint, seated side by side in a little booth, behaving exactly like a 
pair of rabbits in rut. On the dance floor we hardly moved. We were wedged 
in tight and we stayed that way, letting them jog and jostle us about as 
they might. I could have taken her home to my place, as I was alone at the 
time, but no, I had a notion to bring her back to her own home, stand her 
up in the vestibule and give her a fuck right under Maxie’s nose - which I 
did. In the midst of it I thought again of the mannikin in the show window 
and of the way he had laughed that afternoon when I let drop the word quim.
I was on the point of laughing aloud when suddenly I felt that she was 
coming, one of those long drawn-out orgasms such as you get now and then in
a Jewish cunt. I had my hands under her buttocks, the tips of my fingers 
just inside her cunt, in the lining, as it were; as she began to shudder I 
lifted her from the ground and raised her gently up and down on the end of 
my cock. I thought she would go off her nut completely, the way she began 
to carry on. She must have had four or five orgasms like that in the air, 
before I put her feet down on the ground. I took it out without spilling a 
drop and made her lie down in the vestibule. Her hat had rolled off into a 
corner and her bag had spilled open and a few coins had tumbled out. I note
this because just before I gave it to her good and proper I made a mental 
note to pocket a few coins for my carfare home. Anyway, it was only a few 
hours since I had said to Maxie in the bath house that I would like to take
a look at his sister’s quim, and here it was now smack, up against me, 
sopping wet and throwing out one squirt after another. If she had been 
fucked before she had never been fucked properly, that’s a cinch. And I 
myself was never in such a fine cool collected scientific frame of mind as 
now lying on the floor of the vestibule right under Maxie’s nose, pumping 
it into the private, sacred, and extraordinary quim of his sister Rita. I 
could have held it in indefinitely - it was incredible how detached I was 
and yet thoroughly aware of every quiver and jolt she made. But somebody 
had to pay for making me walk around in the rain grubbing a dime. Somebody 
had to pay for the ecstasy produced by the germination of all those 
unwritten books inside me. Somebody had to verify the authenticity of this 
private, concealed cunt which had been plaguing me for weeks and months. 
Who better qualified than I? I thought so hard and fast between orgasms 
that my cock must have grown another inch or two. Finally I decided to make
an end of it by turning her over and back-scuttling her. She balked a bit 
at first, but when she felt the thing slipping out of her she nearly went 
crazy. “Oh yes, oh yes, do it, do it!” she gibbered, and with that I really
got excited, I had hardly slipped it into her when I felt it coming, one of
those long agonizing spurts from the tip of the spinal column. I shoved it 
in so deep that I felt as if something had given way. We fell over, 
exhausted, the both of us, and panted like dogs. At the same time, however,
I had the presence of mind to feel around for a few coins. Not that it was 
necessary, because she had already loaned me a few dollars, but to make up 
for the carfare which I was lacking in Far Rockaway.

Even then, by Jesus, it Wasn’t finished. Soon I felt her groping about, 
first with her hands, then with her mouth. I had still a sort of semi 
hard-on. She got it into her mouth and she began to caress it with her 
tongue. I saw stars. The next thing I knew her feet were around my neck and
my tongue up her twat. And then I had to get over her again and shove it 
in, up to the hilt. She squirmed around like an eel, so help me God. And 
then she began to come again, long, drawn-out, agonizing orgasms, with a 
whimpering and gibbering that was hallucinating. Finally I had to pull it 
out and tell her to stop. What a quim!

And I had only asked to take a look at it!

Maxie with his talk of Odessa revived something which I had lost as a 
child.

Though I had never a very dear picture of Odessa the aura of it was like 
the little neighbourhood in Brooklyn which meant so much to me and from 
which I had been torn away too soon. I get a very definite feeling of it 
every time I see an Italian painting without perspective: if it is a 
picture of a funeral procession, for example, it is exactly the sort of 
experience which I knew as a child, one of intense immediacy. If it is a 
picture of the open street, the women sitting in the windows are sitting on
the street and not above it and away from it. Everything that happens is 
known immediately by everybody, just as among primitive people. Murder is 
in the air, chance rules.

Just as in the Italian primitives this perspective is lacking, so in the 
little old neighbourhood from which I was uprooted as a child there were 
these parallel vertical planes on which everything took place and through 
which, from layer to layer, everything was communicated, as if by osmosis. 
The frontiers were sharp, dearly defined, but they were not impassable. I 
lived then, as a boy, dose to the boundary between the north and the south 
side. I was just a little bit over on the north side, just a few steps from
a broad thoroughfare called North Second Street, which was for me the real 
boundary line between the north and the south side. The actual boundary was
Grand Street, which led to Broadway Ferry, but this street meant nothing to
me, except that it was already beginning to be filled with Jews. No, North 
Second Street was the mystery street, the frontier between two worlds. I 
was living, therefore, between two boundaries, the one real, the other 
imaginary - as I have lived all my life. There was a little street, just a 
block long which lay between Grand Street and North Second Street, called 
Fillmore Place. This little street was obliquely opposite the house my 
grandfather owned and in which we lived. It was the most enchanting street 
I have ever seen in all my life. It was the ideal street - for a boy, a 
lover, a maniac, a drunkard, a crook, a lecher, a thug, an astronomer, a 
musician, a poet, a tailor, a shoemaker, a politician. In fact this was 
just the sort of street it was, containing just such representatives of the
human race, each one a world unto himself and all living together 
harmoniously and inharmoniously, but together, a solid corporation, a 
dose-knit human spore which could not disintegrate unless the street itself
disintegrated.

So it seemed, at least. Until the Williamsburg Bridge was opened, 
whereupon there followed the invasion of the Jews from Delancey Street, New
York. This brought about the disintegration of our little world, of the 
little street called Fillmore Place, which like the name itself was a 
street of value, of dignity, of light, of surprises. The Jews came, as I 
say, and like moths they began to eat into the fabric of our lives until 
there was nothing left by this moth-like presence which they brought with 
them everywhere. Soon the street began to smell bad, soon the real people 
moved away, soon the houses began to deteriorate and even the stoops fell 
away, like the paint. Soon the street looked like a dirty mouth with all 
the prominent teeth missing, with ugly charred stumps gaping here and 
there, the lips rotting, the palate gone. Soon the garbage was knee deep in
the gutter and the fire escapes filled with bloated bedding, with 
cockroaches, with dried blood. Soon the Kosher sign appeared on the shop 
windows and there was poultry everywhere and lax and sour pickles and 
enormous loaves of bread. Soon there were baby-carriages in every areaway 
and on the stoops and in the little yards and before the shop fronts. And 
with the change the English language also disappeared; one heard nothing 
but Yiddish, nothing but this sputtering, choking, hissing tongue in which 
God and rotten vegetables sound alike and mean alike.

We were among the first families to move away, following the invasion. 
Two or three times a year I came back to the old neighbourhood, for a 
birthday or for Christmas or Thanksgiving. With each visit I marked the 
loss of something I had loved and cherished. It was like a bad dream. It 
got worse and worse. The house in which my relatives still lived was like 
an old fortress going to ruin; they were stranded in one of the wings of 
the fortress, maintaining a forlorn, island life, beginning themselves to 
look sheepish, hunted, degraded. They even began to make distinctions 
between their Jewish neighbours, finding some of them quite human, quite 
decent, dean, kind, sympathetic, charitable, etc. etc. To me it was 
heartrending. I could have taken a machine gun and mowed the whole 
neighbourhood down, Jew and Gentile together.

It was about the time of the invasion that the authorities decided to 
change the name of North Second Street to Metropolitan Avenue. This 
highway, which to the Gentiles had been the road to the cemeteries, now 
became what is called an artery of traffic, a link between two ghettoes. On
the New York side the riverfront was rapidly being transformed owing to the
erection of the skyscrapers. On our side, the Brooklyn side, the warehouses
were piling up and the approaches to the various new bridges created 
plazas, comfort stations, pool rooms, stationery shops, ice cream parlours,
restaurants, clothing stores, hock shops, etc. In short everything was 
becoming metropolitan, in the odious sense of the word.

As long as we lived in the old neighbourhood we never referred to 
Metropolitan Avenue: it was always North Second Street, despite the 
official change of name.

Perhaps it was eight or ten years later, when I stood one winter’s day at
the corner of the street facing the river and noticed for the first time 
the great tower of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, that I 
realized that North Second Street was no more. The imaginary boundary of my
world had changed. My lance travelled now far beyond the cemeteries, far 
beyond the rivers, far beyond the city of New York or the State of New 
York, beyond the whole United States indeed. At Point Loma, California, I 
had looked out upon the broad Pacific and I had felt something there which 
kept my face permanently screwed in another direction. I came back to the 
old neighbourhood, I remember, one night with my old friend Stanley who had
just come out of the army, and we walked the streets sadly and wistfully. A
European can scarcely know what this feeling is like.

Even when a town becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges 
of the old. In America, though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped 
out of the consciousness, trampled upon, obliterated, nullified by the new.
The new is, from day to day, a moth which eats into the fabric of life, 
leaving nothing finally but a great hole. Stanley and I, we were walking 
through this terrifying hole. Even a war does not bring this kind of 
desolation and destruction. Through war a town may be reduced to ashes and 
the entire population wiped out, but what springs up again resembles the 
old. Death is fecundating, for the soil as well as for the spirit. In 
America the destruction is completely annihilating. There is no rebirth 
only a cancerous growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each 
one uglier than the previous one.

We were walking through this enormous hole, as I say, and it was a 
winter’s night, dear, frosty, sparkling, and as we came through the south 
side towards the boundary line we saluted all the old relics or the spots 
where things had once stood and where there had been once something of 
ourselves. And as we approached North Second Street, between Fillmore Place
and North Second Street - a distance of only a few yards and yet such a 
rich, full area of the globe - before Mrs. O’Melio’s shanty I stopped and 
looked up at the house where I had known what it was to really have a 
being. Everything had shrunk now to diminutive proportions, including the 
world which lay beyond the boundary line, the world which had been so 
mysterious to me and so terrifyingly grand, so delimited. Standing there in
a trance I suddenly recalled a dream which I have had over and over, which 
I still dream now and then, and which I hope to dream as long as I live. It
was the dream of passing the boundary line. As in all dreams the remarkable
thing is the vividness of the reality, the fad that one is in reality and 
not dreaming. Across the line I am unknown and absolutely alone.

Even the language has changed. In fact, I am always regarded as a 
stranger, a foreigner. I have unlimited time on my hands and I am 
absolutely content in sauntering through the streets. There is only one 
street, I must say - the continuation of the street on which I lived. I 
come finally to an iron bridge over the railroad yards. It is always 
nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short distance from 
the boundary line. Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight 
stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this 
duster of strange moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes place,
just as in a dream. With the transformation and deformation I become aware 
that this is the old dream which I have dreamed so often. I have a wild 
fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, 
just at the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to 
walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance for
me. Just as I go towards this house the lot on which I am standing begins 
to grow vague at the edges, to dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me 
like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of course the house which I 
never succeed in entering.

There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream I
know to the heart of a book called Creative Evolution. In this book by 
Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally as to the dream of the land 
beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a foreigner, again a man
of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a peculiar 
metamorphosis without and within. If this book had not fallen into my hands
at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad. It came at a 
moment when another huge world was crumbling on my hands. If I had never 
understood a thing which was written in this book, if I had preserved only 
the memory of one word, creative, it is quite sufficient. This word was my 
talisman.

With it I was able to defy the whole world, and especially my friends.

There are times when one must break with one’s friends in order to 
understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but 
the discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an 
implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and 
who no longer meant anything to me. This book became my friend because it 
taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the courage to stand 
alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never understood 
the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I 
never really did understand. It was more important for me not to 
understand. With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, 
questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that
I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not 
understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing
became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding 
and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and
the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more 
solid than differences of understanding. Everything which before I thought 
I had understood crumbled, and I was left with a dean slate. My friends, on
the other hand, entrenched themselves more solidly in the little ditch of 
understanding which they had dug for themselves. They died comfortably in 
their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. 
I pitied them, and in short order.

I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.

What was there then in this book which could mean so much to me and yet 
remain obscure? I come back to the word creative. I am sure that the whole 
mystery lies in the realization of the meaning of this word. When I think 
of the book now, and the way I approached it, I think of a man going 
through the rites of initiation. The disorientation and reorientation which
comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience
which it is possible to have.

Everything which the brain has laboured for a lifetime to assimilate, 
categorize and synthesize has to be taken apart and reordered. Moving day 
for the soul! And of course it’s not for a day, but for weeks and months 
that this goes on. You meet a friend on the street by chance, one whom you 
haven’t seen for several weeks, and he has become an absolute stranger to 
you. You give him a few signals from your new perch and if he doesn’t 
cotton you pass him up - for good. It’s exactly like mopping up a 
battlefield: all those who are hopelessly disabled and agonizing you 
dispatch with one swift blow of your dub. You move on, to new fields of 
battle, to new triumphs or defeats. But you move! And as yon move the world
moves with you, with terrifying exactitude. You seek out new fields of 
operation, new specimens of the human race whom you patiently instruct and 
equip with the new symbols. You choose sometimes those you would never have
looked at before. You try everybody and everything within range, provided 
they are ignorant of the revelation.

It was in this fashion that I found myself sitting in the busheling room 
of my father’s establishment, reading aloud to the Jews who were working 
there.

Reading to them from this new Bible in the way that Paul must have talked
to the disciples. With the added disadvantage, to be sure, that these poor 
Jew bastards could not read the English language. Primarily I was directing
myself towards Bunchek the cutter, who had a rabbinical mind. Opening the 
book I would pick a passage at random and read it to them in a transposed 
English almost as primitive as pidgin English. Then I would attempt to 
explain, choosing for example and analogy the things they were familiar 
with. It was amazing to me how well they understood, how much better they 
understood, let me say, than a college professor or a literary man or any 
educated man. Naturally what they understood had nothing to do finally with
Bergson’s book, as a book, but was not that the purpose of such a book as 
this? My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself 
disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated 
into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and 
reshapes the world. It was a great communion feast which we shared in the 
reading of this book and the outstanding feature of it was the chapter on 
Disorder which, having penetrated me through and through, has endowed me 
with such a marvellous sense of order that if a comet suddenly struck the 
earth and jarred everything out of place, stood everything upside down, 
turned everything inside out, I could orient myself to the new order in the
twinkling of an eye. I have no fear or illusions about disorder any more 
than I have of death. The labyrinth is my happy hunting ground and the 
deeper I burrow into the maze the more oriented I become.

With Creative Evolution under my arm I board the elevated line at the 
Brooklyn Bridge after work and I commence the journey homeward towards the 
cemetery.

Sometimes I get on at Delancey Street, the very heart of the ghetto, 
after a long walk through the crowded streets. I enter the elevated line 
below the ground, like a worm being pushed through the intestines. I know 
each time I take my place in the crowd which mills about the platform that 
I am the most unique individual down there. I look upon everything which is
happening about me like a spectator from another planet. My language, my 
world, is under my arm. I am the guardian of a great secret; if I were to 
open my mouth and talk I would tie up traffic. What I have to say, and what
I am holding in every night of my life on this journey to and from the 
office, is absolute dynamite. I am not ready yet to throw my stick of 
dynamite. I nibble at it meditatively, ruminatively, cogently.

Five more years, ten more years perhaps, and I will wipe these people out
utterly. If the train in making a curve gives a violent lurch I say to 
myself fine! jump the track, annihilate them! I never think of myself as 
being endangered should the train jump the track. We’re wedged in like 
sardines and all the hot flesh pressed against me diverts my thoughts. I 
become conscious of a pair of legs wrapped around mine. I look down at the 
girl sitting in front of me, I look her right in the eye, and I press my 
knees still further into her crotch. She grows uneasy, fidgets about in her
seat, and finally she turns to the girl next to her and complains that I am
molesting her. The people about look at me hostilely. I look out of the 
window blandly and pretend I have heard nothing. Even if I wished to I 
can’t remove my legs. Little by little though, the girl, by a violent 
pushing and squiggling, manages to unwrap her legs from mine. I find myself
almost in the same situation with the girl next to her, the one she was 
addressing her complaints to. Almost at once I feel a sympathetic touch and
then, to my surprise, I hear her tell the other girl that one can’t help 
these things, that it is really not the man’s fault but the fault of the 
company for packing us in like sheep. And again I feel the quiver of her 
legs against mine, a warm, human pressure, like squeezing one’s hand. With 
my one free hand I manage to open my book. My object is twofold: first I 
want her to see the kind of book I read, second, I want to be able to carry
on the leg language without attracting attention. It works beautifully. By 
the time the train empties a bit I am able to take a seat beside her and 
converse with her - about the book, naturally. She’s a voluptuous Jewess 
with enormous liquid eyes and the frankness which come from sensuality. 
When it comes time to get off we walk arm in arm through the streets, 
towards her home. I am almost on the confines of the old neighbourhood. 
Everything is familiar to me and yet repulsively strange. I have not walked
these streets for years and now I am walking with a Jew girl from the 
ghetto, a beautiful girl with a strong Jewish accent. I look incongruous 
walking beside her. I can sense that people are staring at us behind our 
backs. I am the intruder, the Goy who has come down into the neighbourhood 
to pick off a nice ripe cunt. She on the other hand seems to be proud of 
her conquest; she’s showing me off to her friends. This is what I picked up
in the train, an educated Goy, a refined Goy! I can almost hear her think 
it. Walking slowly I’m getting the lay of the land, all the practical 
details which will decide whether I call for her after dinner or not.

There’s no thought of asking her to dinner. It’s a question of what time 
and where to meet and how will we go about it, because as she lets drop 
just before we reach the door, she’s got a husband who’s a travelling 
salesman and she’s got to be careful. I agree to come back and to meet her 
at the comer in front of the candy store at a certain hour. If I want to 
bring a friend along she’ll bring her girl friend. No, I decide to see her 
alone. It’s agreed. She squeezes my hand and darts off into a dirty 
hallway. I beat it quickly back to the elevated station and hasten home to 
gulp down the meal.

It’s a Summer’s night and everything flung wide open. Riding back to meet
her the whole past rushes up kaleidoscopically. This time I’ve left the 
book at home. It’s cunt I’m out for now and no thought of the book is in my
head. I am back again this side of the boundary line, each station whizzing
past making my world grow more diminutive. I am almost a child by the time 
I reach the destination. I am a child who is horrified by the metamorphosis
which has taken place. What has happened to me, a man of the 14th Ward, to 
be jumping off at this station in search of a Jewish cunt? Supposing I do 
give her a fuck, what then? What have I got to say to a girl like that? 
What’s a fuck when what I want is love? Yes, suddenly it comes over me like
a tornado… Una, the girl I loved, the girl who lived here in this 
neighbourhood, Una with big blue eyes and flaxen hair, Una who made me 
tremble just to look at her, Una whom I was afraid to kiss or even to touch
her hand. Where is Una? Yes, suddenly, that’s the burning question: where 
is Una? In two seconds I am completely unnerved, completely lost, desolate,
in the most horrible anguish and despair. How did I ever let her go? Why? 
What happened? When did it happen? I thought of her like a maniac night and
day, year in and year out, and then, without even noticing it, she drops 
out of my mind, like that, like a penny falling through a hole in your 
pocket.

Incredible, monstrous, mad. Why all I had to do was to ask her to marry 
me, ask her hand - that’s all. If I had done that she would have said yes 
immediately. She loved me, she loved me desperately. Why yes, I remember 
now, I remember how she looked at me the last time we met. I was saying 
goodbye because I was leaving that night for California, leaving everybody 
to begin a new life. And I never had any intention of leading a new life. I
intended to ask her to marry me, but the story I had framed like a dope 
came out of my lips so naturally that I believed it myself, and so I said 
goodbye and I walked off, arid she stood there looking after me and I felt 
her eyes pierce me through and through. I heard her howling inside, but 
like an automaton I kept on walking and finally I turned the comer and that
was the end of it. Goodbye! Like that. Like in a coma. And I meant to say 
come to me! Come to me because I can’t live any more without you!

I am so weak, so rocky, that I can scarcely climb down the L steps. Now I
know what’s happened - I’ve crossed the boundary line! This Bible that I’ve
been carrying around with me is to instruct me, initiate me into a new way 
of life.

The world I knew is no more, it is dead, finished, cleaned up. And 
everything that I was is cleaned up with it. I am a carcass getting an 
injection of new life. I am bright and glittery, rabid with new 
discoveries, but in the centre it is still leaden, still slag. I begin to 
weep - right there on the L stairs. I sob aloud, like a child. Now it dawns
on me with full clarity: you are alone in the world! You are alone … alone 
… alone. It is bitter to be alone… bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. There is
no end to it, it is unfathomable, and it is the lot of every man on earth, 
but especially mine … especially mine.

Again the metamorphosis. Again everything totters, and careens. I am in 
the dream again, the painful, delirious, pleasurable, maddening dream of 
beyond the boundary. I am standing in the centre of the vacant lot, but my 
home I do not see. I have no home. The dream was a mirage. There never was 
a house in the midst of the vacant lot. That’s why I was never able to 
enter it. My home is not in this world, nor in the next I am a man without 
a home, without a friend, without a wife.

I am a monster who belongs to a reality which does not exist yet. Ah, but
it does exist, it will exist, I am sure of it. I walk now rapidly, head 
down, muttering to myself. I’ve forgotten about my rendezvous so completely
that I never even noticed whether I walked past her or not. Probably I did.
Probably I looked right at her and didn’t recognize her. Probably she 
didn’t recognize me either. I am mad, mad with pain, mad with anguish. I am
desperate. But I am not lost. No, there is a reality to which I belong. 
It’s far away, very far away. I may walk from now till doomsday with head 
down and never find her. But it is there, I am sure of it. I look at people
murderously. If I could throw a bomb and blow the whole neighbourhood to 
smithereens I would do it. I would be happy seeing them fly in the air, 
mangled, shrieking, torn apart, annihilated. I want to annihilate the whole
earth. I am not a part of it. It’s mad from start to finish. The whole 
shooting match. It’s a huge piece of stale cheese with maggots festering 
inside it. Fuck it! Blow it to hell! Kill, kill, kill: Kill them all, Jews 
and Gentiles, young and old, good and bad …

I grow light, light as a feather, and my pace becomes more steady, more 
calm, more even. What a beautiful night it is! The stars shining so 
brightly, so serenely, so remotely. Not mocking me precisely, but reminding
me of the futility of it all. Who are you, young man, to be talking of the 
earth, of blowing things to smithereens? Young man, we have been hanging 
here for millions and billions of years. We have seen it all, everything, 
and still we shine peacefully every night, we light the way, we still the 
heart. Look around you, young man, see how still and beautiful everything 
is. Do you see, even the garbage lying in the gutter looks beautiful in 
this light. Pick up the little cabbage leaf, hold it gently in your hand. I
bend down and pick up the cabbage leaf lying in the gutter. It looks 
absolutely new to me, a whole universe in itself. I break a little piece 
off and examine that. Still a universe. Still unspeakably beautiful and 
mysterious. I am almost ashamed to throw it back in the gutter. I bend down
and deposit it gently with the other refuse. I become very thoughtful, 
very, very calm. I love everybody in the world. I know that somewhere at 
this very moment there is a woman waiting for me and if only I proceed very
calmly, very gently, very slowly, I will come to her. She will be standing 
on a comer perhaps and when I come in sight she will recognize me - 
immediately. I believe this, so help me God! I believe that everything is 
just and ordained. My home?

Why it is the world - the whole world! I am at home everywhere, only I 
did not know it before. But I know now. There is no boundary line any more.
There never was a boundary line: it was I who made it. I walk slowly and 
blissfully through the streets. The beloved streets. Where everybody walks 
and everybody suffers without showing it. When I stand and lean against a 
lamp post to light my cigarette even the lamp post feels friendly. It is 
not a thing of iron - it is a creation of the human mind, shaped a certain 
way, twisted and formed by human hands, blown on with human breath, placed 
by human hands and feet. I turn round and rub my hand over the iron 
surface. It almost seems to speak to me. It is a human lamp post. It 
belongs, like the cabbage leaf, like the torn socks, like the mattress, 
like the kitchen sink. Everything stands in a certain way in a certain 
place, as our mind stands in relation to God. The world, in its visible, 
tangible substance, is a map of our love. Not God but life is love. Love, 
love, love. And in the midmost midst of it walks this young man, myself, 
who is none other than Gotdieb Leberecht Muller.

Gotdieb Leberecht Miiller! This is the name of a man who lost his 
identity.

Nobody could tell him who he was, where he came from or what had happened
to him. In the movies, where I first made the acquaintance of this 
individual it was assumed that he had met with an accident in the war. But 
when I recognized myself on the screen, knowing that I had never been to 
the war, I realized that the author had invented this little piece of 
fiction in order not to expose me.

Often I forget which is the real me. Often in my dreams I take the 
draught of forgetfulness, as it is called, and I wander forlorn and 
desperate, seeking the body and the name which is mine. And sometimes 
between the dream and reality there is only the thinnest line. Sometimes 
while a person is talking to me I step out of my shoes, and, like a plant 
drifting with the current, I begin the voyage, of my rootless self. In this
condition I am quite capable of fulfilling the ordinary demands of life - 
of finding a wife, of becoming a father, of supporting the household, of 
entertaining friends, of reading books, of paying taxes, of performing 
military services, and so on and so forth. In this condition I am capable 
if needs be, of killing in cold blood, for the sake of my family or to 
protect my country, or whatever it may be. I am the ordinary, routine 
citizen who answers to a name and who is given a number in his passport. I 
am thoroughly irresponsible for my fate.

Then one day, without the slightest warning, I wake up and looking about 
me I understand absolutely nothing of what is going on about me, neither my
own behaviour nor that of my neighbours, nor do I understand why the 
governments are at war or at peace, whichever the case may be. At such 
moments I am born anew, born and baptized by my right name: Gotdieb 
Leberecht Miiller! Everything I do in my right name is looked upon as 
crazy. People make furtive signs behind my back, sometimes to my face even.
I am forced to break with friends and family and loved ones. I am obliged 
to break camp. And so, just as naturally as in dream, I find myself once 
again drifting with the current, usually walking along a highway, my face 
set towards the sinking sun. Now all my faculties become alert. I am the 
most suave silky, cunning animal - and I am at the same time what might be 
called a holy man. I know how to fend for myself. I know how to avoid work,
how to avoid entangling relationships, how to avoid pity, sympathy, 
bravery, and all the other pitfalls. I stay in place or widi a person just 
long enough to obtain what I need, and then I’m off again. I have no goal: 
the aimless wandering is sufficient unto itself. I am free as a bird, sure 
as an equilibrist. Manna falls from the sky; I have only to hold out my 
hands and receive. And everywhere I leave the most pleasant feeling behind 
me, as though, in accepting the gifts that are showered upon me, I am doing
a real favour to others. Even my dirty linen is taken care of by loving 
hands. Because everybody loves a right-living man!

Gottlieb! What a beautiful name it is! Gotdieb! I say to myself over and 
over.

Gottlieb Leberecht Muller.

In this condition I have always fallen in with thieves and rogues and 
murderers, and how.kind and gentle they have been with me! As though they 
were my brothers. And are they not, indeed? Have I not been guilty of every
crime, and suffered for it? And is it not just because of my crimes that I 
am united so closely to my fellowman? Always, when I see a light of 
recognition in the other person’s eyes, I am aware of this secret bond. It 
is only the just whose eyes never light up. It is the just who have never 
known the secret of human fellowship. It is the just who are committing the
crimes against man, the just who are the real monsters. It is the just who 
demand our fingerprints, who prove to us that we have died even when we 
stand before them in the flesh. It is the just who impose upon us arbitrary
names, false names, who put false dates in the register and bury us alive. 
I prefer the thieves, the rogues, the murderers unless I can find a man of 
my own stature, my own quality.

I have never found such a man! I have never found a man as generous as 
myself, as forgiving, as tolerant, as carefree, as reckless, as clean at 
heart. I forgive myself for every crime I have committed. I do it in the 
name of humanity. I know what it means to be human, the weakness and the 
strength of it.

I suffer from this knowledge and I revel in it also. If I had the chance 
to be God I would reject it. If I had the chance to be a star I would 
reject it. The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.
It embraces the whole universe. It includes the knowledge of death, which 
not even God enjoys.

At the point from which this book is written I am the man who baptized 
himself anew. It is many years since this happened and so much has come in 
between that it is difficult to get back to that moment and retrace the 
journey of Gottlieb Leberecht Muller. However, perhaps I can give the clue 
if I say that the man which I now am was born out of a wound. That wound 
went to the heart. By all man-made logic I should have been dead. I was in 
fact given up for dead by all who once knew me; I walked about like a ghost
in their midst. They used the past tense in referring to me, they pitied 
me, they shovelled me under deeper and deeper. Yet I remembered how I used 
to laugh then, as always, how I made love to other women, how I enjoyed my 
food and drink, and the soft bed which I dung to like a fiend. Something 
had killed me, and yet I was alive. But I was live without a memory, 
without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret. 
I had no past and I would probably have no future; I was buried alive in a 
void which was the wound that had been dealt me. I was the wound itself.

I have a friend who talks to me from time to time about the Miracle of 
Golgotha of which I understand nothing. But I do know something about the 
miraculous wound which I received, the wound which killed me in the eyes of
the world and out of which I was born anew and rebaptized. I know something
of the miracle of this wound which I lived and which healed with my death. 
I tell it as of something long past, but it is with me always. Everything 
is long past and seemingly invisible, like a constellation which has sunk 
forever beneath the horizon.

What fascinates me is that anything so dead and buried as I was could be 
resuscitated, and not just once, but innumerable times. And not only that, 
but each time I faded out I plunged deeper than ever into the void, so that
with each resuscitation the miracle becomes greater. And never any 
stigmata! The man who is reborn is always the same man, more and more 
himself with each rebirth.

He is only shedding his skin each time, and with his skin his sins. The 
man whom God loves is truly a right living man. The man whom God loves is 
the onion with a million skins. To shed the first layer is painful beyond 
words; the next layer is less painful, the next still less, until finally 
the pain becomes pleasurable, more and more pleasurable, a delight, an 
ecstasy. And then there is neither pleasure not pain, but simply darkness 
yielding before the light. And as the darkness falls away the wound comes 
out of its hiding place: the wound which is man, man’s love, is bathed in 
light.

The identity which was lost is recovered. Man walks forth from his open 
wound, from the grave which he had carried about with him so long.

In the tomb which is my memory I see her buried now, the one I loved 
better than all else, better than the world, better than God, better than 
my own flesh and blood. I see her festering there in that bloody wound of 
love, so dose to me that I could not distinguish her from the wound itself.
I see her struggling to free herself, to make herself clean of love pain, 
and with each struggle sinking back again into the wound, mired, 
suffocated, writhing in blood. I see the terrible look in her eyes, the 
mute piteous agony, the look of the beast that is trapped. I see her 
opening her legs for deliverance and each orgasm a groan of anguish. I hear
the walls falling, the walls caving in on us and the house going up in 
flames. I hear them calling us from the street, the summons to work, the 
summons to arms, but we are nailed to the floor and the rats are biting 
into us.

The grave and womb of love entombing us, the night filling our bowels and
the stars shimmering over the black bottomless lake. I lose the memory of 
words, of her name even which I pronounced like a monomaniac. I forgot what
she looked like, what she felt like, what she smelt like, what she fucked 
like, piercing deeper and deeper into the night of the fathomless cavern. I
followed her to the deepest hole of her being, to the charnel house of her 
soul, to the breath which had not yet expired from her lips. I sought 
relentlessly for her whose name was not written anywhere, I penetrated to 
the very altar and found - nothing. I wrapped myself around this hollow 
shell of nothingness like a serpent with fiery coils; I lay still for six 
centuries without breathing as world events sieved through to the bottom 
forming a slimy bed of mucus. I saw the constellations wheeling about the 
huge hole in the ceiling of the universe: I saw the outer planets and the 
black star which was to deliver me. I saw the Dragon shaking itself free of
dharma and karma, saw the new race of man stewing in the yolk of futurity. 
I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I
could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous 
breasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of 
her incandescent vision.

How had she come to expand thus beyond all grip of consciousness? By what
monstrous law had she spread herself thus over the face of the world, 
revealing everything and yet concealing herself? She was hidden in the face
of the sun, like the moon in eclipse; she was a mirror which had lost its 
quicksilver, the mirror which yields both the image and the horror. Looking
into the backs of her eyes, into the pulpy translucent flesh, I saw the 
brain structure of all formations, all relations, all evanescence. I saw 
the brain within the brain, the endless machine endlessly turning, the word
Hope revolving on a spit, roasting, dripping with fat, revolving 
ceaselessly in the cavity of the third eye. I heard her dreams mumbled in 
lost tongues, the stifled screams reverberating in minute crevices, the 
gasps, the groans, the pleasurable sighs, the swish of lashing whips. I 
heard her call my own name which I had not yet uttered, I heard her curse 
and shriek with rage. I heard everything magnified a thousand times, like a
homunculus imprisoned in the belly organ. I caught the muffled breathing of
the world, as if fixed in the very crossroads of sound.

Thus we walked and slept and ate together, the Siamese twins whom Love 
had joined and whom Death alone could separate.

We walked upside down, hand in hand, at the neck of the Bottle. She 
dressed in black almost exclusively, except for patches of purple now and 
then. She wore no underclothes, just a simple sheet of black velvet 
saturated with a diabolical perfume. We went to bed at dawn and got up just
as it was darkling. We lived in black holes with drawn curtains, we ate 
from black plates, we read from black books. We looked out of the black 
hole of our life into the black hole of the world. The sun was permanently 
blacked out, as though to aid us in continuous internecine strife. For sun 
we had Mars, for moon Saturn: we lived permanently in the zenith of the 
underworld. The earth had ceased to revolve and through the hole in the sky
above us there hung the black star which never twinkled. Now and then we 
had fits of laughter, crazy, batrachian laughter which made the neighbours 
shudder. Now and then we sang, delirious, on-key, full tremolo. We were 
locked in throughout the long dark night of the soul, a period of 
incommensurable time which began and ended in the manner of an eclipse. We 
revolved about our own egos, like phantom satellites. We were drunk with 
our own image which we saw when we looked into each other’s eyes. How then 
did we look to others? As the beast looks to the plant, as the stars look 
to the beast. Or as God would look to man if the devil had given him wings.
And with it all, in the fixed, dose intimacy of a night without end she was
radiant, jubilant, an ultra-black jubilation streaming from her like a 
steady flow of sperm from the Mithraic Bull. She was double-barrelled, like
a shotgun, a female bull with an acetylene torch in her womb. In heat she 
focussed on the grand cosmocrator, her eyes rolled back to the whites, her 
lips a-saliva. In the blind hole of sex she waltzed like a trained mouse, 
her jaws unhinged like a snake’s, her skin horripilating in barbed plumes. 
She had the insatiable lust of a unicorn, the itch that laid the Egyptians 
low. Even the hole in the sky through which the lacklustre star shone down 
was swallowed up in her fury.

We lived glued to the ceiling, the hot, rancid fume of the everyday life 
steaming up and suffocating us. We lived at marble heat, the ascending glow
of human flesh warming the snake-like coils in which we were locked. We 
lived riveted to the nethermost depths, our skins smoked to the colour of a
grey cigar by the fumes of worldly passion. Like two heads carried on the 
pikes of our executioners we circled slowly and fixedly over the heads and 
shoulders of the world below. What was life on the solid earth to us who 
were decapitated and forever joined at the genitals? We were the twin 
snakes of Paradise, lucid in heat and cool as chaos itself. Life was a 
perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. Life was Scorpio 
conjunction Mars, conjunction Mercury, conjunction Venus, conjunction 
Saturn, conjunction Pluto, conjunction Uranus, conjunction quicksilver, 
laudanum, radium, bismuth. The grand conjunction was every Saturday night, 
Leo fornicating with Draco in the house of brother and sister. The great 
malheur was a ray of sunlight stealing through the curtains. The great 
curse was Jupiter, king of the fishes, that he might flash a benevolent 
eye.

The reason why it is difficult to tell it is because I remember too much.
I remember everything, but like a dummy sitting on the lap of a 
ventriloquist. It seems to me that throughout the long, uninterrupted 
connubial solstice I sat on her lap (even when she was standing) and spoke 
the lines she had taught me. It seems to me that she must have commanded 
God’s chief plumber to keep the black star shining through the hole in the 
ceiling, must have bid him to rain down perpetual night and with it all the
crawling torments that move noiselessly about in the dark so that the mind 
becomes a twirling awl burrowing frantically into black nothingness. Did I 
only imagine that she talked incessantly, or had I become such a 
marvellously trained dummy that I intercepted the thought before it reached
the lips? The lips were finely parted, smoothed down with a thick paste of 
dark blood: I watched them open and dose with the utmost fascination, 
whether they hissed a viper’s hate or cooed like a turtle dove. They were 
always close-up, as in the movie stills, so that I knew every crevice, 
every pore, and when the hysterical salivating began I watched the spittle 
fume and foam as though I were sitting in a rocking chair under Niagara 
Falls. I learned what to do just as though I were a part of her organism; I
was better than a ventriloquist’s dummy because I could act without being 
violently jerked by strings. Now and then I did things impromptu like, 
which sometimes pleased her enormously; she would pretend, of course, not 
to notice these interruptions, but I could always tell when she was pleased
by the way she preened herself. She had the gift for transformation; almost
as quick and subtle she was as the devil himself. Next to the panther and 
the jaguar she did the bird stuff best: the wild heron, the ibis, the 
flamingo, the swan in rut. She had a way of swooping suddenly, as if she 
had spotted a ripe carcass, diving right into the bowels, pouncing 
immediately on the tidbits - the heart, the liver, or the ovaries -and 
making off again in the twinkling of an eye. Did someone spot her, she 
would lie stone quiet at the base of a tree, her eyes not quite dosed but 
immovable in that fixed stare of the basilisk. Prod her a bit and she would
become a rose, a deep black rose with the most velvety petals and of a 
fragrance that was overpowering. It was amazing how marvellously I learned 
to take my cue; no matter how swift the metamorphosis I was always there in
her lap, bird lap, beast lap, snake lap, rose lap, what matter: the lap of 
laps, the lip of lips, tip to tip, feather to feather, the yolk in the egg,
the pearl in the oyster, a cancer clutch, a tincture of sperm and 
cantharides.

Life was Scorpio conjunction Mars, conjunction Venus, Saturn, Uranus, et 
cetera, love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, dutch this, dutch that, 
clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust. 
Come food time I could already hear her peeling the eggs, and inside the 
egg cheep-cheep, blessed omen of the next meal to come. I ate like a 
monomaniac: the prolonged dreamlit voracity of the man who is thrice 
breaking his fast. And as I ate she purred, the rhythmic predatory wheeze 
of the succubus devouring her young. What a blissful night of love! Saliva,
sperm, succubation, sphincteritis all in one: the conjugal orgy in the 
Black Hole of Calcutta.

Out there where the black star hung, a Pan-Islamic silence, as in the 
cavern world where even the wind is stilled. Out there, did I dare to brood
on it, the spectral quietude of insanity, the world of men, lulled, 
exhausted by centuries of incessant slaughter. Out there one gory 
encompassing membrane within which all activity took place, the hero-world 
of lunatics and maniacs who had quenched the light of the heaven with 
blood. How peaceful our little dove-and-vulture life in the dark! Flesh to 
bury in with teeth or penis, abundant odorous flesh with no mark of knife 
or scissors, no scar of exploded shrapnel, no mustard bums, no scalded 
lungs. Save for the hallucinating hole in the ceiling, an almost perfect 
womb life. But the hole was there - like a fissure in the bladder - and no 
wadding could plug it permanently, no urination could pass off with a 
smile. Piss large and freely, aye, but how forget the rent in the belfry, 
the silence unnatural, the imminence, the terror, the poom of the “other” 
world? Eat a bellyful, aye, and tomorrow another bellyful, and tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow - but finally, what then? Finally? What was finally? 
A change of ventriloquist, a change of lap, a shift in the axis, another 
rift in the vault… what? what?

I’ll tell you - sitting in her lap, petrified by the still, pronged beams
of the black star, homed, snaffled, hitched and trepanned by the telepathic
acuity of your interacting agitation, I thought of nothing at all, nothing 
that was outside the cell we inhabited, not even the thought of a crumb on 
a white tablecloth. I thought purely within the walls of our amoebic life, 
the pure thought such as Immanuel Pussyfoot Kant gave us and which only a 
ventriloquist’s dummy could reproduce. I thought out every theory of 
science, every theory of art, every grain of truth in every cock-eyed 
system of salvation. I calculated everything out to a pin point with 
gnostic decimals to boot, like primes which a drunk hands out at the finish
of a six-day-race. But everything was calculated for another life which 
somebody else would live some day -perhaps. We were at the very neck of the
bottle, her and I, as they say, but the neck had been broken off and the 
bottle was only a fiction.

I remember how the second time I met her she told me that she had never 
expected to see me again, and the next time I saw her she said she thought 
I was a dope fiend, and the next time she called me a god, and after that 
she tried to commit suicide and then I tried and then she tried again, and 
nothing worked except to bring us closer together, so close indeed that we 
interpenetrated, exchanged personalities, name, identity, religion, father,
mother, brother. Even her body went through a radical change, not once but 
several times. At first she was big and velvety, like the jaguar, with that
silky, deceptive strength of the feline species, the crouch, the spring, 
the pounce; then she grew emaciated, fragile, delicate almost like a 
cornflower, and with each change thereafter she went through the subtlest 
modulations - of skin, muscle, colour, posture, odour, gait, gesture, et 
cetera. She changed like a chameleon. Nobody could say what she really was 
like because with each one she was an entirely different person.

After a time she didn’t even know herself what she was like. She had 
begun this process of metamorphosis before I met her, as I later 
discovered. Like so many women who think themselves ugly she had willed to 
make herself beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful. To do this she first of all 
renounced her name, then her family, her friends, everything which might 
attach her to the past. With all her wits and faculties she devoted herself
to the cultivation of her beauty, other charm, which she already possessed 
to a high degree but which she had been made to believe were nonexistent. 
She lived constantly before the mirror, studying every movement, every 
gesture, every slightest grimace. She changed her whole manner of speech, 
her diction, her intonation, her accent, her phraseology. She conducted 
herself so skilfully that it was impossible even to broach the subject of 
origins. She was constantly on her guard, even in her sleep. And, like a 
good general, she discovered quickly enough that the best defence is 
attack. She never left a single position unoccupied; her outposts, her 
scouts, her sentinels were stationed everywhere. Her mind was a revolving 
searchlight which was never dimmed.

Blind to her own beauty, her own charm, her own personality, to say 
nothing of her identity, she launched her full powers towards the 
fabrication of a mythical creature, a Helen, a Juno, whose charms neither 
man nor woman would be able to resist. Automatically, without the slightest
knowledge of legend, she began to create little by little the ontological 
background, the mythic sequence of events preceding the conscious birth. 
She had no need to remember her lies, her fictions - she had only to bear 
in mind her role. There was no lie too monstrous for her to utter, for in 
her adopted role she was absolutely faithful to herself. She did not have 
to invent a past: she remembered the past which belonged to her. She was 
never outflanked by a direct question since she never presented herself to 
an adversary except obliquely. She presented only the angles of the 
everturning facets, the blinding prisms of light which she kept constantly 
revolving. She was never a being, such as might finally be caught in 
repose, but the mechanism itself, relentlessly operating the myriad mirrors
which would reflect the myth she had created. She had no poise what soever;
she was eternally poised above her multiple identities in the vacuum of the
self. She had not intended to make herself a legendary figure, she had 
merely wanted her beauty to be recognized. But, in the pursuit of beauty, 
she soon forgot her quest entirely, became the victim of her own creation. 
She became so stunningly beautiful that at times she was frightening, at 
times positively uglier than the ugliest woman in the world. She could 
inspire horror and dread, especially when her charm was at its height. It 
was as though the will, blind and uncontrollable, shone through the 
creation, exposing the monster which it is.

In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no 
adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit, 
gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like 
lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid
and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few 
moments. It was like a frantic long distance message, an S.O.S. from a 
sinking ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced 
by flesh rubbing against flesh. I thought I had found a living volcano, a 
female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of 
despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star 
gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above 
our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know it
was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun without
aspect. I know that we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs 
trying to fuck through an iron grate.

I said that in the frantic grappling in the dark I sometimes forgot her 
name, what she looked like, who she was. It’s true. I overeached myself in 
the dark. I slid off the flesh rails into the endless space of sex, into 
the channel-orbits established by this one and that one; Georgiana, for 
instance, of only a brief afternoon, Telma, the Egyptian whore, Carlotta, 
Alannah, Una, Mona, Magda, girls of six or seven; waifs, will’o’-the-wisps,
faces, bodies, thighs, a subway brush, a dream, a memory, a desire, a 
longing. I could start with Georgiana of a Sunday afternoon near the 
railroad tracks, her dotted Swiss dress, her swaying haunch, her Southern 
drawl, her lascivious mouth, her molten breasts, I could start with 
Georgiana, the myriad branched candelabra of sex, and work outwards and 
upwards through the ramification of cunt into the nth dimension of sex, 
world without end. Georgiana was like the membrane of the tiny little ear 
of an unfinished monster called sex. She was transparently alive and 
breathing in the light of the memory of a brief afternoon on the avenue, 
the first tangible odour and substance of the world of fuck which is in 
itself a being limitless and undefinable, like our world the world. The 
whole world of fuck like unto the ever-increasing membrane of the animal we
call sex, which is like another being growing into our own being and 
gradually displacing it, so that in time the human world will be only a dim
memory of this new, all-inclusive, all-procreative being which is giving 
birth to itself.

It was precisely this snake-like copulation in the dark, this 
double-jointed, double-barrelled hook-up, which put me in the strait-jacket
of doubt, jealousy, fear, loneliness. If I began my hem-stitching with 
Georgiana and the myriad-branched candelabra of sex I was certain that she 
too was at work building membrane, making ears, eyes, toes, scalp and 
what-not of sex. She would begin with the monster who had raped her, 
assuming there was truth in the story; in any case she too began somewhere 
on a parallel track, working upwards and outwards through this multiform, 
uncreated being through whose body we were both striving desperately to 
meet. Knowing only a fraction of her life, possessing only a bag of lies, 
of inventions, of imaginings, of obsessions and delusions, putting together
tag-ends, coke dreams, reveries, unfinished sentences, jumbled dream talk, 
hysterical ravings, ill-disguised fantasies, morbid desires, meeting now 
and then a name become flesh, overhearing stray bits of conversation, 
observing smuggled glances, half-arrested gestures, I could well credit her
with a pantheon of her own private fucking gods, of only too vivid flesh 
and blood creatures, men of perhaps that very afternoon, of perhaps only an
hour ago, her cunt perhaps still choked with the sperm of the last fuck. 
The more submissive she was, the more passionately she behaved, the more 
abandoned she looked, the more uncertain I became. There was no beginning, 
no personal, individual starting point; we met like experienced swordsmen 
on the field of honour now crowded with the ghosts of victory and defeat We
were alert and responsible to the least thrust, as only the practiced can 
be.

We came together under cover of dark with our armies and from opposite 
sides we forced the gates of the citadel. There was no resisting our bloody
work; we asked for no quarter and we gave none. We came together swimming 
in blood, a gory, glaucous reunion in the night with all the stars 
extinguished save the fixed black star hanging like a scalp above the hole 
in the ceiling. If she were properly coked she would vomit it forth like an
oracle, everything that had happened to her during the day, yesterday, the 
day before, the year before last, everything, down to the day she was born.
And not a word of it was true, not a single detail. Not a moment did she 
stop, for if she had, the vacuum she created in her flight would have 
brought about an explosion fit to sunder the world. She was the world’s 
lying machine in microcosm, geared to the same unending, devastating fear 
which enables men to throw all their energies into creation of the death 
apparatus. To look at her one would think her fearless, one would think her
the personification of courage and she was, so long as she was not obliged 
to turn in her traces. Behind her lay the calm fact of reality, a colossus 
which dogged her every step. Every day this colossal reality took on new 
proportions, every day it became more terrifying, more paralysing. Every 
day she had to grow swifter wings, sharper jaws, more piercing, hypnotic 
eyes. It was a race to the outermost limits of the world, a race lost from 
the start, and no one to stop it. At the edge of the vacuum stood Truth, 
ready in one lightning-like sweep to recover the stolen ground. It was so 
simple and obvious that it drove her frantic. Marshal a thousand 
personalities, commandeer the biggest guns, deceive the greatest minds, 
make the longest detour - still the end would be defeat. In the final 
meeting everything was destined to fall apart - the cunning, the skill, the
power, everything. She would be a grain of sand on the shore of the biggest
ocean, and, worse than anything, she would resemble each and every other 
grain of sand on that ocean’s shore. She would be condemned to recognize 
her unique self everywhere until the end of time. What a fate she had 
chosen for herself! That her uniqueness should be engulfed in the 
universal!

That her power should be reduced to the utmost node of passivity! It was 
maddening, hallucinating. It could not be! It must not be! Onward! Like the
black legions. Onward! Through every degree of the everwidening circle. 
Onward and away from the self, until the last substantial particle of the 
soul be stretched to infinity. In her panic-stricken flight she seemed to 
bear the whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines 
of the universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We 
were being rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by 
comparison seems a mad witches’ revel.

In the morning, gazing at the bloodless crater of her face. Not a line in
it, not a wrinkle, not a single blemish! The look of an angel in the arms 
of the Creator. Who killed Cock Robin? Who massacred the Iroquois? Not I, 
my lovely angel could say, and by God, who gazing at that pure, blameless 
face could deny her? Who could see in that sleep of innocence that one half
of the face belonged to God and the other half to Satan? The mask was 
smooth as death, cool, lovely to the touch, waxen, like a petal open to the
faintest breeze. So alluringly still and guileless was it that one could 
drown in it, one could go down into it, body and all, like a diver, and 
nevermore return. Until the eyes opened upon the world she would lie like 
that, thoroughly extinguished and gleaming with a reflected light, like the
moon itself. In her death-like trance of innocence she fascinated even 
more; her crimes dissolved, exuded through the pores, she lay coiled like a
sleeping serpent riveted to the earth. The body, strong, lithe, muscular, 
seemed possessed of a weight unnatural; she had a more than human gravity, 
the gravity, one might almost say, of a warm corpse. She was like one might
imagine the beautiful Nefertiti to have been after the first thousand years
of mummification, a marvel of mortuary perfection, a dream of flesh 
preserved from mortal decay. She lay coiled at the base of a hollow 
pyramid, enshrined in the vacuum of her own creation like a sacred relic of
the past. Even her breathing seemed stopped, so profound was her slumber. 
She had dropped below the human sphere, below the animal sphere, below the 
vegetative sphere even: she had sunk down to the level of the mineral world
where animation is just a notch above death. She had so mastered the art of
deception that even the dream was powerless to betray her. She had learned 
how to not dream: when she coiled up in sleep she automatically switched 
off the current. If one could have caught her thus and opened up the skull 
one would have found it absolutely void. She kept no disturbing secrets; 
everything was killed off which could be humanly killed. She might live on 
endlessly, like the moon, like any dead planet, radiating an hypnotic 
effulgence, creating tides of passion, engulfing the world in madness, 
discolouring all earthly substances with her magnetic, metallic rays. 
Sowing her own death she brought everyone about her to fever pitch. In the 
heinous stillness of her sleep she renewed her own magnetic death by union 
with the cold magma of the lifeless planetary worlds. She was magically 
intact. Her gaze fell upon one with a transpiercing fixity: it was the moon
gaze through which the dead dragon of life gave off a cold fire. The one 
eye was a warm brown, the colour of an autumn leaf; the other was hazel, 
the magnetic eye which flickered a compass needle. Even in sleep this eye 
continued to nicker under the shutter of the lid; it was the only apparent 
sign of life in her.

The moment she opened her eyes she was wide awake. She awoke with a 
violent start, as if the sight of the world and its human paraphernalia 
were a shock.

Instantly she was in full activity, lashing about like a great python. 
What annoyed her was the light! She awoke cursing the sun, cursing the 
glare of reality. The room had to be darkened, the candles lit, the the 
windows tightly shut to prevent the noise of the street from penetrating 
the room. She moved about naked with a cigarette dangling from the comer of
her mouth. Her toilet was an affair of great preoccupation; a thousand 
trifling details had to be attended to before she could so much as don a 
bathrobe. She was like an athlete preparing for the great event of the day.

From the roots of her hair, which she studied with keen attention, to the
shape and length of her toe-nails, every part of her anatomy was thoroughly
inspected before sitting down to breakfast. Like an athlete I said she was,
but in fact she was more like a mechanic overhauling a fast plane for a 
test flight. Once she slipped on her dress she was launched for the day, 
for the flight which might end perhaps in Irkutsk or Teheran. She would 
take on enough fuel at breakfast to last the entire trip. The breakfast was
a prolonged affair: it was the one ceremony of the day over which she 
dawdled and lingered. It was exasperatingly prolonged, indeed. One wondered
if she would ever take on, one wondered if she had forgotten the grand 
mission which she had sworn to accomplish each day. Perhaps she was 
dreaming other itinerary, or perhaps she was not dreaming at all but simply
allowing time for the functional processes of her marvellous machine so 
that once embarked there would be no turning back. She was very calm and 
self-possessed at this hour of the day; she was like a great bird of the 
air perched on a mountain crag, dreamily surveying the terrain below. It 
was not from the breakfast table that she would suddenly swoop and dive to 
pounce upon her prey. No, from the early morning perch she would take off 
slowly and majestically, synchronizing her every movement with the pulse of
the motor. All space lay before her, her direction dictated only by 
caprice. She was almost the image of freedom, were it not for the Saturnian
weight of her body and the abnormal span of her wings. However poised she 
seemed, especially at the take-on, one sensed the terror which motivated 
the daily flight. She was at once obedient to her destiny and at the same 
time frantically eager to overcome it. Each morning she soared aloft from 
her perch, as from some Himalayan peak; she seemed always to direct her 
flight towards some uncharted region into which, if all went well, she 
would disappear forever. Each morning she seemed to carry aloft with her 
this desperate, last-minute hope; she took leave with calm, grave dignity, 
like one about to go down into the grave. Never once did she circle about 
the flying field; never once did she cast a glance backward towards those 
whom she was abandoning. Nor did she leave the slightest crumb of 
personality behind her; she took to the air with all her belongings, with 
every slightest scrap of evidence which might testify to the fact of her 
existence. She didn’t even leave the breath of a sigh behind, not even a 
toe-nail. A clean exit, such as the Devil himself might make for reasons of
his own. One was left with a great void on his hands.

One was deserted, and not only deserted, but betrayed, inhumanly 
betrayed. One had no desire to detain her nor to call her back; one was 
left with a curse on his lips, with a black hatred which darkened the whole
day. Later, moving about the city, moving slowly in pedestrian fashion, 
crawling like the worm, one gathered rumours of her spectacular flight; she
had been seen rounding a certain point, she had dipped here or there for 
what reason no one knew, she had done a tailspin elsewhere, she had passed 
like a comet, she had written letters of smoke in the sky, and so on and so
forth. Everything she had done was enigmatic and exasperating, done 
apparently without purpose. It was like a symbolic and ironic commentary on
human life, on the behaviour of the ant-like creature man, viewed from 
another dimension.

Between the time she took off and the time she returned I lived the life 
of a full blooded schizerino. It was not an eternity which elapsed, because
somehow eternity has to do with peace and with victory, it is something 
man-made, something earned: no, I experienced an entr’acte in which every 
hair turns white to the roots, in which every millimetre of skin itches and
burns until the whole body becomes a running sore. I see myself sitting 
before a table in the dark, my hands and feet growing enormous, as though 
elephantiasis were overtaking me at a gallop. I hear the blood rushing up 
to the brain and pounding at the eardrums like Himalayan devils with sledge
hammers; I hear her flapping her huge wings, even in Irkutsk, and I know 
she is pushing on and on, ever further away, ever further beyond reach. It 
is so quiet in the room and so frightfully empty that I shriek and howl 
just to make a little noise, a little human sound. I try to lift myself 
from the table but my feet are too heavy and my hands have become like the 
shapeless feet of the rhinoceros. The heavier my body becomes the lighter 
the atmosphere of the room; I am going to spread and spread until I fill 
the room with one solid mass of stiff jelly. I shall fill up even the 
cracks in the wall; I shall grow through the wall like a parasitic plant, 
spreading and spreading until the whole house is an indescribable mass of 
flesh and hair and nails. I know that this is death, but I am powerless to 
kill the knowledge of it, or the knower. Some tiny particle of me is alive,
some speck of consciousness persists, and, as the inert carcass expands, 
this flicker of life becomes sharper and sharper and gleams inside me like 
the cold fire of a gem. It lights up the whole gluey mass of pulp so that I
am like a diver with a torch in the body of a dead marine monster. By some 
slender hidden filament I am still connected with the life above the 
surface of the deep, but it is so far away, the upper world, and the weight
of the corpse so great that, even if it were possible, it would take years 
to reach the surface. I move around in my own dead body, exploring every 
nook and cranny of its huge, shapeless mass. It is an endless exploration, 
for with the ceaseless growth the whole topography changes, slipping and 
drifting like the hot magma of the earth. Never for a minute is there terra
firma, never for a minute does anything remain still and recognizable: it 
is a growth without landmarks, a voyage in which the destination changes 
with every least move or shudder. It is this interminable filling of space 
which kills all sense of space or time; the more the body expands the 
tinier becomes the world, until at last I feel that everything is 
concentrated on the head of a pin. Despite the floundering of this enormous
dead mass which I have become, I feel that what sustains it, the world out 
of which it grows, is no bigger than a pinhead. In the midst of pollution, 
in the very heart and gizzard of death, as it were, I sense the seed, the 
miraculous, infinitesimal lever which balances the world. I have overspread
the world like a syrup and the emptiness of it is terrifying, but there is 
no dislodging the seed; the seed has become a little knot of cold fire 
which roars like a sun in the vast hollow of the dead carcass.

When the great plunder-bird returns exhausted from her flight she will 
find me here in the midst of my nothingness, I, the imperishable 
schizerino, a blazing seed hidden in the heart of death. Every day she 
thinks to find another means of sustenance, but there is no other, only 
this eternal seed of light which by dying each day I rediscover for her. 
Fly, O devouring bird, fly to the limits of the universe! Here is your 
nourishment glowing in the sickening emptiness you have created! You will 
come back to perish once more in the black hole; you will come back again 
and again, for you have not the wings to carry you out of the world. This 
is the only world you can inhabit, this tomb of the snake where darkness 
reigns.

And suddenly for no reason at all, when I think of her returning to her 
nest, I remember Sunday mornings in the little old house near the cemetery.
I remember sitting at the piano in my nightshirt, working away at the 
pedals with bare feet, and the folks lying in bed toasting themselves in 
the next room. The rooms opened one on the other, telescope fashion, as in 
the good old American railroad flats. Sunday mornings one lay in bed until 
one was ready to screech with well-being. Towards eleven or so the folks 
used to rap on the wall of my bedroom for me to come and play for them. I 
would dance into the room like the Fratellini Brothers, so full of flame 
and feathers that I could hoist myself like a derrick to the topmost limb 
of the tree of heaven. I could do anything and everything singlehanded, 
being double-jointed at the same time. The old man called me “Sunny Jim”, 
because I was full of “Force”, full of vim and vigour.

First I would do a few handsprings for them on the carpet before the bed;
then I would sing falsetto, trying to imitate a ventriloquist’s dummy; then
I would dance a few light fantastic steps to show which way the wind lay, 
and zoom! Like a breeze I was on the piano stool and doing a velocity 
exercise. I always began with Czemy, in order to limber up for the 
performance. The old man hated Czemy, and so did I, but Czemy was the plat 
du jour on the bill of fare then, and so Czemy it was until my joints were 
rubber. In some vague way Czemy reminds me of the great emptiness which 
came upon me later. What a velocity I would work up, riveted to the piano 
stool! It was like swallowing a bottle of tonic at one gulp and then having
someone strap you to the bed. After I had played about ninety-eight 
exercises I was ready to do a little improvising. I used to take a 
fist-full of chords and crash the piano from one end to the other, then 
sullenly modulate into “The Burning of Rome” or the “Ben Hur Chariot Race” 
which everybody liked because it was intelligible noise. Long before I read
Wittgenstein’s Tractatvs Logico-Philosophicus I was composing the music to 
it, in the key of sassafras. I was learned then in science and philosophy, 
in the history of religions, in inductive and deductive logic, in liver 
mantic, in the shape and weight of skulls, in pharmacopeia and metallurgy, 
in all the useless branches of learning which gives you indigestion and 
melancholia before your time. This vomit of learned truck was stewing in my
guts the whole week long, waiting for it to come Sunday to be set to music.
In between “The Midnight Fire Alarm” and “Marche Militaire” I would get my 
inspiration, which was to destroy all the existent forms of harmony and 
create my own cacophony. Imagine Uranus well aspected to Mars, to Mercury, 
to the Moon, to Jupiter, to Venus. It’s hard to imagine because Uranus 
functions best when it is badly aspected, when it is “afflicted”, so to 
speak. Yet that music which I gave off Sunday mornings, a music of 
well-being and of well-nourished desperation, was born of an illogically 
well-aspected Uranus firmly anchored in the 7th House. I didn’t know it 
then, I didn’t know that Uranus existed, and lucky it was that I was 
ignorant. But I can see it now, because it was a fluky joy, a phony 
well-being, a destructive sort of fiery creation. The greater my euphoria 
the more tranquil the folks became. Even my sister who was dippy became 
calm and composed. The neighbours used to stand outside the window and 
listen, and now and then I would hear a burst of applause, and then bang, 
zip! like a rocket I was off again - Velocity Exercise No. 9471/2. If I 
happened to espy a cockroach crawling up the wall I was in bliss: that 
would lead me without the slightest modulation to Opus Izzi of my sadly 
corrugated clavichord. One Sunday, just like that, I composed one of the 
loveliest scherzos imaginable - to a louse. It was Spring and we were all 
getting the sulphur treatment; I had been pouring all week over Dante’s 
Inferno in English. Sunday came like a thaw, the birds driven so crazy by 
the sudden heat that they flew in and out of the window, immune to the 
music. One of the German relatives had just arrived from Hamburg, or 
Bremen, a maiden aunt who looked like a bull-dyker. Just to be near her was
sufficient to throw roe into a fit of rage. She used to pat me on the head 
and tell me I would be another Mozart. I hated Mozart, and I hate him 
still, and so to get even with her I would play badly, play all the sour 
notes I knew. And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real louse
which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I put him
tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little gigue 
around him with my right hand, the noise had probably deafened him tenderly
on the tip of a black key. Then hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble 
pyrotechnic. This trancelike immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided
to introduce a chromatic scale coming down on him full force with my third 
finger.

I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued to my
fingertip. That put the St. Vitus’ Dance in me. From then on the scherzo 
commenced. It was a pot-pourri of forgotten melodies spiced with aloes and 
the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once and 
pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception. 
Later, when I went to hear Prokofief, I understood what was happening to 
him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf 
Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had 
never been a binomial theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why
electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of sprudel baths and fango 
packs. I understood very dearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in 
his blood, and that when you’re handed a symphony or a fresco or a high 
explosive you’re really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included 
in the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to 
become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, 
all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to
St. Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, 
were written for an age to come, an age with less instruments and stronger 
antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be 
experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the 
new territory - one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks
down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations - 
to us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own 
conception of suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its 
travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying
prone and indifferent to the Sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of a 
new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of
stars grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All 
music is still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the 
hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz.

Music is still the antidote for the nameless, but this is not yet music. 
Music is planetary fire, an irreducible which is all-sufficient; it is the 
slate-writing of the gods, the abracadabra which the learned and the 
ignorant alike muff because the axle has been unhooked. Look to the bowels,
to the unconsolable and ineluctable! Nothing is determined, nothing is 
settled or solved. All this that is going on, all music, all architecture, 
all law, all government, all invention, all discovery - all this is 
velocity exercises in the dark, Czemy with a capital Zed riding a crazy 
white horse in a bottle of mucilage.

One of the reasons why I never got anywhere with the bloody music is that
it was always mixed up with sex. As soon as I was able to play a song the 
cunts were around me like flies. To begin with, it was largely Lola’s 
fault. Lola was my first piano teacher. Lola Niessen. It was a ridiculous 
name and typical of the neighbourhood we were living in then. It sounded 
like a stinking bloater, or a wormy cunt. To tell the truth, Lola was not 
exactly a beauty. She looked somewhat like a Kalmuck or a Chinook, with 
sallow complexion and bilious-looking eyes. She had a few warts and wens, 
not to speak of the moustache. What excited me, however, was her hairiness;
she had wonderful long fine black hair which she arranged in ascending and 
descending buns on her Mongolian skull. At the nape of the neck she curled 
it up in a serpentine knot. She was always late in coming, being a 
conscientious idiot, and by the time she arrived I was always a bit 
enervated from masturbating. As soon as she took the stool beside me, 
however, I became exdted again, what with the stinking perfume she soused 
her armpits with. In the summer she wore loose sleeves and I could see the 
tufts’of hair under her arms. The sight of it drove me wild. I imagined her
as having hair all over, even in her navel. And what I wanted to do was to 
roll in it, bury my teeth in it. I could have eaten Lola’s hair as a 
delicacy, if there had been a bit of flesh attached to it. Anyway she was 
hairy, that’s what I want to say and being hairy as a gorilla she got my 
mind off the the music and on to her cunt. I was so damned eager to see 
that cunt of hers that finally one day I bribed her little brother to let 
me have a peep at her while she was in the bath. It was even more wonderful
than I had imagined: she had a shag that reached from the navel to the 
crotch, an enormous thick tuft, a sporran, rich as a hand-woven rug. When 
she went over it with the powder puff I thought I would faint. The next 
time she came for the lesson I left a couple of buttons open on my fly. She
didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. The following time I left my whole 
fly open. This time she caught on. She said, “I think you’ve forgotten 
something. Henry.” I looked at her, red as a beet, and I asked her blandly 
what? She pretended to look away while pointing to it with her left hand. 
Her hand came so close that I couldn’t resist grabbing it and pushing it in
my fly. She got up. quickly, looking pale and frightened. By this time my 
prick was out of my fly and quivering with delight. I closed in on her and 
I reached up under her dress to get at that hand-woven rug I had seen 
through the keyhole. Suddenly I got a sound box on the ears, and then 
another and she took me by the ear and leading me to a comer of the room 
she turned my face to the wall and said, “Now button up your fly, you silly
boy!” We went back to the piano in a few moments - back to Czemy and the 
velocity exercises. I couldn’t see a sharp from a flat any more, but I 
continued to play because I was afraid she might tell my mother about the 
incident. Fortunately it was not an easy thing to tell one’s mother.

The incident, embarrassing as it was, marked a decided change in our 
relations. I thought that the next time she came she would be severe with 
me, but on the contrary; she seemed to have dolled herself up, to have 
sprinkled more perfume over herself, and she was even a bit gay, which was 
unusual for Lola because she was a morose, withdrawn type. I didn’t dare to
open my fly again, but I would get an erection and hold it throughout the 
lesson, which she must have enjoyed because she was always stealing 
sidelong glances in that direction. I was only fifteen at the time, and she
was easily twenty-five or twenty-eight. It was difficult for me to know 
what to do, unless it was to deliberately knock her down one day while my 
mother was out. For a time I actually shadowed her at night, when she went 
out alone. She had a habit of going out for long walks alone in the 
evening. I used to dog her steps, hoping she would get to some deserted 
spot near the cemetery where I might try some rough tactics. I had a 
feeling sometimes that she knew I was following her and that she enjoyed 
it. I think she was waiting for me to waylay her - I think that was what 
she wanted. Anyway, one night I was lying in the grass near the railroad 
tracks; it was a sweltering summer’s night and people were lying about 
anywhere and everywhere, like panting dogs. I wasn’t thinking of Lola at 
all - I was just mooning there, too hot to think about anything. Suddenly I
see a woman coming along the narrow cinderpath. I’m lying sprawled out on 
the embankment and nobody around that I can notice. The woman is coming 
along slowly, head down, as though she were dreaming. As she gets close I 
recognize her. “Lola!” I call.

“Lola!” She seems to be really astonished to see me there. “Why, what are
you doing here?” she says, and with that she sits down beside me on the 
embankment.

I didn’t bother to answer her, I didn’t say a word - I just crawled over 
her and flattened her. “Not here, please,” she begged, but I paid no 
attention. I got my hand between her legs, all tangled up in that thick 
sporran others, and she was sopping wet, like a horse salivating. It was my
first fuck, be Jesus, and it had to be that a train would come along and 
shower hot sparks over us. Lola was terrified. It was her first fuck too, I
guess, and she probably needed it more than I, but when she felt the sparks
she wanted to tear loose. It was like trying to hold down a wild mare. I 
couldn’t keep her down, no matter how I wrestled with her. She got up, 
shook herclothes down, and adjusted the bun at the nape of her neck. “You 
must go home,” she says. “I’m not going home,” I said, and with that I took
her by the arm and started walking. We walked along in dead silence for 
quite a distance.

Neither of us seemed to be noticing where we were going. Finally we were 
out on the highway and up above us were the reservoirs and near the 
reservoirs was a pond. Instinctively I headed towards the pond. We had to 
pass under some low-hanging trees as we neared the pond. I was helping Lola
to stoop down when suddenly she slipped, dragging me with her. She made no 
effort to get up; instead, she caught hold of me and pressed me to her, and
to my complete amazement I also felt her slip her hand in my fly. She 
caressed me so wonderfully that in a jiffy I came in her hand. Then she 
took my hand and put it between her legs. She lay back completely relaxed 
and opened her legs wide. I bent over and kissed every hair on her cunt; I 
put my tongue in her navel and licked it clean. Then I lay with my head 
between her legs and lapped up the drool that was pouring from her. She was
moaning now and clutching wildly with her hands; her hair had come 
completely undone and was lying over her bare abdomen. To make it short, I 
got it in again, and I held it a long time, for which she must have been 
damned grateful because she came I don’t know how many times - it was like 
a pack of firecrackers going off, and with it all she sunk her teeth into 
me, bruised my lips, clawed me, ripped my shirt and what the hell not. I 
was branded like a steer when I got home and took a look at myself in the 
mirror.

It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. A month later 
the Niessens moved to another city, and I never saw Lola again. But I hung 
her sporran over the bed and I prayed to it every night. And whenever I 
began the Czemy stuff I would get an erection, thinking of Lola lying in 
the grass, thinking of her long black hair, the bun at the nape of her 
neck, the groans she vented and the juice that poured out of her. Playing 
the piano was just one long vicarious fuck for me. I had to wait another 
two years before I would get my end in again, as they say, and then it 
wasn’t so good because I got a beautiful dose with it, and besides it 
wasn’t in the grass and it wasn’t summer, and there was no heat in it but 
just a cold mechanical fuck for a buck in a dirty little hotel room, the 
bastard trying to pretend she was coming and not coming any more than 
Christmas was coming. And maybe it wasn’t her that gave me the clap, but 
her pal in the next room who was lying up with my friend Simmons. It was 
like this - I had finished so quick with my mechanical fuck that I thought 
I’d go in and see how it was going with my friend Simmons. Lo and behold, 
they were still at it, and they were going strong. She was a Czech, his 
girl, and a bit sappy; she hadn’t been at it very long, apparently, and she
used to forget herself and enjoy the act.

Watching her hand it out, I decided to wait and have a go at her myself. 
And so I did. And before the week was out I had a discharge, and after that
I figured it would be blueballs or rocks in the groin.

Another year or so and I was giving lessons myself, and as luck would 
have it, the mother of the girl I’m teaching is a slut, a tramp and a 
trollop if ever there was one. She was living with a nigger, as I later 
found out. Seems she couldn’t get a prick big enough to satisfy her. 
Anyway, every time I started to go home she’d hold me up at the door and 
rub it up against me. I was afraid of starting in with her because rumour 
had it that she was full of syph, but what the hell are you going to do 
when a hot bitch like that plasters her cunt up against you and slips her 
tongue halfway down your throat. I used to fuck her standing up in the 
vestibule, which wasn’t so difficult because she was light and I could hold
her in my hand like a doll. And like that I’m holding her one night when 
suddenly I hear a key being fitted into the lock, and she hears it too and 
she’s frightened stiff. There’s nowhere to go. Fortunately there’s a 
portiere hanging at the doorway and I hide behind that. Then I heard her 
black buck kissing her and saying how are yer, honey? and she’s saying how 
she had been waiting up for him and better come right upstairs because she 
can’t wait and so on. And when the stairs stop squeaking I gently open the 
door and sally out, and then by God I have a real fright because if that 
black buck ever finds out I’ll have my throat slit and no mistake about it.
And so I stop giving lessons at that joint, but soon the daughter is after 
me - just turning sixteen - and won’t I come and give her lessons at a 
friend’s house? We begin the Czerny exercises all over again, sparks and 
everything. It’s the first smell of fresh cunt I’ve had, and it’s 
wonderful, like new-mown hay. We fuck our way through one lesson after 
another and in between lessons we do a little extra fucking.

And then one day it’s the sad story - she’s knocked up and what to do 
about it?

I have to get a Jewboy to help me out, and he wants twenty-five bucks for
the job and I’ve never seen twenty-five bucks in my life. Besides, she’s 
under age.

Besides, she might have blood-poisoning. I give him five bucks on account
and beat it to the Adirondacks for a couple of weeks. In the Adirondacks I 
meet a schoolteacher who’s dying to take lessons. More velocity exercises, 
more condoms and conundrums. Every time I touched the piano I seemed to 
shake a cunt loose.

If there was a party I had to bring the fucking music roll along; to me 
it was just like wrapping my penis in a handkerchief and slinging it under 
my arm. In vacation time, at a farmhouse or an inn, where there was always 
a surplus of cunt, the music had an extraordinary effect. Vacation rime was
a period I looked forward to the whole year, not because of the cunts so 
much as because it meant no work. Once out of harness I became a down. I 
was so chock-full of energy that I wanted to jump out of my skin. I 
remember one summer in the Catskills meeting a girl named Francie. She was 
beautiful and lascivious, with strong Scotch teats and a row of white even 
teeth that was dazzling. It began in the river where we were swimming. We 
were holding on to the boat and one of her boobies had slipped out of 
bounds. I slipped the other one out for her and then I undid the shoulder 
straps. She ducked under the boat coyly and I followed and as she was 
coming up for air I wriggled the bloody bathing suit off her and there she 
was floating like a mermaid with her big strong teats bobbing up and down 
like bloated corks.

I wriggled out of my tights and we began playing like dolphins under the 
side of the boat. In a little while her girl friend came along in a canoe. 
She was a rather hefty girl a sort of strawberry blonde with agate-coloured
eyes and full of freckles. She was rather shocked to find us in the raw, 
but we soon tumbled her out of the canoe and stripped her. And then the 
three of us began to play tag under the water, but it was hard to get 
anywhere with them because they were slippery as eels. After we had had 
enough of it we ran to a little bath-house which was standing in the field 
like an abandoned sentry box. We had brought our clothes along and we were 
going to get dressed, the three of us, in this little box. It was 
frightfully hot and sultry and the clouds were gathering for a storm. Agnes
- that was Francie’s friend - was in a hurry to get dressed. She was 
beginning to be ashamed of herself standing there naked in front of us.

Francie, on the other hand seemed to be perfectly at ease. She was 
sitting on the bench with her legs crossed and smoking a cigarette. Anyway,
just as Agnes was pulling on her chemise there came a flash of lightning 
and a terrifying clap of thunder right on the heels of it. Agnes screamed 
and dropped her chemise.

There came another flash in a few seconds and again a peal of thunder, 
dangerously dose. The air got blue all around us and the flies began to 
bite and we felt nervous and itchy and a bit panicky too. Especially Agnes 
who was afraid of the lightning and even more afraid of being found dead 
and three of us stark naked. She wanted to get her things on and run for 
the house, she said. And just as she got that off her chest the rain came 
down, in bucketsful. We thought it would stop in a few minutes and so we 
stood there naked looking out at the steaming river through the partly 
opened door. It seemed to be raining rocks and the lightning kept playing 
around us incessantly. We were all thoroughly frightened now and in a 
quandary as to what to do. Agnes was wringing her hands and praying out 
loud; she looked like a George Grosz idiot, one of those lopsided bitches 
with a rosary around the neck and yellow jaundice to boot. I thought she 
was going to faint on us or something. Suddenly I got the bright idea of 
doing a wardance in the rain - to distract them. Just as I jump out to 
commence my shindig a streak of lightning flashes and splits open a tree 
not far off. I’m so damned scared that I lose my wits. Always when I’m 
frightened I laugh. So I laughed a wild, bloodcurdling laugh which made the
girls scream. When I heard them scream, I don’t know why, but I thought of 
the velocity exercises and with that I felt that I was standing in the void
and it was blue all around and the rain was beating a bot-and-cold tattoo 
on my tender flesh. All my sensations had gathered on the surface of the 
skin and underneath the outermost layer of skin I was empty, light as a 
feather, lighter than air or smoke or talcum or magnesium or any goddamned 
thing you want. Suddenly I was a Chippewa and it was the key of sassafras 
again and I didn’t give a fuck whether the girls were screaming or fainting
or shitting in their pants, which they were minus anyway. Looking at crazy 
Agnes with the rosary around her neck and her big bread-basket blue with 
fright I got the notion to do a sacrilegious dance, with one hand cupping 
my balls and the other hand thumbing my nose at the thunder and lightning. 
The rain was hot and cold and the grass seemed full of dragonflies. I 
hopped about like a kangaroo and I yelled at the top of my lungs - “O 
Father, you wormy old son of a bitch, pull in that fucking lightning or 
Agnes won’t believe in you any more! Do you hear me, you old prick up 
there, stop the shenanigans … you’re driving Agnes nutty. Hey you, are you 
deaf, you old futzer?” And with a continuous rattle of this defiant 
nonsense on my lips I danced around the bath-house leaping and bounding 
like a gazelle and using the most frightful oaths I could summon. When the 
lightning cracked I jumped higher and when the thunder clapped I roared 
like a lion and then I did a handspring and then I rolled in the grass like
a cub and I chewed the grass and spit it out for them and I pounded my 
chest like a gorilla and all the time I could see the Czerny exercises 
resting on the piano, the white page full of sharps and flats, and the 
fucking idiot, think I to myself, imagining that that’s the way to learn 
how to manipulate the well-tempered clavichord. And suddenly I thought that
Czemy might be in heaven by now and looking down on me and so I spat at him
high as I could spit and when the thunder rolled again I yelled with all my
might - “You bastard, Czerny, you up there, may the lightning twist your 
balls off… may you swallow your own crooked tail and strangle yourself… do 
you hear me, you crazy prick?”

But in spite of all my good efforts Agnes was getting more delirious. She
was a dumb Irish Catholic and she had never heard God spoken to that way 
before.

Suddenly, while I was dancing about in the rear of the bath-house she 
bolted for the river. I heard Francie scream - “Bring her back, she’ll 
drown herself! Bring her back!” I started after her, the rain still coming 
down like pitchforks, and yelling to her to come back, but she ran on 
blindly as though possessed of the devil, and when she got to the water’s 
edge she dove straight in and made for the boat. I swam after her and as we
got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got 
hold of her round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her 
calmly and soothingly, as though I were talking to a child. “Go away from 
me,” she said, “you’re an atheist!” Jesus, you could have knocked me over 
with a feather, so astonished I was to hear that. So that was it? All that 
hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty. I felt like batting her
one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over our heads 
and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat 
over our heads if I didn’t handle her right. So I pretended that I was 
terribly sorry and I said I didn’t mean a word of it, that I had been 
scared to death, and so on and so forth, and as I talked to her gently, 
soothingly, I slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently stroked her 
ass. That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly
about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and 
maybe she was so wrapped up in what she was saying that she didn’t know 
what I was doing, but just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and 
said all the beautiful things I could think of, about God, about love, 
about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have felt 
something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them 
around like drunken bobbins. “Put your arms around me Agnes,” I said 
softly, slipping my band out and pulling her to me so that I could get my 
legs between hers…

“There, that’s the girl… take it easy now… it’ll stop soon.” And still 
talking about the church, the confessional. God love, and the whole bloody 
mess I managed to get it inside her. “You’re very good to me,” she said, 
just as though she didn’t know my prick was in her, “and I’m sorry I acted 
like a fool.”

“I know, Agnes,” I said, “it’s all right… listen, grab me tighter… yeah, 
that’s it.” “I’m afraid the boat’s going to tip over,” she says, trying her
best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand. “Yes, 
let’s get back to the shore,” I said, and I start to pull away from her. 
“Oh don’t leave me,” she says, clutching me tighter. “Don’t leave me, I’ll 
drown.” Just then Francie comes running down to the water. “Hurry,” says 
Agnes, “hurry … I’ll drown.”

Francie was a good sort, I must say. She certainly wasn’t a Catholic and 
if she had any morals they were of the reptilian order. She was one of 
those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires, showed
no jealousy, held no grievances, was constantly cheerful and not at all 
unintelligent. At nights when we were sitting on the porch in the dark 
talking to the guests she would come over and sit on my lap with nothing on
underneath her dress and I would slip it into her as she laughed and talked
to the others. I think she would have brazened it out before the Pope if 
she had been given a chance. Back in the city, when I called on her at her 
home, she pulled the same stunt off in front of her mother whose sight, 
fortunately, was growing dim. If we went dancing and she got too hot in the
pants she would drag me to a telephone booth and, queer girl that she was, 
she’d actually talk to some one, some one like Agnes for example, while 
pulling off the trick. She seemed to get a special pleasure out of doing it
under people’s noses; she said there was more fun in it if you didn’t think
about it too hard. In the crowded subway coming home from the beach, say, 
she’d slip her dress around so that the slit was in the middle and take my 
hand and put it right on her cunt. If the train was tightly packed and we 
were safely wedged in a comer she’d take my cock out of my fly and hold it 
in her two hands, as though it were a bird. Sometimes she’d get playful and
hang her bag on it, as though to prove that there wasn’t the least danger. 
Another thing about her was that she didn’t pretend that I was the only guy
she had on the string.

Whether she told me everything I don’t know, but she certainly told me 
plenty.

She told me about her affairs laughingly, while she was climbing over me 
or when I had it in her, or just when I was about to come. She would tell 
me how they went about it, how big they were or how small, what they said 
when they got excited and so on and so forth giving me every possible 
detail, just as though I were going to write a textbook on the subject. She
didn’t seem to have the least feeling of sacredness about her own body or 
her feelings or anything connected with herself. “Francie, you bloody 
fucker,” I used to say, “you’ve got the morals of a clam.” “But you like 
me, don’t you?” she’d answer. “Men like to fuck, and so do women. It 
doesn’t harm anybody and it doesn’t mean you have to love every one you 
fuck does it? I wouldn’t want to be in love; it must be terrible to have to
fuck the same man all the time, don’t you think? Listen, if you didn’t fuck
anybody but me all the time you’d get tired of me quick, wouldn’t you? 
Sometimes it’s nice to be fucked by someone you don’t know at all.

Yes, I think that’s the best of all,” she added - “there’s no 
complications, no telephone numbers, no love letters, no scraps, what? 
Listen, do you think this is very bad? Once I tried to get my brother to 
fuck me; you know what a sissy he is - he gives everybody a pain. I don’t 
remember exactly how it was any more, but anyway we were in the house alone
and I was passionate that day. He came into my bedroom to ask me for 
something. I was lying there with my dress up, thinking about it and 
wanting it terribly, and when he came in I didn’t give a damn about his 
being my brother, I just thought of him as a man, and so I lay there with 
my skirt up and I told him I wasn’t feeling well, that I had a pain in my 
stomach. He wanted to run right out and get something for me but I told him
no, just to rub my stomach a bit, that would do it good. I opened my waist 
and made him rub my bare skin. He was trying to keep his eyes on the wall, 
the big idiot, and rubbing me as though I were a piece of wood. ‘It’s not 
there, you chump,’ I said, ‘it’s lower down … what are you afraid of?’ And 
I pretended that I was in agony. Finally he touched me accidentally. 
“There! that’s it!’ I shouted. ‘Oh do rub it, it feels so good!’ Do you 
know, the big sap actually massaged me for five minutes without realizing 
that it was all a game? I was so exasperated that I told him to get the 
hell out and leave me alone. ‘You’re a eunuch,’ I said, but he was such a 
sap I don’t think he knew what the word meant.” She laughed, thinking what 
a ninny her brother was. She said he probably still had his maiden. What 
did I think about it - was it so terribly bad? Of course she knew I 
wouldn’t think anything of the kind. “Listen Francie,” I said, “did you 
ever tell that story to the cop you’re going with?” She guessed she hadn’t.
“I guess so too,” I said. “He’d beat the piss out of you if ever he heard 
that yam.” “He’s socked me already,” she answered promptly. “What?” I said,
“you let him beat you up?” “I don’t ask him to,” she said, “but you know 
how quick-tempered he is. I don’t let anybody else sock me but somehow 
coming from him I don’t mind so much. Sometimes it makes me feel good 
inside … I don’t know, maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in a 
while. It doesn’t hurt so much, if you really like a guy. And afterwards 
he’s so damned gentle - I almost feel ashamed of myself…”

It isn’t often you get a cunt who’ll admit such things - I mean a regular
cunt and not a moron. There was Trix Miranda, for example, and her sister, 
Mrs. Costello. A fine pair of birds they were. Trix, who was going with my 
friend MacGregor, tried to pretend to her own sister, with whom she was 
living, that she had no sexual relations with MacGregor. And the sister was
pretending to all and sundry that she was frigid, that she couldn’t have 
any relations with a man even if she wanted to, because she was “built too 
small”. And meanwhile my friend MacGregor was fucking them silly, both of 
them, and they both knew about each other but still they lied like that to 
each other. Why? I couldn’t make it out. The Costello bitch was hysterical;
whenever she felt that she wasn’t getting a fair percentage of the lays 
that MacGregor was handing out she’d throw a pseudo-epileptic fit. That 
meant throwing towels over her, patting her wrists, opening her bosom, 
chafing her legs and finally hoisting her upstairs to bed where my friend 
MacGregor would look after her as soon as he had put the other one to 
sleep. Sometimes the two sisters would lie down together to take a nap of 
an afternoon; if MacGregor were around he would go upstairs and lie between
them. And he explained it to me laughingly, the trick was for him to 
pretend to go to sleep. He would lie there breathing heavily, opening now 
one eye, now the other, to see which one was really dozing off. As soon as 
he was convinced that one of them was asleep he’d tackle the other. On such
occasions he seemed to prefer the hysterical sister, Mrs. Costello, whose 
husband visited her about once every six months. The more risk he ran, the 
more thrill he got out of it, he said. If it were with the other sister, 
Trix, whom he was supposed to be courting, he had to pretend that it would 
be terrible if the other one were to catch them like that, and at the same 
time, he admitted to me, he was always hoping that the other one would wake
up and catch them. But the married sister, the one who was “built too 
small”, as she used to say, was a wily bitch and besides she felt guilty 
toward her sister and if her sister had ever caught her in the act she’d 
probably have pretended that she was having a fit and didn’t know what she 
was doing. Nothing on earth could make her admit that she was actually 
permitting herself the pleasure of being fucked by a man.

I knew her quite well because I was giving her lessons for a time, and I 
used to do my damnedest to make her admit that she had a normal cunt and 
that she’d enjoy a good fuck if she could get it now and then. I used to 
tell her wild stories, which were really thinly disguised accounts of her 
own doings, and yet she remained adamant. I had even gotten her to the 
point one day - and this beats everything - where she let me put my finger 
inside her. I thought sure it was settled. It’s true she was dry and a bit 
tight, but I put that down to her hysteria. But imagine getting that far 
with a cunt and then having her say to your face, as she yanks her dress 
down violently - “you see, I told you I wasn’t built right!” “I don’t see 
anything of the kind,” I said angrily. “What do you expect me to do - use a
microscope on you?”

“I like that,” she said, pretending to get on her high horse. “What a way
of talking to me!”

“You know damned well you’re lying,” I continued. “Why do you lie like 
that?

Don’t you think it’s human to have a cunt and to use it once in a while? 
Do you want it to dry up on you?”

“Such language!” she said, biting her under lip and reddening like a beet
“I always thought you were a gentleman.”

“Well, you’re no lady,” I retorted, “because even a lady admits to a fuck
now and then, and besides ladies don’t ask gentlemen to stick their fingers
up inside them and see how small they’re built.”

“I never asked you to touch me,” she said. “I wouldn’t think of asking 
you to put your hand on me, on my private parts anyway.”

“Maybe you thought I was going to swab your ear for you, is that it?”

“I thought of you like a doctor at that moment, that’s all I can say,” 
she said stiffly, trying to freeze me out.

“Listen,” I said, taking a wild chance, “let’s pretend that it was all a 
mistake, that nothing happened, nothing at all. I know you too well to 
think of insulting you like that. I wouldn’t think of doing a thing like 
that to you -

no, damned if I would. I was just wondering if maybe you weren’t right in
what you said, if maybe you aren’t built rather small. You know, it all 
went so quick I couldn’t tell what I felt… I don’t think I even put my 
finger inside you. I must have just touched the outside - that’s about all.
Listen sit down here on the couch … let’s be friends again.” I pulled her 
down beside me - she was melting visibly - and I put my arm around her 
waist, as though to console her more tenderly. “Has it always been like 
that?” I asked innocently, and I almost laughed the next moment, realizing 
what an idiotic question it was. She hung her head coyly, as though we were
touching on an unmentionable tragedy. “Listen, maybe if you sat on my lap 
…” and I hoisted her gently on to my lap, at the same time delicately 
putting my hand under her dress and resting it lightly on her knee … “maybe
if you sat a moment like this, you’d feel better… there, that’s it, just 
snuggle back in my arms… are you feeling better?” She didn’t answer, but 
she didn’t resist either; she just lay back limply and closed her eyes. 
Gradually and very gently and smoothly I moved my hand up her leg, talking 
to her in a low, soothing voice all the time. When I got my fingers into 
her crotch and parted the little lips she was as moist as a dish-rag. I 
massaged it gently, opening it up more and more, and still handing out a 
telepathic line about women sometimes being mistaken about themselves and 
how sometimes they think they’re very small when really they’re quite 
normal, and the longer I kept it up the juicier she got and the more she 
opened up. I had four fingers inside her and there was room inside for more
if I had had more to put in. She had an enormous cunt and it had been well 
reamed out, I could feel. I looked at her to see if she was still keeping 
her eyes shut. Her mouth was open and she was gasping but her eyes were 
tight shut, as though she were pretending to herself that it was all a 
dream. I could move her about roughly now - no danger of the slightest 
protest. And maliciously perhaps, I jostled her about unnecessarily, just 
to see if she would come to. She was as limp as a feather pillow and even 
when her head struck the arm of the sofa she showed no sign of irritation. 
It was as though she had anaesthetized herself for a gratuitous fuck. I 
pulled all her clothes off and threw them on the floor, and after I had 
given her a bit of a workout on the sofa I slipped it out and laid her on 
the floor, on her clothes; and then I slipped it in again and she held it 
tight with that suction valve she used so skilfully, despite the outward 
appearance of coma.

It seems strange to me that the music always passed off into sex. Nights,
if I went out for a walk, I was sure to pick up some one - a nurse, a girl 
coming out of a dance hall; a sales girl, anything with a skirt on. If I 
went out with my friend MacGregor in his car - just a little spin to the 
beach, he would say - I would find myself by midnight sitting in some 
strange parlour in some queer neighbourhood with a girl on my lap, usually 
one I didn’t give a damn about because MacGregor was even less selective 
than I.

Often, stepping in his car I’d say to him - “listen, no cunts tonight, 
what?”

And he’d say - “Jesus, no, I’m fed up … just a little drive somewhere …

maybe to Sheepshead Bay, what do you say?” We wouldn’t have gone more 
than a mile when suddenly he’d pull the car up to the curb and nudge me. 
“Get a look at that,” he’d say, pointing to a girl strolling along the 
sidewalk. “Jesus, what a leg!” Or else - “Listen what do you say we ask her
to come along? Maybe she can dig up a friend.” And before I could say 
another word he’d be hailing her and handing out his usual patter, which 
was the same for every one. And nine times out often the girl came along. 
And before we’d gone very far, feeling her up with his free hand, he’d ask 
her if she didn’t have a friend she could dig up to keep us company. And if
she put up a fuss, if she didn’t like being pawed over that way too 
quickly, he’d say - “All right, get the hell out then … we can’t waste any 
time on the likes of you!” And with that he’d slow up and shove her out. 
“We can’t be bothered with cunts like that, can we Henry?” he’d say, 
chuckling softly. “You wait, I promised you something good before the 
night’s over.” And if I reminded him that we were going to lay off for one 
night he’d answer; “Well, just as you like … I was only thinking it might 
make it more pleasant for you.” And then suddenly the brakes would pull us 
up and he’d be saying to some silky silhouette looming out of the dark: - 
“hello sister, what yer doing - taking a little stroll?” And maybe this 
time it would be something exciting, a dithery little bitch with nothing 
else to do but pull up her skirt and hand it to you. Maybe we wouldn’t even
have to buy her a drink, just hail up somewhere on a side road and go at 
it, one after the other, in the car. And if she was an emptyheaded bimbo, 
as they usually were, he wouldn’t even bother to drive her home. “We’re not
going that way,” he’d say, the bastard that he was.

“You’d better jump out here,” and with that he’d open the door and out 
with her.

His next thought was, of course, was she dean? That would occupy his mind
all the way back. “Jesus, we ought to be more careful,” he’d say. “You 
don’t know what you’re getting yourself into picking them up like that. 
Ever since that last one - you remember, the one we picked up on the Drive 
- I’ve been itchy as hell.

Maybe it’s just nervousness … I think about it too much. Why can’t a guy 
stick to one cunt, tell me that. Henry. You take Trix, now, she’s a good 
kid, you know that. And I like her too, in a way, but… shit, what’s the use
of talking about it? You know me - I’m a glutton. You know, I’m getting so 
bad that sometimes when I’m on my way to a date - mind you, with a girl I 
want to fuck, and everything fixed too - as I say, sometimes I’m rolling 
along and maybe out of the comer of my eye I catch a flash of a leg 
crossing the street and before I know it I’ve got her in the car and the 
hell with the other girl. I must be cunt-struck, I guess … what do you 
think? Don’t tell me,” he would add quickly. “I know you, you bugger … 
you’ll be sure to tell me the worst.” And then, after a pause - “you’re a 
funny guy, do you know that? I never notice you refusing anything, but 
somehow you don’t seem to be worrying about it all the time. Sometimes you 
strike me as though you didn’t give a damn one way or the other. And you’re
a steady bastard too - almost a monogamist, I’d say. How you can keep it up
so long with one woman beats me. Don’t you get bored with them?

Jesus, I know so well what they’re going to say. Sometimes I feel like 
saying… you know, just breeze in on ‘em and say; ‘listen, kid, don’t say a 
word… just fish it out and open your legs wide.’” He laughed heartily. “Can
you imagine the expression on Trix’s face if I pulled a line like that on 
her? I’ll tell you, once I came pretty near doing it. I kept my hat and 
coat on. Was she sore! She didn’t mind my keeping the coat on so much, but 
the hat! I told her I was afraid of a draught… of course there wasn’t any 
draught. The truth is, I was so damned impatient to get away that I thought
if I kept my hat on I’d be off quicker. Instead I was there all night with 
her. She put up such a row that I couldn’t get her quiet… But listen, 
that’s nothing. Once I had a drunken Irish bitch and this one had some 
queer ideas. In the first place, she never wanted it in bed … always on the
table. You know, that’s all right once in a while, but if you do it often 
it wears you out. So one night - I was a little tight, I guess - I says to 
her, no, nothing doing, you drunken bastard … you’re gonna go to bed with 
me tonight. I want a real fuck - in bed. You know, I had to argue with that
son of a bitch for an hour almost before I could persuade her to go to bed 
with me, and then only on the agreement that I was to keep my hat on. 
Listen, can you picture me getting over that stupid bitch with my hat on? 
And stark naked to boot! I asked her … ‘Why do you want me to keep my hat 
on?’ You know what she said? She said it seemed more genteel. Can you 
imagine what a mind that cunt had? I used to hate myself for going with 
that bitch. I never went to her sober, that’s one thing. I’d have to be 
tanked up first and kind of blind and batty - you know how I get sometimes 
…”

I knew very well what he meant. He was one of my oldest friends and one 
of the most cantankerous bastards I ever knew. Stubborn wasn’t the word for
it. He was like a mule - a pigheaded Scotchman. And his old man was even 
worse. When the two of them got into a rage it was a pretty sight. The old 
man used to dance positively dance with rage. If the old lady got between 
she’d get a sock in the eye. They used to put him out of the house 
regularly. Out he’d go, with all his belongings, including the furniture, 
including the piano too. In a month or so he’d be back again - because they
always gave him credit at home. And then he’d come home drunk some night 
with a woman he’d picked up somewhere and the rumpus would start all over 
again. It seems they didn’t mind so much his coming home with a girl and 
keeping her all night, but what they did object to was the cheek of him 
asking his mother to serve them breakfast in bed. If his mother tried to 
bawl him out he’d shut her up by saying - “What are you trying to tell me? 
You wouldn’t have been married yet if you hadn’t been knocked up.” The old 
lady would wring her hands and say - “What a son! What a son! God help me, 
what have I done to deserve this?” To which he’d remark, “Aw forget it! 
You’re just an old prune!” Often as not his sister would come up to try and
smooth matters out.

“Jesus, Wallie,” she’d say, “it’s none of my business what you do, but 
can’t you talk to your mother more respectfully?” Whereupon MacGregor would
make his sister sit on the bed and start coaxing her to bring up the 
breakfast. Usually he’d have to ask his bed-mate what her name was in order
to present her to his sister. “She’s not a bad kid,” he’d say, referring to
his sister. “She’s the only decent one in the family … Now listen, sis, 
bring up some grub, will yer? Some nice bacon and eggs, eh, what do you 
say? Listen, is the old man around? What’s his mood to-day? I’d like to 
borrow a couple of bucks. You try to worm it out of him, will you? I’ll get
you something nice for Christmas.” Then, as though everything were settled,
he’d pull back the covers to expose the wench beside him. “Look at her, 
sis, ain’t she beautiful? Look at that leg! Listen, you ought to get 
yourself a man … you’re too skinny. Patsy here, I bet she doesn’t go 
begging for it, eh Patsy?” and with that a sound slap on the rump for 
Patsy. “Now scram, sis, I want some coffee … and don’t forget, make the 
bacon crisp! Don’t get any of that lousy store bacon … get something extra.
And be quick about it!”

What I liked about him were his weaknesses; like all men who practise 
will-power he was absolutely flabby inside. There wasn’t a thing he 
wouldn’t do - out of weakness. He was always very busy and he was never 
really doing anything. And always boning up on something, always trying to 
improve his mind. For example, he would take the unabridged dictionary and,
tearing out a page each day, would read it through religiously on his way 
back and forth from the office. He was full of facts, and the more absurd 
and incongruous the facts, the more pleasure he derived from them. He 
seemed to be bent on proving to all and sundry that life was a farce, that 
it wasn’t worth the game, that one thing cancelled out another, and so on. 
He was brought up on the North Side, not very far from the neighbourhood in
which I had spent my childhood. He was very much a product of the North 
Side, too, and that was one of the reasons why I liked him. The way he 
talked, out of the comer of his mouth, for instance, the tough air he put 
on when talking to a cop, the way he spat in disgust, the peculiar curse 
words he used, the sentimentality, the limited horizon, the passion for 
playing pool or shooting crap, the staying up all night swapping yams, the 
contempt for the rich, the hobnobbing with politicians, the curiosity about
worthless things, the respect for learning, the fascination of the dance 
hall, the saloon, the burlesque, talking about seeing the world and never 
budging out of the city, idolizing no matter whom so long as the person 
showed “spunk”, a thousand and one little traits or peculiarities of this 
sort endeared him to me because it was precisely such idiosyncrasies which 
marked the fellows I had known as a child. The neighbourhood was composed 
of nothing, it seemed, but lovable failures. The grown-ups behaved like 
children and the children were incorrigible. Nobody could rise very far 
above his neighbour or he’d be lynched.

It was amazing that any one ever became a doctor or a lawyer. Even so, he
had to be a good fellow, had to pretend to talk like every one else, and he
had to vote the Democratic ticket. To hear MacGregor talk about Plato or 
Nietzsche, for instance, to his buddies was something to remember. In the 
first place, to even get permission to talk about such things as Plato or 
Nietzsche to his companions, he had to pretend that it was only by accident
that he had run across their names; or perhaps he’d say that he had met an 
interesting drunk one night in the back room of a saloon and this drunk had
started talking about these guys Nietzsche and Plato. He would even pretend
he didn’t quite know how the names were pronounced. Plato wasn’t such a 
dumb bastard, he would say apologetically. Plato had an idea or two in his 
bean, yes sir, yes siree. He’d like to see one of those dumb politicians at
Washington trying to lock horns with a guy like Plato. And he’d go on, in 
this roundabout, matter of fact fashion to explain to his crap-shooting 
friends just what kind of a bright bird Plato was in his time and how he 
measured up against other men in other times.

Of course, he was probably a eunuch, he would add, by way of throwing a 
little cold water on all this erudition. In those days, as he nimbly 
explained, the big guys, the philosophers, often had their nuts cut off - a
fact! - so as to be out of all temptation. The other guy, Nietzsche, he was
a real case, a case for the bughouse. He was supposed to be in love with 
his sister.

Hypersensitive like. Had to live in a special climate - in Nice, he 
thought it was. As a rule he didn’t care much for the Germans, but this guy
Nietzsche was different. As a matter of fact, he hated the Germans, this 
Nietzsche. He claimed he was a Pole or something like that. He had them 
dead right, too. He said they were stupid and swinish, and by God, he knew 
what he was talking about. Anyway he showed them up. He said they were full
of shit, to make it brief, and by God, wasn’t he right though? Did you see 
the way those bastards turned tail when they got a dose of their own 
medicine? “Listen, I know a guy who cleaned out a nestful of them in the 
Argonne region - he said they were so goddamned low he wouldn’t shit on 
them. He said he wouldn’t even waste a bullet on them - he just bashed 
their brains in with a dub. I forget this guy’s name now, but anyway he 
told me he saw aplenty in the few months he was there. He said the best fun
he got out of the whole fucking business was to pop off his own major. Not 
that he had any special grievance against him - he just didn’t like his 
mug. He didn’t like the way the guy gave orders. Most of the officers that 
were killed got it in the back, he said. Served them right, too, the 
pricks! He was just a lad from the North Side. I think he runs a pool room 
now down near Wallabout Market. A quiet fellow, minds his own business. But
if you start talking to him about the war he goes off the handle. He says 
he’d assassinate the President of the United States if they ever tried to 
start another war. Yeah, and he’d do it too, I’m telling you … But shit, 
what was that I wanted to tell you about Plato? Oh yeah…”

When the others were gone he’d suddenly shift gears. “You don’t believe 
in talking like that, do you?” he’d begin. I had to admit I didn’t. “You’re
wrong,” he’d continue. “You’ve got to keep in with people, you don’t know 
when you may need one of these guys. You act on the assumption that you’re 
free, independent!

You act as though you were superior to these people. Well, that’s where 
you make a big mistake. How do you know where you’ll be five years from 
now, or even six months from now? You might be blind, you might be run over
by a truck, you might be put in the bughouse; you can’t tell what’s going 
to happen to you. Nobody can. You might be as helpless as a baby…”

“So what?” I would say.

“Well, don’t you think it would be good to have a friend when you need 
one? You might be so goddamned helpless you’d be glad to have some one help
you across the street. You think these guys are worthless; you think I’m 
wasting my time with them. Listen, you never know what a man might do for 
you some day. Nobody gets anywhere alone…”

He was touchy about my independence, what he called my indifference. If I
was obliged to ask him for a little dough he was delighted. That gave him a
chance to deliver a little sermon on friendship. “So you have to have 
money, too?” he’d say, with a big satisfied grin spreading all over his 
face. “So the poet has to eat too? Well, well… It’s lucky you came to me. 
Henry me boy, because I’m easy with you, I know you, you heartless son of a
bitch. Sure, what do you want? I haven’t got very much, but I’ll split it 
with you. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?

Or do you think, you bastard, that maybe I ought to give you it all and 
go out and borrow something for myself? I suppose you want a good meal, eh?
Ham and Eggs wouldn’t be good enough, would it? I suppose you’d like me to 
drive you to the restaurant too, eh? Listen, get up from that chair a 
minute - I want to put a cushion under your ass. Well, well, so you’re 
broke! Jesus, you’re always broke - I never remember seeing you with money 
in your pocket. Listen, don’t you ever feel ashamed of yourself? You talk 
about those bums I hang out with … well listen, mister, those guys never 
come and bum me for a dime like you do.

They’ve got more pride - they’d rather steal it than come and grub it off
me.

But you, shit, you’re full of high-falutin’ ideas, you want to reform the
world and all that crap - you don’t want to work for money, no, not you … 
you expect somebody to hand it to you on a silver platter. Huh! Lucky 
there’s guys like me around that understand you. You need to get wise to 
yourself. Henry.

You’re dreaming. Everybody wants to eat, don’t you know that? Most people
are willing to work for it - they don’t lie in bed all day like you and 
then suddenly pull on their pants and run to the first friend at hand. 
Supposing I wasn’t here, what would you have done? Don’t answer… I know 
what you’re going to say. But listen, you can’t go on all your life like 
that. Sure you talk fine - it’s a pleasure to listen to you. You’re the 
only guy I know that I really enjoy talking to, but where’s it going to get
you? One of these days they’ll lock you up for vagrancy. You’re just a bum,
don’t you know that? You’re not even as good as those other bums you preach
about. Where are you when I’m in a jam? You can’t be found. You don’t 
answer my letters, you don’t answer the telephone, you even hide sometimes 
when I come to see you. Listen, I know - you don’t have to explain to me. I
know you don’t want to hear my stories all the time. But shit, sometimes I 
really have to talk to you. A fucking lot you care though. So long as 
you’re out of the rain and putting another meal under your belt you’re 
happy. You don’t think about your friends - until you’re desperate. That’s 
no way to behave, is it? Say no and I’ll give you a buck. Goddamn it. 
Henry, you’re the only real friend I’ve got but you’re a son of a bitch of 
a mucker if I know what I’m talking about. You’re just a born good for 
nothing son of a bitch. You’d rather starve than turn your hand to 
something useful…”

Naturally I’d laugh and hold my hand out for the buck he had promised me.
That would irritate him afresh. “You’re ready to say anything aren’t you, 
if only I give you the buck I promised you? What a guy! Talk about morals -
Jesus, you’ve got the ethics of a rattlesnake. No, I’m not giving it to you
yet, by Christ.

I’m going to torture you a little more first. I’m going to make you earn 
this money, if I can. Listen what about shining my shoes - do that for me, 
will you? They’ll never get shined if you don’t do it now.” I pick up the 
shoes and ask him for the brush. I don’t mind shining his shoes, not in the
least. But that too seems to incense him. “You’re going to shine them, are 
you? Well by Jesus, that beats all hell. Listen, where’s your pride - 
didn’t you ever have any? And you’re the guy that knows everything. It’s 
amazing. You know so goddamned much that you have to shine your friend’s 
shoes to worm a meal out of him. A fine pickle! Here, you bastard, here’s 
the brush! Shine the other pair too while you’re at it.”

A pause. He’s washing himself at the sink and humming a bit. Suddenly, in
a bright, cheerful tone - “How is it out today, Henry? Is it sunny? Listen,
I’ve got just the place for you. What do you say to scallops and bacon with
a little tartare sauce on the side? It’s a little joint down near the 
inlet. A day like today is just the day for scallops and bacon, eh what, 
Henry? Don’t tell me you’ve got something to do … if I haul you down there 
you’ve got to spend a little time with me, you know that, don’t you? Jesus,
I wish I had your disposition. You just drift along, from minute to minute.
Sometimes I think you’re a damned sight better off than any of us, even if 
you are a stinking son of a bitch and a traitor and a thief. When I’m with 
you the day seems to pass like a dream. Listen, don’t you see what I mean 
when I say I’ve got to see you sometimes? I go nuts being all by myself all
the time. Why do I go chasing around after cunt so much? Why do I play 
cards all night? Why do I hang out with those bums from the Point? I need 
to talk to some one, that’s what.”

A little later at the bay, sitting out over the water, with a shot of rye
in him and waiting for the sea food to be served up … “Life’s not so bad if
you can do what you want, eh Henry? If I make a little dough I’m going to 
take a trip around the world - and you’re coming along with me. Yes, though
you don’t deserve it, I’m going to spend some real money on you one day. I 
want to see how you’d act if I gave you plenty of rope. I’m going to give 
you the money, see… I won’t pretend to lend it to you. We’ll see what’ll 
happen to your fine ideas when you have some dough in your pocket. Listen, 
when I was talking about Plato the other day I meant to ask you something: 
I meant to ask you if you ever read that yam of his about Atlands. Did you?
You did? Well, what do you think of it? Do you think it was just a yam, or 
do you think there might have been a place like that once?”

I didn’t dare to tell him that I suspected there were hundreds and 
thousands of continents whose existence past or future we hadn’t even begun
to dream about, so I simply said I thought it quite possible indeed that 
such a place as Atlanris might once have been.

“Well, it doesn’t matter much one way or the other, I suppose,” he went 
on, “but I’ll tell you what I think. I think there must have been a time 
like that once, a time when men were different. I can’t believe that they 
always were the pigs they are now and have been for the last few thousand 
years. I think it’s just possible that there was a time when men knew how 
to live, when they knew how to take it easy and to enjoy life. Do you know 
what drives me crazy? It’s looking at my old man. Ever since he’s retired 
he sits in front of the fire all day long and mopes. To sit there like a 
brokendown gorilla, that’s what he slaved for all his life. Well shit, if I
thought that was going to happen to me I’d blow my brains out now. Look 
around you … look at the people we know … do you know one that’s worth 
while? What’s all the fuss about, I’d like to know? We’ve got to live, they
say. Why? that’s what I want to know. They’d all be a damned sight better 
off dead. They’re all just so much manure. When the war broke out and I saw
them go off to the trenches I said to myself good, maybe they’ll come back 
with a little sense! A lot of them didn’t come back, of course. But the 
others! - listen, do you suppose they got more human, more considerate? Not
at all! They’re all butchers at heart, and when they’re up against it they 
squeal.

They make me sick, the whole fucking lot of ‘em. I see what they’re like,
bailing them out every day. I see it from both sides of the fence. On the 
other side it stinks even worse. Why, if I told you some of the things I 
knew about the judges who condemn these poor bastards you’d want to slug 
them. All you have to do is look at their faces. Yes sir. Henry, I’d like 
to think there was once a time when things were different. We haven’t seen 
any real life - and we’re not going to see any. This thing is going to last
another few thousand years, if I know anything about it. You think I’m 
mercenary. You think I’m cuckoo to want to earn a lot of money, don’t you? 
Well I’ll tell you, I want to earn a little pile so that I can get my feet 
out of this muck. I’d go off and live with a nigger wench if I could get 
away from this atmosphere. I’ve worked my balls off trying to get where I 
am, which isn’t very far. I don’t believe in work any more than you do - I 
-was trained that way, that’s all. If I could put over a deal, if I could 
swindle a pile out of one of these dirty bastards I’m dealing with, I’d do 
it with a dear conscience. I know a little too much about the law, that’s 
the trouble. But I’ll fool them yet, you’ll see. And when I put it over 
I’ll put it over big…”

Another shot of rye as the sea food’s coming along and he starts in 
again. “I meant that about taking you on a trip with me. I’m thinking about
it seriously.

I suppose you’ll tell me you’ve got a wife and a kid to look after. 
Listen when are you going to break off with that battle-axe of yours? Don’t
you know that you’ve got to ditch her?” He begins to laugh softly. “Ho! Ho!
To think that I was the one who picked her out for you! Did I ever think 
you’d be chump enough to get hitched up to her? I thought I was 
recommending you a nice piece of tail and you, you poor slob, you marry 
her. Ho ho! Listen to me. Henry, while you’ve got a little sense left: 
don’t let that sour-balled puss muck up your life for you, do you get me? I
don’t care what you do or where you go. I’d hate to see you leave town … 
I’d miss you, I’m telling you that frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to
Africa, beat it, get out of her clutches, she’s no good for you.

Sometimes when I get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now there’s 
something nice for Henry - and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and 
then of course I forget. But Jesus, man, there’s thousands of cunts in the 
world you get along with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch 
like that… Do you want more bacon? You’d better eat what you want now, you 
know there won’t be any dough later. Have another drink, eh? Listen, if you
try to run away from me to-day I swear I’ll never lend you a cent… What was
I saying? Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married. Listen, are you 
going to do it or not? Every time I see you you tell me you’re going to run
away, but you never do it. You don’t think you’re supporting her, I hope? 
She don’t need you, you sap, don’t you see that? She just wants to torture 
you. As for the kid… well, shit, if I boots I’d drown it. That sounds kind 
of mean, doesn’t it, but you know what I mean. You’re not a father. I don’t
know what the hell you are… I just know you’re too goddamned good a fellow 
to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don’t you try to make 
something of yourself? You’re young yet and you make a good appearance. Go 
off somewhere, way the hell on, and start all over again. If you need a 
little money I’ll raise it for you. It’s like throwing it down a sewer, I 
know, but I’ll do it for you just the same. The truth is. Henry, I like you
a hell of a lot. I’ve taken more from you than I would from anybody in the 
world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old neighbourhood. 
Funny I didn’t know you in those days. Shit, I’m getting sentimental…”

The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out 
strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the 
beach studying the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too -
one of many, many days I spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that 
really seemed to make the wheel stop. On the surface it was jolly and happy
go lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But underneath it was 
fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless. I 
knew very well I’d have to make a break some day; I knew very well I was 
pissing my time away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do 
about it - yet. Something had to happen, something big, something that 
would sweep me off my feet. All I needed was a push, but it had to be some 
force outside my world that could give me the right push, that I was 
certain of. I couldn’t eat my heart out, because it wasn’t in my nature. 
All my life things had worked out all right - in the end. It wasn’t in the 
cards for me to exert myself. Something had to be left to Providence - in 
my case a whole lot. Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune 
or mismanagement I knew that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. 
And with a double crown too. The external situation was bad, admitted - but
what bothered me more was the internal situation. I was really afraid of 
myself, of my appetite, my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my 
malleability, my geniality, my powers of adaptation. No situation in itself
could frighten me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting 
inside a buttercup, as it were and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung 
in jail I had a hunch I’d enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to 
resist, I suppose. Other people wore themselves out tugging and straining 
and pulling; my strategy was to float with the tide. What people did to me 
didn’t bother me nearly so much as what they were doing to others or to 
themselves. I was really so damned well off inside that I had to take on 
the problems of the world. And that’s why I was in a mess all the time. I 
wasn’t synchronized with my own destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live 
out the world destiny. If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there
was no food in the house, not even for the kid, I would turn right around 
and go looking for the food. But what I noticed about myself, and that was 
what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and hustling for the grub than 
I was back at the Weltanschauung again. I didn’t think of food for us 
exclusively, I thought of food in general, food in all its stages, 
everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten and how it was 
prepared and what people did if they didn’t have it and how maybe there was
a way to fix it so that everybody would have it when they wanted it and no 
more time wasted on such an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for 
the wife and kid, sure, but also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the 
Australian Bushmen, not to mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and 
the Armenians. I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man 
and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible - it was the
ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those 
bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless-looking. 
Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and 
beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy 
could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be 
looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of 
it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell “Listen, listen,
people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the 
garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could 
only go out in the street and put it to them dear like that. But no, you 
don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you’re hungry
you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That’s something I never 
understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple - you 
just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you 
can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you 
have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust 
of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about 
whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck 
about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s 
just what the bastards don’t want you to do - to live! They want you to 
spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s 
reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t 
be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have 
to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized 
roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a 
million-billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the 
windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be 
French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would 
kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would 
stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and 
there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures 
because-there wouldn’t be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe 
it would take months and years to trek from place to place, but you 
wouldn’t need a visa or a passport or a carte d’identite because you 
wouldn’t be registered anywhere and you wouldn’t bear a number and if you 
wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t 
make any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could 
carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when 
everything would be free? During this period when I was drifting from door 
to door, job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I did try nevertheless
to rope off a little space for myself which might be an anchorage; it was 
more like a lifebuoy in the midst of a swift channel. To get within a mile 
of me was to hear a huge dolorous bell tolling. Nobody could see the 
anchorage - it was buried deep in the bottom of the channel. One saw me 
bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or else 
swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly.

What held me down safely was the big pigeon-holed desk which I put in the
parlour. This was the desk which had been in the old man’s tailoring 
establishment for the last fifty years, which had given birth to many bills
and many groans, which had housed strange souvenirs in its compartments, 
and which finally I had filched from him when he was ill and away from the 
establishment; and now it stood in the middle of the floor in our 
lugubrious parlour on the third floor of a respectable brown-stone house in
the dead centre of the most respectable neighbourhood in Brooklyn. I had to
fight a tough battle to install it there, but I insisted that it be there 
in the midmost midst of the shebang.

It was like putting a mastodon in the centre of a dentist’s office. But 
since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends didn’t give
a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlour 
and I put all the extra chairs we bad around it in a big circle and then I 
sat down comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I
would write if I could write. I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big
brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then 
to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeon-holes were empty and all
the drawers were empty; there wasn’t a thing on the desk or in it except a 
sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a 
pothook.

When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava which
was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to bring 
the funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably of 
the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand 
years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith.

A phantom struggle, because they weren’t dreaming of such a thing as the 
paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might 
say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or 
they don’t happen, that’s all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and 
struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony 
because we’ve lost the habit of falling asleep. We don’t know how to let 
go. We’re like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we
struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.

I think if I had been crazy I couldn’t have hit upon a better scheme to 
consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the 
middle of the parlour. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, 
and my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in 
an ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, 
and which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were 
trying to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with 
reality that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so 
which I had written, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as 
nothing to me - crude ciphers from the old stone age - because the contact 
was through the head and the head is a useless appendage unless you’re 
anchored in mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before 
was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it 
doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for 
the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not 
authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one 
thought which would come up out of me, out of the lifebuoy, was a Herculean
task. I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression - I 
lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the 
juice. The bloody machine wouldn’t stop, that was the difficulty. I was not
only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me 
and I had no control over it whatever.

I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the other
mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I had 
made with my own hands and my own blood slowly began to function. I had 
gone to the theatre nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and
I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing on line in the lobby, I already 
experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were 
coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like 
the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of 
normality, which is a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow 
its foul breath in my mouth - it wouldn’t matter. I might bend over and 
kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. 
There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and 
disease, which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus 
integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease 
was completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment,
one would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this 
conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back farther than the old
stone age. At that moment I wasn’t even dreaming of taking root; I was 
experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the miraculous.

I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to 
die then and there for the privilege of the experience.

What happened was this … As I passed the doorman holding the torn stub in
my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtains sent up. I stood a moment 
slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the
feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled 
by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain
rising in man. And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which
was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been 
awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have 
mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought - it was a realization, as 
I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine 
stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a 
luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the 
marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw
a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The 
man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever 
since I was born. My eye didn’t take in the entire staircase, just the few 
steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took 
it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand was 
never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and 
for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, 
like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether 
he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the 
stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the bread and cheese 
lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life joined 
at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! the rest faded out in a 
penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home 
without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little 
patch of staircase which is imperishable.

It was just about this time that the Dadaists were in full swing, to be 
followed shortly by the Surrealists. I never heard of either group until 
some ten years later; I never read a French book and I never had a French 
idea. I was perhaps the unique Dadaist in America, and I didn’t know it. I 
might just as well have been living in the jungles of the Amazon for all 
the contact I had with the outside world. Nobody understood what I was 
writing about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was 
daffy. I was describing the New World - unfortunately a little too soon 
because it had not yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that 
it existed. It was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the Fallopian 
tubes. Naturally nothing was dearly formulated: there was only the faint 
suggestion of a backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs, no hair, 
no nails, no teeth. Sex was the last thing to be dreamed of; it was the 
world of Chronos and his ovicular progeny. It was the world of the iota, 
each iota being indispensable, frighteningly logical, and absolutely 
unpredictable.

There was no such thing as a thing, because the concept “thing” was 
missing.

I say it was a New World I was describing, but like the New World which 
Columbus discovered it turned out to be a far older world than any we have 
known. I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the 
indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was 
neither old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes 
from moment to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was 
no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left
me of an evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the 
Australian Bushmen or to the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to
the Igorotes in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because
it was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the 
telegraphic code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of 
difference. Any primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic 
epochs would have understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a 
continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. To
write intelligibly for them I would have been obliged first of all to kill 
something, secondly, to arrest time. I had just made the realization that 
life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the 
present. Did they expect me to deny a truth which it had taken me all my 
life to catch a glimpse of? They most certainly did. The one thing they did
not want to hear about was that life is indestructible. Was not their 
precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and 
plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents had been violated; 
both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious - 
in things. No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man
than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the 
American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that 
California was raped by the gold-diggers.

I blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in blood and 
crime. And there is no let-up to the slaughter and the pillage, as I 
discovered at first hand travelling throughout the length and breadth of 
the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer. 
Often it wasn’t necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding
iron - they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and 
killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word 
annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter 
experience, to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and even smile,
when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say 
how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting 
for me to sit down in order to suck my blood.

How was it possible, when I sat down in the parlour at my prehistoric 
desk, to use this code language of rape and murder? I was alone in this 
great hemisphere of violence, but I was not alone as far as the human race 
was concerned. I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by 
phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which 
could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility. I could
not begin with a full statement - it would have meant the strait-jacket or 
the electric chair. I was like a man who had been too long incarcerated in 
a dungeon - I had to feel my way slowly, falteringly, lest I stumble and be
run over. I had to accustom myself gradually to the penalties which freedom
involves. I had to grow a new epidermis which would protect me from this 
burning light in the sky.

The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is 
born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm 
but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is 
not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm. There is 
not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is undesirable, 
it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to 
defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not 
fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the 
world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the
utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. 
Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. By simple 
external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very 
climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death 
machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of 
peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the 
wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and eternal possessed by a ragged 
beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy? What 
is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and 
philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of 
these energetic Americans.

Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horsepower fiends; in order 
to break their insane rhythm, their death rhythm, I had to resort to a 
wavelength which, until I found the proper sustenance in my own bowels, 
would at least nullify the rhythm they had set up. Certainly I did not need
this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the 
parlour; certainly I didn’t need twelve empty chairs placed around in a 
semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth 
chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a
heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to 
his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some resistance, some 
powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man acting very much 
like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and 
dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practiser of magic.

Such a man is beyond religion - it is his religiousness he is suffering 
from.

Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is
to break the evil spell which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond 
throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop reacting, whether inertly 
or ferociously.

This man, of all men on earth, wants the act to be a manifestation of 
life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins to act 
regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so 
utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this 
man has found his way back to the womb and source of life and that 
tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which you have 
made of him, he will stand forth as a mm in his own right and all the 
powers of the world will be of no avail against him.

Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric 
desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts 
through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There 
is no magic in this wavelength any more than there is magic in the womb. 
Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their 
inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the 
world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has 
never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too - after life. Only one 
like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes,
Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. 
Death as a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a 
crown and shield, yes! But not death from the roots, isolating men, making 
them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling 
them with a will which can only say No! The first word any man writes when 
he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm is Yes! 
Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes - Yes in a thousand 
million ways. No dynamo, no matter how huge - not even a dynamo of a 
hundred million dead souls - can combat one man saying Yes!

The war was on and men were being slaughtered, one million, two million, 
five million, ten million, twenty million, finally a hundred million, then 
a billion, everybody, man, woman and child, down to the last one. “No!” 
they were shouting, “No! they shall not pass!” And yet everybody passed; 
everybody got a free pass, whether he shouted Yes or No. In the midst of 
this triumphant demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I sat with
my feet planted on the big desk trying to communicate with Zeus the Father 
of Atlantis and with his lost progeny, ignorant of the fact that 
Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a military hospital,
ignorant of the fact that in his “new writing” he had penned these 
indelible lines,

“Be forbearing when you compare us
With those who were the perfection of order.
We who everywhere seek adventure,
We are not your enemies.
We would give you vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it.”

Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written: “Have compassion on 
us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the boundless future, 
Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins.” I was ignorant of the 
fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of 
Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vache, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Rene Crevel, 
Henri de Montherlant, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, George Grosz; ignorant of 
the fact that on July, 14, 1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first 
Dada Manifesto had been proclaimed -“manifesto by monsieur antipyrine” - 
that in this strange document it was stated “Dada is life without slippers 
or parallel … severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit 
on humanity.” Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 
contained these lines. “I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I 
say certain things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, 
as I am also against principles … I write this manifesto to show that one 
may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration, I am 
against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am 
neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense… There 
is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass. The work of 
creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for 
himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away …

Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the
whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, 
with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography. On the 
one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jingle-bells of the 
infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings…”

Thirty-two years later and I am still saying Yes! Yes, Monsieur 
Antipyrine!
Yes, Monsieur Tristan Bustanoby Tzara! Yes, Monsieur Max Ernst Geburt! Yes!

Monsieur Rene Crevel, now that you are dead by suicide, yes, the world is
crazy, you were right. Yes, Monsieur Blaise Cendrars, you were right to 
kill. Was it the day of the Armistice that you brought out your little book
-J’ai tue? Yes, “keep on my lads, humanity…” Yes, Jacques Vache, quite 
right - “Art ought to be something funny and a trifle boring.” Yes, my dear
dead Vache, how right you were and how funny and how boring the touching 
and tender and true: “It is of the essence of symbols to be symbolic.” Say 
it again, from the other world! Have you a megaphone up there? Have you 
found all the arms and legs that were blown off during the melee? Can you 
put them together again? Do you remember the meeting at Nantes in 1916 with
Andre Breton? Did you celebrate the birth of hysteria together? Had he told
you, Breton, that there was only the marvellous and nothing but the 
marvellous and that the marvellous is always marvellous - and isn’t it 
marvellous to hear it again, even though your ears are stopped? I want to 
include here, before passing on, a little portrait of you by Emile Bouvier 
for the benefit of my Brooklyn friends who may not have recognized me then 
but who will now, I am sure…

“… he was not all crazy, and could explain his conduct when occasion 
required. His actions, none the less, were as disconcerting as Jarry’s 
worst eccentricities. For example, he was barely out of hospital when he 
hired himself out as a stevedore, and he thereafter passed his afternoons 
in unloading coal on the quays along the Loire. In the evening, on the 
other hand he would make the rounds of the cafes and cinemas, dressed in 
the height of fashion and with many variations of costume. What was more, 
in time of war, he would strut forth sometimes in the uniform of a 
lieutenant of Hussars, sometimes in that of an English officer, of an 
aviator or of a surgeon. In civil life, he was quite as free and easy, 
thinking nothing of introducing Breton under the name of Andre Salmon, 
while he took unto himself, but quite without vanity, the most wonderful 
titles and adventures. He never said good morning nor good evening nor 
goodbye, and never took any notice of letters, except those from his 
mother, when he had to ask for money. He did not recognize his best friends
from one day to another…”

Do you recognize me, lads? Just a Brooklyn boy communicating with the 
redhaired albinos of the Zuni region. Making ready, with feet on the desk, 
to write “strong works, works forever incomprehensible”, as my dead 
comrades were promising. These “strong works” - would you recognize them if
you saw them? Do you know that of the millions who were killed not one 
death was necessary to produce “the strong work”? New beings, yes! We have 
need of new beings still. We can do without the telephone, without the 
automobile, without the high-class bombers - but we can’t do without new 
beings. If Atlantis was submerged beneath the sea, if the Sphinx and the 
Pyramids remain an eternal riddle, it is because there were no more new 
beings being born. Stop the machine a moment! Plash back!

Flash back to 1914, to the Kaiser sitting on his horse. Keep him sitting 
there a moment with his withered arm clutching the bridle rein. Look at his
moustache!

Look at his haughty air of pride and arrogance! Look at his cannon-fodder
lined up in strictest discipline, all ready to obey the word, to get shot, 
to get disembowelled, to be burned in quicklime. Hold it a moment, now, and
look at the other side: the defenders of our great and glorious 
civilization, the men who will war to end war. Change their clothes, change
uniforms, change horses, change flags, change terrain. My, is that the 
Kaiser I see on a white horse? Are those the terrible Huns? And where is 
Big Bertha? Oh, I see - I thought it was pointing towards Notre Dame? 
Humanity, me lads, humanity always marching in the van … And the strong 
works we were speaking of? Where are the strong works?

Call up the Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of foot - not a 
cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one! Ask him to find the great work
and bring it back. We need it. We have a brand new museum ready waiting to 
house it - and cellophane and the Dewey Decimal system to file it. All we 
need is the name of the author. Even if he has no name, even if it is 
anonymous work, we won’t kick. Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we
won’t mind. Bring it back dead or alive - there’s a $25,000 reward for the 
man who fetches it.

And if they tell you that these things had to be, that things could not 
have happened otherwise, that France did her best and Germany her best and 
that little Liberia and little Ecuador and all the other allies also did 
their best, and that since the war everybody has been doing his best to 
patch things up or to forget, tell them that their best is not good enough,
that we don’t want to hear any more this logic of “doing the best one can”,
tell them we don’t want the best of a bad bargain, we don’t believe in 
bargains good or bad, nor in war memorials. We don’t want to hear about the
logic of events - or any kind of logic. “Je ne parle pas logique,” said 
Montherlant, “je parle generosite.” I don’t think you heard it very well, 
since it was in French. I’ll repeat it for you, in the Queen’s own 
language; “I’m not talking logic, I’m talking generosity.” That’s bad 
English, as the Queen herself might speak it, but it’s clear. Generosity - 
do you hear? You never practise it, any of you, either in peace or in war. 
You don’t know the meaning of the word. You think to supply guns and 
ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think sending Red Cross 
nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity. You think a 
bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a
wheel chair is generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back 
it’s generosity. You don’t know what the fucking war means, you bastards! 
To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth. To say 
Yes you have to first be a Surrealist or a Dadaist, because you have 
understood what it means to say No. You can even say Yes and No at the same
time, provided you do more than is expected of you. Be a stevedore in the 
day time and a Beau Brummel in the night-time. Wear any uniform so long as 
it’s not yours. When you write your mother ask her to cough up a little 
dough so that you may have a clean rag to wipe your ass with. Don’t be 
disturbed if you see your neighbour going after his wife with a knife: he 
probably has good reason to go after her, and if he kills her you may be 
sure he has the satisfaction of knowing why he did it. If you’re trying to 
improve your mind, stop it I There’s no improving the mind. Look at your 
heart and gizzard - the brain is in the heart.

Ah yes, if I had known then that these birds existed -Cendrars, Vache, 
Grosz, Ernst, Apollinaire - if I had known that then, if I had known that 
in their own way they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I 
think I’d have blown up. Yes, I think I’d have gone off like a bomb. But I 
was ignorant. Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a 
crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvellous 
phrases as “doubt’s duck with the vermouth lips” or “I have seen a fig eat 
an onager” - that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was 
saying: “Find flowers that are chairs” …

“my hunger is the black air’s bits” … “his heart, amber and spunk”. Maybe
at the same time, or thereabouts, while Jarry was saying “in eating the 
sound of moths”, and Apollinaire repeating after him “near a gentleman 
swallowing himself”, and Breton murmuring softly “night’s pedals move 
uninterruptedly”, perhaps “in the air beautiful and black” which the lone 
Jew had found under the Southern Cross another man, also lonely and exiled 
and of Spanish origin, was preparing to put down on paper these memorable 
words: “I seek, all in all, to console myself for my exile, for my exile 
from eternity, for that unearthing (destierro) which I am fond of referring
to as my unheavening … At present, I think that the best way of writing 
this novel is to tell how it should be written. It is the novel of the 
novel, the creation of creation. Or God of God, Deus de Deo.” Had I known 
he was going to add this, this which follows, I would surely have gone off 
like a bomb… “By being crazy is understood losing one’s reason. Reason, but
not the truth, for there are madmen who speak truths while others keep 
silent…” Speaking of these things, speaking of the war and the war dead, I 
cannot refrain from mentioning that some twenty years later I ran across 
this in French by a Frenchman. O miracles of miracles! “Il faut le dire, il
y a des cadavres que je ne respecte qu’a moitie” Yes, yes, and again yes! 
O, let us do some rash things - for the sheer pleasure of it! Let us do 
something live and magnificent, even if destructive! Said the mad cobbler: 
“All things are generated oat of the grand mystery, and proceed out of one 
degree into another.

Whatever goes forward in its degree, the same receives no abominate.”

Everywhere in all times the same ovarian world announcing itself. Yet 
also, parallel with these announcements, these prophecies, the 
gynecological manifestoes, parallel and contemporaneous with them new totem
poles, new taboos, new war dances. While into the air so black and 
beautiful the brothers of man, the poets, the diggers of the future, were 
spitting their magic lines, in this same time, O profound and perplexing 
riddle, other men were saying: “Won’t you please come and take a job in our
ammunition factory. We promise you the highest wages, the most sanitary and
hygienic conditions. The work is so easy that even a child could do it” And
if you had a sister, a wife, a mother, an aunt, as long as she could 
manipulate her hands, as long as she could prove that she had no bad 
habits, you were invited to bring her or them along to the ammunition 
works.

If you were shy of soiling your hands they would explain to you very 
gently and intelligently just how these delicate mechanisms operated, what 
they did when they exploded, and why you must not waste even your garbage 
because… et ipso facto e pluribus unum. The thing that impressed me, going 
the rounds in search of work, was not so much that they made me vomit every
day (assuming I had been lucky enough to put something into my guts), but 
that they always demanded to know if you were of good habits, if you were 
steady, if you were sober, if you were industrious, if you had ever worked 
before and if not why not. Even the garbage, which I had gotten the job of 
collecting for the municipality, was precious to them, the killers. 
Standing knee-deep in the muck, the lowest of the low, a coolie, an 
outcast, still I was part of the death racket. I tried reading the Inferno 
at night, but it was in English and English is no language for a catholic 
work. “Whatever enters in itself into its selfhood, viz. into its own 
lubet…” Lubet! If I had had a word like that to conjure with then, how 
peacefully I might have gone about my garbage collecting! How sweet, in the
night, when Dante is out of reach and the hands smell of muck and slime, to
take unto oneself this word which in the Dutch means “lust” and in Latin 
‘lubitum” or the divine beneplacitum. Standing knee-deep in the garbage I 
said one day what Meister Eckhart is reported to have said long ago: “I 
truly have need of God, but God has need of me too.” There was a job 
waiting for me in the slaughterhouse, a nice little job of sorting 
entrails, but I couldn’t raise the fare to get to Chicago. I remained in 
Brooklyn, in my own palace of entrails, and turned round and round on the 
plinth of the labyrinth. I remained at home seeking the “germinal vesicle”,
“the dragon castle on the floor of the sea”, “the Heavenly Harp”, “the 
field of the square inch”, “the house of the square foot”, “the dark pass”,
“the space of former Heaven”. I remained locked in, a prisoner of Forculus,
god of the door, of Cardea, god of the hinge, and of Limentius, god of the 
threshold. I spoke only with their sisters, the three goddesses called 
Fear, Pallor and Fever. I saw no “Asian luxury”, as had St. Augustine, or 
as he imagined he had. Nor did I see “the two twins born, so near together,
that the second held the first by the heel”. But I saw a street called 
Myrtle Avenue, which runs from Borough Hall to Fresh Pond Road, and down 
this street no saint ever walked (else it would have crumbled), down this 
street no miracle ever passed, nor any poet, nor any species of human 
genius, nor did any flower ever grow there, nor did the sun strike it 
squarely, nor did the rain ever wash it. For the genuine Inferno which I 
had to postpone for twenty years I give you Myrtle Avenue, one of the 
innumerable bridlepaths ridden by iron monsters which lead to the heart of 
America’s emptiness. If you have only seen Essen or Manchester or Chicago 
or Levallois-Perret or Glasgow or Hoboken or Canarsie or Bayonne you have 
seen nothing of the magnificent emptiness of progress and enlightenment. 
Dear reader, you must see Myrtle Avenue before you die, if only to realize 
how far into the future Dante saw. You must believe me that on this street,
neither in the houses which line it, nor the cobblestones which pave it, 
nor the elevated structure which cuts it atwain, neither in any creature 
that bears a name and lives thereon, neither in any animal, bird or insect 
passing through it to slaughter or already slaughtered, is there hope of 
“lubet”, “sublimate” or “abominate”. It is a street not of sorrow, for 
sorrow would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness: it is 
emptier than the most extinct volcano, emptier than a vacuum, emptier than 
the word God in the mouth of an unbeliever.

I said I did not know a word of French then, and it is true, but I was 
just on the brink of making a great discovery, a discovery which would 
compensate for the emptiness of Myrtle Avenue and the whole American 
continent. I had almost reached the shore of that great French ocean which 
goes by the name of Elie Faure, an ocean which the French themselves had 
hardly navigated and which they had mistaken, it seems, for an inland sea. 
Reading him even in such a withered language as English has become, I could
see that this man who had described the glory of the human race on his cuff
was Father Zeus of Atlantis, whom I had been searching for. An ocean I 
called him, but he was also a world symphony. He was the first musician the
French have produced; he was exalted and controlled, an anomaly, a Gallic 
Beethoven, a great physician of the soul, a giant lightning-rod. He was 
also a sunflower turning with the sun, always drinking in the light, always
radiant and blazing with vitality. He was neither an optimist nor a 
pessimist, any more than one can say that the ocean is beneficient or 
malevolent. He was a believer in the human race. He added a cubit to the 
race, by giving it back its dignity, its strength, its need of creation. He
saw everything as creation, as solar joy. He didn’t record it in orderly 
fashion, he recorded it musically. He was indifferent to the fact that the 
French have a tin ear - he was orchestrating for the whole world 
simultaneously. What was my amazement then, when some years later I arrived
in France, to find that there were no monuments erected to him, no streets 
named after him. Worse, during eight whole years I never once beard a 
Frenchman mention his name. He had to die in order to be put in the 
pantheon of French deities - and how sickly must they look, his deific 
contemporaries, in the presence of this radiant sun! If he had not been a 
physician, and thus permitted to earn a livelihood, what might not have 
happened to him! Perhaps another able hand for the garbage trucks! The man 
who made the Egyptian frescoes come alive in all their flaming colours, 
this man could just as well have starved to death for all the public cared.
But he was an ocean and the critics drowned in this ocean, and the editors 
and the publishers and the public too. It will take aeons for him to dry 
up, to evaporate. It will take about as long as for the French to acquire a
musical ear.

If there had been no music I would have gone to the madhouse like 
Nijinsky. (It was just about this time that they discovered that Nijinsky 
was mad.) He had been found giving his money away to the poor - always a 
bad sign! My mind was filled with wonderful treasures, my taste was sharp 
and exigent, my muscles were in excellent condition, my appetite was 
strong, my wind sound. I had nothing to do except to improve myself, and I 
was going crazy with the improvements I made every day. Even if there were 
a job for me to fill I couldn’t accept it, because what I needed was not 
work but a life more abundant. I couldn’t waste time being a teacher, a 
lawyer, a physician, a politician or anything else that society had to 
offer. It was easier to accept menial jobs because it left my mind free.

After I was fired from the garbage trucks I remember taking up with an 
Evangelist who seemed to have great confidence in me. I was a sort of 
usher, collector and private secretary. He brought to my attention the 
whole world of Indian philosophy. Evenings when I was free I would meet 
with my friends at the home of Ed Bauries who lived in an aristocratic 
section of Brooklyn. Ed Bauries was an eccentric pianist who couldn’t read 
a note. He had a bosom pal called George Neumiller with whom he often 
played duets. Of the dozen or so who congregated at Ed Bauries’ home nearly
every one of us could play the piano. We were all between twenty-one and 
twenty-five at the time; we never brought any women along and we hardly 
ever mentioned the subject of women during these sessions. We had plenty of
beer to drink and a whole big house at our disposal, for it was in the 
Summer time, when his folks were away, that we held our gatherings. Though 
there were a dozen other homes like this which I could speak of, I mention 
Ed Bauries’ place because it was typical of something I have never 
encountered elsewhere in the world.

Neither Ed Bauries himself nor any of his friends suspected the sort of 
books I was reading nor the things which were occupying my mind. When I 
blew in I was greeted enthusiastically - as a clown. It was expected, of me
to start things going. There were about four pianos scattered throughout 
the big house to say nothing of the celesta, the organ, guitars, mandolins,
fiddles and what not. Ed Bauries was a nut, a very affable, sympathetic and
generous one too. The sandwiches were always of the best, the beer 
plentiful, and if you wanted to stay the night he could fix you up on a 
divan just as pretty as you liked.

Coming down the street - a big, wide street, somnolent, luxurious, a 
street altogether out of the world - I could hear the tinkle of the piano 
in the big parlour on the first floor. The windows were wide open and as I 
got into range I could see Al Burger or Connie Grimm sprawling in their big
easy chairs, their feet on the window sill, and big beer mugs in their 
hands. Probably George Neumiller was at the piano, improvising, his shirt 
peeled off and a big cigar in his mouth. They were talking and laughing 
while George fooled around, searching for an opening. Soon as he hit a 
theme he would call for Ed and Ed would sit beside him, studying it out in 
his unprofessional way, then suddenly pouncing on the keys and giving tit 
for tat. Maybe when I’d walk in somebody would be trying to stand on his 
hands in the next room - there were three big rooms on the first floor 
which opened one on to the other and back of them was a garden, an enormous
garden, with flowers, fruit trees, grape vines, statues, fountains an<f 
everything. Sometimes when it was too hot they brought the celesta or the 
little organ into the garden (and a keg of beer, naturally) and we’d sit 
around in the dark laughing and singing - until the neighbours forced us to
stop. Sometimes the music was going on all through the house at once, on 
every floor. It was really crazy then, intoxicating, and if there had been 
women around it would have spoiled it. Sometimes it was like watching an 
endurance contest - Ed Bauries and George Neumiller at the grand piano, 
each trying to wear the other out, changing places without stopping, 
crossing hands, sometimes felling away to plain chopsticks, sometimes going
like a Wurlitzer. And always something to laugh about all the time. Nobody 
asked what you did, what you thought about, and so forth. When you arrived 
at Ed Bauries’ place you checked your identification marks. Nobody gave a 
fuck what size hat you wore or how much you paid for it. It was 
entertainment from the word go - and the sandwiches and the drinks were on 
the house. And when things got going, three or four pianos at once, the 
celesta, the organ, the mandolins, the guitars, beer running through the 
halls, the mantelpieces full of sandwiches and cigars, a breeze coming 
through from the garden, George Neumiller stripped to the waist and 
modulating like a fiend, it was better than any show I’ve ever seen put on 
and it didn’t cost a cent. In fact, with the dressing and undressing that 
went on, I always came away with a little extra change and a pocketful of 
good cigars. I never saw any of them between time - only Monday nights 
throughout the Summer, when Ed held open house.

Standing in the garden listening to the din I could scarcely believe that
it was the same city. And if I had ever opened my trap and exposed my guts 
it would have been all over. Not one of these bozos amounted to anything, 
as the world reckons. They were just good eggs, children, fellows who liked
music and who liked a good time. They liked it so much that sometimes we 
had to call the ambulance. Like the night Al Burger twisted his knee while 
showing us one of his stunts. Everybody so happy, so full of music, so lit 
up, that it took him an hour to persuade us he was really hurt. We try to 
carry him to a hospital but it’s too far away and besides, it’s such a good
joke, that we drop him now and then and that makes him yell like a maniac. 
So finally we telephone for help from a police box, and the ambulance comes
and the patrol wagon too. They take Al to the hospital and the rest of us 
to the hoose-gow. And on the way we sing at the top of our lungs. And after
we’re bailed out we’re still feeling good and the cops are feeling good 
too, and so we all adjourn to the basement where there’s a cracked piano 
and we go on singing and playing. All this is like some period B.C. in 
history which ends not because there’s a war but because even a joint like 
Ed Bauries’ is not immune to the poison seeping in from the periphery. 
Because every street is becoming Myrtle Avenue, because emptiness is 
filling the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Because, after a certain time, you can’t enter a single house throughout 
the length and breadth of the land and find a man standing on his hands 
singing. It just ain’t done any more. And there ain’t two pianos going at 
once anywhere, nor are there two men anywhere willing to play all night 
just for the fun of it. Two men who can play like Ed Bauries and George 
Neumiller are hired by the radio or the movies and only a thimbleful of 
their talent is used and the rest is thrown into the garbage can. Nobody 
knows, judging from public spectacles, what talent is disposable in the 
great American continent. Later on, and that’s why I used to sit around on 
doorsteps in Tin Pan Alley, I would while away the afternoons listening to 
the professionals mugging it out. That was good too, but it was different. 
There was no fun in it, it was a perpetual rehearsal to bring in dollars 
and cents. Any man in America who had an ounce of humour in him was saving 
it up to put himself across. There were some wonderful nuts among them too,
men I’ll never forget, men who left no name behind them, and they were the 
best we produced. I remember an anonymous performer on the Keith circuit 
who was probably the craziest man in America, and perhaps he got fifty 
dollars a week for it. Three times a day, every day in the week, he came 
out and held the audience spellbound. He didn’t have an act - he just 
improvised. He never repeated his jokes or his stunts. He gave himself 
prodigally, and I don’t think he was a hot fiend either. He was one of 
those guys who are born in the corncrakes and the energy and the joy in him
was so fierce that nothing could contain it. He could play any instrument 
and dance any step and he could invent a story on the spot and string it 
out till the bell rang. He was not only satisfied to do his own act but he 
would help the others out. He would stand in the wings and wait for the 
right moment to break into the other guy’s act. He was the whole show and 
it was a show that contained more therapy than the whole arsenal of modem 
science. They ought to have paid a man like this the wages which the 
President of the United States receives.

They ought to sack the President of the United States and the whole 
Supreme Court and set up a man like this as ruler. This man could cure any 
disease on the calendar. He was the kind of guy, moreover, as would do it 
for nothing, if you asked him to. This is the type of man which empties the
insane asylums. He doesn’t propose a cure - he makes everybody crazy. 
Between this solution and a perpetual state of war, which is civilization, 
there is only one other way out - and that is the road we will all take 
eventually because everything else is doomed to failure. The type that 
represents this one and only way bears a head with six faces and eight 
eyes, the head is a revolving lighthouse, and instead of a triple crown at 
the top, as there might well be, there is a hole which ventilates what few 
brains there are. There is very little brain, as I say, because there is 
very little baggage to carry about, because living in full consciousness, 
the grey matter passes off into light. This is the only type of man one can
place above the comedian; he neither laughs nor weeps, he is beyond 
suffering. We don’t recognize him yet because he is too dose to us, right 
under the skin, as a matter of fact. When the comedian catches us in the 
guts this man, whose name might be God, I suppose, if he had to use a name,
speaks up.

When the whole human race is rocking with laughter, laughing so hard that
it hurts, I mean, everybody then has his foot on the path. In that moment 
everybody can just as well be God as anything else. In that moment you have
the annihilation of dual, triple, quadruple and multiple consciousness, 
which is what makes the grey matter coil up in dead folds at the top of the
skull. At that moment you can really feel the hole in the top of the head; 
you know that you once had an eye there and that this eye was capable of 
taking in everything at once. The eye is gone now, but when you laugh until
the tears flow and your belly aches, you are really opening the skylight 
andventilating the brains.

Nobody can persuade you at that moment to take a gun and kill your enemy;
neither can anybody persuade you to open a fat tome containing the 
metaphysical truths of the world and read it. If you know what freedom 
means, absolute freedom and not a relative freedom, then you must recognize
that this is the nearest to it you will ever get. If I am against the 
condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I 
want to laugh more. I don’t say that God is one grand laugh: I say that 
you’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim
in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why
it doesn’t matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. 
Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music
is the can-opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes 
you aware that there’s a roof to your being.

The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters,
because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate 
with them and finally they become tame again … no, it is more like being in
a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket 
for another meal. You are in a city that you never expect to be in again 
and you have only to pass the night in your hotel room, but it takes all 
the courage and pluck you possess to stay in that room. There must be a 
good reason why certain cities, certain places, inspire such loathing and 
dread. There must be some kind of perpetual murder going on in these 
places. The people are of the same race as you, they go about their 
business as people do anywhere, they build the same sort of house, no 
better, no worse, they have the same system of education, the same 
currency, the same newspapers - and yet they are absolutely different from 
the other people you know, and the whole atmosphere is different, and the 
rhythm is different and the tension is different. It’s almost like looking 
at yourself in another incarnation. You know, with a most disturbing 
certitude, that what governs life is not money, not politics, not religion,
not training, not race, not language, not customs, but something else, 
something you’re trying to throtde all the time and which is really 
throttling you, because otherwise you wouldn’t be terrified all of a sudden
and wonder how you were going to escape.

Some cities you don’t even have to pass a night in - just an hour or two 
is enough to unnerve you. I think of Bayonne that way. I came on it in the 
night with a few addresses that had been given me. I had a briefcase under 
my arm with a prospectus of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I was supposed to
go under cover of dark and sell the bloody encyclopaedia to some poor 
devils who wanted to improve themselves. If I had been dropped off at 
Helsingfors I couldn’t have felt more ill at ease than walking the streets 
of Bayonne. It wasn’t an American city to me. It wasn’t a city at all, but 
a huge octopus wriggling in the dark. The first door I came to looked so 
forbidding I didn’t even bother to knock; I went like that to several 
addresses before I could summon the courage to knock. The first face I took
a look at frightened the shit out of me. I don’t mean timidity or 
embarrassment - I mean fear. It was the face of a hod-carrier, an ignorant 
mick who would as lief fell you with an axe as spit in your eye. I 
pretended I had the wrong name and hurried on to the next address. Each 
time the door opened I saw another monster. And then I came at last to a 
poor simp who really wanted to improve himself and that broke me down. I 
felt truly ashamed of myself, of my country, my race, my epoch. I had a 
devil of a time persuading him not to buy the damned encyclopaedia. He 
asked me innocently what then had brought me to his home - and without a 
minute’s hesitation I told him an astounding lie, a lie which was later to 
prove a great truth. I told him I was only pretending to sell the 
encyclopaedia in order to meet people and write about them. That interested
him enormously, even more than the encyclopaedia. He wanted to know what I 
would write about him, if I could say. It’s taken me twenty years to answer
that question, but here it is. If you would still like to know, John Doe of
the City of Bayonne, this is it… I owe you a great deal because after that 
lie I told you I left your house and I tore up the prospectus furnished me 
by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I threw it in the gutter. I said to 
myself I will never again go to people under false pretences even if it is 
to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I 
have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write 
about people. And if anybody knocks at my door to sell me something I will 
invite him in and say “why are you doing this?” And if he says it is 
because he has to make a living I will oner him what money I have and beg 
him once again to think what he is doing. I want to prevent as many men as 
possible from pretending that they have to do this or that because they 
must earn a living. It is not true. One can starve to death - it is much 
better. Every man who voluntarily starves to death throws another cog into 
the automatic process.

I would rather see a man take a gun and kill his neighbour, in order to 
get the food he needs, than keep up the automatic process by pretending 
that he has to cam a living. That’s what I want to say, Mr. John Doe.

I pass on. Not the stabbing horror of disaster and calamity, I say, but 
the automatic throwback, the stark panorama of the soul’s atavistic 
struggle. A bridge in North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. Coming out
of lush tobacco fields, low cabins everywhere and the smell of fresh wood 
burning. The day passed in a thick lake of waving green. Hardly a soul in 
sight. Then suddenly a clearing and I’m over a big gulch spanned by a 
rickety wooden bridge. This is the end of the world! How in God’s name I 
got here and why I’m here I don’t know. How am I going to eat? And if I ate
the biggest meal imaginable I would still be sad, frightfully sad. I don’t 
know where to go from here. This bridge is the end, the end of me, the end 
of my known world. This bridge is insanity; there is no reason why it 
should stand there and no reason why people should cross it. I refuse to 
budge another step, I balk at crossing that crazy bridge.

Nearby is a low wall which I lie against trying to think what to do and 
where to go. I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am - the 
need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre, music, cafes, drinks,
and so forth.

It’s terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the 
world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized
is to have complicated needs. And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn’t 
need a thing. All day I had been moving through tobacco fields, and growing
more and more uneasy.

What have I to do with all this tobacco? What am I heading into? People 
everywhere are producing crops and goods for other people - and I am like a
ghost sliding between all this unintelligible activity. I want to find some
kind of work, but I don’t want to be a part of this thing, this infernal 
automatic process. I pass through a town and I look at the newspaper 
telling what is happening in that town and its environs. It seems to me 
that nothing is happening, that the dock has stopped but that these poor 
devils are unaware of it. I have a strong intuition, moreover, that there 
is murder in the air. I can smell it. A few days back I passed the 
imaginary line which divides the North from the South. I wasn’t aware of it
until a darkie came along driving a team; when he gets alongside of me he 
stands up in his seat and doffs his hat most respectfully. He had 
snow-white hair and a face of great dignity. That made me feel horrible: it
made me realize that there are still slaves. This man had to tip his hat to
me -because I was of the white race. Whereas I should have ripped my hat to
him! I should have saluted him as a survivor of all the vile tortures the 
white men have inflicted on the black. I should have tipped my hat first, 
to let him know that I am not a part of this system, that I am begging 
forgiveness for all my white brethren who are too ignorant and cruel to 
make an honest overt gesture.

To-day I feel their eyes on me all the time; they watch from behind 
doors, from behind trees. All very quiet, very peaceful, seemingly. Nigger 
never say nuthin’. Nigger he hum all time-White man think nigger learn his 
place. Nigger leam nuthin’. Nigger wait. Nigger watch everything white man 
do. Nigger no say nuthin’, no sir, no siree. But JUST THE SAME THE nigger 
IS KILLING THE WHITE MAN OFF!

Every time the nigger looks at a white man he’s putting a dagger through 
him.

It’s not the heat, ifs not the hook worm, it’s not the bad crops that’s 
killing the South off - it’s the nigger! The nigger is giving off a poison,
whether he means to or not. The South is coked and doped with nigger 
poison.

Pass on… Sitting outside a barber shop by the James River. I’ll be here 
just ten minutes, while I take a load off my feet. There’s a hotel and a 
few stores opposite me; it all tails off quickly, ends like it began - for 
no reason. From the bottom of my soul I pity the poor devils who are born 
and die here. There is no earthly reason why this place should exist. There
is no reason why anybody should cross the street and get himself a shave 
and haircut, or even a sirloin steak. Men, buy yourselves a gun and kill 
each other off! Wipe this street out of my mind for ever - it hasn’t an 
ounce of meaning in it.

The same day, after nightfall. Still plugging on, digging deeper and 
deeper into the South. I’m coming away from a little town by a short road 
leading to the highway. Suddenly I hear footsteps behind me and soon a 
young man passes me on the trot, breathing heavily and cursing with all his
might. I stand there a moment, wondering what it’s all about. I hear 
another man coming on the trot; he’s an older man and he’s carrying a gun. 
He breathes fairly easy, and not a word out of his trap. Just as he comes 
in view the moon breaks through the clouds and I catch a good look at his 
face. He’s a man hunter. I stand back as the others come up behind him. I’m
trembling with fear. It’s the sheriff, I hear a man say, and he’s going to 
get him. Horrible. I move on towards the highway waiting to hear the shot 
that will end it all. I hear nothing - just this heavy breathing of the 
young man and the quick eager steps of the mob following behind the 
sheriff. Just as I get near the main road a man steps out of the darkness 
and comes over to me very quietly. “Where yer goin’, son,” he says, quiet 
like and almost tenderly. I stammer out something about the next town. 
“Better stay right here, son,” he says. I didn’t say another word. I let 
him take me back into town and hand me over like a thief. I lay on the 
floor with about fifty other blokes. I had a marvellous sexual dream which 
ended with the guillotine.

I plug on … It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don’t have 
the feeling of being an American citizen any more. The part of America I 
came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me 
that it’s beginning to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though some one’s 
got a gun against my back all the time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear.
If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent. I try to pretend 
that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the 
elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks - they 
look me through and through as though I were juicy and edible. I’ve got to 
walk another thousand miles or so as though I had a deep purpose, as though
I were really going somewhere. I’ve got to look sort of grateful, too, that
nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It’s depressing and exhilarating 
at the same time. You’re a marked man - and nobody pulls the trigger. They 
let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown 
yourself.

Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and 
drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corpse out they found
it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I
was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say - because
I wanted to electrify the cosmos! I meant by that a very simple thing -The 
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, the Seaboard Air 
Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered 
wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very
naturally - what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else 
was taking it seriously. I was the only man in the community who was truly 
civilized. There was no place for me - as yet. And yet the books I read, 
the music I heard assured me, that there were other men in the world like 
myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have
an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse 
myself of my spiritual body, as it were.

When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was
less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of 
responsibility. And if it weren’t for the fact that my friends got tired of
lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. 
The world was like a museum to me: I saw nothing to do but eat into this 
marvellous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped on our
hands. It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself. Their logic 
was that art was very beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a 
living and then you will find that you are too tired to think about art. 
But it was when I threatened to add a layer or two on my own account to 
this marvellous chocolate layer cake that they blew up on me. That was the 
finishing touch. That meant I was definitely crazy. First I was considered 
to be a useless member of society; then for a time I was found to be a 
reckless, happy-go-lucky corpse with a tremendous appetite; now I had 
become crazy. (Listen, you bastard, you find yourself a job… we’re through 
with you!) In a way it was refreshing this change of front. I could feel 
the wind blowing through the corridors. At least “we” were no longer 
becalmed. It was war, and as a corpse I was just fresh enough to have a 
little fight left in me. War is revivifying. War stirs the blood. It was in
the midst of the world war, which I had forgotten about, that this change 
of heart took place. I got myself married overnight, to demonstrate to all 
and sundry that I didn’t give a fuck one way or the other. Getting married 
was O.K. in their minds. I remember that, on the strength of the 
announcement, I raised five bucks immediately. My friend MacGregor paid for
the licence and even paid for the shave and haircut which he insisted I go 
through with in order to get married. They said you couldn’t go without 
being shaved; I didn’t see any reason why you couldn’t get hitched up 
without a shave and haircut, but since it didn’t cost me anything I 
submitted to it. It was interesting to see how everybody was eager to 
contribute something to our maintenance. All of a sudden, just because I 
had shown a bit of sense, they came flocking around us - and couldn’t they 
do this and couldn’t they do that for us? Of course the assumption was that
now I would surely be going to work, now I would see that life is serious 
business. It never occurred to them that I might let my wife work for me. I
was really very decent to her in the beginning.

I wasn’t a slave driver. All I asked for was carfare - to hunt for the 
mythical job - and a little pin money for cigarettes, movies, et cetera. 
The important things, such as books, music albums, gramophones, porterhouse
steaks and such like I found we could get on credit, now that we were 
married. The instalment plan had been invented expressly for guys like me. 
The down payment was easy - the rest I left to Providence. One has to live,
they were always saying. Now, by God, that’s what I said to myself - One 
has to live I Live first andpay afterwards. If I saw an overcoat I liked I 
went in and bought it. I would buy it a little in advance of the season 
too, to show that I was a serious-minded chap. Shit, I was a married man 
and soon I would probably be a father - I was entitled to a winter overcoat
at least, no? And when I had the overcoat I thought of stout shoes to go 
with it - a pair of thick cordevans such as I had wanted all my life but 
never could afford. And when it grew bitter cold and I was out looking for 
the job I used to get terribly hungry sometimes - it’s really healthy going
out like that day after day prowling about the city in rain and snow and 
wind and hail - and so now and then I’d drop in to a cosy tavern and order 
myself a juicy porterhouse steak with onions and French fried potatoes. I 
took out life insurance and accident insurance too - it’s important, when 
you’re married, to do things like that, so they told me. Supposing I should
drop dead one day - what then? I remember the guy telling me that, in order
to clinch his argument. I had already told him I would sign up, but he must
have forgotten it. I had said, yes, immediately, out of force of habit, but
as I say, he had evidently overlooked it - or else it was against the code 
to sign a man up until you had delivered the full sales talk. Anyway, I was
just getting ready to ask him how long it would take before you could make 
a loan on the policy when he popped the hypothetical question: Supposing 
you should drop dead one day - what then? I guess he thought I was a little
off my nut the way I laughed at that. I laughed until the tears rolled down
my face. Finally he said - “I don’t see that I said anything so funny.” 
“Well,” I said, getting serious for a moment, “take a good look at me. Now 
tell me, do you think I’m the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens 
once he’s dead?” He was quite taken aback by this, apparently, because the 
next thing he said was: “I don’t think that’s a very ethical attitude. Mr. 
Miller. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your wife to …”

“Listen,” I said, “supposing I told you I don’t give a fuck what happens 
to my wife when I die - what then?” And since this seemed to injure his 
ethical susceptibilities still more I added for good measure - “As far as 
I’m concerned you don’t have to pay the insurance when I croak - I’m only 
doing this to make you feel good. I’m trying to help the world along, don’t
you see? You’ve got to live, haven’t you? Well, I’m just putting a little 
food in your mouth, that’s all. If you have anything else to sell, trot it 
out.

I buy anything that sounds good. I’m a buyer not a seller. I like to see 
people looking happy - that’s why I buy things. Now listen, how much did 
you say that would come to per week? Fifty-seven cents? Fine. What’s 
fifty-seven cents? You see that piano - that comes to about 39 cents a 
week, I think. Look around you … everything you see costs so much a week. 
You say, if I should die, what then? Do you suppose I’m going to die on all
these people? That would be a hell of a joke. No, I’d rather have them come
and take the things away - if I can’t pay for them, I mean…” He was 
fidgeting about and there was a rather glassy stare in his eye, I thought. 
“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting myself, “but wouldn’t you like to have a 
little drink - to wet the policy?” He said he thought not, but I insisted, 
and besides, I hadn’t signed the papers yet and my urine would have to be 
examined and approved of and all sorts of stamps and seals would have to be
affixed - I knew all that crap by heart - so I thought we might have a 
little snifter first and in that way protract the serious business, because
honestly, buying insurance or buying anything was a real pleasure to me and
gave me the feeling that I was just like every other citizen, a man, what! 
and not a monkey. So I got out a bottle of sherry (which is all that was 
allowed me), and I poured out a generous glassful for him, thinking to 
myself that it was fine to see the sherry going because maybe the next time
they’d buy something better for me. “I used to sell insurance too once upon
a time,” I said, raising the glass to my lips. “Sure, I can sell anything. 
The only thing is - I’m lazy. Take a day like to-day - isn’t it nicer to be
indoors, reading a book or listening to the phonograph? Why should I go out
and hustle for an insurance company? If I had been working to-day you 
wouldn’t have caught me in -isn’t that so? No, I think it’s better to take 
it easy and help people out when they come along… like with you, for 
instance. It’s much nicer to buy things than to sell them, don’t you think?
If you have the money, of course! In this house we don’t need much money. 
As I was saying, the piano comes to about 39 cents a week, or forty-two 
maybe, and the …”

“Excuse me, Mr Miller,” he interrupted, “but don’t you think we ought to 
get down to signing these papers?”

“Why, of course,” I said cheerfully. “Did you bring them all with you? 
Which one do you think we ought to sign first? By the way, you haven’t got 
a fountain pen you’d like to sell me, have you?”

“Just sign right here,” he said, pretending to ignore my remarks. “And 
here, that’s it. Now then, Mr. Miller, I think I’ll say good day - and 
you’ll be hearing from the company in a few days.”

“Better make it sooner,” I remarked, leading him to the door, “because I 
might change my mind and commit suicide.”

“Why, of course, why yes, Mr. Miller, certainly we will. Good day now, 
good day!”

Of course the instalment plan breaks down eventually, even if you’re an 
assiduous buyer such as I was. I certainly did my best to keep the 
manufacturers and the advertising men of America busy, but they were 
disappointed in me it seems. Everybody was disappointed in me..But there 
was one man in particular who was more disappointed in me than any one and 
that was a man who had really made an effort to befriend me and whom I had 
let down. I think of him and the way he took me on as his assistant - so 
readily and graciously - because later, when I was hiring and firing like a
42 horse calibre revolver, I was betrayed right and left myself, but by 
that time I had become so inoculated that it didn’t matter a damn. But this
man had gone out of his way to show me that he believed in me. He was the 
editor of a catalogue for a great mail order house.

It was an enormous compendium of horse-shit which was put out once a year
and which took the whole year to make ready. I hadn’t the slightest idea 
what it was all about and why I dropped into his office that day I don’t 
know, unless it was because I wanted to get warm, as I had been knocking 
about the docks all day trying to get a job as a checker or some damned 
thing. It was cosy in his office and I made him a long speech so as to get 
thawed out. I didn’t know what job to ask for - just a job, I said. He was 
a sensitive man and very kind-hearted. He seemed to guess that I was a 
writer, or wanted to be a writer, because soon he was asking me what I 
liked to read and what was my opinion of this writer and that writer. It 
just happened that I had a list of books in my pocket - books I was 
searching for at the public library - and so I brought it out and showed it
to him. “Great Scott!” he exclaimed, “do you really read these books?” I 
modestly shook my head in the affirmative, and then as often happened to me
when I was touched off by some silly remark like that, I began to talk 
about Hamsun’s Mysteries which I had just been reading. From then on the 
man was like putty in my hands. When he asked me if I would like to be his 
assistant he apologized for offering me such a lowly position; he said I 
could take my time learning the ins-and-outs of the job, he was sure it 
would be a cach(?) for me.

And then he asked me if he couldn’t lend me some money, out of his own 
pocket until I got paid. Before I could say yes or no he had fished out a 
twenty dollar bill and thrust it in my hand. Naturally I was touched. I was
ready to work like a son of a bitch for him. Assistant editor - it sounded 
quite good, especially to the creditors in the neighbourhood. And for a 
while I was so happy to be eating roast beef and chicken and tenderloins of
pork that I pretended I liked the job. Actually it was difficult for me to 
keep awake. What I had to learn I had learned in a week’s time. And after 
that? After that I saw myself doing penal servitude for life. In order to 
make the best of it I whiled away the time writing stories and essays and 
long letters to my friends. Perhaps they thought I was writing up new ideas
for the company, because for quite a while nobody paid any attention to me.
I thought it was a wonderful job. I had almost the whole day to myself, for
my writing, having learned to dispose of the company’s work in about an 
hour’s time. I was so enthusiastic about my own private work that I gave 
orders to my underlings not to disturb me except at stipulated moments. I 
was sailing along like a breeze, the company paying me regularly and the 
slave-drivers doing the work I had mapped out for them, when one day, just 
when I am in the midst of an important essay on The Anti-Christ, a man whom
I had never seen before walks up to my desk, bends over my shoulder, and in
a sarcastic tone of voice begins to read aloud what I had just written. I 
didn’t need to inquire who he was or what he was up to - the only thought 
in my head was, and that I repeated to myself frantically - Will I get an 
extra week’s pay? When it came time to bid goodbye to my benefactor I felt 
a little ashamed of myself, particularly when he said, right off the bat 
like - “I tried to get you an extra week’s pay but they wouldn’t hear of 
it. I wish there was something I could do for you - you’re only standing in
your own way, you know. To tell the truth, I still have the greatest faith 
in you - but I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time of it, for a 
while. You don’t fit in anywhere. Some day you’ll make a great writer, I 
feel sure of it.

Well, excuse me,” he added, shaking hands with me warmly, “I’ve got to 
see the boss. Good luck to you!”

I felt a bit cut up about the incident. I.wished it had been possible to 
prove to him then and there that his faith was justified. I wished I could 
have justified myself before the whole world at that moment: I would have 
jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge if it would have convinced people that I 
wasn’t a heartless son of a bitch. I had a heart as big as a whale, as I 
was soon to prove, but nobody was examining into my heart. Everybody was 
being let down hard - not only the instalment companies, but the landlord, 
the butcher, the baker, the gas, water and electricity devils, everybody. 
If only I could get to believe in this business of work! To save my life I 
couldn’t see it. I could only see that people were working their balls off 
because they didn’t know any better. I thought of the speech I had made 
which won me the job. In some ways I was very much like Herr Nagel myself. 
No telling from minute to minute what I would do.

No knowing whether I was a monster or a saint Like so many wonderful men 
of our time. Herr Nagel was a desperate man - and it was this very 
desperation which made him such a likeable chap. Hamsun didn’t know what to
make of this character himself: he knew he existed, and he knew that there 
was something more to him than a mere buffoon and a mysrifier. I think he 
loved Herr Nagel more than any other character he created. And why?

Because Herr Nagel was the unacknowledged saint which every artist is - 
the man who is ridiculed because his solutions, which are truly profound, 
seem too simple for the world. No man wants to be an artist - he is driven 
to it because the world refuses to recognize his proper leadership. Work 
meant nothing to me, because the real work to be done was being evaded. 
People regarded me as lazy and shiftless, but on the contrary I was an 
exceedingly active individual. Even if it was just hunting for a piece of 
tail, that was something, and well worth while, especially if compared to 
other forms of activity -such as making buttons or turning screws, or even 
removing appendixes. And why did people listen to me so readily when I 
applied for a job? Why did they find me entertaining? For the reason, no 
doubt, that I had always spent my time profitably. I brought them gifts - 
from my hours at the public library, from my idle ramblings through the 
streets, from my intimate experiences with women, from my afternoons at the
burlesque, from my visits to the museum and the art galleries. Had I been a
dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much
a week, they wouldn’t have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they 
have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or loaned me money as they 
frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps 
unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn’t 
know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy.
About the big issues I was dear, but confronted by the petty details of 
life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same bewilderment on a 
colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about Ordinary men are 
often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is 
commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different
from what they imagine it to be. But a man who is completely out of step 
with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of
his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically nonexistent. 
Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his 
existence was a mystery, to himself and to every one else. I couldn’t 
afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way - the mystery was too 
intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human 
being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long 
enough and hard enough and the spark will come!

The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practised by certain 
low forms of life, the marvellous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait
endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of 
the pathologic individual, the mystic’s union with the cosmos, the 
immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order 
to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to the X 
root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries 
over from one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, 
because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His 
appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is 
the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he 
acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to 
which he is geared. Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is 
interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on 
from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. 
Everything that happens in between, which is “life” to most people, is 
merely an interruption in his forward round. The eternality of his work, 
when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of 
life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep,
waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth. This is the
big issue, and this was always dear to me, even when I denied it. The 
dissatisfaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation 
to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement. The 
more awake one becomes, an artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do 
anything. Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out 
of the trance. Action, as expressed in creating a work of art, is a 
concession to the automatic principle of death. Drowning myself in the Gulf
of Mexico I was able to partake of an active life which would permit the 
real self to hibernate a until I was ripe to be born. I understood it 
perfectly, though I acted blindly and confusedly. I swam back to the stream
of human activity until I got to the source of all action and there muscled
in, calling myself personnel director of a telegraph company, and allowed 
the tide of humanity to wash over me like great white-capped breakers. All 
this active life, preceding the final act of desperation, led me from doubt
to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which, like a 
continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, 
had already sunk beneath the surface of the sea. The colossal ego was 
submerged, and what people observed moving frantically above the surface 
was the periscope of the soul searching for its target. Everything that 
came within range had to be destroyed, if I were ever to rise again and 
ride the waves. This monster which rose now and then to fix its target with
deadly aim, which dove again and roved and plundered ceaselessly would, 
when the time came, rise for the last time to reveal itself as an ark, 
would gather unto itself a pair of each kind and at last, when the floods 
abated, would settle down on the summit of a lofty mountain peak thence to 
open wide its doors and return to the world what had been preserved from 
the catastrophe.

If I shudder now and then, when I think of my active life, if I have 
nightmares, possibly it is because I think of all the men I robbed and 
murdered in my day sleep. I did everything which my nature bade me to do. 
Nature is eternally whispering in one’s ear - “if you would survive you 
must kill!” Being human, you kill not like the animal but automatically, 
and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are endless, so that you
kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need. The men who are
the most honoured are the greatest killers.

They believe that they are serving their fellowmen, and they are sincere 
in believing so, but they are heartless murderers and at moments, when they
come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic, quixotic acts of
goodness in order to expiate their guilt. The goodness of man stinks more 
than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, 
not an affirmation of the conscious self. Being pushed over the precipice, 
it is easy at the last moment to surrender all one’s possessions, to turn 
and extend a last embrace to all who are left behind. How are we to stop 
the blind rush? How are we to stop the automatic process, each one pushing 
the other over the precipice?

As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading “Do not 
abandon all hope ye who enter here!” - as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, 
No, I realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was
a puppet in whose hands society had placed a gatling gun. If I performed a 
good deed it was no different, ultimately, than if I had performed a bad 
deed. I was like an equals sign through which the algebraic swarm of 
humanity was passing. I was a rather important, active equals sign, like a 
general in time of war, but no matter how competent I were to become I 
could never change into a plus or a minus sign. Nor could any one else, as 
far as I could determine. Our whole life was built up on this principle of 
equation. The integers had become symbols which were shuffled about in the 
interests of death. Pity, despair, passion, hope, courage - these were the 
temporal refractions caused by looking at equations from varying angles. To
stop the endless juggling by turning one’s back on it, or by facing it 
squarely and writing about it, would be no help either. In a hall of 
mirrors there is no way to turn your back on yourself. I will not do this… 
I will do some other thing I Very good. But can you do nothing at all? Can 
you stop thinking about not doing anything? Can you stop dead, and without 
thinking, radiate the truth which you know? That was the idea which lodged 
in the back of my head and which burned and burned, and perhaps when I was 
most expansive most radiant with energy, most sympathetic, most willing, 
helpful, sincere, good, it was this fixed idea which was shining through, 
and automatically I was saying - “why, don’t mention it … nothing at all, I
assure you … no, please don’t thank me. it’s nothing,” etc. etc. From 
firing the gun so many hundreds of times a day perhaps I didn’t even notice
the detonations any more; perhaps I thought I was opening pigeon traps and 
filling the sky with milky white fowl. Did you ever see a synthetic monster
on the screen, a Frankenstein realized in flesh and blood? Can you imagine 
how he might be trained to pull a trigger and see pigeons flying at the 
same time? Frankenstein is not a myth: Frankenstein is a very real creation
born of the personal experience of a sensitive human being.

The monster is always more real when it does not assume the proportions 
of flesh and blood. The monster of the screen is nothing compared to the 
monster of the imagination; even the existent pathologic monsters who find 
their way into the police station are but feeble demonstrations of the 
monstrous reality which the pathologist lives with. But to be the monster 
and the pathologist at the same time - that is reserved for certain species
of men who, disguised as artists, are supremely aware that sleep is an even
greater danger than insomnia. In order not to fall asleep, in order not to 
become victims of that insomnia which is called “living”, they resort to 
the drug of putting words together endlessly.

This is not an automatic process, they say, because there is always 
present the illusion that they can stop it at will. But they cannot stop; 
they have only succeeded in creating an illusion, which is perhaps a feeble
something, but it is far from being wide awake and neither active nor 
inactive. I wanted to be wide awake without talking or writing about it, in
order to accept life absolutely. I mentioned the archaic men in the remote 
places of the world with who, I was communicating frequently. Why did I 
think these “savages” more capable of understanding me than the men and 
women who surrounded me? Was I crazy to believe such a thing? I don’t think
so in the least. These “savages”

are the degenerate remnants of earlier races of man who, I believe, must 
have had a greater hold on reality. The immortality of the race is 
constantly before oar eyes in these specimens of the past who linger on in 
withered splendour.

Whether the human race is immortal or not is not my concern, but the 
vitality of the race does mean something to me, and that it should be 
active or dormant means even more. As the vitality of the new race banks 
down the vitality of the old races manifests itself to the waking mind with
greater and greater significance. The vitality of the old races lingers on 
even in death, but the vitality of the new race which is about to die seems
already non-existent. If a man were taking a swarming hive of bees to the 
river to drown them… That was the image I carried about in me. If only I 
were the man, and not the bee! In some vague, inexplicable way I knew that 
I was the man, that I would not be drowned in the hive, like the others. 
Always, when we came forwards in a group I was signalled to stand apart; 
from birth I was favoured that way, and, no matter what tribulations I went
through, I knew they were not fatal or lasting. Also, another strange thing
took place in me whenever I was called to stand forth. I knew that I was 
superior to the man who was summoning me! The tremendous humility which I 
practised was not hypocritical but a condition provoked by the realization 
of the fateful character of the situation. The intelligence which I 
possessed, even as a stripling, frightened me; it was the intelligence of a
“savage”, which is always superior to that of civilized men in that it is 
more adequate to the exigencies of circumstance. It is a life intelligence,
even though life has seemingly passed them by. I felt almost as if I had 
been shot forward into a round of existence which for the rest of mankind 
had not yet attained its full rhythm. I was obliged to mark time if I were 
to remain with them and not be shunted off to another sphere of existence. 
On the other hand, I was in many ways lower than the human beings about me.
It was as though I had come out of the fires of hell not entirely purged. I
had still a tail and a pair of horns, and when my passions were aroused I 
breathed a sulphurous poison which was annihilating. I was always called a 
“lucky devil”.

The good that happened to me was called “luck”, and the evil was always 
regarded as a result of my shortcomings. Rather, as the fruit of my 
blindness. Rarely did any one ever spot the evil in me! I was as adroit, in
this respect, as the devil himself. But that I was frequently blind, 
everybody could see that. And at such times I was left alone, shunned, like
the devil himself. Then I left the world, returned to the fires of hell - 
voluntarily. These comings and goings are as real to me, more real, in 
fact, than anything that happened in between. The friends who think they 
know me know nothing about me for the reason that the real me changed hands
countless times. Neither the men who thanked me, nor the men who cursed me,
knew with whom they were dealing. Nobody ever got on to a solid footing 
with me, because I was constantly liquidating my personality. I was keeping
what is called the “personality” in abeyance for the moment when, leaving 
it to coagulate, it would adopt a proper human rhythm. I was hiding my face
until the moment when I would find myself in step with the world. All this 
was, of course, a mistake. Even the role of artist is worth adopting, while
marking time. Action is important, even if it entails futile activity. One 
should not say Yes, No, Yes, No, even seated in the highest place.

One should not be drowned in the human tidal wave, even for the sake of 
becoming a Master. One must beat with his own rhythm - at any price. I 
accumulated thousands of years of experience in a few short years, but the 
experience was wasted because I had no need of it. I had already been 
crucified and marked by the cross; I had been born free of the need to 
suffer - and yet I knew no other way to struggle forward than to repeat the
drama. All my intelligence was against it. Suffering is futile, my 
intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily. 
Suffering has never taught me a thing; for others it may still be 
necessary, but for me it is nothing more than an algebraic demonstration of
spiritual inadaptability. The whole drama which the man of today is acting 
out through suffering does not exist for me: it never did, actually. All my
Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of 
hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being 
forgotten.

Another thing … the mystery which enveloped my behaviour grew deeper the 
nearer I came to the circle of uterine relatives. The mother from whose 
loins I sprang was a complete stranger to me. To begin with, after giving 
birth to me she gave birth to my sister, whom I usually refer to as my 
brother. My sister was a sort of harmless monster, an angel who had been 
given the body of an idiot. It gave me a strange feeling, as a boy, to be 
growing up and developing side by side with this being who was doomed to 
remain all her life a mental dwarf. It was impossible to be a brother to 
her because it was impossible to regard this atavistic hulk of a body as a 
“sister”.

She would have functioned perfectly, I imagine, among the Australian 
primitives.

She might even have been raised to power and eminence among them, for, as
I said, she was the essence of goodness, she knew no evil. But so far as 
living the civilized life goes she was helpless; she not only had no desire
to kill but she had no desire to thrive at the expense of others. She was 
incapacitated for work, because even if they had been able to train her to 
make caps for high explosives, for example, she might absentmindedly throw 
her wages in the river on the way home or she might give them to a beggar 
in the street. Often in my presence she was whipped like a dog for having 
performed some beautiful act of grace in her absentmindedness, as they 
called it. Nothing was worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed 
without reason. I had received the same punishment as my sister, in the 
beginning, because I too had a habit of giving things away, especially new 
things which had just been given me. I had even received a bearing once, at
the age of five, for having advised my mother to cut a wart off her finger.
She had asked me what to do about it one day and, with my limited knowledge
of medicine, I told her to cut it off with scissors, which she did, like an
idiot. A few days later she got blood poisoning and then she got hold of me
and she said - “you told me to cut it off, didn’t you?” and she gave me a 
sound thrashing. From that day on I knew that I was born in the wrong 
household. From that day on I learned like lightning. Talk about 
adaptation! By the time I was ten I had lived out the whole theory of 
evolution. And there I was, evolving through all the phases of animal life 
and yet chained to this creature called my “sister” who was evidently a 
primitive being and who would never, even at the age of ninety, arrive at a
comprehension of the alphabet Instead of growing up like a stalwart tree I 
began to lean to one side, in complete defiance of the law of gravity. 
Instead of shooting out limbs and leaves I grew windows and turrets. The 
whole being, as it grew, was turning into stone, and the higher I shot up 
the more I defied the law of gravity. I was a phenomenon in the midst of 
the landscape, but one which attracted people and elicited praise. If the 
mother who bore us had only made another effort perhaps a marvellous white 
buffalo might have been born and the three of us might have been 
permanently installed in a museum and protected for life. The conversations
which took place between the leaning tower of Pisa, the whipping post, the 
snorting machine and the pterodactyl in human flesh were, to say the least,
a bit queer. Anything might be the subject of conversation - a bread crumb 
which the “sister” had overlooked in brushing the tablecloth or Joseph’s 
coat of many colours which, in the old man’s tailoring brain, might have 
been either double-breasted or cutaway or frock. If I came from the ice 
pond, where I had been skating all afternoon, the important thing was not 
the ozone which I had breathed free of charge, nor the geometric 
convolutions which were strengthening my muscles, but the little spot of 
rust under the clamps which, if not rubbed off immediately, might 
deteriorate the whole skate and bring about the dissolution of some 
pragmatic value which was incomprehensible to my prodigal turn of thought. 
This little rust spot, to take a trifling example, might entrain the most 
hallucinating results. Perhaps the “sister”, in searching for the kerosene 
can, might overturn the jar of prunes which were being stewed and thus 
endanger all our lives by robbing us of the required calories in the 
morrow’s meal. A severe beating would have to be given, not in anger, 
because that would disturb the digestive apparatus, but silently and 
efficiently, as a chemist would beat up the white of an egg in preparation 
for a minor analysis.

But the “sister”, not understanding the prophylactic nature of the 
punishment, would give vent to the most bloodcurdling screams and this 
would so affect the old man that he would.go out for a walk and return two 
or three hours later blind drunk and, what was worse, scratching a little 
paint off the rolling doors in his blind staggers. The little piece of 
paint that had been chipped off would bring on a battle royal which was 
very bad for my dream life, because in my dream life I frequently changed 
places with my sister, accepting the tortures inflicted upon her and 
nourishing them with my supersensitive brain. It was in these dreams, 
always accompanied by the sound of glass breaking, of shrieks, curses, 
groans and sobs, that I gathered an unformulated knowledge of the ancient 
mysteries, of the rites of initiation, of the transmigration of souls and 
so on. It might begin with a scene from real life - the sister standing by 
the blackboard in the kitchen, the mother towering over her with a ruler, 
saying two and two makes how much? and the sister screaming five. Bang! no,
seven. Bang! no, thirteen, eighteen as twenty! I would be sitting at the 
table, doing my lessons, just in real life during these scenes, when by a 
slight twist or squirm, perhaps as I saw the ruler come down on the 
sister’s face, suddenly I would be in another realm where glass was 
unknown, as it was unknown to the Kickapoos or the Lenni-Lenapi. The faces 
of those about me were familiar - they were my uterine relatives who, for 
some mysterious reason, failed to recognize me in this new ambiance. They 
were garbed in black and the colour of their skin was ash grey, like that 
of the Tibetan devils. They were all fitted out with knives and other 
instruments of torture; they belonged to the caste of sacrificial butchers.
I seemed to have absolute liberty and the authority of a god, and yet by 
some capricious turn of events the end would be that I’d be lying on the 
sacrificial block and one of my charming uterine relatives would be bending
over me with a gleaming knife to cut out my heart. In sweat and terror I 
would begin to recite “my lessons” in a high, screaming voice, faster and 
faster, as I felt the knife searching for my heart. Two and two is four, 
five and five is ten, earth, air, fire, water, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, 
hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, Meocene, Pleocene, Eocene, the Father, the Son,
the Holy Ghost, Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, red, blue, yellow, the 
sorrel, the persimmon, the pawpaw, the catalpa…faster and faster… Odin, 
Wotan, Parsifal, King Alfred, Frederick the Great, the Hanseatic League, 
the Battle of Hastings, Thermopylae, 1492, 1786, 1812, Admiral Farragut, 
Pickett’s charge. The Light Brigade, we are gathered here today, the Lord 
is my shepherd, I shall not, one and indivisible, no, 16, no, 27, help! 
murder! police! - and yelling louder and louder and going faster and faster
I go completely off my nut and there is no more pain, no more terror, even 
though they are piercing me everywhere with knives. Suddenly I am 
absolutely calm and the body which is lying on the block, which they are 
still gouging with glee and ecstasy, feels nothing because I, the owner of 
it, have escaped. I have become a tower of stone which leans over the scene
and watches with scientific interest.

I have only to succumb to the law of gravity and I will fall on them and 
obliterate them. But I do not succumb to the law of gravity because I am 
too fascinated by the horror of it all. I am so fascinated, in fact, that I
grow more and more windows. And as the light penetrates the stone interior 
of my being I can feel that my roots, which are in the earth, are alive and
that I shall one day be able to remove myself at will from this trance in 
which I am fixed.

So much for the dream, in which I am helplessly rooted. But in actuality,
when the dear uterine relatives come, I am as free as a bird and darting to
and fro like a magnetic needle. If they ask me a question I give them five 
answers, each of which is better than the other; if they ask me to play a 
waltz I play a double-breasted sonata for the left hand; if they ask me to 
help myself to another leg of chicken I dean up the plate, dressing and 
all; if they urge me to go out and play in the street I go out and in my 
enthusiasm I cut my cousin’s head open with a tin can: if they threaten to 
give me a thrashing I say go to it, I don’t mind! If they pat me on the 
head for my good progress at school I spit on the floor to show that I have
still something to learn. I do everything they wish me to do plus. If they 
wish me to be quiet and say nothing I become as quiet as a rock: I don’t 
hear when they speak to me, I don’t move when I’m touched, I don’t cry when
I’m pinched, I don’t budge when I’m pushed. If they complain that I’m 
stubborn I become as pliant and yielding as rubber. If they wish me to get 
fatigued so that I will not display too much energy I let them give me all 
kinds of work to do and I do the jobs so thoroughly that I collapse on the 
floor finally like a sack of wheat. If they wish me to be reasonable I 
become ultra-reasonable, which drives them crazy. If they wish me to obey I
obey to the letter, which causes endless confusion. And all this because 
the molecular life of brother-and-sister is incompatible with the atomic 
weights which have been allotted us. Because she doesn’t grow at all I grow
like a mushroom; because she has no personality I become a colossus; 
because she is free of evil I become a thirty-two branched candelabra of 
evil; because she demands nothing of any one I demand everything; because 
she inspires ridicule everywhere I inspire fear and respect; because she is
humiliated and tortured I wreak vengeance upon every one, friend and foe 
alike; because she is helpless I make myself all-powerful. The gigantism 
from which I suffered was simply the result of an effort to wipe out the 
little stain of rust which had attached itself to the family skate, so to 
speak. That little stain of rust under the clamps made me a champion 
skater. It made me skate so fast and furiously that even when the ice had 
melted I was still skating, skating through the mud, through asphalt, 
through brooks and rivers and melon patches and theories of economics and 
so forth. I could skate through hell, I was that fast and nimble.

But all this fancy skating was of no use - Father Coxcox, the 
pan-American Noah, was always calling me back to the Ark. Every time I 
stopped skating there was a cataclysm - the earth opened up and swallowed 
me. I was a brother to every man and at the same time a traitor to myself. 
I made the most astounding sacrifices, only to find that they were of no 
value. Of what use was it to prove that I could be what was expected of me 
when I did not want to be any of these things?

Every time you come to the limit of what is demanded of you, you are 
faced with the same problem - to be yourself! And with the first step you 
make in this direction you realize that there is neither plus nor minus; 
you throw the skates away and swim. There is no suffering any more because 
there is nothing which can threaten your security. And there is no desire 
to be of help to others even, because why rob them of a privilege which 
must be earned? Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous 
infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. 
Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be 
anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of 
your action and your action is the harvest of your thought.

Thought and action are one, because swimming you are in it and of it, and
it is everything you desire it to be, no more, no less. Every stroke counts
for eternity. The heating and cooling system is one system, and Cancer is 
separated from Capricorn only by an imaginary line. You don’t become 
ecstatic and you are not plunged into violent grief; you don’t pray for 
rain, neither do you dance a jig. You live like a happy rock in the midst 
of the ocean: you are fixed while everything about you is in turbulent 
motion. You are fixed in a reality which permits the thought that nothing 
is fixed, that even the happiest and mightiest rock will one day be utterly
dissolved and fluid as the ocean from which it was born.

This is the musical life which I was approaching by first skating like a 
maniac through all the vestibules and corridors which lead from the outer 
to the inner.

My struggles never brought me near it, nor did my furious activity, nor 
my rubbing elbows with humanity. All that was simply a movement from vector
to vector in a circle which however the perimeter expanded, remained withal
parallel to the realm I speak of. The wheel of destiny can be transcended 
at any moment because at every point of its surface it touches the real 
world and only a spark of illumination is necessary to bring about the 
miraculous, to transform the skater to a swimmer and the swimmer to a rock.
The rock is merely an image of the act which stops the futile rotation of 
the wheel and plunges the being into full consciousness. And full 
consciousness is indeed like an inexhaustible ocean which gives itself to 
sun and moon and also includes the sun and moon.

Everything which is is born out of the limitless ocean of light - even 
the night.

Sometimes, in the ceaseless revolutions of the wheel, I caught a glimpse 
of the nature of the jump which it was necessary to make. To jump dear of 
the clockwork - that was the liberating thought. To be something more, 
something different, than the most brilliant maniac of the earth! The story
of man on earth bored me. Conquest, even the conquest of evil, bored me. To
radiate goodness is marvellous, because it is tonic, invigorating, 
vitalizing. But just to be is still more marvellous, because it is endless 
and requires no demonstration. To be is music, which is a profanation of 
silence in the interests of silence, and therefore beyond good and evil. 
Music is the manifestation of action without activity. It is the pure act 
of creation swimming on its own bosom. Music neither goads nor defends, 
neither seeks nor explains. Music is the noisdess sound made by the swimmer
in the ocean of consdousness. It is a reward which can only be given by 
oneself. It is the gift of the god which one is because he has ceased 
thinking about god. It is an augur of the God which every one will become 
in due time, when all that is will be beyond imagination.

coda

Not long ago I was walking the streets of New York. Dear old Broadway. It
was night and the sky was an Oriental blue, as blue as the gold in the 
ceiling of the Pagode, rue de Babylone, when the machine starts clicking. I
was passing exactly below the place where we first met. I stood there a 
moment looking up at the red lights in the windows. The music sounded as it
always sounded - light, peppery, enchanting. I was alone and there were 
millions of people around me. It came over me, as I stood there, that I 
wasn’t thinking of her any more; I was thinking of this book which I am 
writing, and the book had become more important to me than her, than all 
that had happened to us. Will this book be the truth, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth, so help me God? Plunging into the crowd again I 
wrestled with this question of “truth”. For years I have been trying to 
tell this story and always the question of truth has weighed upon me like a
nightmare. Time and again I have related to others the circumstances of our
life, and I have always told the truth. But the truth can also be a lie. 
The truth is not enough. Truth is only the core of a totality which is 
inexhaustible.

I remember the first time we were ever separated this idea of totality 
seized me by the hair. She pretended, when she left me, or maybe she 
believed it herself, that it was necessary for our welfare. I knew in my 
heart that she was trying to be free of me, but I was too cowardly to admit
it to myself. But when I realized that she could do without me, even for a 
limited time, the truth which I had tried to shut out began to grow with 
alarming rapidity. It was more painful than anything I had ever experienced
before, but it was also healing. When I was completely emptied, when the 
loneliness had reached such a point that it could not be sharpened any 
further, I suddenly felt that, to go on living, this intolerable truth had 
to be incorporated into something greater than the frame of personal 
misfortune. I felt that I had made an imperceptible switch into another 
realm, a realm of tougher, more elastic fibre, which the most horrible 
truth was powerless to destroy. I sat down to write her a letter telling 
her that I was so miserable over the thought of losing her that I had 
decided to begin a book about her, a book which would immortalize her. It 
would be a book, I said, such as no one had ever seen before. I rambled on 
ecstatically, and in the midst of it I suddenly broke off to ask myself why
I was so happy.

Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized 
suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was 
planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me 
which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have 
been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of 
an “end” is intolerable to me.

Truth lies in this knowledge of the end which is ruthless and 
remorseless. We can know the truth and accept it, or we can refuse the 
knowledge of it and neither die nor be born again. In this manner it is 
possible to live forever, a negative life as solid and complete, or as 
dispersed and fragmentary, as the atom. And if we pursue this road far 
enough, even this atomic eternity can yield to nothingness and the universe
itself fall apart.

For years now I have been trying to tell this story; each time I have 
started out I have chosen a different route. I am like an explorer who, 
wishing to circumnavigate the globe, deems it unnecessary to carry even a 
compass. Moreover, from dreaming over it so long, the story itself has come
to resemble a vast, fortified city, and I who dream it over and over, am 
outside the city, a wanderer, arriving before one gate after another too 
exhausted to enter. And as with the wanderer, this city in which my story 
is situated eludes me perpetually. Always in sight it nevertheless remains 
unattainable, a sort of ghostly citadel floating in the clouds. From the 
soaring, crenellated battlements flocks of huge white geese swoop down in 
steady, wedge-shaped formation. With the tips of their blue-white wings 
they brush the dreams that dazzle my vision. My feet move confusedly; no 
sooner do I gain a foothold than I am lost again. I wander aimlessly, 
trying to gain a solid, unshakeable foothold whence I can command a view of
my life, but behind me there lies only a welter of crisscrossed tracks, a 
groping, confused encircling, the spasmodic gambit of the chicken whose 
head has just been lopped off.

Whenever I try to explain to myself the peculiar pattern which my life 
has taken, when I reach back to the first cause, as it were, I think 
inevitably of the girl I first loved. It seems to me that everything dates 
from that aborted affair. A strange, masochistic affair it was, ridiculous 
and tragic at the same time. Perhaps I had the pleasure of kissing her two 
or three times, the sort of kiss one reserves for a goddess. Perhaps I saw 
her alone several times.

Certainly she could never have dreamed that for over a year I walked past
her home every night hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the window. Every 
night after dinner I would get up from the table and take the long route 
which led to her home. She was never at the window when I passed and I 
never had the courage to stand in front of the house and wait. Back and 
forth I passed, back and forth, but never hide nor hair of her. Why didn’t 
I write her? Why didn’t I call her up? Once I remember summoning enough 
pluck to invite her to the theatre. I arrived at her home with a bunch of 
violets, the first and only time I ever bought flowers for a woman. As we 
were leaving the theatre the violets dropped from her corsage, and in my 
confusion I stepped on them. I begged her to leave them there, but she 
insisted on gathering them up. I was thinking how awkward I was - it was 
only long afterwards that I recalled the smile she had given me as she 
stooped down to pick up the violets.

It was a complete fiasco. In the end I ran away. Actually I was running 
away from another woman, but the day before leaving town I decided to see 
her once again. It was midaftemoon and she came out to talk to me in the 
street, in the little areaway which was fenced on”. She was already engaged
to another man; she pretended to be happy about it but I could see, blind 
as I was, that she wasn’t as happy as she pretended to be. If I had only 
said the word I am sure she would have dropped the other fellow; perhaps 
she would even have gone away with me. I preferred to punish myslef. I said
goodbye nonchalantly and I went down the street like a dead man. The next 
morning I was bound for the Coast, determined to start a new life.

The new life was also a fiasco. I ended up on a ranch in Chula Vista, the
most miserable man that ever walked the earth. There was this girl I loved 
and there was the other woman, for whom I felt only a profound pity. I had 
been living with her for two years, this other woman, but it seemed like a 
lifetime. I was twenty-one and she admitted to be thirty-six. Every time I 
looked at her I said to myself - when I am thirty she will be forty-five, 
when I am forty she will be fifty-five, when I am fifty she will be 
sixty-five. She had fine wrinkles under the eyes, laughing wrinkles, but 
wrinkles just the same. When I kissed her they magnified a dozen times. She
laughed easily, but her eyes were sad, terribly sad. They were Armenian 
eyes. Her hair, which had been red once, was now a peroxide blonde. 
Otherwise she was adorable - a Venusian body, a Venusian soul, loyal 
lovable, grateful, everything a woman should be, except that she was 
fifteen years older. The fifteen years difference drove me crazy. When I 
went out with her I thought only - how will it be ten years hence? Or else,
what age does she seem to have now? Do I look old enough for her? Once we 
got back to the house it was all right. Climbing the stairs I would run my 
fingers up her crotch, which used to make her whinny like a horse. If her 
son, who was almost my age, were in bed we would dose the doors and lock 
ourselves in the kitchen.

She’d lie on the narrow kitchen table and I’d slough it into her. It was 
marvellous. And what made it more marvellous was that with each performance
I would say to myself - This is the last time … tomorrow I will beat it! 
And then, since she was the janitress, I would go down to the cellar and 
roll the ash barrels out for her. In the morning, when the son had left for
work, I would climb up to the roof and air the bedding. Both she and the 
son had T.B….

Sometimes there were no table bouts. Sometimes the hopelessness of it all
got me by the throat and I would put on my things and go for a walk. Now 
and then I forgot to return. And when I did that I was more miserable than 
ever, because I knew that she would be waiting for me with those large 
sorrowful eyes. I’d go back to her like a man who had a sacred duty to 
perform. I’d lie down on the bed and let her caress me; I’d study the 
wrinkles under her eyes and the roots of her hair which were turning red. 
Lying there like that, I would often think about the other one, the one I 
loved, would wonder if she were lying down for it too, or… Those long walks
I took 365 days of the year! - I would go over them in my mind lying beside
the other woman. How many times since have I relived these walks! The 
dreariest, bleakest, ugliest streets man ever created. In anguish I relive 
these walks, these streets, these first smashed hopes. The window is there,
but no Melisande; the garden too is there, but no sheen of gold. Pass and 
repass, the window always vacant. The evening star hangs low; Tristan 
appears, then Fidelio, and then Oberon. The hydra-headed dog barks with all
his mouths and though there are no swamps I hear the frogs croaking 
everywhere. Same houses, same car-lines, same everything. She is hiding 
behind the curtain, she is waiting for me to pass, she is doing this or 
doing that…

but she is not there, never, never, never. Is it a grand opera or is it a
hurdygurdy playing? It is Amato bursting his golden lung; it is the 
Rubaiyat, it is Mount Everest, it is a moonless night, it is a sob at dawn,
it is a boy making believe, it is Puss in the Boot, it is Mauna Loa, it is 
fox or astrakhan, it is of no stuff and no time, it is endless and it 
begins over and over, under the heart, in the back of the throat, in the 
soles of the feet, and why not just once, just once, for the love of 
Christ, just a shadow or a rustle of the curtain, or a breath on the 
window-pane, something once, if only a lie, something to stop the pain, to 
stop this walking up and down … Walking homeward. Same houses, same lamp 
posts, same everything. I walk past my own home, past the cemetery, past 
the gas tanks, past the car barns, past the reservoir, out into the open 
country. I sit beside the road with my head in my hands and sob. Poor 
bugger that I am, I can’t contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I 
would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.

Meanwhile the other one is waiting. I can see her again as she sat on the
low stoop waiting for. me, her eyes large and dolorous, her face pale and 
trembling trembling with eagerness. Pity I always thought it was that 
brought me back, but now as I walk towards her and see the look in her eyes
I don’t know any more what it is, only that we will go inside and lie 
together and she will get up half weeping, half laughing, and she will grow
very silent and watch me, study me as I move about, and never ask me what 
is torturing me, never, never, because that is the one thing she fears, the
one thing she dreads to know. I don’t love you! Can’t she hear me screaming
it? I don’t love you! Over and over I yell it, with lips tight, with hatred
in my heart, with despair, with hopeless rage. But the words never leave my
lips. I look at her and I am tongue-tied. I can’t do it … Time, time, 
endless time on our hands and nothing to fill it but lies.

Well, I don’t want to rehearse the whole of my life leading up to the 
fatal moment - it is too long and too painful. Besides, did my life really 
lead up to this culminating moment? I doubt it. I think there were 
innumerable moments when I had the chance to make a beginning, but I lacked
the strength and the faith.

On the night in question I deliberately walked out on myself: I walked 
right out of the old life and into the new. There wasn’t the slightest 
effort involved. I was thirty then. I had a wife and child and what is 
called a “responsible” position. These are the facts and facts mean 
nothing. The truth is my desire was so great it became a reality. At such a
moment what a man does is of no great importance, it’s what he is that 
counts. It’s at such a moment that a man becomes an angel. That is 
precisely what happened to me: I became an angel. It is not the purity of 
an angel which is so valuable, as the fact it can fly. An angel can break 
the pattern anywhere at any moment and find its heaven; it has the power to
descend into the lowest matter and to extricate itself at will. The night 
in question I understood it perfectly. I was pure and inhuman, I was 
detached, I had wings. I was depossessed of the past and I had no concern 
about the future. I was beyond ecstasy. When I left the office I folded my 
wings and hid them beneath my coat.

The dance hall was just opposite the side entrance of the theatre where I
used to sit in the afternoons instead of looking for work. It was a street 
of theatres and I used to sit there for hours at a time dreaming the most 
violent dreams. The whole theatrical life of New York was concentrated in 
that one street, so it seemed. It was Broadway, it was success, fame, 
glitter, paint, the asbestos curtain and the hole in the curtain. Sitting 
on the steps of the theatre I used to stare at the dance hall opposite, at 
the string of red lanterns which even in the summer afternoons were lit up.
In every window there was a spinning ventilator which seemed to waft the 
music into the street, where it was broken by the jangled din of traffic. 
Opposite the other side of the dance hall was a comfort station and here 
too I used to sit now and then, hoping either to make a woman or make a 
touch. Above the comfort station, on the street level, was a kiosk with 
foreign papers and magazines; the very sight of these papers, of the 
strange languages in which they were printed, was sufficient to dislocate 
me for the day.

Without the slightest premeditation I climbed the stairs to the dance 
hall, went directly to the little window of the booth where Nick, the 
Greek, sat with a roll of tickets in front of him. Like the urinal below 
and the steps of the theatre, this hand of the Greek now seems to me a 
separate and detached thing - the enormous, hairy hand of an ogre borrowed 
from some horrible Scandinavian fairy-tale. It was the hand which spoke to 
me always, the hand which said “Miss Mara will not be here tonight,” or 
“Yes, Miss Mara is coming late tonight.” It was this hand which I dreamt of
as a child when I slept in the bedroom with the barred window. In my 
fevered sleep suddenly this window would light up, to reveal the ogre 
clutching at the bars. Night after night the hairy monster visited me, 
clutching at the bars and gnashing its teeth, I would awake in a cold 
sweat, the house dark, the room absolutely silent Standing at the edge of 
the dance floor I notice her coming towards me; she is coming with sails 
spread, the large full face beautifully balanced on the long, columnar 
neck. I see a woman perhaps eighteen, perhaps thirty, with blue-black hair 
and a large white face, a full white face in which the eyes shine 
brilliantly. She has on a tailored blue suit of duveteen. I remember 
distinctly now the fulness other body, and that her hair was fine and 
straight, parted on the side, like a man’s. I remember the smile she gave 
me - knowing, mysterious, fugitive - a smile that sprang up suddenly, like 
a puff of wind.

The whole being was concentrated in the face. I could have taken just the
head and walked home with it; I could have put it beside me at night, on a 
pillow, and made love to it. The mouth and the eyes, when they opened up, 
the whole being glowed from them. There was an illumination which came from
some unknown source, from a centre hidden deep in the earth. I could think 
of nothing but the face, the strange, womb-like quality of the smile, the 
engulfing immediacy of it. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting 
that it was like the flash of a knife. This smile, this face, was borne 
aloft on a long white neck, the sturdy, swan-like neck of the medium - and 
of the lost and the damned.

I stand on the comer under the red lights, waiting for her to come down. 
It is about two in the morning and she is signing off. I am standing on 
Broadway with a flower in my buttonhole, feeling absolutely clean and 
alone. Almost the whole evening we have been talking about Strindberg, 
about a character of his named Henriette. I listened with such tense 
alertness that I fell into a trance. It was as if, with the opening phrase,
we had started on a race - in opposite directions. Henriette! Almost 
immediately the name was mentioned she began to talk about herself without 
ever quite losing hold of Henriette. Henriette was attached to her by a 
long, invisible string which she manipulated imperceptibly with one finger,
like the street-hawker who stands a little removed from the black doth, on 
the sidewalk, apparently indifferent to the little mechanism which is 
jiggling on the doth, but betraying himself by the spasmodic movement of 
the little finger to which the black thread is attached. Henriette is me, 
my real self, she seemed to be saying. She wanted me to believe that 
Henriette was really the incarnation of evil. She said it so naturally, so 
innocendy, with an almost subhuman candour - how was I to believe that she 
meant it? I could only smile, as though to show her I was convinced.

Suddenly I fed her coming. I turn my head. Yes, there she is coming full 
on, the sails spread, the eyes glowing. For the first time I see now what a
carriage she has. She comes forward like a bird, a human bird wrapped in a 
big soft fur. The engine is going full steam: I want to shout, to give a 
blast that will make the whole world cock its ears. What a walk! It’s not a
walk, it’s a glide. Tall, stately, full-bodied, self-possessed, she cuts 
the smoke and jazz and red-light glow like the queen mother of all the 
slippery Babylonian whores. On the comer of Broadway just opposite the 
comfort station, this is happening. Broadway - it’s her realm. This is 
Broadway, this is New York, this is America. She’s America on foot, winged 
and sexed. She is the lubet, the abominate and the sublimate - with a dash 
of hydrochloric add, nitto-glycerine, laudanum and powdered onyx. Opulence 
she has, and magnificence: it’s America right or wrong, and the ocean on 
other side. For the first time in my life the whole continent hits me full 
force, hits me between the eyes. This is America, buffaloes or no 
buffaloes, America the emery wheel of hope and disillusionment. Whatever 
made America made her, bone, blood, muscle, eyeball, gait, rhythm; poise; 
confidence; brass and hollow gut. She’s almost on top of me, the full face 
gleaming like calcium. The big soft fur is slipping from her shoulder. She 
doesn’t notice it.

She doesn’t seem to care if her clothes should drop off. She doesn’t give
a fuck about anything. It’s America moving like a streak of lightning 
towards the glass warehouse of red-blooded hysteria. Amurrica, fur or no 
fur, shoes or no shoes.

Amurrica C.O.D. And scram, you bastards, before we plug you! It’s got me 
in the guts, I’m quaking. Something’s coming to me and there’s no dodging 
it. She’s coming head on, through the plate-glass window. If she would only
stop a second, if she would only let me be for just one moment. But no, not
a single moment does she grant me. Swift, ruthless, imperious, like Fate 
itself she is on me, a sword cutting me through and through…

She has me by the hand, she holds it tight. I walk beside her without 
fear.

Inside me the stars are twinkling; inside me a great blue vault where a 
moment ago the engines were pounding furiously.

One can wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this. The woman whom you 
never hoped to meet now sits before you, and she talks and looks exactly 
like the person you dreamed about. But strangest of all is that you never 
realized before that you had dreamed about her. Your whole past is like a 
long sleep which would have been forgotten had there been no dream. And the
dream too might have been forgotten had there been no memory, but 
remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which 
everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even 
than life: REALITY.

We are seated in a little booth in the Chinese restaurant across the way.
Out of the comer of my eye I catch the flicker of the illuminated letters 
running up and down the sky. She is still talking about Henriette, or maybe
it is about herself. Her little black bonnet, her bag and fur are lying 
beside her on the bench. Every few minutes she lights a fresh cigarette 
which bums away as she talks. There is no beginning nor end; it spurts out 
other like a flame and consumes everything within reach. No knowing how or 
where she began. Suddenly she is in the midst of a long narrative, a fresh 
one, but it is always the same.

Her talk is as formless as dream: there are no grooves, no walls, no 
exits, no stops. I have the feeling of being drowned in a deep mesh of 
words, of crawling painfully back to the top of the net, of looking into 
her eyes and trying to find there some reflection of the significance of 
her words - but I can find nothing, nothing except my own image wavering in
a bottomless well. Though she speaks of nothing but herself I am unable to 
form the slightest image of her being. She leans forward, with elbows on 
the table, and her words inundate me; wave after wave rolling over me and 
yet nothing builds up inside me, nothing that I can seize with my 
mind.”She’s telling me about her father, about the strange life they led at
the edge of Sherwood Forest where she was born, or at least she was telling
me about this, but now it’s about Henriette again, or is it Dostoievski? - 
I’m not sure - but anyway, suddenly I realize that she’s not talking about 
any of these any more but about a man who took her home one night and as 
they stood on the stoop saying goodnight he suddenly reached down and 
pulled up her dress. She pauses a moment as though to reassure me that this
is what she means to talk about. I look at her bewilderingly. I can’t 
imagine by what route we got to this point.

What man? What had he been saying to her? I let her continue, thinking 
that she will probably come back to it, but no, she’s ahead of me again and
now it seems the man, this man, is already dead; a suicide, and she is 
trying to make me understand that it was an awful blow to her, but what she
really seems to convey is that she is proud of the fact that she drove a 
man to suicide. I can’t picture the man as dead; I can only think of him as
he stood on her stoop lifting her dress, a man without a name but alive and
perpetually fixed in the act of bending down to lift up her dress. There is
another man who was her father and I see him with a string of race horses, 
or sometimes in a little inn just outside Vienna; rather I see him on the 
roof of the inn flying kites to while the time away. And between this man 
who was her father and the man with whom she was madly in love, I can make 
no separation. He is some one in her life about whom she would rather not 
talk, but just the same she comes back to him all the time, and though I’m 
not sure that it was not the man who lifted up her dress neither am I sure 
that it wasn’t the man who committed suidde. Perhaps it’s the man whom she 
started to talk about when we sat down to eat. Just as we were sitting down
I remember now that she began to talk rather hectically about a man whom 
she had just seen entering the cafeteria. She even mentioned his name, but 
I forgot it immediately. But I remember her saying that she had lived with 
him and that he had done something which she didn’t like - she didn’t say 
what - and so she had walked out on him, left him flat, without a word of 
explanation. And then, just as we were entering the Chop Suey joint, they 
ran into each other and she was still trembling over it as we sat down in 
the little booth … For one long moment I have the most uneasy sensation. 
Maybe every word she uttered was a lie! Not an ordinary lie, no, something 
worse, something indescribable. Only sometimes the truth comes out like 
that too, especially if you think you’re never going to see the person 
again. Sometimes you can tell a perfect stranger what you would never dare 
reveal to your most intimate friend.

It’s like going to sleep in the midst of a party; you become so 
interested in yourself that you go to sleep. And when you’re sound asleep 
you begin to talk to some one, some one who was in the same room with you 
all the time and therefore understands everything even though you begin in 
the middle of a sentence. And perhaps this other person goes to sleep also,
or was always asleep, and that’s why it was so easy to encounter him, and 
if he doesn’t say anything to disturb you then you know that what you are 
saying is real and true and that you are wideawake and there is no other 
reality except this being wideawake asleep.

Never before have I been so wideawake and so sound asleep at the same 
time. If the ogre in my dreams had really pushed the bars aside and taken 
me by the hand I would have been frightened to death and consequently now 
dead, that is, forever asleep and therefore always at large, and nothing 
would be strange any more, nor untrue, even if what happened did not 
happen. What happened must have happened long ago, in the night 
undoubtedly. And what is now happening is also happening long ago, in the 
night, and this is no more true than the dream of the ogre and the bars 
which would not give, except that now the bars are broken and she whom I 
feared has me by the hand and there is no difference between that which I 
feared and what is, because I was asleep and now I am wideawake asleep and 
there is nothing more to fear, nor to expect, nor to hope for, but just 
this which is and which knows no end.

She wants to go. To go… Again her haunch, that slippery glide as when she
came down from the dance hall and moved into me. Again her words … 
“suddenly, for no reason at all, he bent down and lifted up my dress”. 
She’s slipping the fur around her neck; the little black bonnet sets her 
face off like a cameo. The round, full face, with Slavic cheek-bones. How 
could I dream this, never having seen it? How could I know that she would 
rise like this, dose and full, the face full white and blooming like a 
magnolia? I tremble as the fullness ot her thigh brushes me. She seems even
a little taller than I, though she is not. It’s the way she holds her chin.
She doesn’t notice where she’s walking. She walks over things, on, on, with
eyes wide open and staring into space. No past, no future.

Even the present seems dubious. The self seems to have left her, and the 
body rushes forward, the neck full and taut, white as the face, full like 
the face.

The talk goes on, in that low, throaty voice. No beginning, no end. I’m 
aware not of time nor the passing of time, but of timelessness. She’s got 
the little womb in the throat hooked up to the big womb in the pelvis. The 
cab is at the curb and she is still chewing the cosmological chaff of the 
outer ego. I pick up the speaking tube and connect with the double uterus. 
Hello, hello, are yon there? Let’s go! Let’s get on with it - cabs, boats, 
trains, naptha launches; beaches, bedbugs, highways, byways, ruins; relics;
old world, new world, pier, jetty; the high forceps; the swinging trapeze, 
the ditch, the delta, the alligators, the crocodiles, talk, talk; and more 
talk, then roads again and more dust in the eyes, more rainbows, more 
cloudbursts, more breakfast foods, more creams, more lotions. And when all 
the roads have been traversed and there is left only the dust of our 
frantic feet there will still remain the memory of your large full face so 
white, and the wide mouth with fresh lips parted, the teeth chalk white and
each one perfect, and in this remembrance nothing can possibly change 
because this, like your teeth, is perfect…

It is Sunday, the first Sunday of my new life, and I am wearing the dog 
collar you fastened around my neck. A new life stretches before me. It 
begins with the day of rest. I lie back on a broad green leaf and I watch 
the sun bursting in your womb. What a clabber and clatter it makes! All 
this expressly for me, what?

If only you had a million suns in you! If only I could lie here forever 
enjoying the celestial fireworks!

I lie suspended over the surface of the moon. The world is in a womb-like
trance: the inner and the outer ego are in equilibrium. You promised me so 
much that if I never come out of this it will make no difference. It seems 
to me that it is exactly 25,960 years since I have been asleep in the black
womb of sex. It seems to me that I slept perhaps 365 years too many. But at
any rate I am now in the right house, among the sixes, and what lies behind
me is well and what lies ahead is well. You come to me disguised as Venus, 
but you are Lilith, and I know it. My whole life is in the balance; I will 
enjoy the luxury of this for one day. Tomorrow I shall tip the scales. 
Tomorrow the equilibrium will be finished; if I ever find it again it will 
be in the blood and not in the stars. It is well that you promise me so 
much. I need to be promised nearly everything, for I have lived in the 
shadow of the sun too long. I want light and chastity - and a solar fire in
the guts. I want to be deceived and disillusioned so that I may complete 
the upper triangle and not be continually flying off the planet into space.
I believe everything you tell me, but I know also that it will all turn out
differently. I take you as a star and a trap, as a stone to tip the scales,
as a judge that is blindfolded, as a hole to fall into, as a path to walk, 
as a cross and an arrow. Up to the present I travelled the opposite way of 
the sun; henceforth I travel two ways, as sun and as moon. Henceforth I 
take on two sexes, two hemispheres, two skies, two sets of everything. 
Henceforth I shall be double-jointed and double-sexed. Everything that 
happens will happen twice. I shall be as a visitor to this earth, partaking
of its blessings and carrying off its gifts. I shall neither serve nor be 
served. I shall seek the end in myself.

I look out again at the sun - my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men
are walking about on the roof-tops. Everything above the horizon is dear to
me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going 
to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life 
of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the 
bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the 
goal - the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all 
those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day,
while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in 
splendour while the sun bursts in your womb.

I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of 
evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the Maharanee of the night. Tack 
your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. 
Tomorrow, tomorrow…

September 1938 Villa Seurat, Paris.

