by Nick Tosches
Some of the erased messages must have been calls of care and concern from Lorna. Maybe there was among them even a plea or two to come back to me from Melissa.
This may not have been true, not any of it. But it made me feel good to believe that it was.
I called Frankie, let him know I was all right and thanked him for being a friend in need. We laughed about doctors and hospitals and illness and age. When I hung up, and then shut off the phone, I took to wondering what others might be thinking had become of me. Maybe they thought I was dead or lay dying in some unknown place. Whether or not this was true, it too made me feel good somehow to believe it was.
Back in my own bed, in my own exorcised home, I slept long and well, and rose early the next day. I went out, bought buttermilk at a corner store, moved on to Whole Foods for more provisions: a big thick boneless rib eye steak, baking spuds, onions, strawberries, coffee, a pint of half-and-half. I was now adept at boosting from the butcher counter. After the meat was wrapped and price-stickered, I merely rounded an aisle and slipped it in a jacket pocket. On my way out, I slipped a sixteen-ounce container of Hemp Pro 70 protein-and-omega-3 into my bag. The stuff went for $24.99, but it was good—even better when free—and I liked to mix a big, heaping tablespoon of it into my buttermilk in the morning. Walking home, I bought bottled water and cigarettes at the same corner store where I had bought the buttermilk.
After putting everything away, I turned on the phone, called Elena, my cleaning lady of almost thirty years, and arranged to have her come by in a few days. Then I shut off the phone again.
I took my vitamins, my supplements, my baclofen, drank down a big glass of buttermilk and hemp protein. I put on some Bach cello suites, took a Valium, and poured myself a glass of cold milk. It was quiet outside. There was only the Bach. I sat and lit a cigarette. I felt great, calm, free.
There was a cigarette butt on the floor, where my fortune in gold bullion had lain. How this butt had escaped my previous notice I did not know. I rose, picked it up, and went to the kitchen to throw it in the trash. Sure enough, it was an English Oval butt. I had already found the English Oval pack in a pocket of the dirty clothes I had laundered. There were still a few cigarettes left in the pack, which I had set near the ashtray on the end table. How had I come to have a pack of English Ovals? I must have got them from the array of cigarettes on display for sale at Circa Tabac. I hadn’t smoked one for so many years that I had forgotten what they tasted like, though not what they looked like: sort of as if someone had sat on them. Maybe I had wanted to take another shot at figuring out why Frank Costello had been so enamored of them. I knew that they were looked on as quite elegant in Costello’s heyday. But I did not know if they were still made of the same tobacco, or if they had ever even been English. I knew that their maker, Philip Morris, had started out as a tobacconist in nineteenth-century London, but I also knew that Philip Morris had moved to America in the early twentieth century. And I knew that, whatever they tasted like back in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Costello smoked between two and three packs of them every day.
I lit one, which was probably quite stale by now, inhaled, and sought not to figure out what Frank Costello had liked about them, but thought only of what he had said about there being only so many bullets in the gun. How true, I told myself, how true. And mine, like his when he said those words, were used up. Or were they?
My eyes closed, and I wandered. He was right, of course. I was afraid. Not foremost and above all of death. But something. Knowing this did not affect the loveliness of my mood. I pondered it as I pondered the silent mystery of clouds in the sky. No, not death. But something. For a very many years I had fancied myself, and been fancied by others, fearless.
Those years were behind me now. And in my acknowledging and searching for the fear within me, however unknown its nature, and doing so in serene, unflinching calm, perhaps the fancy of fearlessness was drifting cloud-like to the reality of fearlessness. Or, cloud-like, to nothing at all.
THERE WAS RISOTTO WITH MARROW ON THE MENU, BUT THE waiter said they were out of marrow.
This sent us to studying anew the menus we had pushed aside. The waiter made several suggestions as we did so, but waiters seemed always to suggest what the kitchen was trying to be rid of. We each ordered a dry-aged young Hereford sirloin steak for two, telling the waiter that we wanted them burnt on the outside and very rare on the inside. Spuds with some kind of fancy name, peas with same. I told Keith I wasn’t drinking. “Well, I am,” he said, sipping his Campari and soda and looking over the wine list.
“Remember the last time we had dinner,” I said, “I asked you if you’d ever drunk blood?”
“Yes.” He laughed. “And how is the old vein-broaching business these days?”
“You were all, like, oh, God, no, don’t go there. You said you could tell by my eyes that I was headed for trouble.”
“As I recollect, you seemed half insane. Looked it, too, if you don’t mind my saying. ‘Barney Google with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes.’ ” He indecisively ordered a bottle of some grand cru or other. “My grandmother Emily used to love that song.”
He palpated the cork, took a snort of the wine, knocked off the taste in the glass, nodded, and the sommelier decanted and poured.
“I thought it was the dope or the booze that was dragging you down by the yoke. Believe me, mate, you were not you.”
“And what was all that about seeing things coming out of people?”
“What?” He laughed. Then: “Oh, that. I did at one time or another. I saw things come out of people. I didn’t say that things came out of them. I said that I saw things come out of them.”
“And you said it led to their death.”
“Well, hell, look, they are now pushing up daffodils, but my seeing things coming out of them had nothing to do with it.”
This was somewhat like getting him to try to remember what he had said about Paganini, or whoever it was.
“Did you ever hear of Magnan’s sign?” he asked. “It’s a type of—what the fuck do they bloody call it?—some sort of, some kind of paraphasia, or paraesthesia, or para-something-or-other where you feel things moving under your skin or coming through your skin or whatever. It’s mostly an end-of-the-line coke thing.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, maybe I had a spot or two of it in reverse, seeing it in others rather than myself. Or maybe their ranting about what they felt under their skin and saw coming through it made me, in whatever state I may have been in at the time, see it too. Worms, I think it might have been, or little baby snakes, some such nonsense.”
The steaks arrived, and the spuds and peas with the fancy names.
“That was the first song I ever learned to play properly, drop-down, on guitar: ‘Cocaine.’ I learned it from an album, ten-inch album, that Jack Elliott put out in England in 1958 or so. I learned that in the john of my art school. It was so pretty. I had no idea what cocaine was. I just surmised it was some weirdo grown-up perversion. I really didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what cocaine was.”
He burst out in laughter, shook his head, cut off a piece of steak, swabbed it in the blood that ran from it.
“I don’t use cocaine,” I said. “The only times I ever did, it was to help me stay awake to drink more. Never really saw much in it.”
“You never had the good stuff, the real Bolivian marching powder.”
We chewed awhile in quiet.
“Anyway, all the same shit,” he said. “Smack, coke”—he gestured with his fork to the glass of Médoc before him—“booze. All the same.”
“Well, all I know is I wasn’t fucked-up that night.”
“You’d checked your mind in the cloakroom of a place you couldn’t remember.” He laughed.
Schizophreniform disorder. Drive-by psychosis. Magnan’s sign.
“I saw ghost-rats, shadow-rats come out of me,” I said.
“Worms, rats, snakes, belching frogs. Whatever. We co
uld start a zoo of empty cages and terrariums. People have paid more to see less.”
“You had me going that night,” I told him.
“Ah, you know me. Preaching is the one thing I’ve never been accused of. But I wanted to give you a kick, a gentle kick, in the right direction.” He ate some of the spuds with the fancy name. “Right direction,” he repeated. “Sometimes I wonder what direction that might be.”
I finished my peas with the fancy name. I always dispose first of what I like least.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’ll take you any way I can get you, but I prefer you like this. Nobody at this table is getting any younger. And you’ve got that diabetes thing, like my old man, Bert.” His tone lightened. “He looked just like Popeye, old Bert did.”
I asked him how the Hoagy Carmichael album was coming along. He looked at me as if he suspected that I was trying to give him a dig, which I was.
“We will sell no wine before its time.”
He told me that he didn’t even have a record label these days. Then we were on to the evaporation of the recording business, and the publishing business, the downloading from the ether of both music and books, all executed with the suckers’ shibboleth of “back money.”
We were lucky, we reflected, to have grown up as boys in a world full of magic vinyl and cheap paperbacks all about and waiting to be discovered for a few coins. The best stuff was happened upon by accident. Discovery after discovery in the oddest of bins in the oddest of shops. But now the age of discovery was over. All were reduced to industrially bred cows at the same trough of the same slop.
Suddenly we realized that we had not taken a cigarette break.
“If only our forgetfulness could have gone on forever,” he said as we made our way out of the restaurant into the street.
I asked him if he knew whether or not English Ovals had originated in England.
“Oh, those things. The ones that come pre-sat-upon. I’ve no idea. I don’t much remember seeing them around there when I was coming up.”
We stood silently smoking awhile.
“Why do you ask?” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe because lately I’ve been concerned inexplicably with meaningless things. With questions whose answers have no meaning. I don’t know.”
We smoked awhile more in silence.
“It’s all meaningless,” he said. “And it all has meaning.”
I looked at him, flicking my butt toward the gutter.
“And I have not the least fucking idea why I said that,” he said‚ laughing, “or whatever it could possibly mean.”
He flicked his butt. We returned slowly to the restaurant. As we did so, he glanced at the night sky and sang a few lines.
Barney Google tried to enter paradise,
Saint Peter saw his face, he said “Go to the other place.”
The sky above the spiritless electric haze of this island of dead souls was about as black as it ever got. It was good to imagine that someday black night would reclaim it, and the firmament would again be one of stars near and far.
YES, AUTUMN WAS MY SEASON. IT WAS WHEN I FELT WHAT was beyond the power to express. Part of that feeling was a minor-key fugue of deep, delicious melancholy that filled me and swept me into myself and the billowing swift-moving clouds at once. With every bright leaf I saw drift away in its death, borne by a breeze or a gust, the feeling grew deeper, and the melancholy became more exquisite than ecstasy: an inspiration, a truth of sadness and joy dancing gently together in a way that almost brought to the eyes the tears, so unknown and so longed for, of happiness and sorrow commingled.
I had once articulated this autumn spell as best I could, looking back on other autumns. I remembered recalling in it the autumn of my mother’s death, the autumn I shared with the love of my life, the autumn I lost her, or drove her from me—autumns and autumns, when times were good and when times were bad, but, no matter what, that same autumn spell cast its magic.
This had been written down in one of my notebooks or diaries, and I now set about searching for it. While, after many hours, these words were not to be found, I remained convinced that I still had them, somewhere. What I did find was a darkly revealing shock. As I went through the pages of decades of disparate notes, I saw that they possessed what my labors of long composition, my books, very often lacked: a theme. I had in fact some time ago consciously forsaken and denounced the frill of theme as almost as silly a writerly pretense as symbolism. Yet here, scribbled amid the omniana of these ruled and unruled pages, spanning from the 1970s to the 1990s, I encountered what struck me increasingly as not only a theme, but the theme of my being.
In the oldest of the notebooks were the ancient Greek words for “poet of savagery” (αγριοποιος) and “beyond even the gods’ ability to express” (αθεστος). There was the orphaned phrase “Louise, in the darkness of her desire.” In notebooks that followed came—and I here set them down chronologically, be they notes intended for envisioned novels, diary entries, or personal secrecies:
I think these things—they plague me—awful dark moistures of past dreadful deeds or sins—and then somehow find myself smiling in the dark, my mind one way, my heart another… rapacity… fill mouth with water before blowing brains out… Face down, legs apart—wide, unmoving. In sleep you are a stranger. By some unbeing river in a dream you might meet me, slaughter me, and move on. I stare at you, kneel by you, by the bed, and masturbate. I rise, wipe the sperm from my hand, and sleep myself, by some river you do not know…
She made him jealous, made him want to kill her, and he did… deathward… quattuor novissima—the last four things… Hamlet’s resolution to ‘speak daggers’—III.ii.387…
Her blood so sweet… Illaque favente dolore—fondling me in sorrow… Vera incessu patuit dea—she walked in the manner of a goddess… ψυχοδλεθρος—the death of the soul… Indo-European ne, the primeval grunt of negativity, negation; nek, destroy → Greek nekros, dead body, and nux, night, Latin nox, Italian notturno, Germanic night… Indo-European leuk, shining → Sanskrit loka, open space, the universe, Greek leuko, Latin lux, Lucifer, Germanic light… Death is this night’s light… I used to drink and fuck. What do I do now? I write: I used to drink and fuck… I am going mad, or growing sane, in the dullest, the deadliest of ways…“fucked girls and fat leopards”—Pound, Canto XXXIX… Pound re nuclear bomb / nuclear holocaust: “Step on it” (1946, St. Elizabeths)… the leopard alone removes the hide from the carcass of its prey… caress the dead… something in the blood… the blood of black night…
There is a sadness within me as vast and as deadly as the Eocene dusk… He had never fallen for her, not really. It was better that way. He would’ve ended up hating her, loving her, one of those things… I wish I had a mother… To be like the leopard, to devour, to lay open the heart and drink the blood of beauty. To move with that blood flowing in the veins, unseen, like leopard or like wild dog, predator… May the leopard within become a creature of grace w/ no need again…“that which we are, we are”—Tennyson, Ulysses…“Whatever you is, be that”—Lightnin’ Hopkins…
I have come from Mastema, have come from the quiet well of your fear. Enter me… When I drew the blade across her throat it was not only the blood of her extinction that flowed forth but also that of any love I might henceforth know… There is no love in my heart. There is nothing in my heart.
Words come to me from an ancient stillness, from nowhere… and to know that there is no love in one’s heart is to know love itself. And so—delendum est—I await the breath from the mouth of the Other… What cunt of you gods did rhythm my life w/ ink so black to leave me here to die alone?… umbrosus et immensus…“Fear stops men.”—Homer… the demon confessor…
I await the savioress. I await deliverance. I cannot dwell here, in the dark of me, alone. A dark enshrouded in dark. A man can rip out his own liver, but not his own brain, not his mind.
The first time I saw her, I wanted to rape her.
Not have sex with her, not make love to her: rape her. Maybe you can understand this. Why have I written that last line? There is no you. No one will ever see this. I am the you to whom I write. I am you. The only you. And of course I can understand this. I—you—of course we understand it…
I wanted to know. But I did not want to know what I ended up knowing… in hora mortis… odium Dei… What Hesiod knew of neuroscience we have yet to learn…“Thomas Cantipratensis, a Dominican of the thirteenth century, beheld the Devil in the form of a priest, who was exhibiting himself in a most indecent attitude.”—Arturo Graf, Il Diavolo (1889), English translation (1931), p. 35. Term “altar boy” not known until 1772…
“Ye are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning…”—John 8:44…“Good and evil things fall without discrimination upon those who are good and those who are evil.”—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations…
Heel in , ottobre 17…
Let those who care for me, and those who do not care for me, die. Let those who share these breezes perish… On a night such as this, I arm myself against love and disbelieve in all that has inspired and brought me breath. I prepare to go down… I had delivered myself. I was to know my fate…
1/16/94. Twenty-five years, a quarter of a century ago, I fucked her, came in her cunt, her mouth, her ass. Today, on the phone, sitting here watching Dallas not beat the spread, Houston not beat anything, on this freezing day, coldest since 1893, she somewhere in Pennsylvania, not far from Valley Forge, said she’s a grandmother; he’s the joy of her life. How strange and how long the years. It’s as if that quarter century, what began w/ her, ended w/ Linda. That quarter century is over. Do I have another left to live? It is time to seize the years, these years, these moments—time to draw new blood, new life, new cunt into these days to mingle with, to temper, and to lighten the company of ghosts…