This truly is a delightful spot. No point in weeping about not having found it sooner. Enjoy it today. Far enough away from traffic to hear the breeze in the trees. Hope the birds respect me. Have to come here on a warm night. See the stars peeking between the trees. No. Cant let my mind go wandering like that. Need to stay aware. Must make it habitual … right here right now. Always aware. Like what Im reading in the paper. Millions starving; hundreds of thousands massacred; women and children hacked and burned … . Dont even know if this is todays paper, yesterdays, last week, last year … same old same old. What a world. Nothing but violence, mayhem, slaughter, everything but peace. I dont know, mans inhumanity to—Oh no! I dont believe it! What sort of madness is this? How long are they going to allow this sort of thing to continue? Measures should be taken to stop it instantly. Instantly!!!! This is utterly disgraceful. Oh yeah, you bet your sweet patouzy it is. Man oh man … jumpin bald headed codfish. Oh zippidy do dah, zippidy yay, my oh my what a wonderful day … Authorities fear an outbreak of gang warfare in Brooklyn. Yesterday at 9:42 a.m., a bomb ex—yeah, yeah, we know all about that, lets get to the good part wh—here we go, lets see, yeah, A bar, a reputed hangout for the Russian mafia, in Brighton Beach was attacked with grenades and automatic weapon fire—Alright! Right the fuck on!—First reports place the damage to the bar as ‘total’, and 4 are confirmed dead, 5 more seriously injured. The fire depart—yeah, yeah. Oh god, this is exciting. Careful now, careful. In … out … In … out … Nice and easy. Get too excited the top of my head will blow off. After all the time I spent trying, this is no time to succeed. Have to take it easy. Dont want a heart attack. Oh god, I feel so good it hurts. Feeling dizzy for krists sake. Okay now, just keep breathing in … out … nice and slow … nice and easy. Yeah. Krist, people are predictable. Always jumping to conclusions. All out war. Havent had an all out war in Brooklyn for years. Wonder if they still know how to do it. Do the wise guys today know how to hit the mattresses? Oh how wonderful … how fucking delicious. Theyre killing each other. Can you believe these assholes? I knew theyd do this. I absolutely knew it, yet Im still surprised at how stupid greed can make them. Well, thank god for that. Wonder if anythings happening elsewhere???? Doesnt seem to be anything in the paper. See whats on the Net later. Im sure theyll follow suit. Wow, my chest is still pounding, but its getting better … hearts slowing down. Better just sit here for a while. Yeah … breeze feels good. I/ll be fine in a few minutes. Dont think Ive ever been hit with so much excitement at once. This is better than all the others. To get them to kill each other is sublime, absolutely sublime. It will be a while before I can walk, I can feel it. Whats the difference. No need to move. Sit as long as I want. Should have brought some nuts for squirrels. Have nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in. Yowza, yowza, yowza … But all that aside Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the play? Yeah, the play, the plays the thing. What do we play next? Oh, there are so many candidates. A lot of real winners. Bankers, Lawyers, so many deserving of a little ‘attention’. Like that Insurance Commissioner Quackenbush. Quackenbush … if you had a name like that youd be a low-life weasel too. Runs to Hawaii and gets away with it. Who, Quackendabush? No Chico, thats a bird in the bush, and it gathers no moss. Man, does he deserve a little ‘attention’. But nothing gratuitous. No punishment for the sake of punishing … well, that is the American way, punish, punish and then punish. Dont want to fall into that punishment trap. Good god, thats the last thing I need. Leave that to the christians. Oh well, no point in wasting my time on concentrating on them, more important fish to fry. Hmmm, frying fish, now that sounds like a good idea. If I knew a little more about electricity I just might be able to pull that off. Krist, the entire insurance industry is filled with deserving individuals. Especially HMOs. Lordy lordy, lordy, are they ever deshpicable. Yeah, you tellem Daffy. And theres Chain Saw Al. What a dinner guest hed make. ‘Tell me, Albert, how many thousand employees did you discharge today?’ The problem is once you start thinking of the slime-balls in the world the list is endless. Well, I do have plenty of time … a lifetime actually. Now that I know what my purpose is in life I can relax and be certain I dont dissipate my energies. Take the actions of ‘elimination’ that are the most efficacious. Everyone needs a purpose for living. Even those vermin like Barnard. But we need a higher purpose … Yeah, nobility. Must be noble in thought and action. Only way to noble results … Yeah … guess that excitement is calming down. Stroll home soon. Might be a good idea to take a trip. Change of scenery. Good for the mind … and soul. Yeah … I like that idea. Bahamas … or Costa Rica. Now that sounds great. Yeah! Costa Rica. Kick back for a few weeks, let these last months go … hmm, year or so actually. What do you know? Yeah, let it drain away. Refresh my body, mind and spirit. Sort of empty myself out so Providence can show me the way to my next venture. Yowza, yowza, yowza …
… damn, I heard that Costa Rica was the ultimate place, but this is beyond … What a spectacular view … trees, underbrush, ocean, sun shimmering and reflecting … and no army. Beyond paradise. Yeah, tomorrow I/ll go to the rainforest. And who knows after that. And theyre still knocking each other off … and its spread to Chicago and Miami. Ohhh, how beautiful … warm sun, cool breezes cold drink and those stupid pisanos and Russians are still knocking each other off. Yes indeed, life is worth living afterall.
Amen
A Biography of Hubert Selby, Jr.
Hubert Selby Jr. (1928–2004) was the celebrated author of seven novels, including Requiem for a Dream and the classic bestseller Last Exit to Brooklyn, both of which were made into successful motion pictures. His singular portrayals of addiction and urban despair have influenced generations of authors, artists, and musicians.
As a child, Selby’s father, Hubert Selby Sr., worked as a coal miner in Kentucky, but he left the mines at twelve years of age when his father died and his stepmother kicked him out of their home. Eventually he became an engineer, working for the Merchant Marine. In 1925, Selby Sr. met and courted Selby’s mother, Adalin, in Brooklyn, where she had been born and raised.
Selby Jr. grew up in hardscrabble south Brooklyn and dropped out of school at age fourteen. At age fifteen, he changed his birth certificate in order to join the Merchant Marine himself. He served through World War II, but in 1945, when he was seventeen, a shipboard doctor diagnosed Selby with tuberculosis, and he was sent home to Brooklyn.
During a three-year period of frequent hospitalization, Selby underwent four surgeries and became addicted to morphine, but an experimental drug saved his life. While in the TB ward, however, Selby often contemplated his mortality. He knew that when he died he didn’t want to regret what he had done with his life. He also wrote a letter to the family of a victim of the disease. Later, he would say that these two things had led directly to his becoming a writer.
Selby married his first wife, Inez, when he was twenty-five, and they had two children. While working as a typist at an insurance agency, he met someone who told him heroin was in the same family as morphine, and he began to use the drug. During this time, he also began to write and was encouraged by his friends, including the author Gil Sorrentino. Selby claimed that it was Sorrentino who taught him to write, but Sorrentino denied this.
In his writing, Selby experimented with grammar, punctuation, spelling, language, and spacing so that his readers would “experience” the story. The brutal urban landscapes he portrayed, combined with the potent immediacy of his prose, captivated early readers. His frank descriptions of drugs, prostitution, and the rough Brooklyn streets he’d known since childhood also attracted the attention of censors, and his stories were submitted as evidence in obscenity trials focused on publishers and editors.
Through the support of writers such as Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, known now as Amiri Baraka, Selby found a publisher for his first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a series of stories fused into a single narrative. It was published to rave reviews, and Ginsberg said he hoped the book would “explode li
ke a rusty, hellish bombshell over America, and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” Indeed, it seemed he had changed the face of modern literature.
After the success of his first novel, Selby moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to beat his addictions and start over. He kicked his heroin addiction while in jail on a possession charge, and when he was released he went directly to a bar in West Hollywood. There he met his third wife, Suzanne Schwartzman, with whom he would have two children. The couple joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1969, and Selby began to write again, this time clean and sober. In the seventies, his reputation expanded with the release of his second and third novels, The Room (1971) and The Demon (1976). Requiem for a Dream (1978) established Selby as a poet laureate of the dark side of the American Dream.
An established writer by the eighties, Selby began teaching younger writers at the University of Southern California. He saw Last Exit to Brooklyn made into a film in 1989, followed by Requiem for a Dream in 2000. He succumbed to lung disease in 2004, a consequence of his battle with tuberculosis in the 1940s. Selby is survived by his wife, four children, and twelve grandchildren.
Selby as a newborn in 1928. When asked to recount a defining moment in his life he mentioned the circumstances surrounding his birth: “I was in deep serious trouble. I was blue from cyanosis, my head was all twisted and out of shape, and a few kinds of brain damage. My mother, she almost died too, she had severe toxemia, and when she asked the doctor what she should do about feeding me, he said, ‘Well, just keep breastfeeding him and eventually he’ll suck out all the poison.’ They had to drag me screaming into the twentieth century . . . I have been defiant ever since.”
Selby as a toddler in the early 1930s. During this time the family lived across the street from what is now the New School for Liberal Arts, in a luxury apartment building where Selby’s father worked as a superintendent. They later settled in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. While growing up in Bay Ridge, Selby acquired the nickname ‘Cubby,’ which stuck with him for the rest of his life. “Anyone who knew Cubby, only called him Cubby,” said Selby’s friend and fellow novelist Gilbert Sorrentino.
A postwar portrait of Selby’s parents, Adalin and Hubert Sr. As multigenerational Americans of Anglo-Saxon Methodist heritage, the Selbys were an anomaly in Bay Ridge, where many Irish, Italian, and Norwegian families settled in the early twentieth century. “I was a member of the smallest minority in the country, for God’s sake!” Selby joked in an interview with Rain Taxi quarterly. Hubert Sr., a native of Island, Kentucky, lost both of his parents before he was thirteen. He spent much of his youth working as a coal miner and later served in the Merchant Marine. According to Selby, his parents were ill-matched. “My mother’s a very strong, powerful woman,” he explained. “And my father was a drunk.” He often felt torn between the two of them. “There was a lot of conflict. I wanted to please my mother, and I wanted to please my father. And so, it’s pretty hard to please them both when they were so opposite in personality.”
Selby in 1943, shortly before he forged his birth certificate and enlisted in the Merchant Marine, an act that would change his life forever. Selby’s ship was responsible for transporting cattle to troops during World War II. It was soon discovered that the cattle were infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in humans. Selby contracted the disease and was taken off of the ship in Germany. Back in New York, he was admitted to a sanatorium and told he had three months to live. “I was in the hospital and this so-called specialist consultant came by,” he remembered. “He wouldn’t come in the room. He just stood out in the hall and he said, ‘You know there's nothing we can do for you, you just don’t have any lungs, you can't possibly live. So just go home and sit in a chair and be as comfortable as you can, because you’re gonna die.’ And he walked away and sent me a bill!”
Selby with his cousin Adalin, who was named after his mother, in the 1940s.
A 1975 passport photo of Selby. The following year he published his third novel, The Demon. It received negative reviews but has since become a cult classic. Selby speculated that critics did not like the fact that the novel depicted the spiritual emptiness of American middle-class life. “I am obviously attacking the American Dream,” he told John O’Brien in an interview. “The old clichés. The very foundations of our nation. They don’t want to hear that.”
Selby and his third wife, Suzanne, with their son, Bill, in 1970. The family lived in a triplex in West Hollywood. At the time Selby was working on his second novel, The Room, which many consider his masterpiece. “Cubby asked me to marry him the night we met in 1967 and continued to ask me for two years,” says Suzanne. The couple married two years later at the suggestion of Selby’s AA sponsor. Although both had struggled with addiction in the past, they remained clean and sober for their entire marriage, which lasted thirty-five years. (Photo courtesy of Bill Shumate.)
Selby with his son Bill in 1983. During these years the family lived on welfare, as Selby made little money from his writing and remained largely ignored by the literary establishment. “I’ve never gotten a fellowship, I’ve never gotten a grant, I’ve never gotten anything,” Selby once said. In his forties he went to work as a gas station attendant, and later, in his fifties, as a hotel clerk.
A photo of Selby with his mother, Adalin, at a party for the 1988 film premiere of Last Exit to?Brooklyn in Munich, Germany. Selby’s mother was a strict disciplinarian and a devout Christian who “sang in the same choir for more than sixty years.” According to Selby, she responded deeply to the world depicted in Last Exit to Brooklyn, despite the novel’s explicit language and violence. “She said: ‘Oh, those poor people,’” Selby recalled. “I really must have succeeded,” he continued, “in doing what I planned to do. And that is: to put the reader through an emotional experience, because the experience of reading that book transcended all her prejudices, her ideas, her beliefs, and she just responded to the pain of the people.”
Selby with his son Kyle, from his first marriage to Inez Taylor, and granddaughter in 1997. Altogether Selby had four children and twelve grandchildren.
Selby with his grandchildren Kimberly and Joseph in 1999.
Selby with Darren Aronofsky, who directed the film adaptation of Requiem for a Dream, in 2000. “I needed to make a film from this novel,” Aronofsky wrote, “because the words burn off the page. Like a hangman’s noose, the words scorch your neck with rope burn and drag you into the sub-sub-basement we humans build beneath hell.” Selby felt that Aronofsky’s film did justice to his work. After seeing it at the Cannes Film Festival he burst into tears. “It was so moving,” he explained. “It is such an emotional film, so powerful.” Requiem for a Dream is widely regarded as one of the best novels ever written about substance abuse. Selby’s profound understanding of addiction was surpassed only by his will to overcome the disease in his own life. The month before he passed away, doctors offered him morphine to help relieve his pain—but he refused. He wanted, he said, to retain his clarity.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2005 by Hubert Selby Jr.
Cover design by Morgan Allan
978-1-4532-9780-3
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