Tropic of Capricorn

  Grover’s conversion followed right upon the old man’s deflation, which is why I am reminded of it. Nobody had seen the Watrouses for a number of years and then, right in the midst of a bloody snore, you might say, in pranced Grover scattering benedictions and calling upon God as his witness as he rolled up his sleeves to deliver us from evil. What I noted first in him was the change in his personal appearance; he had been washed clean in the blood of the Lamb. He was so immaculate, indeed, that there was almost a perfume emanating from him. His speech too had been cleaned up; instead of wild oaths there were now nothing but blessings and invocations. It was not a conversation which he held with us but a monologue in which, if there were any questions, he answered them himself. As he took the chair which was offered him he said with the nimbleness of a jack-rabbit that God had given his only beloved Son in order that we might enjoy life everlasting. Did we really want this life everlasting – or were we simply going to wallow in the joys of the flesh and die without knowing salvation? The incongruity of mentioning the “joys of the flesh” to an aged couple, one of whom was sound asleep and snoring, never struck him, to be sure. He was so alive and jubilant in the first flush of God’s merciful grace that he must have forgotten that my sister was dippy, for, without even inquiring how she had been, he began to harangue her in this new-found spiritual palaver to which she was entirely impervious because, as I say, she was minus so many buttons that if he had been talking about chopped spinach it would have been just as meaningful to her. A phrase like “the pleasures of the flesh” meant to her something like a beautiful day with a red parasol. I could see by the way she sat on the edge of her chair and bobbed her head that she was only waiting for him to catch his breath in order to inform him that the pastor – her pastor, who was an Episcopalian – had just returned from Europe and that they were going to have a fair in the basement of the church where she would have a little booth fitted up with doylies from the five-and-ten cent store. In fact, no sooner had he paused a moment than she let loose – about the canals of Venice, the snow in the Alps, the dog carts in Brussels, the beautiful liverwurst in Munich. She was not only religious, my sister, but she was clean daffy. Grover had just slipped in something about having seen a new heaven and a new earth … for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, he said, mumbling the words in a sort of hysterical glissando in order to unburden himself of an oracular message about the New Jerusalem which God had established on earth and in which he, Grover Watrous, once foul of speech and marred by a twisted foot, had found the peace and the calm of the righteous. “There shall be no more death …” he started to shout when my sister leaned forward and asked him very innocently if he liked to bowl because the pastor had just installed a beautiful new bowling alley in the basement of the church and she knew he would be pleased to see Grover because he was a lovely man and he was kind to the poor. Grover said that it was a sin to bowl and that he belonged to no church because the churches were godless: he had even given up playing the piano because God needed him for higher things. “He that over cometh shall inherit all things,” he added “and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.” He paused again to blow his nose in a beautiful white handkerchief, whereupon my sister took the occasion to remind him that in the old days he always had a running nose but that he never wiped it. Grover listened to her very solemnly and then remarked that he had been cured of many evil ways. At this point the old man woke up and, seeing Grover sitting beside him large as life, he was quite startled and for a moment or two he was not sure, it seemed, whether Grover was a morbid phenomenon of dream or an hallucination, but the sight of the clean handkerchief brought him quickly to his wits. “Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed. “The Watrous boy, what? Well, what in the name of all that’s holy are you doing here?”

  “I came in the name of the Holy of Holies,” said Grover unabashed. “I have been purified by the death on Calvary and I am here in Christ’s sweet name that ye may be redeemed and walk in light and power and glory.”

  The old man looked dazed. “Well, what’s come over you?” he said, giving Grover a feeble, consolatory smile. My mother had just come in from the kitchen and had taken a stand behind Grover’s chair. By making a wry grimace with her mouth she was trying to convey to the old man that Grover was cracked. Even my sister seemed to realize that there was something wrong with him, especially when he had refused to visit the new bowling alley which her lovely pastor had expressly installed for young men such as Grover and his likes.

  What was the matter with Grover? Nothing, except that his feet were solidly planted on the fifth foundation of the great wall of the Holy City of Jerusalem, the fifth foundation made entirely of sardonyx, whence he commanded a view of a pure river of water of life issuing from the throne of God. And the sight of this river of life was to Grover like the bite of a thousand fleas in his lower colon. Not until he had run at least seven times around the earth would he be able to sit quietly on his ass and observe the blindness and the indifference of men with something like equanimity. He was alive and purged, and though to the eyes of the sluggish, sluttish spirits who are sane he was “cracked”, to me he seemed infinitely better off this way than before. He was a pest who could do you no harm. If you listened to him long enough you became somewhat purged yourself, though perhaps unconvinced. Grover’s bright new language always caught me in the midriff and through inordinate laughter cleansed me of the dross accumulated by the sluggish sanity about me. He was alive as Ponce de Leon had hoped to be alive; alive as only a few men have ever been. And being unnaturally alive he didn’t mind in the least if you laughed in his face, nor would he have minded if you had stolen the few possessions which were his. He was alive and empty, which is so close to Godhood that it is crazy.

  With his feet solidly planted on the great wall of the New Jerusalem Grover knew a joy which is incommensurable. Perhaps if he had not been born with a club foot he would not have known this incredible joy. Perhaps it was well that his father had kicked the mother in the belly while Grover was still in the womb. Perhaps it was that kick in the belly which had sent Grover soaring, which made him so thoroughly alive and awake that even in his sleep he was delivering God’s messages. The harder he laboured the less he was fatigued. He had no more worries, no regrets, no clawing memories. He recognized no duties, no obligations, except to God. And what did God expect of him? Nothing, nothing … except to sing His praises. God only asked of Grover Watrous that he reveal himself alive in the flesh. He only asked of him to be more and more alive. And when fully alive Grover was a voice and this voice was a flood which made all dead things into chaos and this chaos in turn became the mouth of the world in the very centre of which was the verb to be. In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So God was this strange little infinitive which is all there is – and is it not enough? For Grover it was more than enough: it was everything. Starting from this Verb what difference did it make which road he travelled? To leave the Verb was to travel away from the centre, to erect a Babel. Perhaps God had deliberately maimed Grover Watrous in order to hold him to the centre, to the Verb. By an invisible cord God held Grover Watrous to his stake which ran through the heart of the world and Grover became the fat goose which laid a golden egg every day …

  Why do I write of Grover Watrous? Because I have met thousands of people and none of them were alive in the way that Grover was. Most of them were more intelligent, many of them were brilliant, some of them were even famous, but none were alive and empty as Grover was. Grover was inexhaustible. He was like a bit of radium which, even if buried under a mountain does not lose its power to give off energy. I had seen plenty of so-called energetic people before – is not America filled with them? – but never, in the shape of a human being, a reservoir of energy. And what created this inexhaustible reservoir of energy? An illumination. Yes, it happened in the twinkling of an eye, which is the only way that anything important ever does happen. Overnight
all Grover’s preconceived values were thrown overboard. Suddenly, just like that, he ceased moving as other people move. He put the brakes on and he kept the motor running. If once, like other people, he had thought it was necessary to get somewhere now he knew that somewhere was anywhere and therefore right here and so why move? Why not park the car and keep the motor running? Meanwhile the earth itself is turning and Grover knew it was turning and knew that he was turning with it. Is the earth getting anywhere? Grover must undoubtedly have asked himself this question and must undoubtedly have satisfied himself that it was not getting anywhere. Who, then, had said that we must get somewhere? Grover would inquire of this one and that where they were heading for and the strange thing was that although they were all heading for their individual destinations none of them ever stopped to reflect that the one inevitable destination for all alike was the grave. This puzzled Grover because nobody could convince him that death was not a certainty, whereas nobody could convince anybody else that any other destination was an uncertainty. Convinced of the dead certainty of death Grover suddenly became tremendously and overwhelmingly alive. For the first time in his life he began to live, and at the same time the club foot dropped completely out of his consciousness. This is a strange thing, too, when you come to think of it, because the club foot, just like death, was another ineluctable fact. Yet the club foot dropped out of mind, or, what is more important, all that had been attached to the club foot. In the same way, having accepted death, death too dropped out of Grover’s mind. Having seized on the single certainty of death all the uncertainties vanished. The rest of the world was now limping along with club-footed uncertainties and Grover Watrous alone was free and unimpeded. Grover Watrous was the personification of certainty. He may have been wrong, but he was certain. And what good does it do to be right if one has to limp along with a club foot? Only a few men have ever realized the truth of this and their names have become very great names. Grover Watrous will probably never be known, but he is very great just the same. This is probably the reason why I write about him – just the fact that I had enough sense to realize that Grover had achieved greatness even though nobody else will admit it. At the time I simply thought that Grover was a harmless fanatic, yes, a little “cracked”, as my mother insinuated. But every man who has caught the truth of certitude was a little cracked and it is only these men who have accomplished anything for the world. Other men, other great men, have destroyed a little here and there, but these few whom I speak of, and among whom I include Grover Watrous, were capable of destroying everything in order that the truth might live. Usually these men were born with an impediment, with a club foot, so to speak, and by a strange irony it is only the club foot which men remember. If a man like Grover becomes depossessed of his club foot, the world says that he has become “possessed”. This is the logic of incertitude and its fruit is misery. Grover was the only truly joyous being I ever met in my life and this, therefore, is a little monument which I am erecting in his memory, in the memory of his joyous certitude. It is a pity that he had to use Christ for a crutch, but then what does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?

  AN INTERLUDE

  Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. I like to dwell on this period when things were taking shape because the order, if it were understood, must have been dazzling. In the first place there was Hymie, Hymie the bull-frog, and there were also his wife’s ovaries which had been rotting away for a considerable time. Hymie was completely wrapped up in his wife’s rotting ovaries. It was the daily topic of conversation; it took precedence now over the cathartic pills and the coated tongue. Hymie dealt in “sexual proverbs”, as he called them. Everything he said began from or led up to the ovaries. Despite everything he was still nicking it off with the wife – prolonged snake-life copulations in which he would smoke a cigarette or two before un-cunting. He would endeavour to explain to me how the pus from the rotting ovaries put her in heat. She had always been a good fuck, but now she was better than ever. Once the ovaries were ripped out there’d be no telling how she’d take it. She seemed to realize that too. Ergo, fuck away! Every night, after the dishes were cleared away, they’d strip down in their little bird-like apartment and lay together like a couple of snakes. He tried to describe it to me on a number of occasions – the ways she fucked. It was like an oyster inside, an oyster with soft teeth that nibbled away at him. Sometimes it felt as though he were right inside her womb, so soft and fluffy it was, and those soft teeth biting away at his pecker and making him delirious. They used to lie scissors-fashion and look up at the ceiling. To keep from coming he would think about the office, about the little worries which plagued him and kept his bowels tied up in a knot. In between orgasms he would let his mind dwell on some one else, so that when she’d start working on him again he might imagine he was having a brand new fuck with a brand new cunt. He used to arrange it so that he could look out of the window while it was going on. He was getting so adept at it that he could undress a woman on the boulevard there under his window and transport her to the bed; not only that, but he could actually make her change places with his wife, all without un-cunting. Sometimes he’d fuck away like that for a couple of hours and never bother to shoot off. Why waste it! he would say.

  Steve Romero, on the other hand, had a hell of a time holding it in. Steve was built like a bull and he scattered his seed freely. We used to compare notes sometimes sitting in the Chop Suey joint around the corner from the office. It was a strange atmosphere. Maybe it was because there was no wine. Maybe it was the funny little black mushrooms they served us. Anyway it wasn’t difficult to get started on the subject. By the time Steve met us he would already have had his workout, a shower and a rubdown. He was clean inside and out. Almost a perfect specimen of a man. Not very bright, to be sure, but a good egg, a companion. Hymie, on the other hand, was like a toad. He seemed to come to the table direct from the swamps where he had passed a mucky day. Filth rolled off his lips like honey. In fact, you couldn’t call it filth, in his case, because there wasn’t any other ingredient with which you might compare it. It was all one fluid, a slimy, sticky substance made entirely of sex. When he looked at his food he saw it as potential sperm; if the weather were warm he would say it was good for the balls; if he took a trolley ride he knew in advance that the rhythmic movement of the trolley would stimulate his appetite, would give him a slow, “personal” hard-on, as he put it. Why “personal” I never found out, but that was his expression. He liked to go out with us because we were always reasonably sure of picking up something decent. Left to himself he didn’t always fare so well. With us he got a change of meat – Gentile cunt, as he put it. He liked Gentile cunt. Smelled sweeter, he said. Laughed easier too … Sometimes in the very midst of things. The one thing he couldn’t tolerate was dark meat. It amazed and disgusted him to see me travelling around with Valeska. Once he asked me if she didn’t smell kind of extra strong like. I told him I liked it that way – strong and smelly, with lots of gravy around it. He almost blushed at that. Amazing how delicate he could be about some things. Food, for example. Very finicky about his food. Perhaps a racial trait. Immaculate about his person, too. Couldn’t stand the sight of a spot on his dean cuffs. Constantly brushing himself off, constantly taking his pocket mirror out to see if there were any food between his teeth. If he found a crumb he would hide his face behind the napkin and extract it with his pearlhandled toothpick. The ovaries of course he couldn’t see. Nor could he smell them either, because his wife too was an immaculate bitch. Douching herself all day long in preparation for the evening nuptials. It was tragic, the importance she gave to her ovaries.