The World Is the Home of Love and Death (47 page)

“Childe Harold to the dark tower came—or
This is what I didn’t do for so-and-so
(in the last fuck), or
This isn’t what so-and-so did for me—.
these steps to—whatever, the waste dump, the ash pit after—”

Deut said, “At least it is something I know how to do. I don’t have to worry what someone else thinks of my technique.…”

Then I lost my head and didn’t hold back: “No
heavy
reality of consequence overlays this act-and-physical-reality: going too fast, going too slow, being fat, being small-pricked, none of it matters. It’s king-of-the-dream-of-final-power time. People say that it is just jacking off, or that so-and-so is just jacking himself off, meaning wasting time: the term comes from
Jack
and refers to
the common people
, to what ordinary people do—it refers to labor. The watery eyes, the slack mouth. The little jolts along the spine. Sometimes it feels like the doorway to suicide—a natural underlining to biological isolation. Sometimes, after a fuck with a lost orgasm, the kind of coming where it seems lost in a cloudy thicket, you know, I jerk off and the damned orgasm then brings tears to my eyes, but I’m ashamed—ashamed and embarrassed, ashamed and embarrassed and
defiant
—I wonder why. Well, I suppose it’s cheating on lovers and parents; it really is kind of an exploration of being alone and self-willed—you know all those myths where someone behaves well and is given power and wishes and then goes berserk with the wishes? That’s what it’s like. Your body, your mind, you take them over. The desperate chronicle, the secret club and blasphemous thing of it, this sneaking off to the treehouse, the rebellion keeps twisting this way and that, and you don’t have to notice, you can be quick and not look. If you slow it down or think about it driftingly, after, you can see that it twists and turns with strange beliefs, strange dishonesties—honesties, too. But it is rarely used in dramas—we don’t see Hamlet jacking off and deciding to die. Or Lear doing it. Or Macbeth. You can find out that you don’t love someone very much or even the world. And it’s a chronic thing to do it—it’s really not just sexual. Prometheus stole more than fire. Our jokes as kids were Aladdin and his lamp, djinni and the light brown pubic hair, Jack and the bean stalk, et cetera—”

“Don’t say
et cetera
—it’s not fair …” I.e., tell us everything.

“We had names for it from comic strips, Dagwood and Superman or Blondie and Mickey Mouse. I knew a guy who called it Swan Lake because of the neck of the swan. A lot was movies: Public Enemy Number One, Little Caesar, Gone With the Wind, Come with the Breeze—the weird one was Casablanca: I thought it was maybe Hump-free Bogus. But later I heard that
kazzo
is one of the Italian terms for prick, so it could mean
white prick.
Nothing is ever just Freudian-sexual, Freud was a sexual dud which is a kind of a good thing to be, romantic, you know, but we do lie a lot if we’re like Freud. Writing, it’s masturbatory, it’s Jack and the bean stalk stuff, just you alone with the world with hallucinatory accompaniment. A lot of what we are in a democracy is a jerk-off society—you know what I mean?”

Kellow, although he’s quite good-looking, is physically repellent. So is Deut. Brr is famously dapper and does very spruce, pretty things with graphics (we said
with art direction
in those days) in his magazines. He is fine-featured, well-proportioned, and has handsome hair; he knows about being attractive, he deals in this stuff but, physically, he is accepted with difficulty—it’s his nervous, insectlike drive. It’s
him.
Often you have to choke back real distaste if you want his company. He is
repellent.
He is maybe spiritually a cockroach. Or chaste. A
cockroach
, the waving legs, the foreignness, the scuttling movements, the oddly unsettling shape … A famous figure in art, after all.

Perhaps he was phenomenally odd-looking as a child or was persuaded that he was, and, so, became an expert in self-presentation and in enraged disguise, in perfuming hidden stenches and the like—and now he preserves by some magic or other his childhood ugliness and his sense of methods and so is tremendously successful in the world, and is caught by that success. He can’t exist physically. He milks
the cockroach aspect
and is appalled by himself and is sad and dangerous like someone deformed and vengeful, like someone smart.

Deuteronomy said, “Do you find you want to get even with everyone for your being smart?”

“I’m not smart,” I said automatically. I minded the doubleness of what he was doing: the offering of friendship and the shoving me into a sack, the warning he was issuing.

Deuteronomy said patiently (with acted out patience), “What do you call what you just did, what you just said?”

“I only heard part of it: I was too busy saying it to notice it. I would say it was a talent as in a tennis rally—I don’t know what it is. If I’m so smart, how come I’m not king of the world? My mother said there was such a thing as being too smart: so you weren’t smart at all. Brr is smart,
pig-smart
, doesn’t Moira tell me you use that word for him? He uses everything; he finds everything useful: I mean, in running his magazines—as in seeing who will talk and show off. All I do is show off in speeches. He makes faces at me and gets me to talk to see if I’m loyal—buyable …”

What I said wasn’t making sense because I was trying to hide what I thought of Deut and Brr. I haven’t much gift for intimate politics. But I can see what is going to happen, but that separates me, it doesn’t help me join in.

Brr was heroic and caught in a psychological-social bind in relation to a personal pain since it guided him to success in mass market stuff, it guided him to a sense of the mass mind, or whatever. To go back to the it-began-in-childhood theories that he held, I saw him as a sly, unpleasant child whose embraces and attentions had been unwanted because of something
vile
in them, a precocity of powers of association and of courage in acting on those powers in spite of his being displeasing to his parents. He dealt in his own shit and had an appetite for
glamour
, for constructions of meaning and propriety because his family did, but he did it better. Years later, I saw some Arbus photographs, and I think Brr must have been a horror, or thought he was. He liked women because they were less violent and more interesting than men—this is seeing him in the third person, not the sort of third person that is oneself in dreams or in a mirror; but I’m trying to see him not in relation to me. This sliding in and out of one’s self and trying to see him is strange, is as strange as looking at a cockroach.

He saw women as ugly-but-pretty—just as he was good-looking-but-repellent: there is a kind of odd stitching of sanity to be found in the embrace of reality, sanity as a style; but that isn’t what he did—his sanity was desperate, his style was powerful and riddled with fantasy. If a man is attached to his own ugliness he might substitute being in the world of yearning for the actuality of his never having been a child-object of embraces and a source of comfort once upon a time. He faked the comfort he gave. He was not pleasant. He gained a tremendous energy from this, and his mental acuity was sorely tried; he wasn’t as miserable as Moira was. This stuff represents the limits of my mind and feelings that year. I hadn’t Kellow’s gift for substitutive algebra. I figured that in him this stuff generated few emotions except for pride and a sense of what-is-appropriate and then the excited sense of what-is-not-appropriate-but-is-fascinating-anyway. I figured he felt those things
strongly.

To be honest, I have a good time mostly, but life scares me.

First Love and Other Sorrows

Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

The Runaway Soul

Profane Friendship

This Wild Darkness

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