2. I would wipe out all the sex stuff as a pathetic attempt to prove to Julitta that my sex life is so relevant here. (It’s not.)
3. I would refuse to be the amphitheatre; or, if I agreed to try, I would fail. Alan looks like hell, with his mysterious mission (“supposed to be”) and then his con-man outfit (vest and all); but as a matter of fact, I am him. We need an entirely new dream. I leave that up to my mangled (by me) but surviving and adorable “child.”
‘I was surprised Friday by my surprise at being so comfortable as an amphitheatre; since “that is what I am.”
‘Yesterday and today, I am still surprised, but for a very different reason: didn’t the deluded son-of-a-bitch recognize his delusion?!’
He relaxed in his chair with a sense of angry out-of-the-woods triumph but also with disappointment at the level of grief. Just one failure more! Many months would pass, not until one rainy morning nearly ten months later would he be able to write, with sudden realization: ‘Yes. Contract One was indispensable. So long as I considered my self as merely the medium of (arena for) my powers, sobriety was out of the question: no care for self (“You were not responsible for yourself,” as Vin said).
‘The even deeper delusion that my science and art depended on my drinking, or at least were connected with it, could not be attacked directly. Too far down. The cover had to be exploded off, then the under-madness simply withered away, for lack of sustenance and protection.
‘No effect, maybe, on the apparent difficulty, the stated Contract. So what? Who ever died of mismanagement of his fame or lack of peace with it or my impediments to its shameless enjoyment? It’s only Whiskey kills.’
Severance was a conscientious man. He had really thought, off and on for twenty years, that it was his duty to drink, namely, to sacrifice himself. He saw the products as worth it. Maybe they were—if there had been any connexion.
An electrical storm, trivial compared to Long Island’s but a very decent try on its own (B–), imposed the survival of the outside world briefly on Ward W and Severance was interested in the duologue that ushered Harry out into it—Old Harry, he thought of him as, though it was to turn out much later that Harry was several years younger than Middle-aged (Old he thought of himself as, but Younger) Alan.
Harley began Group on Thursday with, ‘Harry. You took your Fifth Step yesterday.’
‘That’s right.’ Harry looked like a benign lizard, long, half-drowsy, low-keyed, Permian.
‘How was it?’
‘Seemed to go all right. He gave me some advice. Not bad at all.’
‘We’re discharging you today. You’ll check in with Ray right now—you know where his office is? and then the Cashier over in Main and you’re off. How do you feel about going home.’
‘Be nice, I guess. Never liked the food here.’
‘What are your plans?’
‘No great plans. Work a little maybe. Keep out of trouble.’ He grinned.
It seemed to Alan Severance a hell of a Programme but he had to admit Harry was utterly relaxed. He wished he was. After all, he took it in as if afresh, tension was required to make a recovering alcoholic drink. How could tension be avoided—his life was built on it.
‘No problems, eh?’ But Harley was smiling too.
‘Oh, I’m very worried, but I don’t let it worry me none.’ He winked at Mary-Jane, actually winked. And that was it.
Long afterward, when he had grown to feel the power of Harry’s long, distinguished silences, this little scene recurred to Severance’s mind one afternoon and without knowing why, he applied to it the remark of some great conductor, that he would require a far larger orchestra than had ever yet been assembled, in order to produce real silence.
IV
THE LAST TWO FIRST STEPS
The eternal gates terrific porter lifted the northern bar.
Thel enter’d in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.
12
IRREGULAR PROGRESS but, undoubtedly, some. Too many plus-strokes pistoning in from qualified sources for entire doubt. Of course the big tests had not come yet, and his private struggles with the ack-ack First Step were, so far, private—he reported faithfully, without any attempt at fullness, to Ruth every evening or so, but she did not take in at all what he was talking about in that stratosphere. Otherwise they were getting on brilliantly. Cozy over the on-coming Him or Her. Only one blow-up: the interviews. In Group, the red heart after all, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was going like a house afire, confronting and levelling, helping everybody reachable. No doubt he was talking too much, as ever, but not only had nobody said so but Keg had actually complimented him while leaving one twelve-fifteen, though he couldn’t recall what on. Ten o’clock was almost a pleasure. His Jewish studies were fascinating Severance. his disciplines were rigorous, his room was shipshape, his talks three mornings a week with Dr Gullixson were banquets of approval, only (really) his scrotum was bothering him to any serious degree. It was so sensitive he could hardly walk. He widened his thighs and went slow. Why hadn’t he complained to anybody, he wondered. After all he was in a hospital. Severance was aware that he stood pain remarkably well, considering the delicacy of his nervous organization, short of course of the crushing of his greater occipital nerve (in a muscle spasm apparently) that had put him in hospital for two months the year before, out a few weeks in daily massage-and-heat and then when they began traction, back in hospital on Demerol; he gave himself no credit for this; he considered his stoicism (various people had used the word off and on for years) idiotic; he knew he was a fool for not seeking help. Why suffer? But he did. He had not examined it, even in the shower either yesterday or the day before or today. He had not, certainly, examined it. No indeed. The less he heard thought saw imagined and above all felt about it, the better. It would probably not kill him. In fact he expected it to go away, any minute, and felt hurt, or outraged rather, as it mysteriously and worseningly didn’t.
He sat with spread legs in Group while Wilbur tried to explain to Harley and Keg, especially Keg, why he called his even more elderly parents two or three (or four and five—the number magnified with the pressure on him) times every single day. The telephone was a topic on Ward W. There was only one, and its use was discouraged. Severance had tried to get the Group to agree to just one call a day, limited to five minutes, for the Repeaters that is, and had had some support but not enough; Harley had asked him, with a twisted happy smile, if he was applying for a job as Counsellor. The point was: associations outside—there should not be any. Everybody, or all who spoke (Jeree and Mary-Jane, at their opposite ends of the well-ing spectrum, were silent), agreed; except Wilbur. After he had finally been harried and battered into the admission that he spent a good part of every day on the phone to his goddamned parents (Wilbur was sixty-odd, and, believe Severance, it was hard to imagine that he had ever been married, though two wives had left him), the question could be taken up of Why. ‘They need me,’ he said many times. His father, drunk from morning to night, was urging him to come home, and Wilbur was anxious to go—although they fought like madmen right through every call and it was perfectly clear to everybody but Wilbur that he got a bang out of holding his own against his frightful Dad from a safe telephone distance (Father’s ax, kept in the kitchen where he drank: ‘I’ll chop you, Wilbur, late one night, I’ll chop you.’), revelling too in the fact that he himself was not only sober at the moment but being treated for the disease that was killing them both. ‘They need me,’ he said stubbornly. ‘They need you sober,’ Keg threw him. ‘Next time you drink you’re fired for the last time, right? How the hell at this point in the U.S. economy, with your record, do you expect—do you ever expect, Wilbur—to get another job. You’ll all three starve.’ ‘Dad has his pension.’ ‘You can live on it.’ ‘No. No, he won’t give me a cent.’ ‘So you’ll starve.’ ‘They need me!’ ‘You need yourself, you fucking deluded bastard. You’ll be drinking within twenty-four hours, and we won’t take
you back. That’s a promise. You’ve got to get your mind off your parents and work on a Programme that will give you, after five treatments isn’t it, here and in Illinois and Minnesota, a ghost of a Chinese prayer of a chance to stay dry long enough to be of some real help to your miserable parents.’ It was never possible to be certain whether Keg was really angry or was making with it to bring the patient out, but Severance saw him here as exasperated, at a loss. He glanced at Harley. The senior Counsellor was staring at Wilbur with what the scientist realized, with a start, was something like hopeless love. He had never seen anything quite like it. He saw that Harley the Hound, Author of Drouth in this part of the death-prone addicted country, saw himself, saw Harley of old a hundred and a hundred times, where Wilbur was—and hurt. The guy had a heart of gold, for God’s sake, he was full of grief for Wilbur. So was Severance, he had to confess, but not in that degree. His not-responsible heart was comparatively a stone, he just felt sorry for Wilbur. There was pain all around the room.
But everybody was his own hot topic too, and you could almost see pain—recede. They sat there. Nobody said anything. Gradually everybody forgot about Wilbur, including Wilbur. A long time passed. Nobody was looking at anybody. A sense began and grew in Severance of Trouble on both sides of him and across and around and up and down and outside and inside and Harley said pleasantly, ‘It’s nice to know that all of you are cured. Why don’t you all go home?’
Stung under the general lash of this, Severance let go. ‘I’ve been fed up for five minutes. We’re all cowards. We might as well be in the Lesser Antilles, slopping rum.’ To his surprise, nobody hit him. But nobody else spoke, either. Mary-Jane was slumped over, grim, depressed. ‘Tout le monde, ou du moins bien du monde allait dans ce salon, et il n’avait rien de banal’ (not exactly!); ‘on y respirait, en entrant’ (and staying), ‘un air de discrétions et de mystère.’ Sainte-Beuve on Mme Recamier’s. That was the trouble, nobody dared indiscretion. ‘What’s with you, Letty?’ Harley finally asked tiredly. It was the worst session they had had, and noone looked at anyone after they joined hands for the Serenity Prayer (‘the courage to change the things I can’) and went slouching out.
At lunch, which reminded him of the two most unpopular dishes at his preparatory school (fisheyes-in-glue and Purple Passion), he listened with relief, for the fourth time, to old Alice’s frenzied, gleeful recitation of how she had once done Hildegarde’s hair when the singer was in Akron, ‘and she was just like you and me—so sweet.’ Severance and several of his cronies could not understand how Alice had become an alcoholic, a concentrated resolute person after all, with a certain malign dignity, whereas Alice scattered in all directions like her own white wisps and flagrant streamers, but like everybody else he was fond of her and hoped to God she would make it, if they ever let her out. (They did, a week later, and she wandered in, the following afternoon, blind-drunk, ‘just to make a phone-call,’ she said, as they locked her in her not yet occupied room, safe with anti-convulsant and sedative, before transferring her to Seven—psychiatric.) Poor old Alice, probably a better human being than he was, and in fact he knew it.
Brooding on a passage in one of his Jewish books (‘Even selfishness, the most dangerous of human traits, has its proper place. A modicum of it is a sine qua non. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” asked Hillel, going on, however, to add, “If I am for myself alone, what do I amount to?” ’) he underscored ‘for myself alone’ and was late as usual to lecture, had to sit in the back, heard only random words, not enough to discover what the subject was—no doubt he had heard it before, though he couldn’t remember the lecturer, an intense young-middle-aged woman with a long nose and a forefinger—and was thoroughly bored. Impediments!
He spent an hour in his room with the Big Book, Chapter V. Meat all over. If only he had had his brain with him at Howarden. Easing his awful crotch—not the crotch precisely, somewhere southwest on the scrotum, an acre of the scrotum—he read slowly. ‘We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him (no trouble there, thank God himself, Father Boniface, and Vin): “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. [Double margin-marks.] Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life.” ’ (Thy Way of my life. A heavy saying, as Origen described, ‘Many are called, but few are chosen.’) ‘“May I do Thy Will Always!” We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves [double underscoring] to Him.’ The opening words of the Step drifted into Severance’s open mind, and he realized —with a physical start—that he had never actually ‘Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of.’ He had tried to do it, all right, off and on, off and on, but the decision? He stood up, feeling quite unlike himself, and went and opened the door and hurried down the corridor to the nurses’ station and right and crossed in front of the elevators to the chapel door and opened it and entered and without genuflecting knelt down in the first pew on the right and without even crossing himself leant his elbows on the rail and clasped his hands very tightly and bowed his head and took the Third Step. Christ. Afterward he probably prayed for a long time, who knows, feeling easy and light and amazed at not having ever done this before and, ‘just the decision—now it’s up to Him too—I can’t do it all—He knows that, for Christ’s sake, He made me up, He knows what’s possible to me and what’s just not (at this point) possible—God and I are a majority, as somebody said,’ and when he finally stood up in the dusky empty chapel he felt as if a weighty knapsack had been hoisted off from between his shoulders, he felt possible. ‘Hurrah,’ he said in a low voice to the light on the altar as he genuflected and turned back out.
Bravo you tardy bastard, he bade a happy farewell to himself, wondering if maybe one-sixteenth of it would stick. Submission, eh? Not so clear sailing for pricks cursed with intransigence and power like Baby, but anyway he was on record, and he didn’t plan to forget it. Returning to his neat room for one minute, he wrote the Third Step below the First Step inside the front cover of his 24-Hour Book, where he had already put the names of the thirty-odd people most prominent in his treatment. Slogans were jabbed in there too, and ‘Amends’ notes, and he read it all carefully every morning before he read the three texts for the day. Then he trotted gaily down to the Snack Room and told Jeree, Mike M, George, and Delores stories.
Severance was, though he had never developed a special system of breathing-just-before-concluding (like his old friend Jean Stafford) to keep from losing the floor, an able storyteller. He said that most of the time Ward W reminded him of the legend carved on W. C. Fields’s gravestone—‘I’D RATHER BE HERE THAN PHILADELPHIA’ —though on the other hand he also felt about it what that elegant veteran Maurice Chevalier replied to a reporter: ‘Old age is not so bad, when you consider the alternative.’ Nobody knew the pineapple-juice story. ‘Fields not only had a refrigerator-bar built into his limousine, to ingratiate himself into his role—that is, himself—on the way to the set, but he drank steadily on the set: martinis. A pitcher of them. He did not however call them martinis. He called them pineapple juice. One day some wag, while Fields was on-camera, emptied the pitcher and filled it with pineapple juice. When next he went to his throne to refresh himself, he sputtered, gagged, and—having, like most great comedians, no more sense of humour than a flatworm—exploded. “Who’s been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice?” ’ This pleased one and all, so he went on to mention a personal experience of the sincere delusions of quite ordinary bar-drinkers, most of them probably not even alcoholics. He had done some devoted drinking in West Side bars around 23rd Street after his first wife left him, and was fascinated in some can by the column of graffiti about a certain ‘Mary Jane.’ (He winced at the incongruity of name but it was out, and true, and no matter.) Outstanding and epiph
enomenal sexual qualifications, tastes, and achievements were attributed to her, beginning about seven feet high on the wall and descending, in many calligraphies, to below one’s knee—where some realist had knelt down to record at the bottom his opinion. ‘“I don’t believe,” he wrote soberly, “Mary Jane exists.” ’ Non-alcoholic stories were at a premium on the ward, so this too made a hit, and Severance went away recharged to further his newest campaign against the First Step, glad that he had refrained from boasting about his Third Step insight—where in his chair at the end of half an hour’s work he looked up suddenly from his note-making with incredulity: all his labours had been wasted or nullified.
He realized at last where he stood, and it was in the worst place a patient could be.
He did not speak during dinner except, twice, to a scary scrawny frozen-faced woman named Luriel who had come down the day before from Seven looking so wretchedly that Severance had sort of taken her on, at meals. She hadn’t answered him yet but he kept at it.
It would be hard to say why Severance took Gene into his confidence about a matter so capital, when Mike M or Charley or Mary-Jane would have been natural. So much happened by accident on the Ward, who ran into who where when in what stage of progress, regression, torpor, despair, or mania. Even the deliberate seeking-people which was mandatory for the Repeaters’ Group turned largely on whim, in these early days, before their Programmes (some of their Programmes) had hardened and before they (some of them) finally grew back lax. Severance later read miracles here and there in this matter. The immensely tall lazy intelligent young man, maybe twenty years his junior, who had just come into treatment, was relating from his great height, in the Snack Room, his first confrontation. ‘They’re just trying to make me mad,’ he concluded.
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