Spread
Page 2
Unfamiliar with the races, I am nonetheless eager to learn. What marvelous passions, what heights of misdirection, what strange peace seems to afflict these people as they wander in the grandstand between bar and restaurant, tote board and window, rail and garden! Everything seems simple here; none of the complexities of the social organism and all of it reduced to figures, besides, in a paper which I can comprehend and worked out in races which I can see. Not for a long time have I permitted myself to believe in immediate outcome, but I am interested, hopeful; the office can wait for two hours and the payoff from the tip will more than cover me for my time. As I wander down toward the rail, a blond woman in a tight dress gives me an absent look compounded of desire and fear; vague but constant adulterous impulses churn, I wonder if I should ask her the time. I decide not to. I intimate from other sources that sex is nonexistent at the track.
By the rail, jammed cheek to shoulder with hundreds of others, I watch the running of the second race. My tip is on the third and for interest I have bet $2 on the longest shot in the race to show. The horses break from the gate opposite us and run down the backstretch, into the turn, and all the way through the unfolding stretch, hitting the finish wire some yards from where I stand. This is a simple enough act; as basic and straightforward in its convolutions as fucking or sleep but it seems to overwhelm the crowd; they scream and curse, shake their fists into the air and pray, do everything within their power to urge their horses on. A small man beside me seems to faint but before his head has even hit the rail he is awake again, bright-eyed and desperate, saying something about the seven horse. I try to clear a little space around me with knees and elbows, looking for my own number, but it seems hopeless. The race is over before I am even acclimated and I have no idea how my horse has done. Numbers come on the board and it turns out that my horse has placed. The numbers turn the screams of the crowd into dull rumbles, analyses, excuses. The race is declared official and my horse has paid thirteen dollars and eighty cents to show. I get in line to collect.
In the line I find further mysteries: no one seems particularly happy. Some feel that they should have bet their horses to win, others are convinced that they did not bet enough. They know that some person or forces have done terrible things to them, but I can see their advantage over me; they feel that this person or force is at the track this very afternoon and that there is still the possibility of intercession or, at least, of divining motive. It is something like being at God’s elbow while the Book of Life is made out for the coming year and you are able to discuss the issue with him as slowly the names of friends, acquaintances and relatives are written in, along with those of several enemies. Perhaps your name will not appear. Then again, very possibly it will. The book is open and God is writing; he is willing to hear your position on the matter.
I take my thirteen dollars and change and go forward to the seller’s area, seeing the blond woman for the second time that day. Her glance is more meaningful; there is no question now that she is trying to get my attention. She is not particularly attractive but there is a demented tilt to her breasts under the tautness of her dress which excites me, and I go to her side, ask her if she has any ideas on the next race, explain that I have come out to bet it. She touches my wrist and leans against my elbow, whispers something that I do not hear. We then make arrangements to meet by the rear grandstand cigarette counter, ground level, after the race. She shows some interest in staying with me, but I explain that I have to meet associates on important business before the running of the race and she is content. I hand her a cigarette and she leaves.
I go to the $50 window and bet Tony’s money on the horse to win. Then, abstracted, I move over to the $100 window some feet down and, under the glum face of a Pinkerton, bet $200 on the horse to place. As I do this, feeling a faint warmth to the tickets, I feel a distant excitement within me, but the excitement is hardly enough, and on the instant I decide that I will play the horses no more. It does not seem worth it.
The betting completed, I return to the rail and watch the horses circle the paddock and then move to the track for the post parade. The jockeys sit uneasily on the horses, shake their heads, look at the sky while around me people make comments on their riding in the last race and beg them to do better or worse. Gemini turns out, through some error in Tony’s information, to be not a bay horse but a roan, a series of uneven red blotches marring what would otherwise be a dirty gray. She moves unsteadily, her feet trembling on the dirt, her head tossing now and then to the opposite of her stride. I decide on the basis of the little I know about horses that she is probably hurting, but for this too there must be a reason; possibly only the question of pain will inform the horse with terror and the need to run. I think of a veterinarian creeping into the horse’s stall at midnight to inflict brutalities upon her hips and hocks, a cigarette dangling unhealthily between his lips as he cunningly inserts nails into the bottom of each shoe. There is a certain air of disreputability to the track which I like, although most of the people who surround me seem to think that it is killing their chances.
In due course the horses get into the starting gate and across the track break for their seven furlongs. The filly is on top all the way but begins to stagger in the stretch and barely hangs on to finish third, beaten by several lengths by the second place horse and only a nose in front of the fourth horse. For the first time it occurs to me to look at the toteboard, and it turns out that the horse was 25–1, certainly enough to make a show bet very profitable. Sullenly I hope for a disqualification but this is not to be and once again the race becomes official. Gemini pays $14.60 to show, meaning that I would have won $1260 for my $200 if I had only been cautious as I had been the first time. It is, however, too late for considerations of this sort.
I begin to wonder why I am at the track. I decide to leave. I have forgotten the woman already but passing the Stevens cigarette stand I see her by herself, casting darting glances through the crowd, her hands fluttering as she reaches into her handbag for a cigarette, a certain fine beam of despair in her glance. I find that I have no stomach to leave her there and instead go over and tell her that I am now ready to leave but have lost several hundred dollars on a bad tip and am therefore unable to entertain her.
She gives me a complex look of bitterness, pain, and communion and says that I have obviously had the situation all wrong. That she is not that kind of person at all. That she would not permit herself to go around with a person who saw her in that way. That I have done nothing less than cheapen her in such a way that she literally is ashamed of herself for ever having spoken to me.
She moves to slap my face but I dodge agilely enough and move quickly down the stairwell and to the ground level, then out to the parking lot. My stride is loose, easy, a certain space seems to lay between my feet and the asphalt; unforeseen, a strange, manic tune begins to burble out of my throat. If I did not know better — but surely by this time I know better — I could almost swear that I have had a good time at the races and that like everyone there, I have found exactly what I was looking for.
X
Not since our fifth issue have we run pictures showing couples actually engaged in the act of sexual intercourse. The law of the land, as interpreted through the Supreme Court, seems clear enough: nothing that has socially redeeming value may be denied the rights of publication and mass distribution and all published materials have this socially redeeming value since they are an expression of certain phases of the culture, social obsessions, so to speak, and an index of the taste of thousands. Despite this, the District Attorney of Kings County, through his minions, seized several thousand copies of our fifth issue, the centerfold of which showed a man and woman lying side by side, his erect penis in the act of penetrating her vagina. The contention of the District Attorney was that this picture was pornography per se and unentitled to the protection of the First Amendment, and the efforts of our attorneys to block the action at the level of the first hearing were unsuccessful. T
he case went on appeal to the next highest court, but in the meantime the District Attorney carried an injunction enjoining all newsdealers in his borough from carrying further issues of our newspaper since the offending publication indicated that we were likely to print pornography in the future. Because of this, several of our outlets in the other boroughs became panicky and substantially cut down their orders for issues, while all hopes of out-of-town distribution were lost. Our attorneys stated that the action of the District Attorney was illegal and the case, when it got into the higher courts, would certainly be decided in our favor, but in the meantime we were faced with the possibility that the actions of the District Attorney could put us out of business. Sales of our sixth issue were off 75 percent from those of the fifth and of the seventh were even worse, and the clearest projections showed that we would hardly last another month unless the pressure on us was removed.
Our attorneys, then, worked out an agreement with the District Attorney whereby he would withdraw his injunction if we in return would promise not to run offending material in the future. We were not to show couples in the actual act of intercourse, we were not to show manipulation of the genitals and we were not to depict any acts which in the opinion of the District Attorney could be labeled an incitement to riot. Naked bodies, male and female, were permitted, as were pictures of males and females, females and females, or males and males together as long as intercourse, sodomy, or pre-coital play were clearly contraindicated. By agreeing to this compromise, we were able to recover our circulation and eventually paid only a very small fine. Our sales have never returned to the level that they reached at the point of offense, but on the other hand the newspaper has been extraordinarily profitable, and we would clearly be misguided if we were to risk our position for a principle whose finding would come too late to save us.
These are part of the compromises of publishing and I have little guilt or self-recrimination about the action which we took. Nevertheless, now and then, looking at proofs of the pages or the newspaper in actual distribution, I feel a sense of loss overtake me; it is not so much the act of connection that I find missing as a certain expression which seems to come to the faces of all couples engaging in sexual intercourse or even miming it. It is an expression of knowledge and cunning, complex apperception under the fact of connection, and for that which is missing, the pain and knowledge which overtakes even the ugliest and most professionalized model, I feel loss and wish that it could have been different while knowing that this can never happen.
XI
With a priest, a television producer and the moderator, I am sharing a panel on a late-night radio program, broadcast live over a network hookup from a small, shadowy, gutted studio in midtown Manhattan. The subject of the panel is the new libertarianism in the arts, and I have been invited as a demonstration case. The moderator, an ugly man in his fifties who intersperses insults of the most personal and vicious type with off-the-air reminders to us that there is nothing personal here at all and that he is only trying to get a discussion going, the moderator, as I am saying, has momentarily stopped the discussion to read an ad for a hamburger chain in New Jersey which serves a complete meal for nineteen cents and tosses in a hospitalization guarantee. The moderator’s facial gestures are totally out of accord with his material as he speaks; he gives us to know, through a horrid series of winks, twitches and contortions, that he is a serious man given to serious purposes and that all of this nonsense is only the price that he must pay for the boldness of the discussions he hosts, the positions he takes. When he has finished the advertisement, he returns to the issue at hand, which happens to be my sense of responsibility for what I am publishing, and asks me if I would like to have my daughter read an issue of the newspaper I publish.
“I don’t have a daughter,” I say, “but if I did, I am sure that I would not object to her reading anything that happened to be in my home and, yes, my newspaper is often found in my home. I must take a lot of the work with me; what you have to understand is that this is a difficult business.” The priest breaks in to say that he thinks that the moderator is arguing ad hominem and is misdirecting the issue which deserves to be taken on its own merits. He is a very libertarian priest, who is in favor of clerical marriages and the breaking down of the old Italian control of the Church although he, personally, observes the vows of celibacy. I hate to say this but I find the priest something of a bore; a bore and a fool as well, he reminds me of nothing so much as certain boys I knew in college who were afraid to go out with girls but had a kind of relentless jocularity about sex in general and believed that their social failures were personal rather than something to do with the scheme of things. That is what the priest is; a dormitory boy who has discovered the reality of sex at the age of forty and now, hopelessly too far behind to ever catch up, can only submit to it by laughing the question out of court. “The tiling you should be asked,” he says, “is not about your daughter because you’re obviously too young to have a daughter who could be influenced by this newspaper in any way, but about your wife. Do you let your wife read your publication? What does she think of it?”
“My wife reads anything she wants to,” I say, “I could hardly control her reading. She reads the newspaper, yes. I think she rather likes it although we’ve never discussed it in those terms. Mature adults don’t feel they have to take positions on sexual material, you know.” This is, perhaps, an unfortunate thrust, but it has been a long session, the studio is foul with our breath, and since there is no payment for the broadcast, one must take his compensation where he may.
“Exactly,” says the television producer. He is a stunned little man who, many years ago I understand, directed a loathsome situation comedy into the top ten ratings; when the package changed hands and he was fired, he took a position with a university journalism department and appointed himself an academic critic of television; in due course he became associated with an educational channel from which he was never heard again except for occasional freelance articles in Sunday newspapers deploring the progress of the medium. “That is exactly the point.” Then he folds his hands, takes a look down at an intricate doodle he has been composing and sighs further into the microphone. “I would think that one would ask his wife,” he says. I find it difficult to understand exactly why he was added to this panel although the moderator, before the show went on the air, hastily whispered to the priest and myself that the “original” guest who was far more interesting had taken ill at the last moment and that in the interests of “balance” this is really all the network can produce at short notice. “If his wife is askable of course,” the producer says.
There is a dead spot of silence into which the moderator moves quickly to question my sexual adequacy and wonder whether my newspaper has as its basis a psychic need in me to make sex ugly and degrading and punish all of its participants. It is somewhat subtler than this, of course, but I get the idea. I point out to him that my sexual life or lack of it has nothing to do with the significance or value of my work and that a similar statement could be made about, say, Karl Marx or Ernest Hemingway without in any way managing to come to the point. The priest says that he agrees with this wholeheartedly and the moderator makes a nasty, veiled comment about the code of celibacy. The producer says, “I think that we’re all being dragged down to a gutter level now by our publisher-guest.” The priest says that this is disgusting and offensive, the moderator says that the whole problem with sex nowadays is that the basic sacredness of the act has been utterly lost along with a sense of self-respect, and I feel the program literally beginning to dissolve under me; it is hard to maintain a proper sense of attention anymore and the room is wavering, voices are wandering; sounds are pulsing in the air as in the instants before deep sleep, and when I come to myself, my cigarette is being lit for me by someone who has come out of the control booth and I am talking passionately, floridly, about the reasons for my establishing the newspaper. It seems that I was sick of hypocrisy, sick of cant, sick
of the whole insane bent of the culture which made death visible and glamorous yet shielded the act of love and the naked body as something despicable. It was a sickness in the culture which was symptomatic of the whole mad misdirection since the time of the industrial revolution and I had had enough of this, quite enough. I founded the newspaper because I wanted to do my part to tear open the windows and let the cold breath of sanity into the room of America. I realized that often the publication was perverse and offensive, but this was the way that it had to be if it were to have any vitality at all because the price of freedom was pain, the price of liberty was the blasting of cultural cant, and I was willing to do this because through the centuries it had been men like me who had restored human culture, periodically, to sanity through upheaval. I listen to myself with astonished interest; I appear to have a social conscience. Also it seems that I am making very little money from the newspaper, virtually every cent being plowed back to the distributors, the employees, the paper itself and most importantly the legal fund which is reaching massive dimensions as we face the necessity for a large number of court cases to prove that people have the right to their own thoughts and desires. The few dollars which I am making from the newspaper I could have made just as easily and at less strain on a payroll elsewhere and, in fact, did for many years, but decided when I passed the crucial age of thirty that I had to do something useful for my life, take a position at the barricades and try to save America from her own madness. The moderator listens to this with nods and winks reminiscent of the gestures with which he delivers the commercials and says that on that note he will wrap things up for the night and thank you very much all of you for attending; we cannot always agree with one another but we can learn to respect each other’s motives, and this is the purpose of his program, to shed light on issues through people. The priest says that he is moved by my statement and on his own level is trying to do exactly that kind of thing within his impoverished Brownsville parish; the television producer coughs, struggling with a cigarette and says that he has learned through the years to take men seriously only through their acts and not so much through their rationalizations. I show him with a nod that I see his point and may even agree with it and the moderator signs us all off the air with a jingle for Howard Shoes which are not for cowards but for men who want to beat the blues. We stand up stiffly, twitching in the heat of the studio and shake hands. The moderator says that he thinks that this has been a very good show, interesting show, useful show, he must have all of us back soon for another go at it. Eearded men pour from the control booth, giggling, and ask me if I have any spare issues of the newspaper in my attaché case, or failing that, the numbers of any of the models. Once again things dissolve, although in full color this time, and when I come back to myself I am having a martini in an empty bar with the priest who seems to be drunk and who tells me in desperate tones that he was thirty-five years old before he understood that the flesh could no longer be denied, thirty-five wasted years, and another five to struggle through as far as he had come, but I have to understand the terrible guilt of a strict Catholic upbringing and it indeed would have happened to me if I had grown up in his circumstances. I am smoking a cigarette, appear to be agreeing with him, although with a quiet smile now and then for the bartender who appears, however, to be engaged with other business. Later I am in a taxicab alone going home and later than that I am lying in the bed, next to my naked and sleeping wife, listening to the playback of the radio program on which I have just appeared. I listen to my voice with quizzical interest; I have no idea what I am getting at. My wife is a light sleeper and I could, at any moment, reach over and with a touch on her buttocks turn her toward me and reach for her breasts, take the obligatory act of love that at three in the morning comes from whatever source as full of mystery and need … but I do not want to touch her, I am lying bolt upright in the bed at three in the morning, listening to the radio, listening to my voice, trying to understand what I am saying, and it seems that if I could only get to the sense of it, I would come to a sense of myself which would answer all of the questions, but I know that it is not that easy and listening to the bland, shrieking confidence of my intonation, so self-righteous that I could cut it, I begin to come to a different perception, and the perception is one of confusion and loss, and finally I fall asleep although not for a long time and not to an easy awakening.