by Henry Miller
You want a bottle opener, not a woman, I said.
He laughed, as though he were slightly embarrassed.
Well, you know how it is, he said. Jesus, I like her all right ... she's fine. Another girl would have ditched me long ago. But—.
Yes, I know. The trouble is she sticks.
It sounds rotten, doesn't it?
It is rotten, said I. Listen, did it ever occur to you that you may never again be an art director, that you had your chance and you muffed it? Now you've got another chance—and you're muffing it again. You could get married and become ... well, I don't know what ... any damned thing ... what difference does it make? You have a chance to lead a normal, happy life—on a modest plane. It doesn't seem possible to you, I suppose, that you might be better off driving a milk wagon? That's too dull for you, isn't it? Too bad! I'd have more respect for you as ditch digger than as president of the Palm Olive Soap Company. You're not burning up with original ideas, as you imagine, you're simply trying to retrieve something that's lost. It's pride that's goading you, not ambition. If you had any originality you'd be more flexible: you'd prove it in a hundred different ways. What gripes you is that you failed. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to you. But you don't know how to exploit your misfortunes. You were probably cut out for something entirely different, but you won't give yourself a chance to find out what. You revolve your obsession like a rat in a trap. If you ask me, it's pretty horrible ... more horrible than the sight of these poor doomed bastards hanging out of the windows. They're willing to tackle anything; you're not willing to lift your little finger. You want to go back to your throne and be the king of the advertising world. And if you can't have that you're going to make everybody around you miserable. You're going to castrate yourself and then say that somebody cut your balls off....
The musicians were tuning up; we had to scoot back to our seats. Mona and Marcelle were already seated, buried in a deep conversation. Suddenly there was a full blare from the orchestra pit, like a snarl of prussic acid over a tight tarpaulin. The red-haired fellow at the piano was all limp and boneless, his fingers falling like stalactites on the keyboard. People were still streaming back from the lavatories. The music got more and more frenetic, with the brass and the percussion instruments getting the upper hand. Here and there a switch of lights blinked, as if there were a string of electrified owls opening and closing their eyes. In front of us a young lad was holding a lighted match to the back of a post-card, expecting to discover the whore of Babylon—or the Siamese twins rolling in a double-jointed orgasm.
As the curtain went up the Egyptian beauties from the purlieus of Rivington Street began to unlimber: they flung themselves about like flounders just released from the hook. A scrawny contortionist did the pin-wheel, then folded up like a jack-knife and, after a few flips and flops, tried to kiss her own ass. The music grew soupy, alternating from one rhythm to another and getting nowhere. Just when everything seemed on the verge of collapse the floundering chorines did a fade-out, the contortionist picked herself up and limped away like a leper, and out limped away like a leper, and out came a pair of incongruous buffoons pretending to be full-blown lechers. The back curtain drops and there they are standing in the middle of a street in the city of Irkutsk. One of them wants a woman so bad his tongue is hanging out. The other one is a connoisseur of horse flesh. He has a little apparatus, a sort of Open Sesame, which he will sell to his friend for 964 dollars and 32 cents. They compromise on a dollar and a half. Fine. A woman comes walking down the street. She's from Avenue A. He talks French to her, the fellow who bought the apparatus. She answers in Volapuk. All he has to do is turn on the juice and she flings her arms around him. This goes on in ninety-two variations, just as it did last week and the week before—as far back as the days Bob Fitzimmons, in fact. The curtain drops and a bright young man with a microphone steps out of the wings and croons a romantic ditty about the aeroplane delivering a letter to his sweatheart in Caledonia.
Now the flounders are out again, this time disguised as Navajos. They reel about the electric camp-fire. The music switches from Pony Boy to the Kashmiri Song and then to Rain in the Face. A Latvian girl with a feather in her hair stands like Hiawatha, looking towards the land of the setting sun. She has to stand on tip-toe until Bing Crosby Junior finishes fourteen quatrains of Amerindian folklore written by a cow-puncher from Hester Street. Then a pistol shot is fired, the chorines whoop it up, the American flag is unfurled, the contortionist somersaults through the block-house, Hiawatha does a fandango, and the orchestra becomes apoplectic. When the lights go out the white-haired mother from the lavatory is standing by the electric chair waiting to see her son burn. This heart-rending scene is accompanied by a falsetto rendition of Silver Threads Among the Gold. The victim of justice is one of the clowns who will be out in a moment with a piss-pot in his hand. He will have to measure the leading lady for a bathing suit. She will bend over obligingly and spread her ass so that he can get the measurements absolutely correct. When that's over she will be the nurse in the lunatic asylum, armed with a syringe full of water which she will squirt down his pants. Then there will be two leading ladies attired in negligee. They sit in a cosy furnished flat waiting for their boy friends to call. The boys call and in a few moments they start taking their pants off. Then the husband returns and the boys hop around in B. V. D's, like crippled sparrows.
Everything is calculated to the minute. By the time 10:23 strikes Cleo is ready to do her second and final number. She will have just about eight and a half minutes to spare, according to the terms of the contract. Then she will have to stand in the wings for another twelve minutes and take her place with the rest of the cast for the finale. Those twelve minutes burn her up. They are precious minutes which are completely wasted. She can't even get into her street clothes; she must show herself in all her glory and give just one little squirm or two as the curtain falls. It burns her up.
Ten twenty-two and a half! An ominous decrescendo, a muffled two-four flam from the drums. All the lights are doused except those over the Exits. The spot-light focuses on the wings where at 10:23 to the dot first a hand, then an arm, then a breast will appear. The head follows after the body, as the aura follows the saint. The head is wrapped in excelsior with cabbage leaves masking the eyes; it moves like a sea urchin struggling with eels. A wireless operator is hidden in the carmined mouth of the navel: he is a ventriloquist who uses the deaf-mute code.
Before the great spastic movements begin with a drum-like roll of the torso, Cleo circles about the stage with the hypnotic ease and lassitude of a cobra. The supple, milk-white legs are screened behind a veil of beads girdled at the waist; the pink nipples are draped with transparent gauze. She is boneless, milky, drugged: a medusa with a straw wig undulating in a lake of glass beads.
As she discards the tinkling robe the pom-pom becomes the tom-tom and the tom-tom the pom-pom.
And now we are in the heart of darkest Africa, where the Ubangi flows. Two snakes are locked in mortal combat. The big one, which is a constrictor, is slowly swallowing the smaller one—tail first. The smaller one is about twelve feet long—and poisonous. He fights up until the last breath; his fangs are still spitting, even as the jaws of the big snake close about his head. A siesta in the shade now follows in order to give the digestive processes full sway. A strange, silent combat produced not by hatred but by hunger. Africa is the continent of plenty in which hunger reigns supreme. The hyena and the vulture are the referees. A land of chilly silences split by furious snarls and agonizing screams. Everything is eaten warm and uncooked. Life so abundant whets the appetite of death. No hatred, only hunger. Hunger in the midst of plenty. Death conies quickly. The moment one is hors de combat the process of devoration sets in. Tiny fishes, mad with hunger, can devour a giant and leave him a skeleton in a few minutes. Blood is sucked up like water. Hair and skin are instantly appropriated. Claws and tusks makes weapons or wampum. No waste. Everything is eaten alive
amidst blood-curdling snarls and screams. Death strikes like lightning through forest and river. The big fellows are no more immune than the little ones. All is prey.
In the midst of this ceaseless tussle the remnants of the human kingdom stage their dances. Hunger is the solar body of Africa, the dance is the lunar body. The dance is the expression of a secondary hunger: sex. Hunger and sex are like two snakes locked in mortal combat. There is no beginning nor end. One swallows the other in order to reproduce a third: the machine become flesh. A machine which functions of itself and to no purpose, unless it be to produce more and more and thus create less and less. The wise ones, the renunciators, seem to be the gorillas. They live a life apart: they inhabit the trees. They are the most ferocious of all—more terrible even than the rhino or the lioness. They utter piercing, deafening screams. They defy approach.
Everywhere throughout the continent the dance goes on. It is the ever-repeated story of dominion over the dark forces of nature. Spirit working through instinct. Africa dancing is Africa trying to lift itself above the confusion of mere reproduction.
In Africa the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes erect and is handled like a banana it is not a personal hard-on we see but a tribal erection. It is a religious hard-on, directed not towards a woman but towards every female member of the tribe. Group souls staging a group fuck. Man lifting himself out of the animal world through a ritual of his own invention. By his mimicry he demonstrates that he has made himself superior to the mere act of intercourse.
The hoochie koochie dancer of the big city dances alone—a fact of staggering significance. The law forbids response, forbids participation. Nothing is left of the primitive rite but the suggestive movements of the body. What they suggest varies with the individual observer. For the majority, probably nothing more than an extraordinary fuck in the dark. A dream fuck, more exactly.
But what law is it that keeps the spectator rigid in his seat, as though shackled and manacled? The silent law of common consent which has made of sex a furtive, nasty act to be indulged in only with the sanction of the Church.
Observing Cleo, the image of that Viennese torso in the side-show reverts to mind. Was Cleo not as thoroughly excommunicated from human society as that seductive freak who was born without legs? No one dares to pounce upon Cleo, any more than one would dare to paw the legless beauty at Coney Island. Though every movement of her body is based on the manual of earthly intercourse no one even thinks of responding to the invitation. To approach Cleo in the midst of her dance would be considered as heinous a crime as to rape the helpless freak of the sideshow.
I think of the dressmaker's model which was once the symbol of feminine allure. I think how that image of carnal pleasure finished off below the torso in an airy skirt of umbrella ribs.
Here's what's passing through my head....
We are a community of seven or eight million people, democratically free and equal, dedicated to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for all—in theory. We represent nearly all the races and peoples of the world at the height of their cultural attainments—in theory. We have the right to worship as we please, vote as we please, create our own laws, and so forth and so on—in theory.
Theoretically everything is ideal, just, equitable. Africa is still a dark continent which the white man is only beginning to enlighten with Bible and sword.
Yet, by some queer, mystical agreement, a woman called Cleo is performing an obscene dance in a darkened house next door to a church. If she were to dance this way in the street she would be arrested; if she were to dance this way in a private house she would be raped and mangled; if she were to dance this way in Carnegie Hall she would create a revolution. Her dance is a violation of the Constitution of the United States. It is archaic, primitive, obscene, tending only to arouse and inflame the base passions of men and women. It has only one honest purpose in view—to augment the box office receipts for the Minsky brothers. That it does. And there one must stop thinking about the subject or go crazy. But I can't stop thinking.... I see a mannikin who under the lustful gaze of the cosmopolitan eye has assumed flesh and blood. I see her draining the passions of a supposedly civilized audience in the second biggest city in the world. She has taken on their flesh, their thoughts, their passions, their lascivious dreams and desires, and in doing so has truncated them, left them with stuffed torsos and umbrella ribs. I suspect that she has even robbed them of their sexual organs, because, if they were still men and women, what would hold them to their seats? I see the whole swift performance as a sort of Caligari seance, a piece of deft, masterful psychic transference. I doubt that I am sitting in a theatre at all. I doubt everything, except the power of suggestion. I can just as easily believe that we are in a bazaar in Nagasaki, where sexual objects are sold; that we are sitting there in the dark with rubber sexes in our hands and masturbating like maniacs. I can believe that we are in limbo, amidst the smoke of astral worlds, and that what passes before the eye is a mirage from the phenomenal world of pain and crucifixion. I can believe that we are all hanging by the neck, that it is the moment between the springing of the trap and the snapping of the cerebro-spinal cord, which brings about the last most exquisite ejaculation. I can believe that we are anywhere except in a city of seven or eight million souls, all free and equal, all cultured and civilized, all dedicated to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Above all, I find it most difficult to believe that I have just this day given myself in holy wedlock for the third time, that we are seated side by side in the darkness as man and wife, and that we are celebrating the rites of spring with rubber emotions.
I find it utterly incredible. There are situations which defy the laws of intelligence. There are moments when the unnatural commingling of eight million people gives birth to floral pieces of blackest insanity. The Marquis de Sade was as lucid and reasonable as a cucumber. Sacher Masoch was a pearl of equanimity. Blue Beard was as gentle as a dove.
Cleo is becoming positively luminous in the cold radiance of the spotlight. Her belly has become a swollen, sullen sea in which the brilliant carmine navel tosses about like the gasping mouth of a naufrage. With the tip of her cunt she tosses floral pieces into the orchestra. The pom-pom becomes the tom-tom and the tom-tom the pom-pom. The blood of the masturbator is in her veins. Her teats are concentric veins of stewed purple. Her mouth flashes like the red sear of a tusk ripping a warm limb. The arms are cobras, the legs are made of patent leather. Her face is paler than ivory, the expressions fixed, as in the terra cotta demons of Yucatan. The concentrated lust of the mob invades her with the nebulous rhythm of a solar body taking substance. Like a moon wrenched from the fiery surface of the earth, she disgorges pieces of blood-soaked meat. She moves without feet, as do the freshly amputated victims of the battle-field in their dreams. She writhes on her imaginary soft stumps, emitting noiseless groan of lacerating ecstasy.
The orgasm comes slowly, like the last gouts of blood from a geyser in pain. In the city of eight million she is alone, cut off, excommunicated. She is giving the last touches to an exhibition of sexual passion which would bring even a corpse to life. She has the protection of the City Fathers and the blessings of the Minsky Brothers. In the city of Minsk, whence they had journeyed from Pinsk, these two far-sighted boys planned that all should be thus and so. And it came about, just as in the dream, that they opened their beautiful Winter Garden next door to the Catholic Church. Everything according to plan, including the white-haired mother in the lavatory.
The last few spasms.... Why is it that all is so quiet? The black floral pieces are dripping with condensed milk. A man named Silverberg is chewing the lips of a mare. Another called Vittorio is mounting a ewe. A woman without name is shelling peanuts and stuffing them between her legs.
And at this same hour, almost to the minute, a dark, sleek chap, nattily attired in a tropical worsted with a bright yellow tie and a white carnation in his button-hole, takes his stand in front of the Hote
l Astor on the third step, leaning his weight lightly on the bamboo cane which he sports at this hour of the day.
His name is Osmanli, obviously an invented one. He has a roll of ten, twenty and fifty dollar bills in his pocket. The fragrance of an expensive toilet water emanates from the silk kerchief which cautiously protrudes from his breast pocket. He is as fresh as a daisy, dapper, cool, insolent—a real Jim Dandy. To look at him one would never suspect that he is in the pay of an ecclesiastical organization, that his sole mission in life is to spread poison, malice, slander, that he enjoys his work, sleeps well and blossoms like the rose.
To-morrow noon he will be at his accustomed place in Union Square, mounted on a soap box, the American flag protecting him; the foam will be drooling from his lips, his nostrils will quiver with rage, his voice will be hoarse and cracked. Every argument that man has trumped up to destroy the appeal of Communism he has at this disposal, can shake them out of his hat like a cheap magician. He is there not only to give argument, not only to spread poison and slander, but to foment trouble: he is there to create a riot, to bring on the cops, to go to court and accuse innocent people of attacking the Stars and Stripes.
When it gets too hot for him in Union Square he goes to Boston, Providence, or some other American city, always wrapped in the American flag, always surrounded by this trained fomentors of discord, always protected by the shadow of the Church. A man whose origin is completely obscured, who has changed his name dozens of times, who has served all the Parties, red, white and blue, at one time or another. A man without country, without principle, without faith, without scruples. A servant of Beelzebub, a stooge, a stool pigeon, a traitor, a turncoat. A master at confusing men's minds, an adept of the Black Lodge.