With every crack he made O’Mara put his foot in deeper. I had a presentiment things were not going to work out at all. However, as long as the money held out we would enjoy a respite. After that he’d probably get a job and fend for himself.
Ever since I knew O’Mara he had been making these sorties and coming back with a little jack which he always divvied up with me. There never had been a period when he had found me in good straits. Our friendship dated from the time we were seventeen or eighteen. We met for the first time in the dark at a railway station in New Jersey. Bill Woodruff and I were spending a vacation on the shores of a beautiful lake. Alec Walker, their boss, who had come to visit us, had brought O’Mara along as a surprise. It was a long drive from the station to the farmhouse where we were boarding. (We were traveling by horse and carriage.) About midnight we got back to the farmhouse. No one felt like going to bed immediately. O’Mara wanted to see the lake we had talked so much about. We got into a rowboat and headed towards the center of the lake, which was about three miles across. It was black as pitch. On an impulse O’Mara peeled off his clothes. Said he wanted to have a swim. In a jiffy he had dived overboard. It seemed an endless time before he came up to the surface; we couldn’t see him, we could only hear his voice. He was panting and puffing like a walrus. “What happened?” we asked. “I got stuck in the bulrushes,” he said. He turned over on his back and floated a while to get his breath. Then he started swimming, with strong, vigorous strokes. We followed in his wake, calling to him from time to time, begging him to get back in the boat before he got cold and exhausted.
That was how we met. His performance made a deep impression on me. His manliness and fearlessness won my admiration. During the week we spent together at the farmhouse we got to know one another inside out. Woodruff seemed more than ever a sissy to me now. He was not only full of qualms and misgivings but he was mercenary too. O’Mara, on the other hand, always gave recklessly. He was a born adventurer. At ten he had run away from the orphan asylum. Somewhere in the South, while working in a carnival, he had run across Alec Walker who immediately took a fancy to him and brought him North to work for him. Later Woodruff was also taken into the office. We were to see and hear a lot of Alec Walker soon. He was to become the sponsor of our club, our patron saint virtually. But I am getting ahead of myself.… What I wanted to say was that it was impossible for me to ever refuse O’Mara anything. He gave all and he expected all. Among friends this was the natural, spontaneous way to behave, he believed. As for morals, he had no moral sense whatever. If he were hard up for a woman he would ask you if he couldn’t sleep with your wife—that is, until he found himself “a piece of tail.” If he lacked the money to help you out in a pinch he would do a little thieving on the side or he would forge a check. He had no scruples, no compunctions whatever. He liked to eat well and sleep long. He hated work but when he undertook something he went at it wholeheartedly. He always wanted to make money quickly. “Make a haul and clear out,” that was the way he put it. He was fond of all the sports and loved to hunt and fish. When it came to cards he was a shark: he played a mean game, entirely out of keeping with his character. His excuse was that he never played for the fun of it. He played to win, to make a killing. He was not above cheating either, if he felt he could get away with it. He had formed a romantic notion of himself as a clever gambler.
Best of all was his talk. To me, at least. Most of my friends found him tiresome. But I could listen to O’Mara without ever desiring to open my own trap. All I did was to ply him with questions. I suppose the reason his talk was so stimulating to me was because it dealt with worlds I had never entered. He had been over a good part of the globe, had lived a number of years in the Orient, particularly China, Japan and the Philippines. I liked the picture he drew of Oriental women. He always spoke of them with tenderness and reverence. I liked too the way he spoke about fish, big fish, the monsters of the deep. Or about snakes, which he handled like pets. Trees and flowers also figured heavily in his talks: he knew every variety, it seemed to me, and he could dwell on their particularities endlessly. Then too he had been a soldier, even before the war broke out. A top sergeant, no less. He could talk about the qualities of a top sergeant in a way that would make one believe this little tyrant to be far more important than a colonel or a general. Officers he always spoke of with contempt and derision, or else with bitter hatred. “They tried to push me up the ladder,” he said once, “but I wouldn’t hear of it. As top sergeant I was king, and I knew it. Any horse’s ass can become a lieutenant. You have to be good to be top sergeant.”
He gave himself plenty of elbow room when talking. Never in a hurry to finish. Not O’Mara. Talked just as well when sober as when drunk. Of course he had a wonderful listener in me. An ideal listener. All anyone had to do in those days was merely to mention China, Java or Borneo, and I was all ears. Mention anything foreign and remote and I was a willing victim.
The surprising thing about a guy like O’Mara was that he also read a great deal. Almost the first thing he would do, on looking me up, would be to survey the books on hand. One by one he would go through them, savoring them slowly and delectably. The books also entered into our talks. Somehow I preferred O’Mara’s impressions of a book to those of my other friends who were more widely read or more critical. Like myself, O’Mara was all appreciation, all enthusiasm. He had no critical sense. If the book held his interest it was a good book, or a great book, or a marvelous book. We would live as vividly in the books we devoured together as in our imaginary peregrinations through China, India, Africa. It was at the dinner table these jags often began. Over the coffee O’Mara would suddenly recall some incident out of his checkered past. We would egg him on. At two or three in the morning we would still be sitting there at table. By that time we would be ready for a little snack—to revive ourselves. Then a bit of a walk to get some clean fresh air into our lungs, as he always phrased it. Of course the next day was always shot. None of us thought of stirring out of bed before noon. Breakfast and lunch combined was always a leisurely affair. None of us was geared to start going first thing out of bed. And, since the day was already shot, we would immediately begin thinking about the theater or a movie.
As long as the money lasted it was wonderful.…
I suppose it was O’Mara’s practical turn of mind which gave me the idea one day of getting my little prose poems printed and selling them myself. After looking through my “stuff,” O’Mara was of the opinion that I would never get an editor to take them. I knew he was right. I began to turn it over in my mind. I had loads of friends and acquaintances, and they were all eager to help me, so they said. Why not sell my work direct to them, to begin with? I broached the idea to O’Mara. He thought it excellent. I would sell by mail and he would go around on foot, from one office building to another. Besides, he had lots of friends. Well, we found a little printer who gave us a very reasonable estimate; he had a good quantity of stiff colored paper which he would use for the purpose. I was to bring out one a week, printing five hundred at a time. Mezzotints we called them, owing to the influence of Whistler. Signed: Henry V. Miller.
The most amazing thing, when I look back on it now, is that the first prose poem I wrote for this project was inspired by the Bowery Savings Bank. It was the architecture of their new building, not the gold in the vaults, which kindled my enthusiasm. “The Bowery Phoenix,” I called it. My friends weren’t very enthusiastic but they coughed up. After all, it was only the price of a meal I was charging for these dithyrambs. Had we sold the five hundred we would have made a tidy little sum.
Among other things we tried to get yearly subscriptions, at a reduced rate. A half-dozen subscriptions per week and our problem would have been solved. But even my best friends were dubious that I could keep it up for a year. They knew me well. In a month or two I would be broaching another scheme. At best I was able to persuade them to take a month’s subscription—mere chicken feed. O’Mara was incensed with my friends, s
aid he could do better with utter strangers. Every morning he got up early and began plugging for me. He went all over town—Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island—wherever he had a hunch that he would be welcome. He was trying to bag subscriptions.
After I had turned out two or three Mezzotints Mona came forward with another plan. She would sign her name to them and peddle them from place to place in the Village. The night spots, she meant. People who were half-drunk weren’t very critical, she thought. Besides, it would be hard to resist a beautiful-looking woman. O’Mara didn’t take to her scheme—it was too unbusinesslike for him—but Mona insisted that there was no harm in trying. We had an assortment of back issues, all in different colors; my name had to be blacked out and hers printed below it. No one would know the difference.
The first week she did famously. They went like hot cakes. Some bought the whole series, others paid her triple and quintuple for a single Mezzotint. It seemed as though she had hit on the right idea. Now and then we got orders in the mail. Now and then O’Mara got a subscription, for six months or for a year. I had all sorts of ideas for the coming issues. The hell with editors—we could do better on our own.
While Mona made the rounds of the Village nightly, O’Mara and I went in search of material. We couldn’t have gone about our task more energetically had we been hired by a big syndicate. We went everywhere, looked into everything. One night we would be sitting in the press box at the Six Day Bike Race, the next night we would have ringside seats at a wrestling bout. Some nights we would start out on foot, to explore Chinatown more thoroughly, or the Bowery, or we would go to Hoboken or some other Godforsaken town in New Jersey, “just for a change.…” One afternoon, while O’Mara was plugging away for me in the Bronx, I called up Ned and induced him to go with me to the Burlesque on Houston Street, to write it up. I wanted Ned as my illustrator. We invented a yarn, of course, about the magazine which had requested the article. Cleo was no longer there, unfortunately, but there was a young, racylooking blonde, who had replaced her, who was a seething mass of sex from head to foot. After a little chat with her in the wings we persuaded her to have a drink with us after the show. She was one of those witless-shitless bitches who grow up in places like Newark or Sandusky. Had the laugh of a hyena. She had promised to introduce me to the comedian, who was her boy friend, but he never turned up. A few of the girls from the chorus straggled in, looking even more horrible with their clothes on, poor wretches. I got into conversation with one of them at the bar. Discovered that she was studying to be a violinist, of all things. She was as homely as sin, hadn’t an ounce of sex in her, but was intelligent and sympathetic. Ned went to work on the blonde, hoping against hope to get her to go to the studio with him for a quick one.…
To make a Mezzotint of an afternoon like that was like working out a jigsaw puzzle. It would take me days to whittle my prose poem down to the required length. Two hundred and fifty words was the maximum that could be printed. I used to write two or three thousand, then reach for the axe.
Mona, of course, never got home till about two in the morning. It was a bit wearing on her, I thought. Not the hours, but the atmosphere of the night clubs. Now and then, to be sure, she ran into an interesting person. Like Alan Cromwell, for example, who claimed to be a banker from Washington, D.C. A man of this caliber always invited her to sit down and talk to him. In Mona’s opinion this Cromwell was a cultured individual. He had begun by buying everything she had with her. Seventy-five or eighty dollars he had handed over for a pile of Mezzotints, and in leaving he had forgotten to take them with him, purposely no doubt. A gentleman, what! He had to come to New York on business once every ten days or so. Was always to be found at the Golden Eagle or at Tomtit’s Nest. Though he drank heavily he was ever “the perfect gentleman.” Never parted from her without leaving a fifty-dollar bill in her palm. “Just for keeping him company.” There were lots of lonely souls like Alan Cromwell floating about, Mona maintained. All these lonely souls were well-heeled, what’s more. Soon I would hear of the others, like that lumber king who kept a suite of rooms the year round at the Waldorf; like Moreau, the professor from the Sorbonne, who took her to the most exotic places whenever they happened to meet; like Neuberger, the oil man from Texas, who had so little conception of the value of money that, whether it was a long haul or a short haul, he always tipped the taxi driver a five spot. Then there was the retired brewer from Milwaukee, who was passionate about music. He always notified Mona in advance of his coming so that she might accompany him to the concert which he came expressly from Milwaukee to hear. The little tributes which Mona exacted of these types represented so much more than anything we might have hoped to earn legitimately that O’Mara and I stopped thinking about subscriptions altogether. Any Mezzotints which were left over at the end of the week we sent out gratis to people we thought would like to read them. Sometimes we sent them to editors of newspapers and magazines, or to the members of the Senate at Washington. Sometimes we sent them to the heads of large industrial organizations—just for the fun of it, just to see what might happen. Sometimes, and this was even more fun, we would go through the telephone book and pick out names at random. Once we telegraphed the contents of a Mezzotint to the director of an insane asylum on Long Island. We signed a fishy name, of course. A crazy name, like Aloysius Pentecost Onega. Just to throw him off the track (!)
An idea like this last would come to us after an evening with Osiecki who had now become a frequent visitor. He was an architect who lived in the neighborhood; we had met him at a bar one evening just as it was closing. In the beginning his talk was fairly rational—the usual humdrum stuff about life in a big architect’s office. Fond of music, he had bought himself a beautiful player piano and, after getting quietly soused all by himself he would start playing his records—until the neighbors pounded at the door.
Nothing unusual about such behavior. We used to visit him now and then and help him listen to his bloody records. He always had a good supply of liquor in the house. Little by little, however, we observed a strange note creeping into his conversations. It was his hatred for his boss. Or rather, his suspicions about the boss.
It required a little coaxing at first to draw him out. He was coy about revealing the full extent of his misgivings. But when he saw that we swallowed his remarks without a murmur of surprise or disapproval, he unlimbered remarkably fast.
Apparently the boss wanted to get rid of him. But since he had nothing on Osiecki, he was at a loss how to do it.
“So that’s why he puts the lice in your desk every night, eh?” piped O’Mara, slipping me the horse wink.
“I don’t say that he does it. All I know is that they’re there every morning,” and with this our friend would begin scratching himself.
“He doesn’t have to do it himself, of course,” said I. “Maybe he pays the janitor to do it for him.”
“I’m not saying who does it. I’m not making any accusations, not publicly anyway. All I know is that it’s a dirty trick. If he were a man he would hand me my walking papers and be rid of me.”
“Why don’t you turn the tables on him?” said O’Mara maliciously.
“How do you mean?”
“Why, just this… put the lice in his desk, see!”
“I’m in enough trouble,” said poor Osiecki.
“But you’re going to lose your job anyway.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. I’ve got a good lawyer who’s promised to defend me.”
“You’re certain you’re not imagining all this?” I asked quite innocently.
“Imagining it? Listen, see those glass cups under your chairs? He’s got them running around in here now.”
I looked casually around. Even the piano legs were standing in glass cups filled with kerosene.
“Jesus,” said O’Mara, “I’m getting itchy myself. You’ll go cuckoo if you don’t quit that job soon.”
“All right,” said Osiecki smoothly and tonelessly, “all ri
ght, I’ll go cuckoo then. But I won’t give him the satisfaction of handing in my resignation. Never.”
“Man,” I said, “you must be a bit nuts already to talk like that.”
“I am,” said Osiecki. “Who wouldn’t be? Can you lie awake all night scratching yourself and act normal the next day?”
There was no answer to make to that. On the way home O’Mara and I began to discuss ways and means of helping the poor devil. “Let’s talk to his girl,” said O’Mara. “That might help.” We agreed that we would get Osiecki to introduce us to his girl friend. We’d invite them both for dinner one evening.
“Maybe she’s nuts too,” I thought to myself.
It was by accident we made the acquaintance shortly thereafter of Osiecki’s bosom friends, Andrews and O’Shaughnessy, also architects. Andrews, a Canadian, was a short, cocky little fellow, well-mannered, highly intelligent, and a loyal friend, as we soon discovered. He had known Osiecki since boyhood. O’Shaughnessy was quite another type, big, brawny, full of health and vitality, reckless, carefree, happy-go-lucky. Always looking for a good time. Always ready to go on a drinking bout. He had a mind, too, but he suppressed it. He liked to talk about food, women, horses, suspension bridges. The three of them at a bar were quite a sight—like something out of Du Maurier or Alexandre Dumas. Inseparable companions. Always took good care of one another. The reason we hadn’t met them before was because Andrews and O’Shaughnessy had been away on a business trip.
They were quite pleased, it turned out, to learn that Osiecki had made friends with us. They were worried about him, but had been unable to decide what to do about the situation. The boss was a fine chap, they said. Couldn’t understand what had got into their friend to change him so—unless it was his girl.
“What’s the matter with her?” we asked.
Andrews, who was doing the talking, was reluctant to say much about her. “I know her only a short time,” he said. “There’s something fishy about her, that’s all I can say. She gives me the creeps.” And with that he shut up. O’Shaughnessy simply laughed heartily over the whole affair. “He’ll come out of it,” he said. “He’s drinking too much, that’s all. After you’ve seen snakes and cobras climbing into your bed the itch is nothing. I’ll admit, though, I’d almost rather go to bed with a cobra than with that gal of his! There’s something inhuman about her. I think she’s a succubus, if you know what I mean.” Here he gave a hearty guffaw. “In plain English—a bloodsucker. Do you get it?”