by Henry Miller
She laughed. Why, they were her best friends. They would do anything for her, they worshiped her. One has to have someone he can rely on in a pinch. Why, Hannah would hock her false teeth for her if she asked her to. Speaking of friends, there was a wonderful girl she would like to introduce me to someday—quite another type, almost aristocratic. Lola was her name. She had a little colored blood in her, but it was scarcely noticeable. Yes, Lola was a very dear friend. She was sure I would like her.
“Why not make a date?” I suggested promptly. “We could meet at my friend Ulric’s studio. I’ve wanted you to meet him too.”
She thought that would be excellent. Couldn’t say when it would be, though, as Lola was always going off on trips. But she would try to make it soon. Lola was the mistress of some rich shoe manufacturer; she wasn’t always free. But it would be good to have Lola—she had a racing car. Perhaps we could drive out into the country and stay the night somewhere. Lola had a way about her. She was just a little too haughty, in fact. But that was because of her colored blood. I mustn’t let on that I knew anything about that. And as for my friend Ulric—I wasn’t to breathe a word of that to him.
“But he likes colored girls. He’ll be crazy about Lola.”
“But Lola doesn’t want to be liked for that reason,” said Mara. “You’ll see—she’s very pale and very attractive. Nobody would suspect that she had a drop of colored blood in her.”
“Well, I hope she’s not too proper.”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” said Mara promptly. “Once she forgets herself she’s very gay. It won’t be a dull evening, I assure you.”
We had a bit of a walk from the subway station to her home. Along the way we stopped under a tree and started to mush it up. I had my hand up her dress and she was fumbling with my fly. We were leaning against the tree trunk. It was late and not a soul in sight. I could have laid her out on the sidewalk for all it mattered.
She had just got my pecker out and was opening her legs for me to ram it home when suddenly from the branches above a huge black cat pounced on us, screaming as if in heat. We nearly dropped dead with fright, but the cat was even more frightened since its claws had gotten caught in my coat. In my panic I beat the hell out of it and in return was badly clawed and bitten. Mara was trembling like a leaf. We walked into a vacant lot and lay on the grass. Mara was fearful I might get an infection. She would sneak home and come back with some iodine and what not. I was to lie there and wait for her.
It was a warm night and I lay back full length looking up at the stars. A woman passed but didn’t notice me lying there. My cock was hanging out and beginning to stir again with the warm breeze. By the time Mara returned it was quivering and jumping. She kneeled beside me with the bandages and the iodine. My cock was staring her in the face. She bent over and gobbled it greedily. I pushed the things aside and pulled her over me. When I had shot my bolt she kept right on coming, one orgasm after another, until I thought it would never stop.
We lay back and rested a while in the warm breeze. After a while she sat up and applied the iodine. We lit our cigarettes and sat there talking quietly. Finally we decided to go. I walked her to the door of her home and as we stood there embracing one another she grabbed me impulsively and whisked me off. “I can’t let you go yet,” she said. And with that she flung herself on me, kissing me passionately and reaching into my fly with murderous accuracy. This time we didn’t bother to look for a vacant patch of ground, but collapsed right on the sidewalk under a big tree. The sidewalk wasn’t too comfortable—I had to pull out and move over a few feet where there was a bit of soft earth. There was a little puddle near her elbow and I was for taking it out again and moving over another inch or so, but when I tried to draw it out she got frantic. “Don’t ever take it out again,” she begged, “it drives me crazy. Fuck me, fuck me!” I held out on her a long while. As before, she came again and again, squealing and grunting like a stuck pig. Her mouth seemed to have grown bigger, wider, utterly lascivious; her eyes were turning over, as if she were going into an epileptic fit. I took it out a moment to cool it off. She put her hand in the puddle beside her and sprinkled a few drops of water over it. That felt marvelous. The next moment she was on her hands and knees, begging me to give it to her assways. I got behind her on all fours; she reached her hand under and grabbing my cock she slipped it in. It went right in to the womb. She gave a little groan of pain and pleasure mixed. “It’s gotten bigger,” she said, squirming her ass around. “Put it in again all the way . . . go ahead, I don’t care if it hurts,” and with that she backed up on me with a wild lurch. I had such a cold-blooded erection that I thought I’d never be able to come. Besides, not worrying about losing it, I was able to watch the performance like a spectator. I would draw it almost out and roll the tip of it around the silky, soppy petals, then plunge it in and leave it in there like a stopper. I had my two hands around her pelvis, pulling and pushing her at will. “Do it, do it,” she begged, “or I’ll go mad!” That got me. I began to work on her like a plunger, in and out full length without a let-up, she going Oh—Ah, Oh—Ah! and then bango! I went off like a whale.
We brushed ourselves off and started back towards the house once again. At the corner she stopped dead in her tracks and, turning round to face me squarely, she said with a smile that was almost ugly—“And now for the dirt!”
I looked at her in amazement. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“I mean,” she said, never relinquishing that strange grimace, “that I need fifty dollars. I must have it tomorrow. I must. I must. . . . Now do you see why I didn’t want you to take me home?”
“Why did you hesitate to ask me for it? Don’t you think I can raise fifty dollars if you need it badly?”
“But I need it at once. Can you get a sum like that by noon? Don’t ask me what it’s for—it’s urgent, very urgent. Do you think you can do it? Will you promise?”
“Why of course I can,” I answered, wondering as I said so where in hell I would get it in such quick time.
“You’re wonderful,” she said, seizing my two hands and squeezing them warmly. “I do hate to ask you. I know you have no money. I’m always asking for money—that seems to be all I can do—get money for others. I hate it, but there’s nothing else to do. You trust me, don’t you? I’ll give it back to you in a week.”
“Don’t talk that way, Mara. I don’t want it back. If you’re in need I want you to tell me. I may be poor but I can raise money too now and then. I wish I could do more. I wish I could take you out of that damned place—I don’t like seeing you there.”
“Don’t talk about that now, please. Go home and get some sleep. Meet me at twelve-thirty tomorrow in front of the drugstore at Times Square. That’s where we met before, you remember? God, I didn’t know then how much you would mean to me. I took you for a millionaire. You won’t disappoint me tomorrow—you’re sure?”
“I’m sure, Mara.”
Money always has to be raised in jig time and paid back at regular stipulated intervals, either by promises or in cash. I think I could raise a million dollars if I were given enough time, and by that I don’t mean sidereal time but the ordinary clock time of days, months, years. To raise money quickly, however, even carfare, is the most difficult task one can set me. From the time I left school I have begged and borrowed almost continuously. I’ve often spent a whole day trying to raise a dime; at other times I’ve had fat bills thrust into my hand without even opening my mouth. I don’t know any more about the act of borrowing now than I did when I started. I know there are certain people whom you must never, not under any circumstances, ask for help. There are others again who will refuse you ninety-nine times and yield on the hundredth, and perhaps never again refuse you. There are some whom you reserve for the real emergency, knowing that you can rely on them, and when the emergency comes and you go to them you are cruelly deceived. There isn’t a soul on earth who can be relied on absolutely. For a quic
k, generous touch the man you met only recently, the one who scarcely knows you, is usually a pretty safe bet. Old friends are the worst: they are heartless and incorrigible. Women, too, as a rule, are usually callous and indifferent. Now and then you think someone you know would come across, if you persisted, but the thought of the prying and prodding is so disagreeable that you wipe him out of your mind. The old are often like that, probably because of bitter experience.
To borrow successfully one has to be a monomaniac on the subject, as with everything else. If you can give yourself up to it, as with Yoga exercises, that is to say, wholeheartedly, without squeamishness or reservations of any kind, you can live your whole life without earning an honest penny. Naturally the price is too great. In a pinch the best single quality is desperation. The best course is the unusual one. It is easier, for example, to borrow from one who is your inferior than from an equal or from one who is above you. It’s also very important to be willing to compromise yourself, not to speak of lowering yourself, which is a sine qua non. The man who borrows is always a culprit, always a potential thief. Nobody ever gets back what he lent, even if the sum is paid with interest. The man who exacts his pound of flesh is always shortchanged, even if by nothing more than rancor or hatred. Borrowing is a positive thing, lending negative. To be a borrower may be uncomfortable, but it is also exhilarating, instructive, lifelike. The borrower pities the lender, though he must often put up with his insults and injuries.
Fundamentally borrower and lender are one and the same. That is why no amount of philosophizing can eradicate the evil. They are made for one another, just as man and woman are made for each other. No matter how fantastic the need, no matter how crazy the terms, there will always be a man to lend an ear, to fork up the necessary. A good borrower goes about his task like a good criminal. His first principle is never to expect something for nothing. He doesn’t want to know how to get the money on the least terms but exactly the contrary. When the right men meet there is a minimum of talk. They take each other at face value, as we say. The ideal lender is the realist who knows that tomorrow the situation may be reversed and the borrower become the lender.
There was only one person I knew who could see it in the right light and that was my father. He was the one I always held in reserve for the crucial moment. And he was the only one I never failed to pay back. Not only did he never refuse me but he inspired me to give to others in the same way. Every time I borrowed from him I became a better lender—or I should say giver, because I’ve never insisted on being repaid. There is only one way to repay kindnesses and that is to be kind in turn to those who come to you in distress. To repay a debt is utterly unnecessary, so far as the cosmic bookkeeping is concerned. (All other forms of bookkeeping are wasteful and anachronistic.) “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” said the good Shakespeare, voicing a wish fulfillment out of his utopian dream life. For men on earth, borrowing and lending is not only essential but should be increased to outlandish proportions. The fellow who is really practical is the fool who looks neither to the left nor the right, who gives without question and asks unblushingly.
To make it short, I went to my old man and without beating about the bush I asked him for fifty dollars. To my surprise he didn’t have that much in the bank but he informed me quickly that he could borrow it from one of the other tailors. I asked him if he would be good enough to do that for me and he said sure, of course, just a minute.
“I’ll give it back to you in a week or so,” I said, as I was saying goodbye.
“Don’t worry about that,” he replied. “Any time will do. I hope everything’s all right with you otherwise.”
At twelve-thirty sharp I handed Mara the money. She ran off at once, promising to meet me the next day in the garden of the Pagoda Tea Room. I thought it a good day to make a little touch for myself and so I trotted off to Costigan’s office to ask for a five-spot. He was out, but one of the clerks, suspecting the nature of my errand, volunteered to help me out. He said he wanted to thank me for what I had done for his cousin. Cousin? I couldn’t think who his cousin might be. “Don’t you remember the boy you took to the psychiatric clinic?” he said. “He was a runaway boy from Kentucky—his father was a tailor, remember? You telegraphed his father that you would take care of the boy until he arrived. That was my cousin.”
I remembered that lad very well. He wanted to be an actor—his glands were out of order. At the clinic they said he was an incipient criminal. He had stolen some clothes belonging to a buddy of his while at the Newsboys’ Home. He was a fine lad, more of a poet than an actor. If his glands were out of order then mine were completely disorganized. He had given the psychiatrist a kick in the balls for his pains—that’s why they had tried to make him out a criminal. When I heard about it I laughed my head off. He should have used a blackjack on that sadistic jake of a psychiatrist. . . . Anyway, it was a pleasant surprise to find I had an unknown friend in the wardrobe attendant. Nice, too, to hear him say I could have more any time I was in need of a little change. In the street I bumped into an ex-wardrobe attendant now working as a messenger. He insisted on giving me two tickets for a ball to be run under the auspices of the Magicians and Conjurors’ Association of New York City, of which he was the president. “I wish you could get me a wardrobe attendant’s job again,” he said. “I have so many things to attend to now since I’m president of the Association that I can’t do justice to the messenger work. Besides, my wife is going to have another baby soon. Why don’t you come up to see us—I have some new tricks to show you. The little boy is learning to be a ventriloquist; I’m going to put him on the stage in a year or so. We have to make a living somehow. You know, magic doesn’t pay very much. And I’m getting too old to run my feet down too much. I was cut out for the professional life. You understand my personal capabilities and idiosyncrasies. If you come to the ball I’m going to introduce you to the Great Thurston—he’s promised to be there. I’ve got to go now—I’ve got a death message to deliver.”
You understand my personal capabilities and idiosyncrasies. I stood at the corner and wrote it down on the back of an envelope. Seventeen years ago. Here it is. Fuchs was his name. Gerhardt Fuchs of F.U. office. Same name as that of the Hunski picker in Glendale where Joey and Tony lived. Used to meet this other Fuchs coming through the cemetery grounds, a sack of dog, bird and cat shit over his shoulder. Brought it to a perfumery house somewhere. Always smelt like a skunk. A foul, evil-minded bugger, one of the original tribe of blind Hessians. Fuchs and Kunz—two obscene birds who could be seen drinking every night in Laubscher’s Beer Garden near the Fresh Pond Road. Kunz was tubercular, a dermatologist by profession. They talked a bird-and-skin language over their stinking pots of beer. Ridgewood* was their Mecca. Never spoke English unless they had to. Germany was their God and the Kaiser His spokesman. Well, bad cess to them! May they die like dirty umlauts—if they haven’t already. Funny, though, to find a pair of inseparable twins with names like that. Idiosyncratic, I should say. . . .
3
And now it’s Saturday afternoon, the sun’s out bright and strong, and I’m sipping some pale Chinese tea in Dr. Wuchee Hachee Tao’s garden. He’s just handed me a long poem about Mother written on firecracker paper. He looks like a superior type of man—not very communicable either. I’d like to ask him something about the original Tao but it so happens that at this point in time, retrogressively speaking, I haven’t yet read the Tao Tê Ching. If I had read it I wouldn’t need to ask him any questions—nor in all probability would I be sitting in his garden waiting for a woman named Mara. Had I been intelligent enough to have read that most illustrious and most elliptical piece of ancient wisdom I would have been spared a great many woes that befell me and which I am now about to relate.
As I sit in the garden, B.C. 17, I have utterly different thoughts than these. To be quite honest, I can’t recall a single one at this moment. I vaguely remember that I didn’t like the poem about Mother—it struck me as being s
heer crap. And what’s more, I didn’t like the Chink who wrote it—I remember that very distinctly. I know too that I was getting furious because it was beginning to look like another stand-up. (Had I imbibed a bit of Tao I would not have lost my temper. I would have sat there as contented as a cow, thankful that the sun was out and grateful to be alive.) Today as I write this there is no sun and no Mara and, though I have not yet become a contented cow, I feel very much alive and at peace with the world.
I hear the telephone ringing inside. A slat-faced Chink, probably a professor of philosophy, tells me in chopstick language that a lady wishes to speak to me on the telephone. It’s Mara, and to believe her she’s only just getting out of bed. Has a hangover, she informs me. So has Florrie. The two of them are sleeping it off in a hotel nearby. What hotel? She doesn’t want to say. Just wait a half-hour and she’ll doll herself up. I don’t feel like waiting another half-hour. I’m in a bad mood. First it’s the split and then it’s a hangover. And who else is in bed with her, I want to know. Couldn’t possibly be a man whose name begins with a C, no? She doesn’t like that. She doesn’t allow anybody to talk to her that way. Well, I’m talking that way, do you hear? Tell me where you are and I’ll be up to see you in a jiffy. If you don’t want to say then to hell with you. I’m sick of . . . Hello, hello! Mara!
No answer. Well, that must have touched her to the quick. Florrie, that’s the little bitch who’s responsible for it. Florrie and her itchy fur-lined muff. What are you to think when all you ever hear about a girl is that she can’t find a prick big enough to suit her? To look at her you’d think a good fuck would knock the slats out of her. About 103 in her stocking feet. A hundred and three pounds of insatiable flesh. A booze artist to boot. An Irish slut. A sluttee, if you ask me. Putting on a stage accent as if to pretend that she’d once been a Ziegfeld Follies girl.