Cain’s Book

by Alexander Trocchi

  I put the sticks down near the fireplace and added a few to the flames.

  “He should get rid of it,” Fay said before Tom returned.

  “He’s mad,” I said. “You know a few nights ago in the street another dog tried to mount her. Tom went stark raving mad.”

  “I don’t want her knocked up by any lousy mongrel!” Fay mimicked.

  “That dog is me,” Tom said once. And it is. It is vicious and untrustworthy and it bites his friends. “She was badly treated by her first owner!” She attacked anyone who tried to feed her. Like Tom, she never had a chance. Anger, innocence; the voice of the oppressed.

  “Jesus,” Fay said, “all that sentimental crap makes me sick. I don’t know why he doesn’t get rid of it!”

  He came back, closing the door behind him. The dog whimpered on the far side of it. Tom sat down again and for a while none of us spoke.

  “Seen Jody lately?” Fay asked me.

  “No. Have you?”

  Fay shook her head. “Tom saw her yesterday,” she said.

  I looked over at Tom.

  “At Sheridan Square,” he said. “She wanted to turn on but she didn’t have any bread.”

  “How was she?” I said mechanically. The question came from a theoretical part of me, and yet I was involved in it, and I was more interested than either of the others knew. I suppose I loved Jody. At least I had often found myself acting as though I did. But it wouldn’t bear analysis and I enjoyed it as a sensation, intense, fragile, relative, a state of being, a hint of possibility. If Jody had been in the room at that moment, lying on the bed, and if she had said: “Come and lie down beside me, Joe,” I would have gone and lain down beside her.

  “OK,” Tom said. “She looked OK.”

  But I had no impulse to go out and look for her. If I had known then she was sitting in Jim Moore’s Diner I wouldn’t have walked over to Sheridan Square to pick her up.

  “You mean she was sweating her ass off for a fix but she was looking all the same fine, Tom?”

  “Yeah!” Fay said.

  “She doesn’t sweat much,” Tom said. “She’s not hooked.”

  Listening to the tone of his voice I wondered why he didn’t like Jody. I have asked him more than once but he’s always evasive in his replies. Of course I can understand anyone’s not liking Jody.

  “She’s no chippie, man!” Fay said to Tom, fixing her bilious yellow eyes on him. They glinted like yellow ivory in the firelight.

  Tear said he didn’t say she was but that she didn’t use enough to have a real habit.

  “A ‘real’ habit,” Fay said ironically. “She takes all she can get, man.”

  “She could hustle, she could boost4 more,” Tear said.

  “Sure, she could make a profession of it.” I said.

  “That’s the trouble in this damn country,” Fay said. “You take shit and it becomes your profession.”

  ...Feed my habit, I was thinking. That’s what Moira said to me: “Jody! She just uses you! She lies in her little nest and waits for you to come and feed her. She’s like a bird, a fat, greedy little bird!” The thought only amused me. It wasn’t that it hadn’t occurred to me. Jody would burn me mercilessly. I amused myself by telling Moira that I loved Jody. “And she loves you, I suppose! You’re a fool, Joe! She loves horse. My God, it makes me mad! And you come to me for money to buy shit for her! She doesn’t even let you screw her!” “Yes, that’s too much,” I said quickly, “but it doesn’t matter, Moira, not in the way you think, and not as much as you think it does.” I remember Jody saying: “When we do make love, Joe, it’ll be the end!” The end-love, she meant, the ultimate. – Like an overdose, Jody?

  “When you’re not straight,” Fay said, “you’re looking for it or looking for money to get it with.”

  “It simplifies things,” I said with a smile. “Are you ready to simplify things and become a professional, Tom?”

  Fay laughed huskily.

  “I’m gonna kick tomorrow,” Tear said woodenly, leaning his long hands towards the fire.

  We both looked at him.

  “I mean it, fuck it all,” he said in a slow, laconic voice. “I’ve been on this kick long enough. It’s no fucking good. I spend most of my time in the subway. Backwards and forwards. To cop.”

  “Yeah,” Fay said. Her lip drooped in a smile as she poked the fire again. “It’s a big drag.”

  Of course I knew I was playing with them as I always played. And they were playing with me and with each other. I wondered whether it wasn’t always like that. In all the living how could you expect other people to act except “as if”? At this point I was involved once again in the feeling of thinking something not quite authentic and I allowed the heroin to come back and take me entirely, and then only the room existed, like a cave, like “Castle Keep”, and if other people existed it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter at all. The jungle could encroach no further than the tips of my senses. No matter what went before, from the moment of the fix. And I thought again of Jody, and of how plump she is from eating too many cakes, of the soft wad of her belly, of our thighs without urgency interlaced, of her ugly bitten hands, of the mark on the back of her left hand, high, between forefinger and thumb... it looks like a small purple cyst... into which she drives the needle each time she fixes. “That’s your cunt, Jody,” I said once, and I remember how she looked at me, softly and speculatively, drawing out the needle and watching the bead of blood form on the back of her hand, how she put the hand then to my mouth.

  “Even without dollies,”5 Tom Tear said, “I could kick it in three days.”

  “Sure, three days is plenty,” Fay said elliptically. She clasped her hands at her knees and leant forward towards the fire to lay her chin on them.

  “I wouldn’t need dollies,” Tear said, leaning backwards again and closing his eyes.

  “What would you do all day if you didn’t have to look for a fix?” I said to him.

  “You write,” Fay said, glancing sideways and upwards at me. “Cain is great.”

  “Yeah, not necessarily for anyone else. It’s all I’ve got except Now... you know?”

  “Sure,” Fay said. “It’s evidence.”

  “Yeah, Kilroy was here.”

  “I want to read it,” Tom said. (He never will. He’s afraid of evidence. He acts all the time with a kind of eager anti-intelligence, like his own mad dog, in the teeth of evidence.)

  “Any time,” I said. “I wrote it for us. It’s a textbook for dope fiends and other moles.”

  Fay laughed huskily.

  “It’s great,” she said. “What was it about the gallows, Joe?”

  I smiled with pleasure at being able to quote myself.

  “If a gallows is clean, what more can a criminal expect?”

  I showed Jody Cain’s Book. Something prevented her from having any response whatsoever. She said she couldn’t understand it. She looked blank and shook her head.

  “Nothing?” I said incredulously.

  Fay understood at once. Tom didn’t. He rubbed his woolly head. His dog has the same woolly hair, only it’s chestnut. But Fay understood. “That’s it,” she said. “You gotta keep at it. You gotta do something. If you don’t do anything it’s a big drag. If I could only get a place to work!”

  “Go to Mexico or back to Paris,” I said. “You’d have to get out of this whole context. Here in New York you can only do as you’re doing. Better make it Paris. In Mexico it costs more than it does here, just the atmosphere’s better.”

  “You can say that again,” Fay said. She added irrelevantly: “It’s no good without a pad where I can work.”

  There’s always something irrelevant. I had heard it all before. But I hesitate to deny all validity to this kind of talk. And when someone who hasn’t used junk speaks easily of junkies I am full of contempt. It isn’t simple, any kind of judgement here, and the judgements of the uninitiated tend to be stupid, hysterical. Anger and innocence... those virgin sisters aga
in. No, when one presses the bulb of the eye-dropper and watches the pale, blood-streaked liquid disappear through the nozzle and into the needle and the vein it is not, not only, a question of feeling good. It’s not only a question of kicks. The ritual itself, the powder in the spoon, the little ball of cotton, the matches applied, the bubbling liquid drawn up through the cotton filter into the eye-dropper, the tie round the arm to make a vein stand out, the fix often slow because a man will stand there with the needle in the vein and allow the level in the eye-dropper to waver up and down, up and down, until there is more blood than heroin in the dropper – all this is not for nothing; it is born of a respect for the whole chemistry of alienation. When a man fixes he is turned on almost instantaneously... you can speak of a flash, a tinily murmured orgasm in the bloodstream, in the central nervous system. At once, and regardless of preconditions, a man enters “Castle Keep”. In “Castle Keep”, and even in the face of the enemy, a man can accept... I can see Fay in her fur coat walking in the city at night close to walls. At every corner a threat; the Man and his finks are everywhere. She moves like a beast full of apprehension and for the Man and the values he seeks to impose on her she has the beast’s unbounded contempt.

  A few hundred years ago Fay would have been burnt as a witch and she would have hurled curses and insults at her destroyers from the stake, the unkempt black hair alive with shock, her gleaming yellow eyes mad, and her whole face contorted and hideous with hate to override her pain. Who knows how she may die today? Limits have been closing in; you can hang for dealings with a minor, or rather, you can be electrocuted. Perhaps that is how Fay will die, strapped to a very old-fashioned-looking chair... it is a curious fact that the death chair has such a quaint old-fashioned look!... whinnying hate through purple nostrils, her outraged torso exuding blue smoke. But for the moment she is a forlorn figure slipping quickly through dark streets, desperate for a private place, for a burrow, for “Castle Keep”. There in that low-ceilinged room, I had often said to Fay and to Tom that there was no way out but that the acceptance of this could itself be a beginning. I talked of plague, of earthquake, as being no longer contemporary, of the death of tragedy which made the diarist more than ever necessary. I exhorted them to accept, to endure, to record. As a last act of blasphemy I exhorted them to be ready to pee on the flames.

  “Jesus,” Fay said suddenly, “I could use another fix.”

  “It’s infectious,” I said.

  “I can get bread tomorrow,” Fay said. “Couldn’t you borrow a dime from Moira, Joe? I could give you it tomorrow. I’m going uptown tomorrow.”

  “Not a chance. We’re hardly on speaking terms.”

  “Where’s your boat?” Tom said.

  “Pier 72.”

  “If we could only borrow a dime,” Fay said. “There must be someone.”

  “You hit him last night,” Tom said. “Why don’t you go out and turn a trick?”

  “D’you think I wouldn’t?”

  Past forty, and with her blue look, Fay finds it difficult to interest a john... Dracula’s idea of a good lay. Since she got back from Lexington (the second time) her habit has re-entrenched itself. From day to day I watched her retreat being cut off, and I knew that if I said to her: “Fay, you’re cutting off your retreat,” she would say she knew and that she was going to kick tomorrow, a perfectly valid answer if you are a junkie. Fay could say she was going to kick tomorrow without compromising herself in any way. Fixed, she was in the citadel, and such justifications as came to mind were transparent, of no weight, not part of her affective living. She was inviolate. Talking to Fay you have the impression you are speaking to the secretary of her personal secretary. There is no question of her being capped. It’s a religion for her and she is the only member of the church. That’s often said about Fay. It becomes more and more difficult to get through to her. It’s not that she doesn’t reply. It’s simply you have the impression you are in touch with an answering service, that Fay herself is not speaking to you, that she will certainly not feel committed to anything that’s agreed upon between you and whoever it is that replies.

  “Yes, baby,” Fay says. Which means no, or perhaps, or even yes. There’s no way of telling. There is no more systematic nihilism than that of the junkie in America.

  I often felt during those months like a frantic fisherman struggling grotesquely to hold on to the only fish I could ever hope to catch. I couldn’t say whether Fay felt she had lost her fish. I supposed she didn’t. Her movements were those of a yellow ferret. There was always a lithe quality in her caution. When she strikes she strikes quickly, with bared teeth; she will burn anyone when she is desperate. She is known everywhere in the Village, but she returns to her lair again and again unharmed. Whatever lair. She has none of her own. Under heroin one adapts oneself naturally to a new habitat. It is possible to live in a doorway, on someone’s couch, or bed, or floor, always moving, and turning up from time to time at known places. Fay, owning nothing but the clothes on her back and ridden by her terrible craving, is more than anyone the grey ghost of the district; she can always cop, and she has burnt everyone. She invokes horror, disgust, indignation, a nameless fear. She is the soul’s scavenger, the unexpected guest, a kind of underworld Florence Nightingale always abroad with her spike and her little bag of heroin. She is beyond truth and falsity. When I think of her I think of her soft yellow pugface and her violet hands.

  “It’s no good,” I said, “there’s no one. No point in beating our brains.”

  “If I could just get a taste,” Fay said.

  “What are you going to do, Joe?” Tom said.

  “Back to the scow. I may go out early in the morning, any time after eight.”

  “I’ll walk you as far as Sheridan Square,” Tom said. “I think I’ll hang around there a while. I might run into something.”

  “What about you, Fay?”

  “No. I’ll stay here. Look, Tom, if you cop anything, bring it back, will you? I’m going uptown tomorrow, boost a good coat.”

  “Don’t get caught,” I said. “Why don’t you take some of your sculptures up to that guy who’s interested?”

  “I would but I need something to wear. I can’t go like this. An’ I’ve got to have a fix before I go.”

  “Sure. OK. Look after yourself. I’ll see you.”

  “See you, Joe. Look, try to get back quick, will you, Tom?”

  “Christ, I don’t know if I’ll get anything!”

  “OK, but hurry...”

  When I was three I went to bed at night with a stuffed white bird. It had soft feathers and I held it close to my face. But it was a dead bird and sometimes I looked at it hard and for a long time. Sometimes I ran my thumbnail along the split in the rigid beak. Sometimes I sucked the blue beads which had been sewn in place of the eyes. When the beak was prised open and wouldn’t close again I disliked the bird and sought justifications. It was indeed a bad bird.

  THE PAST IS TO be treated with respect, but from time to time it should be affronted, raped. It should never be allowed to petrify. A man will find out who he is. Cain, Abel. And then he will make the image of himself coherent in itself, but only in so far as it is prudent will he allow it to be contradictory to the external world. A man is contradicted by the external world when, for example, he is hanged.

  These thoughts come to mind... such is my drugged state, the only witness myself, only the metamorphic count offering you eternal death, who has committed suicide in a hundred obscene ways, an exercise in spiritual masturbation, a game well played when you are alone... and I write them down as I try to feel my way into where I left off.

  I always find it difficult to get back to the narrative. It is as though I might have chosen any of a thousand narratives. And, as for the one I chose, it has changed since yesterday. I have eaten, drunk, made love, turned on – hashish and heroin – since then. I think of the judge who had a bad breakfast and hanged the lout.

  Cain’s Book. When all is said and done,
“my readers” don’t exist, only numberless strange individuals, each grinding me in his own mill, for whose purpose I can’t be responsible. No book was ever responsible. (Sophocles didn’t fuck anyone’s mother.) The feeling that this attitude requires defence in the modern world obsesses me.

  God knows there are enough natural limits to human knowledge without our suffering willingly those that are enforced upon us by an ignorantly rationalized fear of experience. When I find myself walled in by the solid slabs of other men’s fear I have a ferocious impulse to scream from the rooftops. “Yah bleedin’ mothahfuckahs! So help me Ah’ll pee on you!” Prudence restrains me. But as the past must sometimes be affronted so also must prudence sometimes be overruled. Caveat.

  I say it is impertinent, insolent, and presumptuous of any person or group of persons to impose their unexamined moral prohibitions upon me, that it is dangerous both to me and, although they are unaware of it, to the imposers, that in every instance in which such a prohibition becomes crystallized in law an alarming precedent is created. History is studded with examples, the sweet leper stifled by the moral prejudice of his age. Vigilance. Dispute legal precedent.

  In my study of drugs (I don’t pretend for a moment that my sole interest in drugs is to study their effects... To be familiar with this experience, to be able to attain, by whatever means, the serenity of a vantage point “beyond” death, to have such a critical technique at one’s disposal – let me say simply that on my ability to attain that vantage point my own sanity has from time to time depended) – in my study of drugs I have been forced to run grave risks, and I have been stymied constantly by the barbarous laws under which their usage is controlled. These crude laws and the social hysteria of which they are a symptom have from day to day placed me at the edge of the gallows’ leap. I demand that these laws be changed.

  The hysterical gymnastics of governments confronting the problem of the atomic bomb is duplicated exactly in their confrontation of heroin. Heroin, a highly valuable drug, as democratic statistics testify, comes in for all the shit-slinging. Perhaps that is why junkies, many of whom possess the humour of detachment, sometimes call it “shit”.