Standing there on the ocean’s shore I see Crazy George leaning against the wall of the undertaker’s shop. He has on a funny little cap, a celluloid collar and no tie; he sits on the bench beside the coffin, neither sad nor smiling. He sits there quietly, like an angel that has stepped outside of a Jewish painting. The man in the coffin, whose body is still fresh, is decked out in a modest pepper and salt suit just George’s size. He has a collar and tie on and a watch in his vest pocket. George takes him out, undresses him and, while he changes his clothes, lays him on the ice. Not wishing to steal the watch he lays the watch on the ice beside the body. The man is lying on the ice with a celluloid collar around his neck. It is getting dark as George steps out of the undertaker’s shop. He has a tie now and a good suit of clothes. At the corner drugstore he stops off to buy a joke book which he saw in the window; he memorizes a few jokes standing in the subway. They are Joe Miller’s jokes.
At precisely the same hour Tante Melia is sending a Valentine greeting to the relatives. She has a gray uniform on and her hair is parted in the middle. She writes that she is very happy with her newfound friends and that the food is good. She would like them to remember however that she asked for some Fastnacht Kuchen the last time-could they send some by mail, by parcel post? She says that there are some lovely petunias growing up around the garbage can outside the big kitchen. She says that she took a long walk on Sunday last and saw lots of reindeer and rabbits and ostriches. She says that her spelling is very poor, but that she was never a good hand at writing anyway. Everybody is very kind and there is lots of work to do. She would like some Fastnacht Kuchen as soon as possible, by air mail if possible. She asked the director to make her some for her birthday but they forgot. She says to send some newspapers because she likes to look at the advertisements. There was a hat she saw once, from Bloomingdale’s, she thought, and it was marked down. Maybe they could send the hat along with the Fastnacht Kuchen? She thanks them all for the lovely cards they sent her last Christmas-she still remembers them, especially the one with the silver stars on it. Everybody thought it was lovely. She says that she will soon be going to bed and that she will pray for all of them because they were always so good to her.
It’s growing dusky, always about the same hour, and I’m standing there gazing at the ocean’s mirror. Icecold time, neither fast nor slow, but a stiff lying on the ice with a celluloid collar-and if only he had an erection it would be marvelous … too marvelous! In the dark hallway below Tom Jordan is waiting for the old man to descend. He has two blowsers with him and one of them is fixing her garter; Tom Jordan is helping her to fix her garter. Same hour, toward dusk, as I say, Mrs. Lawson is walking through the cemetery to look once again at her darling son’s grave. Her dear boy Jack, she says, though he was thirty-two when he kicked off seven years ago. They said it was rheumatism of the heart, but the fact is the darling boy had knocked up so many venereal virgins that when they drained the pus from his body he stank like a shitpump. Mrs. Lawson doesn’t seem to remember that at all. It’s her darling boy Jack and the grave is always tidy; she carries a little piece of chamois in her handbag in order to polish the tombstone every evening.
Same dusky time, the stiff lying there on the ice, and the old man is standing in a telephone booth with the receiver in one hand and something warm and wet with hair on it in the other. He’s calling up to say not to hold the dinner, that he’s got to take a customer out and he’ll be home late, not to worry. Crazy George is turning the leaves of Joe Miller’s joke book. Down further, toward Mobile, they’re practicing the St. Louis Blues without a note in front of ‘em and people are getting ready to go crazy when they hear it yesterday, today, tomorrow. Everybody’s getting ready to get raped, drugged, violated, soused with the new music that seeps out of the sweat of the asphalt. Soon it’ll be the same hour everywhere, just by turning a dial or hanging suspended over the earth in a balloon. It’s the hour of the kaffee-klatchers sitting around the family table, each one operated on for a different thing, the one with the whiskers and the heavy rings on her fingers having had a harder time than any one else because she could afford it.
It’s staggeringly beautiful at this hour when every one seems to be going his own private way. Love and murder, they’re still a few hours apart. Love and murder, I feel it coming with the dusk: new babies coming out of the womb, soft, pink flesh to get tangled up in barbed wire and scream all night long and rot like dead bone a thousand miles from nowhere. Crazy virgins with ice-cold jazz in their veins egging men on to erect new buildings and men with dog collars around their necks wading through the muck up to the eyes so that the czar of electricity will rule the waves. What’s in the seed scares the living piss out of me: a brand new world is coming out of the egg and no matter how fast I write the old world doesn’t die fast enough. I hear the new machine guns and the millions of bones splintered at once; I see dogs running mad and pigeons dropping with letters tied to their ankles.
Always merry and bright, whether north from Delancey Street or south toward the pus line! My two soft hands in the body of the world, ploughing up the warm entrails, arranging and disarranging, cutting them up, sewing them together again. The warm body feeling which the surgeon knows, together with oysters, warts, ulcers, hernias, cancer sprouts, the young kohlrabies, the clips and the forceps, the scissors and tropical growths, the poisons and gases all locked up inside and carefully covered with skin. Out of the leaking mains love gushing like sewer gas: furious love with black gloves and bright bits of garter, love that champs and snorts, love hidden in a barrel and blowing the bunghole night ofter night. The men who passed through my father’s shop reeked with love: they were warm and winey, weak and indolent, fast yachts trimmed with sex, and when they sailed by me in the night they fumigated my dreams. Standing in the center of New York I could hear the tinkle of the cowbells, or, by a turn of the head, I could hear the sweet sweet music of the death rattle, a red line down the page and on every sleeve a mourning band. By twisting my neck just a little I could stand high above the tallest skyscraper and look down on the ruts left by the huge wheels of modern progress. Nothing was too difficult for me if only it had a little grief and anguish in it. Chez nous there were all the organic diseases-and a few of the inorganic. Like rock crystal we spread, from one crime to another. A merry whirl, and in the center of it my twentyfirst year already covered with verdigris.
And when I can remember no more I shall always remember the night I was getting a dose of clap and the old man so stinking drunk he took his friend Tom Jordan to bed with him. Beautiful and touching thisto be out getting a dose of clap when the family honor was at stake, when it was at par, you might say. Not to be there for the shindig, with mother and father wrestling on the floor and the broomstick flying. Not to be there in the cold morning light when Tom Jordan is on his knees and begging to be forgiven but not being forgiven even on his knees because the inflexible heart of a Lutheran doesn’t know the meaning of forgiveness. Touching and beautiful to read in the paper next morning that about the same hour the night before the pastor who had put in the bowling alley was caught in a dark room with a naked boy on his lap! But what makes it excruciatingly touching and beautiful is this, that not knowing these things, I came home next day to ask permission to marry a woman old enough to be my mother. And when I said “get married” the old lady picks up the bread knife and goes for me. I remember, as I
