Under cover of darkness the ushers are spraying the dead and live lice and the nests of lice and the egg lice buried in the thick black curly locks of those who have no private baths, the poor, homeless Jews of the East Side who in their desperate poverty walk about in fur coats selling matches and shoe laces. Outside it’s exactly like the Place des Vosges or the Haymarket or Covent Garden, except that these people have faith-in the Burroughs Adding Machine. The fire escapes are crowded with pregnant women who have blown themselves up with bicycle pumps. All the poor desperate Jews of the East Side are happy on the fire escapes because they are eating ham sandwiches with one foot in the clouds. The curtain is rising to the odor of formaldehyde sweetened with Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum, five a package. The curtain is rising on the one and only portion of the human anatomy about which the less said the better. In life’s December when love is an ember it will be sad to remember the star-spangled bananas floating over the sheet-iron portions of the epigastric, hypogastric and umbilical sections of the human anatomy. Minsky is dreaming in the box office, his feet planted on the higher ground.
The Oberammergau Players are playing somewhere else. The chow dogs are being bathed and perfumed for the blue ribbon show. Sister Blanchard is sitting in the rocker with a fallen womb. Age comes, the body withers-but hernia can be cured. Looking down from the fire escape one sees the beautiful, unending landscape, exactly as it was painted by Cezanne-with corrugated ash cans, rusty can openers, broken-down baby carriages, tin bathtubs, copper boilers, nutmeg graters and partially nibbled animal crackers carefully preserved in cellophane. This is the fastest, cleanest show on earth brought all the way from the Rue de la Paix. You have the choice of two things-one looking down, down into the black depths, the other looking up, up into the sunlight where the hope of the resurrection waves above the star-spangled banner each and every one guaranteed to be genuine. Stand still, men, and see the salvation of the Lord. Cleo is dancing tonight and every night this week at less than the price of ordinary ground burial. Death is coming on all fours, like a sprig of shamrock. The stage glitters like the electric chair. Cleo is coming. Cleo, darling of the gods and queen of the electric chair.
Now works the calmness of Scheveningen like an anesthetic. The curtain rises on Colossius 3. Cleo advances out of the womb of night, her belly swollen with sewer gas. Glory! Glory! I’m climbing up the ladder. Out of the womb of night rises the old Brooklyn Bridge, a torpid dream wriggling in spume and moonfire. A drone and sizzle scraping the frets. A glister of chryso prase, a flare of naptha. The night is cold and men are walking in lock step. The night is cold but the queen is naked save for a jockstrap. The queen is dancing on the cold embers of the electric chair. Cleo, the darling of the Jews, is dancing on the tips of her lacquered nails; her eyes are twisted, her ears filled with blood. She is dancing through the cold night at reasonable prices. She will dance every night this week to make way for platinum bridges. 0 men, behind the virwmque cano, behind the duodecimal system and the Seaboard Air Line stands the Queen of Tammany Hall. She stands in bare feet, her belly swollen with sewer gas, her navel rising in systolic hexameters. Cleo, the queen, purer than the purest asphalt, warmer than the warmest electricity, Cleo the queen and darling of the gods dancing on the asbestos seat of the electric chair. In the morning she will push off for Singapore, Mozambique, Rangoon. Her barque is moored to the gutter. Her slaves are crawling with lice. Deep in the womb of night she dances the song of salvation. We-are all going down in a body to the Men’s Room to stand on the higher ground. Down to the Men’s Room where it is sanitary and dry and sentimental as a churchyard.
Imagine now, while the curtain’s falling, that it’s a fine balmy day and the smell of clams coming in from the bay. You step out along the Atlantic littoral in your cement suit and your gold-heeled socks and there’s the roar of Chop Suey in your ears. The Great White Way is blazing with spark plugs. The comfort stations are open. You try to sit down without breaking the crease in your pants. You sit down on the pure asphalt and let the peacocks tickle your larynx. The gutters are running with champagne. The only odor is the odor of clams coming from the bay. It’s a fine balmy day and all the radios are going at once. You can have a radio attached to your ass-for just a little more. You can tune in on Manila or Honolulu while you walk. You can have ice in your ice water or both kidneys removed at the same time. If you have lockjaw you can have a tube put up your rectum and imagine you’re eating. You can have anything you want for the asking. That is, if it’s a fine balmy day and the smell of clams coming in from the bay. Because why? Because America is the grandest country God ever made and if you don’t like this country you can get the hell out of it and go back where you came from. There isn’t a thing in the world America won’t do for you if you ask for it like a man. You can sit in the electric chair and while the juice is being turned on you can read about your own execution; you can look at a picture of yourself sitting in the electric chair while you are waiting to be executed.
A continuous performance from morn till midnight. The fastest, cleanest show on earth. So fast, so clean, it makes you desperate and lonely.
I go back over the Brooklyn Bridge and sit in the snow opposite the house where I was born. An immense, heartbreaking loneliness grips me. I don’t yet see myself standing at Freddie’s Bar in the Rue Pigalle. I don’t see the English cunt with all her front teeth missing. Just a void of white snow and in the center of it the little house where I was born. In this house I dreamed about becoming a musician.
Sitting before the house in which I was born I feel absolutely unique. I belong to an orchestra for which no symphonies have ever been written. Everything is in the wrong key, Parsi f al included. About Parsi f al, now -it’s just a minor incident, but it has the right ring. It’s got to do with America, my love of music, my grotesque loneliness… .
Was standing one night in the gallery of the Metropolitan Opera House. The house was sold out and I was standing about three rows back from the rail. Could see only a tiny fragment of the stage and even to do that had to strain my neck. But I could hear the music, Wagner’s Parsi f al, with which I was already slightly familiar through the phonograph records. Parts of the opera are dull, duller than anything ever written. But there are other parts which are sublime and during the sublime parts, because I was being squeezed like a sardine, an embarrassing thing happened to me-I got an erection. The woman I was pressing against must also have been inspired by the sublime music of the Holy Grail. We were in heat, the two of us, and pressed together like a couple of sardines. During the intermission the woman left her place to pace up and down the corridor. I stayed where I was, wondering if she would return to the same place. When the music started up again she returned. She returned to her spot with such exactitude that if we had been married it could not have been more perfect. All through the last act we were joined in heavenly bliss. It was beautiful and sublime, nearer to Boccaccio than to Dante, but sublime and beautiful just the same.
Sitting in the snow before the place of my birth I remember this incident vividly. Why, I don’t know, except that it connects with the grotesque and the void, with the heartbreaking loneliness, the snow, the lack of color, the absence of music. One
