Walking along the Bowery … and a beautiful snotgreen pasture it is at this hour. Pimps, crooks, cokies, panhandlers, beggars, touts, gunmen, chinks, wops, drunken micks. All gaga for a bit of food and a place to flop. Walking and walking and walking. Twentyone I am, white, born and bred in New York, muscular physique, sound intelligence, good breeder, no bad habits, etc., etc. Chalk it up on the board. Selling out at par. Committed no crime, except to be born here.
In the past every member of our family did something with his hands. I’m the first idle son of a bitch with a glib tongue and a bad heart.
Swimming in the crowd, a digit with the rest. Tailored and re-tailored. The lights are twinkling-on and off, on and off. Sometimes it’s a rubber tire, sometimes it’s a piece of chewing gum. The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition. The lights jigging like electric needles. The atoms going crazy with light and heat. A conflagration going on behind the glass and nothing burns away. Men breaking their backs, men bursting their brains, to invent a machine which a child will manipulate. If I could only find the hypothetical child who’s to run this machine I’d put a hammer in its hands and say: Smash it! Smash it!
Smash it! Smash it! That’s all I can say. The old man’s riding around in an open barouche. I envy the bastard his peace of mind. A bosom pal by his side and a quart of rye under his belt. My toes are blistering with malice. Twenty years ahead of me and this thing growing worse by the hour. It’s throttling me. In twenty years there won’t be any soft, lovable men waiting to greet me. Every bosom pal that goes now is a buffalo lost and gone forever. Steel and concrete hedging me in. The pavement getting harder and harder. The new world eating into me, expropriating me. Soon I won’t even need a name.
Once I thought there were marvelous things in store for me. Thought I could build a world in the air, a castle of pure white spit that would raise me above the tallest building, between the tangible and the intangible, put me in a space like music where everything collapses and perishes but where I would be immune, great, godlike, holiest of the holies. It was I imagined this, I the tailor’s son! I who was born from a little acorn on an immense and stalwart tree. In the hollow of the acorn even the faintest tremor of the earth reached me: I was part of the great tree, part of the past, with crest and lineage, with pride, pride. And when I fell to earth and was buried there I remembered who I was, where I came from. Now I am lost, lost, do you hear? You don’t hear? I’m yowling and screaming-don’t you hear me? Switch the lights off! Smash the bulbs! Can you hear me now? Louder! you say. Louder! Christ, are you making sport of me? Are you deaf, dumb, and blind? Must I yank my clothes off? Must I dance on my head?
All right, then! I’m going to dance for you! A merry whirl, brothers, and let her whirl and whirl and whirl! Throw in an extra pair of flannel trousers while you’re at it. And don’t forget, boys, I dress on the right side. You hear me? Let ‘er go! Always merry and bright!
Jabberwhorl Cronstadt
This man, this skull, this music …
He lives in the back of a sunken garden, a sort of bosky glade shaded by whiffletrees and spinozas, by deodars and baobabs, a sort of queasy Buxtehude diapered with elytras and feluccas. You pass through a sentry box where the concierge twirls his mustache con furioso like in the last act of Ouida. They live on the third floor behind a mullioned belvedere filigreed with snaffled spaniels and sebaceous wens, with debentures and megrims hanging out to dry. Over the bell-push it says: “JABBERWHORL CRONSTADT, poet, musician, herbologist, weather man, linguist, oceanographer, old clothes, colloids.” Under this it reads: “Wipe your feet and blow your nose!” And under this is a rosette from a second-hand suit.
“There’s something strange about all this,” I said to my companion whose name is Dschilly Zilah Bey. “He must be having his period again.”
After we had pushed the button we heard a baby crying, a squeaky, brassy wail like the end of a horseknacker’s dream.
Finally Katya comes to the door-Katya from HesseKassel-and behind her, thin as a wafer and holding a bisque doll, stands little Pinochinni. And Pinochinni says: “You should go in the drawing room, they aren’t dressed yet.” And when I asked would they be very long because we’re famished she said, “Oh no! They’ve been dressing for hours. You are to look at the new poem father wrote today-it’s on the mantelpiece.”
And while Dschilly unwinds her serpentine scarf Pinochinni giggles and giggles, saying oh, dear, what is the matter with the world anyway, everything is so behindtime and did you ever read about the lazy little girl who hid her toothpicks under the mattress? It’s very strange, father read it to me out of a large iron book.
There is no poem on the mantelpiece, but there are other things-The Anatomy of Melancholy, an empty bottle of Pernod Fils, The Opal Sea, a slice of cut plug tobacco, hairpins, a street directory, an ocarina … and a machine to roll cigarettes. Under the machine are notes written on menus, calling cards, toilet paper, match boxes … “meet the Cuntess Cathcart at four” … “the opalescent mucus of Michelet” … “deflux-ions … cotyledons … phthisical” … “if Easter falls in Lady Day’s lap, beware old England of the clap” .. . “from the ichor of which springs his successor” … “the reindeer, the otter, the marmink, the minkfrog.”
The piano stands in a corner near the belvedere, a frail black box with silver candlesticks; the black keys have been bitten off by the spaniels. There are albums marked Beethoven, Bach, Liszt, Chopin, filled with bills, manicure sets, chess pieces, marbles, and dice. When he is in good humor Cronstadt will open an album marked “Goya” and play something for you in the key of C. He can play operas, minuets, schottisches, rondos, sarabands, preludes, fugues, waltzes, military marches; he can play Czerny, Prokofief or Granados, he can even improvise and whistle a Provencal air at the same time. But it must be in the key of C.
So it doesn’t matter how many black keys are missing or whether the spaniels breed or don’t breed. If the bell gets out of order, if the toilet doesn’t flush, if the poem isn’t written, if the chandelier falls, if the rent isn’t paid, if the water is shut off, if the maids are drunk, if the sink is stopped and the garbage rotting, if dandruff falls and the bed creaks, if the flowers are mildewed, if the milk turns, if the sink is greasy and the wallpaper fades, if the news is stale and calamities fail, if the breath is bad or the hands sticky, if the ice doesn’t melt, if the pedals won’t work, it’s all one and come Christmas because everything can be played in the key of C if you get used to looking at the world that way.
Suddenly the door opens to admit an enormous epileptoid beast with fungoid whiskers. It is Jocatha the famished cat, a big, buggerish brute with a taupe fur and two black walnuts hidden under its kinkless tail. It runs about like a leopard, it lifts its hind leg like a dog, it micturates like an owl.
“I’m coming in a minute,” says Jabberwhorl through the sash of the door. “I’m just putting on my pants.”
Now Elsa comes in-Elsa from Bad Nauheim-and she places a tray with blood-red glasses on the mantelpiece. The beast is bounding and yowling and thrashing and caterwauling: he has a few grains of cayenne pepper on the soft lilypad of his nose, the butt of his nose soft as a dum-dum bullet. He thrashes about in large Siamese wrath and the bones in his tail are finer than the finest sardines. He claws the carpet and chews the wallpaper,
