Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  Others were discussing explosives. Before long, those of us who had just come in were attaching ourselves to technical discussions: Could you blow a lap-butt box-girder joint weld with C-3 plastic? I gave appropriate nods and gobbled beer like a wolf let loose on wounded game. The Green Punch at Mory’s could not have gone down faster.

  Later, as I fell asleep in the upstairs dormitory of my new barracks, my cot turned into a gondola and carried me along mysterious canals. I had an epiphany. I was reminded of those distant relatives of mine, the Jews, who believed in twelve just men. Once, at Yale, a lecturer in Medieval History had spoken of the ancient ghetto belief that the reason God, whenever He became enraged at humankind, did not destroy the universe, was because of His twelve just men. None of the twelve had any conception that he was unique, but the natural and unwitting goodness of each of these rare men was so pleasing to God that He tolerated the rest of us.

  In my half-sleep, I wondered if something of the same divine phenomenon had not been taking place in America ever since the Pilgrims landed. Were there not forty-eight just men for the forty-eight states I had grown up with? (For that matter, would the sum change when we went to fifty?) In any event, America had God’s sanction. Out in Camp Peary, on my first night at the Farm, I wondered if I might be one of America’s forty-eight just men. My patriotism, my dedication, my recognition that no one could love America more, put me—was it possible?—among such anointed innocents. Yes, I, lacking conspicuous talents and virtues, could be a true lover all the more. I adored America. America was a goddess. Washed by beatific rhapsodies, I fell asleep on my half-gallon of beer.

  In the morning, I was queasy at stomach and owned a pile driver for a head. Taken by our drill instructor to the supply room for fatigues, we promptly christened them by jogging two miles out to the gatehouse and two miles back. In those days, jogging was looked upon as bizarre—about as many people practiced it as do hang gliding now, but then everything that first day was alien. As was the rest of the week. We took most of our courses in two-hour labs, and our curriculum was exotic to me. It was like sitting down in a restaurant to discover that you had never tasted anything on the menu before: roast of peccary, cassowary stew, anteater steak, breast of peacock, lumpwort salad, passion-fruit pie, bisque of kelp.

  Owing to the Agency’s success in 1954 in Guatemala, priorities at the Farm had gone back to covert action. While we still had clandestine photography, surveillance, border crossing, interrogation techniques, clandestine radio communication, advanced use of dead drops, the real emphasis over the next sixteen weeks was focused on aiding resistance groups to overthrow Marxist governments. We had courses in parachute jumping, map reading, wilderness survival, unarmed special combat (dirty fighting), silent strikes (murdering without noise), physical conditioning, obstacle courses, and the assembly and disassembly of foreign and domestic pistols, rifles, submachine guns, mortars, bazookas, grenades, grenade launchers, TNT, C-3, C-4, dynamite and classified explosives with an accompanying variety of pressure release, push-pull, delay, slow fuse, and other varieties of detonators for the demolition of bridges, generators, small factories.

  Compared to the real difficulties, our sixteen weeks, we were soon told, was an overview. After all, you wouldn’t attempt to become a good courtroom lawyer in sixteen weeks. Still, it had purpose. The alumni who came back to St. Matthew’s to deliver an evening exhortation in chapel were fond of remarking over tea how strenuously tough it used to be in the old days. Invariably, they would tell us in confidence, “My years at St. Matt’s were the worst of my life, and the most valuable.” Say something of the same for the Farm. I went in as a young man not properly graduated from college, a stranger to his own nature, not ready, but for his rock climbing, to pin any merit badges on his soul, and came out in the best physical condition of my life, ready for a street fight, ready for glory. I was also one hell of a patriot. I would have trouble falling asleep if I began to think of Communists; murderous rages rose in me, and I was ready to kill the first Red who came through the window. I was not brainwashed so much as brain-fevered.

  I also made friends in large numbers. Were there thirty Junior Officer Trainees in our group? I could devote a chapter to each—if, that is, we have, as I suspect, chapters for those who come close enough to color our emotions. Yet the irony is that we formed these deep alliances like actors who are together in a play for sixteen weeks and love and detest each other and are inseparable and have nothing to do with one another again until meeting once more on a new job. If I speak of Arnie Rosen or Dix Butler, it is because I saw a lot of them later.

  Camp Peary, however, could have turned out badly. I had been put, by the luck of the draw (unless my father’s hand was present), into a training platoon of ex–football players and ex-Marines. If I did well in the more sedentary classwork, and Rosen even better, our physical tests were severe. While I was adequate at weapons, found map reading a piece of cake and forty-eight-hour survival treks in the forest around Camp Peary, offering, after summers in the Maine woods, no undue demand, I found myself hopelessly inhibited at silent strikes. I could not throw myself into the state of mind required to tiptoe up behind a trainee while I whipped a ribbon (in substitute for a wire garrote) around his neck. When it was my turn to serve as sentry I’d flinch before the cloth even touched my skin. My Adam’s apple, a prominent Hubbard pride, was in its own panic at getting crunched.

  Dirty fighting went better. It was not difficult to simulate breaking a man’s fingers, stamping on his feet, cracking his shin, sticking three fingers into his larynx, one finger into his eye, and biting whatever was available. After all—these were dummy moves.

  Boxing was done on our own time at the gym, but we all felt the unspoken imperative not to avoid it. I hated being hit on the nose. One blow was enough to switch me over to all that was wild-swinging in my makeup. Besides, I was afraid. Whenever I caught my opponent with anything harder than a tap, I’d blurt out, “Sorry!” Who was fooled? My apology was to hold the other man off. I could not learn a left hook, and my jab flew out with no force, or left me lunging off balance. My straight right was as round as a pork chop. After a while, I accepted the inevitable, and proceeded to mill as best I could with men who were something like my own weight, and learned to take punishment everywhere but on my nose, which I so protected that I was always getting hit on the brow. Boxing left me with headaches equal to college hangovers, and my worst humiliation was with Arnie Rosen, who was as scrappy as a cornered and wholly frantic cat. Nothing he bounced off my head and body made a dent into the hard envelope of my adrenaline, but it was infuriating to realize that he might even have won the round.

  One night at the Club, I ended up drinking with our boxing instructor, who had the odd name of Reggie Minnie. He was the only one of our teachers that we found impressive. The verdict in our training group had soon gone around: Good men in the Agency were too valuable to use for teaching. We received the culls. Minnie, however, was special. He fought in a stand-up classic stance, and had been a Navy boxing champ during the war. He had also been married to an English girl who was killed in a car accident, a fact to mention because he was the driver. His sorrow was complete; it was as if he had been dipped into a tragic rue. This loss permeated every pore and organ cell, left him, indeed, a complete man, all of one piece, one whole tincture of loss. He spoke in a gentle voice and listened to every word that everyone said, as if words were as much of a comfort as warm clothing.

  While he sipped his one beer and I had three, while we drank in the twilight and explosions still kept going off in the woods while men on a twenty-four-hour exercise dashed in for a quick shot and dashed out, I complained about my ineptitude at defense as if it were a peculiar phenomenon, some hopeless relative to my body.

  He then made a remark I never forgot. “You have to learn how to hit,” he said. “It’ll give you more of a sense of when the punch is coming at you.”

  I thought a good deal over the next f
ew days of the cousin who had knocked me down to one knee when he was eleven and I was nine, and how I had not risen to fight him back but merely watched blood fall from my nose to splash down on the ground, and with each drop, wished for it to be his blood. Now in the gym, when I worked on the heavy bag, something of that vast and near to long-lost rage came back to me, and I tried to embody a bit of such hatred into each punch I gave the bag.

  How well it worked, I do not know. I got better as time went on, but then, so did everyone. I may have gained a few strides on the rest. At the least, I began to handle Rosen with ease. What did more for me was parachuting. From the day they first brought us to the thirty-eight-foot tower, I was ready. Four stories above the ground, I would leap through a mock-up of a C-47 hatch—our instructor called it the “open-door policy”—and jump into space with my parachute harness (no parachute) attached to a spring cable. I was back to leaping off the balcony in Maine—when STOP! the cable and harness jerked us to a halt, and we swung above the ground. Some of the ruggedest men in our class would throw up before making their jump.

  It was even better when those few of us considered best in these exercises were allowed to practice accuracy jumping at a nearby airport. I found that I was relatively free of fear, even of the fear I might have packed my chute incorrectly. I thought it was not unlike sailing: Some understood it, some never did. In Maine, I used to show what the family called a spiffy nostril for the yaw of the wind to port or starboard, but the signs were subtler passing through air. Still, the pullulation of the trees gave a clue to the wind vector, and I became enough of an adept to steer my parachute onto a target during night drops. The sky could be black and the whitewashed landing circle below appear no more phosphorescent than the minuscule presence of a barnacle on a rock deep underwater, but I made the circle as often as any man in our group.

  Veteran covert-action officers kept coming back to Camp Peary for this special parachute training, so I cannot make the claim that I was the best in our class, but I was among the best, and the first of my pleasures was to be clearly superior to Dix Butler. He had the fastest time on the obstacle course, was unapproachable at dirty fighting, surprisingly silent as a putative assassin, and a beast at boxing. Nobody but Minnie could work with him. He was also the unofficial arm wrestling champion at Camp Peary, and once succeeded in taking on everyone in the Club at the time, twenty-two men was the count, instructors and heavies among them, and it did not take long.

  I could top him every time, though, when it came to hitting that parachute target. It proved unbelievably grievous to his idea of himself. Rage came off him like a ground wave.

  The irony is that he ought to have been proud of his parachuting. He began with a large fear of airplanes. Later, after we knew him better, he explained it one night in the Club. While he usually did his drinking in a group, for he liked a quorum to give resonance to his stories, Rosen and I were his pets, and on occasion, he drank only with us. I expect his motive was clear. Rosen and I were invariably first and second at book work. Butler, surprisingly good in the classroom, could nonetheless recognize our superiority there. I think he saw us as members of the Eastern establishment which, from his point of view, was running just about everything in the Company. In consequence, Rosen and I became the field studies available. On the other hand, he was hardly without contempt for us. He loved to tell us how to live. “You fellows would not be able to comprehend it. Big strong man, ha, ha. Why is he so afraid of flying? Horseshit. I have what I call superior-athlete fear.” He stared at us hard, then without warning, grinned, as if to feint us off our feet. “Neither of you can comprehend what goes on in an athlete’s skull. You think like sportswriters. They observe, but do not comprehend. The clue to a superior athlete is that he is telepathic.” Butler nodded. “Some of us also have the power to hypnotize moving objects, no, not hypnotize—the appropriate word is telekinesize. When I am properly keyed, I can not only read which play is next in my opponent’s mind, but I can telekinesize a football.”

  “Divert it in its path?” asked Rosen.

  “By one foot at least on a long pass. And when a punt hits the ground, I can affect the bounce.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Rosen comfortably.

  Butler reached forward, took Rosen’s upper lip between his thumb and forefinger, and squeezed. “Cut that,” Rosen managed to cry out through the grip, and to my surprise, Butler let go. Rosen had an odd authority, not unlike the way a spoiled but very self-assured young boy can command a fierce police dog. Up to a point.

  “How could you do that?” Rosen complained. “We were just having a discussion.”

  “They don’t teach it here,” Butler said, “but that’s the treatment for quieting an hysterical woman. Grab her upper lip and squeeze. I have used it in motel rooms from the time I was sixteen.” Another toke of beer. “Goddammit, Rosen, don’t you people in New York have the foggiest conception of manners? An hysterical woman calls me crazy, not a man talking to me.”

  “I don’t believe your claims,” said Rosen. “It’s delusional. Telekinesis cannot be measured.”

  “Of course it can’t. Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty applies.”

  We laughed. But I was not unimpressed that Butler could cite Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty.

  “My fear of airplanes,” said Dix Butler, “derives from the fact that I am always looking to raise the ante. The first time I got on a plane, it was a ten-seater with no partition between the pilot and the passengers. I tell you, I just had to play some games. Before long, there is old Dix putting his mind into the pilot’s fingertips, and thereby getting the plane a bit whippy. Well, the pilot overcame that in turn by his will. You can move other men’s matter just so much with your mind—it’s a highly inefficient interpersonal mode,” and here he looked at us across the table, his yellow-green eyes as childlike and solemn as a lion in a tender moment, full of a poet’s sweet awe at the wondrous equations of movement, and said, “All right, what do I do now that this pilot’s hand is on guard, why, I start to listen to the plane. It’s old, and its two motors are wheezing out their lungs with every buck and tuck—man, my ears get into the vitals of that ship. I know how little it would take to set the motors on flame or crack the wing at the root. Nothing is holding that flying machine together but the mental strength of every one of the passengers and the pilot praying to keep hold of their paltry existence. And there I am, in the middle, a maniac. My existence is larger than myself. I’ve been in car wrecks, been shot at. There’s a no-man’s-land out there between the given and the immense, and it has a set of rules very few can follow. All I know is that I am not sufficiently afraid of death. It is a transcendental experience that calls to me right through the foam of this piss-taster’s brew. Can rational shit-heads like the two of you comprehend that? I tell you, the mad scientist in me was ready to experiment. I wanted to wreak a mischief on the inner machinery of that plane. You better believe that the desire was powerful. Why, the little washed-out idiots sitting around me in their passenger seats were so fearful of losing what they never had, an honest-to-God life, that I had to pull myself back from exercising my powers. I could truly visualize those plane motors catching fire. I still believe that by my mental efforts, I could have started such a blaze. In another moment, I would have. But I pulled myself back. I saved the plane from myself. Gentlemen, I was sick from the effort. My forehead had sweat on it the size of hailstones, and my liver might just as well have been stomped on by a platoon of Marines. I had to crawl off that misbegotten flying flivver when we landed. And I have been afraid of planes ever since. Afraid of my inability to restrain my evil impulses.” Beer. A pause. Another swallow. One could visualize the stately flow of the beer down his gullet, equal in solemnity to the sure sweep of a conductor’s baton.

  I had no idea if he was serious or had merely been telling one of his tales, always and dependably extreme, but I suspect it was the truth, for him at least, since I believe he told it t
o purge himself, in much the way I had given my confession to Reggie Minnie. Next day, he began to make progress in his parachuting techniques, even as I began to move up in boxing until I even dared to get into the ring with Dix, and mustered enough character not to mumble as I put in my mouthpiece, “Take it easy, will you, Butler?”

  It was an interesting three minutes. We were using headgear and fourteen-ounce gloves, but his jab was heavier than a straight right from any other trainee, and the first left hook I caught sent me half-across the ring.

  I was in a panic. Only the sight of Reggie Minnie in my corner made me stay in with Butler and accept the bombardment to my ribs; I felt brain cells blinking out in full banks each time his jab rammed my forehead. When, once or twice, he chose to catch me with a straight right, I was taught all I needed to know about electricity. The voltage discharged in my brain would never be discharged again. In the middle of it, I began to understand for the first time what a serious athlete must feel, for I had reached a place where I was ready to live in the maelstrom. I no longer wished to quit. I had found peace in combat. Blessed feeling! Damn the damage! Whatever little futures were being wrecked in me forever were not going to count against this fortification of my ego.

  Of course, I knew the bell would ring, and the three minutes would be over. My vast determination to take whatever onslaught the gods would loose was attached to a three-minute contract. Just as well. Another three minutes and I might have been in the infirmary. Later, watching Butler blast away at the trainee closest to him in weight, I was appalled at the power of his punches. Had Butler been hitting me that hard? I made the mistake of asking Rosen.