by Henry Miller
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 clean lay will clean 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 he’ll 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 precipitated 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 Jew-boys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Carnarsie, Bronville, opening and closing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the sausage machine, clogging 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 acid 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, Carnarsie and intermediate points. The octopus is dancing like a rubber dick – the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil inédit. 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 lips 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 this 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 Schna
dig, 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.