Tropic of Capricorn

  It seemed as if it would go on forever, the sex and death chant. The very next afternoon at the office I received a telephone call from my wife saying that her friend Arline had just been taken to the insane asylum. They were friends from the convent school in Canada where they had both studied music and the art of masturbation. I had met the whole flock of them little by little, including Sister Antolina who wore a truss and who apparently was the high priestess of the cult of Fonanism. They had all had a crush on Sister Antolina at one time or another. And Arline with the chocolate eclair mug wasn’t the first of the little group to go to the insane asylum. I don’t say it was masturbation that drove them there but certainly the atmosphere of the convent had something to do with it. They were all spoiled in the egg.

  Before the afternoon was over my old friend MacGregor walked in. He arrived looking glum as usual and complaining about the advent of old age, though he was hardly past thirty. When I told him about Arline he seemed to liven up a bit. He said he always knew there was something wrong with her. Why? Because when he tried to force her one night she began to weep hysterically. It wasn’t the weeping so much as what she said. She said she had sinned against the Holy Ghost and for that she would have to lead a life of continence. Recalling the incident he began to laugh in his mirthless way. “I said to her – well you don’t need to do it if you don’t want … just hold it in your hand. Jesus, when I said that I thought she’d go clean off her nut. She said I was trying to soil her innocence – that’s the way she put it. And at the same time she took it in her hand and she squeezed it so hard I damned near fainted. Weeping all the while, too. And still harping on the Holy Ghost and her ‘innocence’. I remembered what you told me once and so I gave her a sound slap in the jaw. It worked like magic. She quieted down after a bit, enough to let me slip it in, and then the real fun commenced. Listen, did you ever fuck a crazy woman? It’s something to experience. From the instant I got it in she started talking a blue streak. I can’t describe it to you exactly, but it was almost as though she didn’t know I was fucking her. Listen, I don’t know whether you’ve ever had a woman eat an apple while you were doing it … well, you can imagine how that affects you. This one was a thousand times worse. It got on my nerves so that I began to think I was a little queer myself … And now here’s something you’ll hardly believe, but I’m telling you the truth. You know what she did when we got through? She put her arms around me and she thanked me … Wait, that isn’t all. Then she got out of bed and she knelt down and offered up a prayer for my soul. Jesus, I remember that so well. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian,’ she said. And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her. I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or what. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian!’ Can you beat that?

  “What are you doing to-night?” he added cheerfully.

  “Nothing special,” I said.

  “Then come along with me. I’ve got a gal I want you to meet … Paula, I picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She’s not crazy – she’s just a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It’ll be a treat … just to watch you. Listen, if you don’t shoot off in your pants when she starts wiggling, well then I’m a son of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. What’s the use of farting around in this place?”

  There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it was a French joint; now it was a speak-easy run by a couple of wops. There was a tiny bar near the door and in the back a little room with a sawdust floor and a slot machine for music. The idea was that we were to have a couple of drinks and then eat. That was the idea. Knowing him as I did, however, I wasn’t at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland together. If a woman should come along who pleased his fancy – and for that she didn’t have to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb – I knew he’d leave me in the lurch and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, when I was with him, was to make sure in advance that he had enough money to pay for the drinks we ordered. And, of course, never to let him out of my sight until the drinks were paid for.

  The first drink or two always plunged him into reminiscence. Reminiscences of cunt to be sure. His reminiscences were reminiscent of a story he had told me once and which made an indelible impression upon me. It was about a Scotchman on his deathbed. Just as he was about to pass away his wife, seeing him struggling to say something bends over him tenderly and says – “What is it, Jock, what is it ye’re trying to say?” And Jock, with a last effort, raises himself wearily and says: “Just cunt … cunt … cunt.”

  That was always the opening theme, and the ending theme, with MacGregor. It was his way of saying – futility. The leitmotif was disease, because between fucks, as it were, he worried his head off, or rather he worried the head off his cock. It was the most natural thing in the world, at the end of an evening, for him to say – “come on upstairs a minute, I want to show you my cock.” From taking it out and looking at it and washing it and scrubbing it a dozen times a day naturally his cock was always swollen and inflamed. Every now and then he went to the doctor and he had it sounded. Or, just to relieve him, the doctor would give him a little box of salve and tell him not to drink so much. This would cause no end of debate, because as he would say to me, “if the salve is any good why do I have to stop drinking?” Or, “if I stopped drinking altogether do you think I would need to use the salve?” Of course, whatever I recommended went in one ear and out the other. He had to worry about something and the penis was certainly good food for worry. Sometimes he worried about his scalp. He had dandruff, as most everybody has, and when his cock was in good condition he forgot about that and he worried about his scalp. Or else his chest. The moment he thought about his chest he would start to cough. And such coughing! As though he were in the last stages of consumption. And when he was running after a woman he was as nervous and irritable as a cat. He couldn’t get her quickly enough. The moment he had her he was worrying about how to get rid of her. They all had something wrong with them, some trivial little thing, usually, which took the edge off his appetite.

  He was rehearsing all this as we sat in the gloom of the back room. After a couple of drinks he got up, as usual, to go to the toilet, and on his way he dropped a coin in the slot machine and the jiggers began to jiggle and with that he perked up and pointing to the glasses he said: “Order another round!” He came back from the toilet looking extraordinarily complacent, whether because he had relieved his bladder or because he had run into a girl in the hallway, I don’t know. Anyhow, as he sat down, he started in on another tack – very composed now and very serene, almost like a philosopher. “You know, Henry, we’re getting on in years. You and I oughtn’t to be frittering our time away like this. If we’re ever going to amount to anything it’s high time we started in …” I had been hearing this line for years now and I knew what the upshot would be. This was just a little parenthesis while he calmly glanced about the room and decided which bimbo was the least sottish-looking. While he discoursed about the miserable failure of our lives his feet were dancing and his eyes were getting brighter and brighter. It would happen as it always happened, that just as he was saying – “Now you take Woodruff, for instance. He’ll never get ahead because he’s just a natural mean scrounging son of a bitch …” – just at such a moment, as I say it would happen that some drunken cow in passing the table would catch his eye and without the slightest pause he would interrupt his narrative to say “hello kid, why don’t you sit down and have a drink with us?” And as a drunken bitch like that never travels alone, but always in pairs, why she’d respond with a “Certainly, can I bring my friend over?” And MacGregor, as though he were the most gallant chap in the world, would say “Why sure, why not? What’s her name?” And then, tugging at my sleeve, he’d bend over and whisper: “Don’t you beat it on me, do you hear? We’ll give ’em one drink and get rid of them, see?”

  And, as it always happened,
one drink led to another and the bill was getting too high and he couldn’t see why he should waste his money on a couple of bums so you go out first, Henry, and pretend you’re buying some medicine and I’ll follow in a few minutes … but wait for me, you son of a bitch, don’t leave me in the lurch like you did the last time. And like I always did, when I got outside I walked away as fast as my legs would carry me, laughing to myself and thanking my lucky stars that I had gotten away from him as easily as I had. With all those drinks under my belt it didn’t matter much where my feet were dragging me. Broadway lit up just as crazy as ever and the crowd thick as molasses. Just fling yourself into it like an ant and let yourself get pushed along. Everybody doing it, some for a good reason and some for no reason at all. All this push and movement representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes or fancy shirts, the new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every other joint a food emporium.

  Every time I hit that runway towards dinner hour a fever of expectancy seized me. It’s only a stretch of a few blocks from Times Square to Fiftieth Street, and when one says Broadway that’s all that’s really meant and it’s really nothing, just a chicken run and a lousy one at that, but at seven in the evening when everybody’s rushing for a table there’s a sort of electric crackle in the air and your hair stands on end like an antennae and if you’re receptive you not only get every bash and flicker but you get the statistical itch, the quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial, ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which compose the Milky Way, only this is the Gay White Way, the top of the world with no roof and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through and say it’s a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch of warm human delirium which makes you run forward like a blind nag and wag your delirious ears. Every one is so utterly, confoundedly not himself that you become automatically the personification of the whole human race, shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up to Moses, and beyond that you are a woman buying a hat, or a bird cage, or just a mouse trap. You can lie in wait in a show-window, like a fourteen carat gold ring, or you can climb the side of a building like a human fly, but nothing will stop the procession, not even umbrellas flying at lightning speed, nor double-decked walruses marching calmly to the oyster banks. Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy centre of Manhattan Island. From Times Square to Fiftieth Street all that St. Thomas Aquinas forgot to include in his magnum opus is here included, which is to say among other things, hamburger sandwiches, collar buttons, poodle dogs, slot machines, grey bowlers, typewriter ribbons, oranges sticks, free toilets, sanitary napkins, mint jujubes, billiard balls, chopped onions, crinkled doylies, manholes, chewing gum, sidecars and sour-balls, cellophane, cord tyres, magnetos, horse liniment, cough drops, feenamint, and that feline opacity of the hysterically endowed eunuch who marches to the soda fountain with a sawed off shotgun between his legs. The before-dinner atmosphere, the blend of patchouli, warm pitchblende, iced electricity, sugared sweat and powdered urine drives one on to a fever of delirious expectancy. Christ will never more come down to earth nor will there be any law-giver, nor will murder cease nor theft, nor rape, and yet … and yet one expects something, something terrifyingly marvellous and absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an invention, like the electric light, like television, only more devastating, more soul rending, an invention unthinkable that will bring a shattering calm and void, not the calm and void of death but of life such as the monks dreamed, such as is dreamed still in the Himalayas, in Tibet, in Lahore, in the Aleutian Islands, in Polynesia, in Easter Island, the dream of men before the flood, before the word was written, the dream of cave men and anthropophagists, of those with double sex and short tails, of those who are said to be crazy and have no way of defending themselves because they are outnumbered by those who are not crazy. Cold energy trapped by cunning brutes and then set free like explosive rockets, wheels, intricately interwheeled to give the illusion of force and speed some for light, some for power, some for motion, words wired by maniacs and mounted like false teeth, perfect, and repulsive as lepers, ingratiating, soft, slippery, nonsensical movement, vertical, horizontal, circular, between walls and through walls, for pleasure, for barter, for crime; for sex; all light, movement, power impersonally conceived, generated, and distributed throughout a choked, cunt-like cleft intended to dazzle and awe the savage, the yokel, the alien, but nobody dazzled or awed, this one hungry, that one lecherous, all one and the same and no different from the savage, the yokel, the alien, except for odds and ends, bric-à-brac, the soapsuds of thought, the sawdust of the mind. In the same cunty cleft, trapped and undazzled, millions have walked before me, among them one, Blaise Cendrars, who afterwards flew to the moon, thence back to earth and up the Orinoco impersonating a wild man but actually sound as a button, though no longer vulnerable, no longer mortal, a splendiferous hulk of a poem dedicated to the archipelago of insomnia. Of those with fever few hatched, among them myself still unhatched, but pervious and maculate, knowing with quiet ferocity the ennui of ceaseless drift and movement. Before dinner the slat and chink of sky light softly percolating through the boned grey dome, the vagrant hemispheres spored with blue-egged nuclei coagulating, ramifying, in the one basket lobsters, in the other the germination of a world antiseptically personal and absolute. Out of the manholes, grey with the underground life, men of the future world saturated with shit, the iced electricity biting into them like rats, the day done in and darkness coming on like the cool, refreshing shadows of the sewers. Like a soft prick slipping out of an overheated cunt I, the still unhatched, making a few abortive wriggles, but either not dead and soft enough or else sperm-free and skating ad astra, for it is still not dinner and a peristaltic frenzy takes possession of the upper colon, the hypogastric region, the umbilical and the post-pineal lobe. Boiled alive, the lobsters swim in ice, giving no quarter and asking no quarter, simply motionless and unmotivated in the ice-watered ennui of death, life drifting by the show-window muffled in desolation, a sorrowful scurvy eaten away by ptomaine, the frozen glass of the window cutting like a jack-knife, dean and no remainder.

  Life drifting by the show-window … I too as much a part of life as the lobster, the fourteen carat ring, the horse liniment, but very difficult to establish the fact, the fact being that life is merchandise with a bill of lading attached, what I choose to eat being more important than I the eater, each one eating the other and consequently eating, the verb ruler of the roost. In the act of eating the host is violated and justice defeated temporarily. The plate and what’s on it, through the predatory power of the intestinal apparatus, commands attention and unifies the spirit, first hypnotizing it, then slowly swallowing it, then masticating it, then absorbing it. The spiritual part of the being passes off like a scum, leaves absolutely no evidence or trace of its passage, vanishes, vanishes even more completely than a point in space after a mathematical discourse. The fever, which may return tomorrow, bears the same relation to life as the mercury in a thermometer bears to heat. Fever will not make life heat, which is what was to have been proved and thus consecrates the meat balls and spaghetti. To chew while thousands chew, each chew an act of murder, gives the necessary social cast from which you look out the window and see that even human kind can be s
laughtered justly, or maimed, or starved, or tortured because, while chewing, the mere advantage of sitting in a chair with clothes on, wiping the mouth with napkin, enables you to comprehend, what the wisest men have never been able to comprehend, namely that there is no other way of life possible, said wise men often disdaining to use chair, clothes or napkin. Thus men scurrying through a cunty cleft of a street called Broadway every day at regular hours, in search of this or that, tend to establish this and that, which is exactly the method of mathematicians, logicians, physicists, astronomers and such like. The proof is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts.

  The meat balls devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the 24 carat sparkle and with the theatre pack. This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a part of life too like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When is it life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders on and I remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten: the coffee was lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid. The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next. At the corner the blind man stops again and plays “Home to Our Mountains’. I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket – I chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I belong and I don’t belong.