An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  “Red light, buddy-boy.” Then it changed, and we worked down Lexington Avenue, twenty-two miles an hour down the staggering of the lights. I could not bear to be in the cab after four more minutes. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Quarter to four.”

  “Out here.”

  I got into a bar before the closing, and had a double bourbon, the liquor going down like love. In a few minutes I would be close to Cherry again, and tomorrow we would buy a car. We would travel for a long time. Then, God and the gods willing, return for Deirdre. I could steal her from Kelly. There might be a way. And felt the beginning of a heart of happiness at being with Cherry—there was promise at the center of the thought. Hoisting the drink on this lilt, I looked into my mind—the memory of Deborah now like a scroll which must be read from back to front—and thought, “You’ve gotten off easy,” and gagged on the drink, for dread came up like a wave. In my mind, I saw a fire in a tenement on the Lower East Side. And heard the wail of a fire engine. But it was a real fire engine; sixty seconds later it went by the bar in a red shriek and sword.

  I was up and out, and tried to get a cab. Nothing followed however but the sense of sleep disturbed and people whispering in double beds. The city was awake. There was a beast in New York, but by times he slept. Other nights New York did not, and this was a night for the beast. Suddenly I knew something was wrong, something had gone finally wrong: it was too late for the parapet now. And three blocks away I heard the yawp and whoop of a gang. My stomach felt severed from me as on those long nights in this last year when Deborah took still another step away into the dark of our separation. A woe came riding down the wind. Then a taxi.

  Just before Gramercy Park we turned from Lexington over to Second and continued south, down into the Lower East Side and over on Houston Street to First. But as we came north on First, the road was blocked. Three fire engines took up all but one lane, and a crowd of people had gathered, even at this hour. The fire was in a tenement a block and a half from the house where Cherry lived, far enough away for no one to notice that a police car was stopped in front of her door, and an ambulance. There were no witnesses on the street, only faces at every window, and then my cab stopped and I paid it off. Still another police car came up, and Roberts stepped out, and seeing me, took a quick step and caught me by the arm, “Rojack, where were you tonight?”

  “Nowhere,” I said, “nothing criminal.” The whiskey brought up a ball of bile.

  “Have you been to Harlem?”

  “No, I spent the last two hours with Barney Oswald Kelly. What’s going on in Harlem?”

  “Shago Martin got beaten to death.”

  “No,” I said. “God, no,” and had an intimation. “What was the weapon?” I asked.

  “Somebody broke in his head with an iron pipe in Morningside Park.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “It was lying beside him.”

  “Then why are you here?” the words came out as if they had been printed on paper. “Why here?”

  Now he could begin to pay me back. He spoke slowly. “We were dipping down to see what Shago’s ex might know. Then something came in on the box. Not ten minutes ago. Report of a boogie going ape in her room. That’s all we heard. The Puerto Ricans were screaming.”

  But now the street door to the tenement came open. Two orderlies worked a stretcher through the hall door and the street door. Cherry was on the stretcher. She was covered with a blanket and the blanket was wet with blood. The orderlies set the stretcher on the pavement and went to open the ambulance doors. A detective tried to move me away. My voice said, “She’s my wife, officer.”

  “We’ll talk to you later,” he said.

  Cherry opened her eyes and saw me and gave the smile she had sent to me across the room in the precinct. “Oh, Mr. Rojack,” she said, “you’re back at that.”

  “Are you … all right?”

  “Well, sir,” she said, “I really don’t know.” Her face was badly beaten.

  “Get out of the way, mister,” said an intern. “Nobody comes near this patient.”

  I held to the handgrip on the stretcher, and the intern looked away for someone to assist him. I had another moment or more.

  “Come near,” she said.

  I bent over.

  “Don’t tell the fuzz,” she whispered. “It was a friend of Shago’s. He got it all wrong—so dumb.”

  Now mysteries were being exchanged for other mysteries.

  “Darlin’?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to die.”

  “No,” I said, “you’ll be all right.”

  “No, baby-pie,” she said, “this is very different.” And as I reached out to her, Cherry gave a look of surprise, and died.

  And Roberts took me to an after-hours joint, and kind as a mother, fed me whiskey, and finally confessed that on the night before, returning home to Queens after interrogating me, he had awakened an old mistress for a drinking bout—first time in three years—had drunk the morning in, beaten the mistress up, and still had not called the wife. Then he asked me if I had anything to do with Shago’s murder, and when I said no, Roberts explained it was not his mistress but his wife he had beaten up last night, just why he did not know, had Cherry been a good piece of ass, and when I looked up with outrage at that appetite for the treacherous which rides the Irish like a leper, he said, “Did you know she did some work for us?”—said it in such a way I would never know for certain, not ever, there was something in his voice I could not for certain deny; and Roberts said, “If you don’t like it, rat fink, take it out on the street,” and when I with all the courage of the ashes said yes, let’s go to the street, Roberts said, “Do you know what frustration is to a cop? Why, that’s how we lose it,” he said, “our standards, our quality …” and his features began to reef, and Roberts began to cry. The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

  EPILOGUE / The Harbors of the Moon Again

  ON THE WAY out West, driving through the landscape of Super-America, there was a stopover in southern Missouri, a time out from the duals and freeways, motor lodges, winged motel inns, the heated pools and America’s hot highway. I stopped off to see an Army friend, a doctor now, and he had read my book, The Psychology of the Hangman, and laid down a challenge from the bottom of the bottle. “You write so much about death, Rojack, let this trooper show you some.” Which he did. Next morning at nine, with five hours of sleep and some booze from the night before being processed still in the vats of my metabolism, I saw an autopsy. There was no way to avoid it. The man had been dying of cancer, but he went out overnight from a burst appendix and a peritoneal gangrene; the smell which steamed up from the incision was so extreme it called for the bite of one’s jaws not to retch up out of one’s own cavity.

  I remember I breathed it in to the top of the lung, and drew no further. Pinched it off in the windpipe. After half an hour of such breathing, my lungs were to ache for the rest of the day, but it was impossible to accept the old man’s odor all the way in. After the autopsy, my friend apologized for the smell, said we had bad luck, said this was the worst smell he encountered in the last three years. I must not judge from this what a body is like, he went on to say, because healthy bodies have a decent odor in death and there is a bounty in the sight of our organs revealed. I was ready to agree—there had even been bounty in the excavation of this old man’s horror; there was also the smell. I kept getting a whiff of the smell for the next two days, all along the trip through the dried hard-up lands of Oklahoma, northern Texas, New Mexico, on into the deserts of Arizona and southern Nevada where Las Vegas sits in the mirror of the moon. Then for weeks I never lost the smell. In the beginning the dead man came back at every turn, he came back from phosphate fertilizer in every farmer’s field, he rose up out of every bump of a dead rabbit on the road, from each rotting ghost in the stump of a tree, he chose to come back later at every hint of a hole in em
otion or a pit of decay, he offered the knowledge this was how your organs would look when you had exploited them that far. The cadaver had been crowned with the head of a good-looking old man; a stern waxlike face looked back as the tubers were revealed. It could have been the face of a man who owned his own farm or had been the local banker. It was lustful and proud, much hate in it, but disciplined. A general could have been cousin to that face. Maybe the discipline did him in; all that desire and all that compression of the will clamped on one another in some spew of the private states, the pressure continuing into that instant when the dissecting knife went into the belly. A sound hissed, the whistle of still another ghost released, pssssssssssss went this long sound like an auto tire in the instant before it blows, eighty miles an hour, and rubber all over the highway. Then the smell came up. Madness in it. It was a maniacal smell.

  In some, madness must come in with breath, mill through the blood and be breathed out again. In some it goes up to the mind. Some take the madness and stop it with discipline. Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied. In that corpse I saw, madness went down to the blood—leucocytes gorged the liver, the spleen, the enlarged heart and violet-black lungs, dug into the intestines, germinated stench.

  It was bad to mine into that cavern. More than the odor of madness went into the chest; some of the real madness went into me. The stink of the dead man went along the dry lands of Oklahoma and northern Texas, through the desert bake of New Mexico, Arizona, on into the valleys of the moon.

  I got into Las Vegas at five, after twice ten hours of driving across a night of heat, July heat in the month of March, black and full of waves. The lights were on in town. The Fremont was one electric blaze, the Golden Nugget another, the sky was dark, the streets were light, lighter than Broadway on New Year’s Eve, the heat was a phenomenon. Was it ninety degrees at nine minutes to five, five in the morning now? The car took a ride down the Strip in the dawn, carburetor smelling the burned-out air, madnesses forming, madnesses consumed. A small fist of the large fear which is saved for eternity formed like a stone in the pipe. Smell of death in the nose, I found a hotel, unpacked the dusty baggage. The bedroom was cold, seventy degrees, a cellar, a tomb, an air-conditioned chill. Sank into unconsciousness through vortices of road, blast furnaces of heat and currents of Las Vegas which carried me on a nerve-strung sleep to New York, where I was moving from friend to friend to find the money to buy a car. I had gone to a funeral after all, but it was Cherry’s. And wanted to go to another, but it was Shago’s, and let it pass. I did not want to face the Chinese Negroes who would be waiting at the door.

  It was March, near the beginning of April. The heat wave held. I went into two atmospheres. Five times a day, or eight, or sixteen, there was a move from hotel to car, a trip through the furnace with the sun at one hundred and ten, a sprint along the Strip (billboards the size of a canyon) a fast sprint in the car, the best passenger car racing in America, driving not only your own piece of the mass production, but shifting lanes with the six or seven other cars in your field of collision. It was communal living at its best, everybody ready for everybody else, and then an aces fast turn off the Strip to land in the parking lot of the next hotel, lungs breathing up the bellows of the desert, that hundred-and-ten air, hotter than hot flannel on the lining of the throat, and once again it was hopeless to know whether one could go to the end, or if in two hours, four hours, six, or six-and-twenty, the heat would swell some hinge of the brain, and madness would burn up out of that rent in the hinge. But for five or ten minutes the desert air was nothing to endure, a sport, one hundred and ten and going up, half-conducive the way the entrance to a sauna is half-conducive—that heat, that desert bake, hot as the radiation from a hard-wood fire. But then always into a hotel where the second atmosphere was on, the cold atmosphere, the seventy degrees of air-conditioned oxygen, that air which seemed to have come a voyage through space as if you were in the pleasure chamber of an encampment on the moon and fortified air was brought in daily by rockets from the earth. Yes the second atmosphere had a smell which was not the air conditioning of other places: the hollow sucked out by the machine left a hole which was deeper here. You caught the odor of an empty space where something was dying alone.

  Lived in this second atmosphere for twenty-three hours of the twenty-four—it was life in a submarine, life in the safety chambers of the moon. Nobody knew that the deserts of the West, the arid empty wild blind deserts, were producing again a new breed of man.

  Stayed at the dice tables. I was part of the new breed. Cherry had left a gift. Just as Oswald Kelly once went to sleep knowing which stocks would be on the rise by morning, so I knew the luck in the hand of each man who came to the table, I knew when to go down on the pass-line and when to bet the Don’t Come. I was flat with the dice on my own, I dropped them quick as I could, but I kept an eye for the losers and worked up the fortune there. In four weeks I made twenty-four, paid my debts, all sixteen plus the loan for the car, and got ready to go on. There was a jungle somewhere in Guatemala which had a friend, an old friend, I thought to go there. And on to Yucatán. The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. I was not good enough to climb up and pull them down. So wandered farther out to the desert where the mad before me had come, and thought of walking into ambush. Eyes had been on me four full weeks, eyes collecting more and more—the news was out of who I was and verdicts were waiting. But I was safe in the city—no harm would come to me there—it was only in the desert that death would come up like a scorpion with its sting. If anyone wished to shoot me, he might have me here. But no one did, and I wandered on, and found a booth by the side of the empty road, a telephone booth with a rusty dial. Went in and rang up and asked to speak to Cherry. And in the moonlight, a voice came back, a lovely voice, and said, “Why, hello, hon, I thought you’d never call. It’s kind of cool right now, and the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello. We get along, which is odd, you know, because girls don’t swing. But toodle-oo, old baby-boy, and keep the dice for free, the moon is out and she’s a mother to me.” Hung up and walked on back to the city of jewels, and thought before I left the spires, might go out to call her one more time. But in the morning, I was something like sane again, and packed the car, and started on the long trip to Guatemala and Yucatán.

  Provincetown,

  New York,

  September 1963–October 1964

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

  By Norman Mailer

  The Naked and the Dead

  Barbary Shore

  The Deer Park

  Advertisements for Myself

  Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

  The Presidential Papers

  An American Dream

  Cannibals and Christians

  Why Are We in Vietnam?

  The Deer Park—A Play

  The Armies of the Night

  Miami and the Siege of Chicago

  Of a Fire on the Moon

&
nbsp; The Prisoner of Sex

  Maidstone

  Existential Errands

  St. George and the Godfather

  Marilyn

  The Faith of Graffiti

  The Fight

  Genius and Lust

  The Executioner’s Song

  Of Women and Their Elegance

  Pieces and Pontifications

  Ancient Evenings

  Tough Guys Don’t Dance

  Harlot’s Ghost

  Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery

  Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

  The Gospel According to the Son

  The Time of Our Time

  The Spooky Art

  Why Are We at War?

  Modest Gifts

  The Castle in the Forest

  On God (with J. Michael Lennon)

  Mind of an Outlaw