Truth
and folly are ever about to expire, so that we, like our beloved Sancho Panza, kneeling at the
deathbed of Don Quixote, must always be ready to go out to receive the holy
communion of cudgels and distaffs, for the rebirth of the Pulse.
Edward
Dahlberg
I
hadn’t talked to Van for three months. I
felt guilty for leaving him in the apartment on
From
the perspective of twenty years, I suppose that he could feel nothing but
contempt for me because he wasn’t Jesus Christ.
But I tried anyway. I remembered
his birthday and so, a month before the event, I called to invite him out for
dinner. I raised my finger from his name
in the address book, lifted the receiver from the hook and began dialing. There was no ring. I heard his voice. He had called just as I was dialing and I
picked up the phone before it rang. I
told him what happened and the poor man certainly thought I was lying and
trying to destroy his sanity. I swore to
him that I was telling the truth but it was another one of those occurrences
that leads one to believe that the Greeks were right: we are the playthings of
the Gods. It was another proof that They exist.
“Are
you still writing?” he asked, believing, for the moment at least, that I was an
inveterate fabulist.
“No,
just taking a lot of notes. I have to
devote a little time to cab driving. You
know...”
“Yesss...” he broke in with his high pitched laugh. I expected him to go on, but he was
silent. I
said, “Well,
I’m convinced that it is impossible to publish a serious novel.” Pause.
“I have to make a living. You
know...” I waited for him to say
something but he didn’t. I continued:
“They hung Jesus Christ on the cross for writing the most successful novel of
all time.”
There
was a silence and then again the high pitched titter. He said:
“Shirley Jackson is said to have written ‘The Lottery’ in two
hours. Maybe you could rip off a few
things in your spare time.”
His
tone of voice told me that he thought I was without Genius. When a man thinks he has been wounded deeply
he begins to search out the soft underbelly of his adversary which is usually
his pride. He was a man who had been
humiliated by the
I
answered, “I
didn’t know that. That’s really far
out.”
He
had easily located my dearest illusion:
“Toil on, dull crowd, in extacy,...” A small fire
spread from my solar plexus. I expected
him to take the opportunity to sink the bare bodkin into my guts, but he
waited, not really wanting to hurt me, being instinctively noble.
I
continued, “Kerouac
wrote ‘On The Road’ in ten days. Didn’t
Stendhal dictate ‘The Charterhouse of
Even while I discounted him as a Neurotic, and therefore, as
essentially a Comic figure, I wanted him for a
“Van,
I really want to continue our friendship.”
Occasionally
honesty served me well.
“I
do too.”
We
concluded our conversation as we should have, I invited him to dinner for his
birthday and he accepted. But the Gods
were laughing at us.
I
was a horse, and when I felt strong emotions I wanted to run. And so I donned my tennis shoes and shorts,
scampered out into the pale sun, and feeling like God running through a parking
lot, I ran along
I
needed to run. In high school I could
run the 50 yard dash in 5.4 seconds and the 100 in 10.0. For me, sprinting was either a kind of
controlled panic, or an ecstatic Dionysian pursuit. I had worked out the theory that without both sports and dance, a civilization would tear itself
apart with sexual crimes and acts of terrorism, or expire from State terrorism
and the crimes of the State. I thought
that the quality of sport and dance, and of the music, which must accompany
dance, determines the quality of a civilization. And I don’t think that I was wrong. But I never learned to dance.
I
returned, drenched in sweat. I worked as
hard as a man getting in shape for the Olympics: hundred-yard wind sprints,
starts, quarter-mile sprints. My pulse
was never below 180 beats per minute.
When I walked through the door they were all there: the three women from the house next door
sitting on the floor, each with her back against a different wall. Billy and Chris were sitting with their backs
against the other wall and looked like two besieged men. They all looked up at me. Tilly said, “We decided to come over and introduce
ourselves. It didn’t look like you were
ever going to do it so we took matters into our own hands.”
It
seemed to me that the metaphor was consciously intended to break the tension we
all felt for her missing hand. When I
remembered all of the aborted attempts at conversation over the last three
months, I was astonished and too tired to do anything but attempt to imitate a
smile with a twitching grimace.
“So
you’re the old man of the group,” she said, challenging my silence. I looked at Chris and Billy to see how they
were reacting to her toothy, manic attack.
They were both terrified underneath their faked sophisticated calm.
I
said, “I’m 25,”
pause, “how old are you?”
“27.” Her eyes glittered.
Mary
flailed her arms in mock despair.
“They’re babies. It’s
hopeless.”
I
stared at her, not wanting to ask her age.
“I’m
old enough to be your mother,” she said after a short, slightly painful silence.
“I’m
24,”
“I’m
going to take a shower.” I gave a
little wave and smile, catching all of their eyes and, relieved, went to my
room. I took off my tennis shoes and
socks and sat on the mattress that was lying on the floor. The walls were bare except for a reproduction
of Paul Klee’s Sinbad the Sailor and the room was
empty except for a chest of drawers and my guitar, which stood in the
corner. I felt like Sinbad skimming over
the waters of the unconscious, looking for some unsuspected prey, my spear
poised. I could hear their voices in the
living room, 30 feet away.
I
took off my shirt and lay on my bed, listening to their conversation. I slipped out of my trunks and lay naked,
contemplating the object of their desire.
The curtain billowed out through the open window exposing a row of
distant windows and I imagined a grateful old lady with binoculars and then a
preadolescent girl wetting her panties.
I coaxed it out of its torpor, stroking it with detached boredom, but it
refused to solidify. Raucous laughter
from the living room threatened to send it into hibernation, so I retreated to
the safety of the shower. Mutual
masturbation with an Italian waitress that I had been flirting with for a
couple of weeks, produced an orgasm that, as usual, surprised me with its
intensity and left me feeling like a relationship with a female cocker spaniel
would be preferable.
There
is another vice, a monster so hideous in mien, so disgusting in feature,
altogether so beastly and loathsome, that, in very shame and cowardice, it
hides its head by day, and vampyre-like, sucks the
very life-blood from its victims by night; and it may perhaps commit more
direct ravages upon the strength and reason of those victims than even
intemperance; and that vice is:
SELF-ABUSE
It
cannot be that such loathsome wrecks of humanity as men and women reduced to
driveling idiocy by this cause, should be permitted to float upon the tide of
life, without some useful purpose: and the only one we can conceive, is that of
awful beacons to make others avoid,-- as they would eschew moral pullution and death, - the course which leads to such ruin.
I
dawdled, massaged Vitalis into my scalp, cut my
toenails, took infinite pains selecting a shirt from my minuscule wardrobe - to
go with my jeans, and finally returned to the living room, 45 minutes
later. Florence was still there, talking
to Billy who was evidently smitten or cunt struck, or both. She was standing near the open door, leaning
towards it as if she were waiting for the house to tilt so she might gracefully
slide out.
“Oh, hi. Where’s
everybody else?” I asked, using my
surprise that she was still there to pretend that I was surprised that they
were gone.
“Chris
and Tilly both had to go to work and Mary had to do
something- I
don’t remember.” She looked at me with
attentive, observant eyes.
Billy
broke into the silence. He said to her, “So you’re planning
on staying for awhile.”
“Well,
if you want me to go...” She gave me a
playful smile.
He
said, “In
I
asked, “Where
are you from?”
She
looked at me with too much self-confidence, but she was interested. “
“From
“Everybody
asks me that. No, from a little town
that’s even closer to
“Does
your father sell insurance?” I returned
her malicious smile. Billy disappeared
into the kitchen.
“No,
he’s the only man in
We
just looked at each other, both of us overconfident and predatory.
“What
do you do for a living?” I asked.
She
looked startled and evasive. “I’m in between jobs.”
We
observed a moment of silence for the unemployed.
“What
do you do?”
“I
drive a cab.”
I
had found that middle class women detest cab drivers. I was testing her, attacking her really. Her eyes lit up with emotion.
“Oh,
THAT’S why you come in at all hours of the night!”
That
seemed like a pretty good response. I
smiled for an answer. There was a very
long silence. We looked at each other
until I became uncomfortable. I broke
the silence, “So
you don’t work?”
When
things get unbearable I tend to go for the jugular. She just looked at me. Cock stirred again after his brief rest. I looked into the kitchen and Billy was
pretending to be busy and not listening.
She was thinking, weighing me, and I persisted against her silence, “What do you do with yourself?”
The
question lent itself to at least two interpretations.
“Well,
that depends on the mood I’m in.”
She
gave a little laugh. I knew I was in
over my head. She waited. Suddenly I felt like running. I looked at her legs and they seemed enormous
and her upper body small and thin. Yet
at the same time her legs seemed useless, immobile, like artificial legs. Her face seemed to hover somewhere in the
center of the room and it seemed like her legs were in no definite place at
all. Just then I realized that she was
very tall.
“How
tall are you anyway?”
“Five nine and a half.”
“Your
legs are really long.”
She
looked ashamed. I noticed that I had
changed the subject and that I was trying to regain control of my emotions by
attacking her.
“People
say that.” Her voice quavered, but she
didn’t move. We looked at each other in
silence.
“What
do YOU do with yourself?” She
asked. She gave a mischievous smile
again and it was obvious that she wouldn’t be put off.
“All kinds of things.”
I
wasn’t sure what we were talking about.
But my member strained against its confinement.
Mary
yelled into the living room from the driveway outside, “Flo! Telephone.”
“OK,
I’m coming.”
We
moved towards the door. She asked, “Can I drop by to
see you again?”
I
was surprised. I pretended to myself
that I didn’t believe it was possible for women to be that direct.
“Of course.”
“Bye.” She walked down the stairs towards Mary and
Julian, the black high school student.
Again I noticed a strangeness in her legs. She said, “Hi Julian.”
He
gave her a big smile. “Hi
Flo.”
The
knife of jealousy operated on my lumbar and spermatic plexuses and it surprised
me because I didn’t even like her legs.