I sat for a long time thinking of my father in the lounge of the hotel where, to discourage late drinkers, most of the lights had been turned out. Everyone else had gone, except the one with the wen, and even she went away for long periods, through the pantry door. But I had begun to enjoy its bleakness and its emptiness.
The murderer entered and sat down some distance away at the only other table at which a light was burning. I noticed him come in at the moment at which he entered, but it was as though I retained the visual image of his entering in a preconscious state and at a distance from what I was at the instant experiencing, the image of him flat and without contour, there during all those ten minutes during which I was still following the hollow recesses of the room into their tawdry elaboration in the mind of a professional plasterer, amongst shadows, in the oblong gloom of the ceiling, and its emptiness, and its dank, ash-laden smell, the spirals of blue smoke all ascended to a dripping unstable cloud under the roof, as in an auditorium deserted after a performance. Then suddenly – I say ten minutes – I was aware of him seated at the table under the light, like a man waiting, as he was, a white blob of a face and a dark blue suit, and I had a sense that he was elderly.
The wen came and went to his table a moment later. It might have been she who called my attention to him. I had felt her restlessness and the fact of there being another customer seemed to enliven her. And it let me off a hook.
And then we were both sitting in all that emptiness and it occurred to me that if one of us wished to speak he would have to call out at the top of his voice. If I called out at the top of my voice, officials would come from all directions, porters, night clerks, chambermaids, to witness the taking of the madman. But it wasn’t so. When the gentleman spoke, he did so in a high voice but not loudly.
“Stranger in town?”
I had not expected him to address me and was caught off guard. I began to say yes but it trailed away into an anonymous gesture of the hand which was to indicate the enormity of the room, the impracticality of carrying on an intelligent conversation at that great distance. He got up and came across. Sit here, no need to shout, he conveyed to me, and I found myself smiling acceptance. – He is now here by your explicit request, I was thinking. Anything that happens now is your own doing. The table, the man, the dim light, the wen in the pantry stealing cakes. He was about to say something but I dropped my right hand to his thigh, near the crotch, and looked him in the eye. He looked like a stunned fish, a big cod splayed chin flat on the marble. He goggled. Then he pulled himself up, struggling to remove my hand which clung to the fat of his thigh like a hook to beef, and a sly, wheedling expression was suddenly jammed close to my own, an expression which flashed intelligence of the pantry where the wen might walk. “Not here!” he said in a breathless whisper.
It occurred to me that if at that moment I were to lick his face as a cow might he would certainly scream.
When I got up to go to my room he was still at his table (which, of course, he had never left). I crossed the hall to the foyer and went outside into the street where there was a light rain. A night in London, I was thinking. Well, for Christ’s sake go to bed, you don’t have to write it!
...two hundred little girls, aged from five to twenty: when they are sufficiently mortified by the operations of my lechery, I eat them.
– D.-A.F. de Sade
“CAPACITY FOR LOVE?” GEO said. “I don’t know anything about that. I have noticed Jody has a capacity for horse.”
Mona was trying to get a job in Indochina and the very thought of being in that country gave Geo wet dreams. I was hoping she would get it. She was on the scows only at weekends, like some other women who had jobs during the week. As they are still employable they are usually better looking.
Mona said to me: “I’m not a kid any longer, Joe. I’m thirty-two. I know Geo can’t give up horse, not now anyway, but I want to know where I stand. I don’t care whether he’s a good painter or not. He doesn’t paint. He hasn’t painted for over a year now. But I want to know if he wants me to be his woman. He doesn’t live on what he makes on the scow. He’s always in debt and he doesn’t notice how much he’s really getting from me. I don’t mean only money, Joe,” etc.
What are you going to say to Mona?
“She’s great,” Geo said, “like she’s not small. I can get a good grip on her ass... but sometimes I feel like young, untired pussy.”
There’s not much young pussy in sight today. Hatless women with bare pink legs in broken shoes, red, flat, suspicious faces. But in the strong sun and the glint of the silvery water everything is at peace. Occasionally a man calls out to someone on another scow. The water laps gently at the bilges and moves back, bubbling. A small red and black tug with a large white C painted on its funnel hoots and moves away from the side of a scow and quickly towards the head of the tow. The scows are four abreast in seven tiers. Some of them have roof gardens, a kind of window box in which one can sit in the midst of geraniums. A circular came with our last pay cheque: “Captains desiring geraniums please notify paymaster at the New York office immediately.”
The green trees; the fragrance of the trees in the water-travelled wind avoided the nostril that twitched to find a word to express it. The hairs of the earth’s body; to get beyond the abstraction it was necessary to sink or soar, and that was wordless, my sitting there in the summer wind, sinking, soaring. But then my mind came back, like a scythe, to reap the corn, to refine the sensual elisions. From the tropisms of vegetables, my ancestors, no exit except through symbol, the scaffoldings of imagination. An indignity for a man to be a tree which knows other trees sexually but not women.
I was sitting, stripped to the waist in the sun, the light river wind like a cool feather at my skin, my thighs prickling on the painted wood seat, the sweat there at the loins in my shorts, smelling my own summer smell and the tar smell of the scow, a hanging warmly about my belly of summer air, and a consciousness of the hairs at my crotch in prickling sweat. I was smelling the trees and the summer air, conscious of knowing the instant of living in the summer afternoon. A moment ago, lust, with an elation behind my nose and eyes, twitched like a blade of grass at my scrotum, and my gaze came to rest on a fat woman under a beach umbrella perched hugely in the foreground of distant hills... put a pillow under it dear and I’ll ram it home. Between the big knees and the big arse, thighs, God-given and gratefully accepted, the luscious seedy melon slice of Eve, greedy for get, and to beget. She had red hair.
My mother had red hair. That worried me. Her body was creamy and varicose-veined at the legs. The thought of a red sex worried me. It was incongruous, almost occult... a single item of uncorrelatable evidence disturbing my general picture of her, pointing to a vast and formless hinterland of experience which, because she was my mother, I felt constrained to shun. I should have needed a new language for it. I was never able to get beyond the idea of her as “my mother”. And yet at a time which I cannot in its uniqueness recall I came bursting bloodily out from between her spread thighs, head first, they said, as one thrown. Her goodness was legendary and my total experience of her – “She was a gem, she was,” Aunt Hettie said after her death – consisted in a vague colouration of particulars within the general construct of her sanctity. Only the mute knowledge of her constant loving of me was vivid as the seditious thought of the red sex. As I grew up that became a symbol whose meaning I was unable to comprehend, always there, strange, substantial, rather horrifying. Even up to her death I did not become aware of the woman. I realized that clearly for the first time when I looked at her face in the coffin. The others touched her hair. But to me it was the hair of a bad dead doll, undertaker’s colour, and I didn’t know her.
And I moved out of the past back into my glance at the woman under the umbrella who now reminded me of Ella (why not?) whom I had picked up on the night train from Liverpool to London a week after I said goodbye to my father. Only the blue nightlight was on in the crowded compartment and I fel
t her belly and thighs under a spread coat. When we arrived at Victoria we took a taxi to where she lived in Notting Hill Gate. I remember being conscious of the fact that I was looking at the upper half of a naked woman. She was in the bed with the bedclothes drawn up far enough to obscure her navel. Half an hour before, she had got up. The soles of her feet made a flat thocking sound on the floor. In an upright position her big belly piled itself up on its own ripple just above her crinkly black pubic hairs. Her fat thighs trembled with the shock of her step. I watched them approach and pass. When she came back I met her on my knees. To see her close, her abdomen falling outwards towards my singing face, caused both me and what I was looking at to lose in separateness. I underwent a kind of catharsis. I remember my eyes moving from her hips to her navel and down, the whiteness exploding softly under the pressure of lips and fingertips, the heat, the skin close, odorous, opaque, yellowish, and pitted almost like pumice stone, a mass which lost all distinctness as it came to rest against my forehead. Her body jerked softly, nameless, absolute. I rose from her later and went to the lavatory. When I returned she was already back in the bed. I looked directly at her, my attention held by the soft wad of hair at her armpit. Except to tell me her name she scarcely spoke. Ella Forbes. I knew nothing about her. I suspected she was married. Perhaps her husband was a commercial traveller, like Hector. She carried an assortment of articles purchased in a chemist’s in her large, bucket-shaped handbag. She was a Catholic. I knew that because she was wearing a rosary she didn’t take off. Her nipples were corkish. I approached on my tongue, quitting her deeply indented navel to move upwards between them, and finally I contained the warm silver crucifix in my mouth. Strong white teeth and thick lips. She used numerous cosmetics. The nails of her fingers and toes were enamelled a cyclamen red. For a few hours we were able to annihilate ourselves in each other. There was no complicated syntax between us.
The man who is constantly scrapping with the world, constantly fighting the controls that circumstance and society place upon him is only fourteen years old emotionally. At fourteen, it is normal and accepted behaviour for the adolescent to rebel against control because the adolescent is “feeling his acts”, testing out his new “grown-upness” against the controls that were placed upon him as a child. But when an adult rebels so violently and constantly against his environment, he is emotionally immature in that area.
How to Make Your Emotions Work for You.
Dorothy C. Finkelor Ph.D. foreword by Dale Carnegie.33
Turn on all the lights and take a good look round. Look at Jennie in Paris drinking a cognac at the bar of the Dôme. A few moments ago you noticed her extract her large black tits from her wide brassiere and lay them on the copper bar. There they lie like overgrown eggplants on a tray of burnished gold, and with them she defies the room. Jennie is wearing a wig. She is black and fat and nearing thirty-five and killing herself more or less purposively with drink. Back in the room at Montparnasse she says: “Honey, I’m not really so fat. I’m just well-developed.”
“You’re fat and you’ve got a fat black ass.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Goddammit, you blonde blue-eyed nymphet! Will you open your legs?”
Feeling under your own belly the hard bristles of hers.
“Ugh.” Her nostrils tightening.
“Because two farts maketh no poem, dost think two bellies cannot?”
Jennie is always raped.
The taste of her still in your mouth. She is dressing in front of the mirror over the wash-basin. Fuck over, dress quick, is her experience. She seldom exhibits her nakedness, except in defiance, in public places.
I was like she was, hot, see? a fat lovable little boy with an eye that peeped at her with sheer joy, the slicks, flats, elastic tensions at her great thighs, the torque of her hot delta which smoked a Turkish cigarette for me to see she was all lips and hips at the base of the green pod she burgeoned downwards from like a butter bean. As she moved, her belly dangling like an egg on poach, she scissored her legs cleverly, and spat out the roach, which I raised to my lips. I was like she was, and she at her ease, and ripe was she as a thumb pressed on a Camembert cheese, her chevron gamey-dark like good game as she came on me and retrieved her cigarette which, like a flutist, she laid at her mouth, inhaled, and threw it away, before she leant against me, like a sea.
It occurred to me often that to be a user in New York was to lay oneself open to a whole system of threats, not only legal; for my mind always came back as I looked down at the little heap of whitish powder to wonder what an analyst would find there. The horse is cut with all manner of adulterous powders, until, at the average user’s end, there remains three per cent heroin. You can usually count on three per cent. But there are times when codeine or even a barbiturate is substituted for the real thing... so long as they stun you, they calculate. And so you look to cop again, at once, and so it goes on. To administer an overdose a pusher has only substantially to raise the percentage of heroin in what he gives you. When you turn blue your friends try to bring you round and if they cannot they discuss how to have your body discovered elsewhere, away from their pad so as not to bring the heat on them. An occasional corpse is found in a parking lot.
I look back on all the moving from city to city and across continents. Sometimes a move was to another bed, to another room, and then suddenly, like an unguided missile, I travelled a thousand miles. I remember travelling with Midhou third class on a third-class Greek steamer from Genoa to Piraeus with a vague plan to meet up with a girl who had flown to Athens, and to walk to China. We were confined amongst cattle and other livestock to the bows, sailing across the Aegean to the Corinth canal. At the table in the dining room there was Midhou, the Algerian without a country, and this old Orthodox Jew, and myself. Midhou didn’t speak English and the Jew didn’t speak French, so I was in the middle. Midhou was an Arab who couldn’t bring himself to fight for anything, and certainly not for Arab nationalism. The Orthodox Jew, bearded, in sombre clothes, glanced distastefully at Midhou and spoke to me of the progress they were making in Israel.
“Not like the Arabs. You wouldn’t believe it, my dear sir, how primitive they are... so backward, no sanitation...”
“Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?”34 Midhou said to me.
“He says you’re unsanitary.”
“Merde! Petit con!”35
The Jew nodded his head to confirm his own thoughts when he saw Midhou’s leer. At the first meal he discovered that the cooking wasn’t kosher. For the rest of the voyage he ate apples and sardines and hard-boiled eggs while Midhou, three feet away, gnawed dripping bones.
All the women in third class were pregnant.
The notes from Athens were pretty much the same as notes from elsewhere:
For a long time I have suspected there is no way out. I can do nothing I am not. I have been living destructively towards the writer in me for some time, guiltily conscious of doing so all along, cf. the critical justification in terms of the objective death of a historical tradition: a decadent at a tremendous turning point in history, constitutionally incapable of turning with it as a writer, I am living my personal Dada.36 In all of this there is a terrible emotional smear. The steel of the logic has daily to be strengthened to contain the volcanic element within. It grows daily more hard to contain. I am a kind of bomb.
In three weeks in Athens I have been unable to summon the energy to climb 260 feet to the summit of the Acropolis to see the Parthenon.
To lose my identity as a writer is to lose all social identity. I can choose no other any more than I can seriously sustain that. I am being left with a subjective identity, something I am discovering (or not) in the act of becoming.
At times I am living at the tip of my senses. I am near flesh, blood, hair. I brood on the bodies of women, on the red slit of the cunt opening amongst hairs, on the pale round belly, on hot, faintly smelling thighs.
A few notes about the hot, restless streets, but not really mu
ch about Athens. I found it more and more difficult to get outside my own skull.
SO AMERICA WASN’T REALLY very different from anywhere else when I finally arrived. A question of degree.
Breast culture
Land of mothers’ sons
For cunt
Use deodorunt
For pricks
Kleenix
That much I couldn’t go back on, and a great deal more besides.
I remember sailing into the Hudson River for the first time, on a troop ship. My first view of the Statue of Liberty, and then being amongst them, the high buildings, like matchboxes open and shut. I had seen photographs of them, walked streets in the cinema, and, armoured by Hollywood and Aldous Huxley against experience – he was a boyhood hero of mine, and I’m glad to see him on drugs at last – was consigned to the care of the indignant, and I came and went, in fear, trembling and security, like a zombie.
During the years in Paris I had my doubts about those who had nothing good to say about America just as I had my doubts about those who talked about Europe’s being dead. They were like my father and his pal who always talked about the good old days. As a child I used to think that adults when they spoke always gave the impression that one lost something by still being alive and that all places had been better in former times. Before I ever went there I heard that Paris was dead, and later I heard that Greenwich Village was dead... but I never found any place dead where a number of men and women for whatever reason tried to strike permanently against uncreative work. In those places I found dissent, sedition, personal risk. And there I learnt to explore and modify my great contempt.
Cain’s Book Page 17