Saturday afternoons, for example, breaking chain in Bill Woodruff’s accessory shop. Breaking chain all afternoon for a half-dollar. Jolly work! Afterwards we’d all go back to Bill Woodruff’s house and sit and drink. Come dark Bill Woodruff would get out his opera glasses and we’d all take turns, looking at the woman across the yard who used to undress with the shade up. This business of the opera glasses always infuriated Bill Woodruff’s wife. To get even with him she’d come out in a negligee studded with big holes. A frigid son of a bitch, his wife, but it gave her a kick to walk up to one of his friends and say-“feel my ass! feel how big it’s getting.” Bill Woodruff pretended not to mind. “Sure,” he’d say, “go ahead and feel it. She’s cold as ice.” And like that she’d pass herself around, each one grabbing her ass to warm her up a bit. A funny couple they were. Sometimes you’d think they were in love with each other. She made him miserable, though, holding him off all the time. He used to say: “I can get a fuck out of her about once a month-if I’m lucky!” Used to say it right to her face. It didn’t bother her much. She had a way of laughing it off, as though it were an unimportant blemish.
If she had simply been cold it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she was greedy too. Always clamoring for dough. Always hankering for something they couldn’t afford. It got on his nerves, which is easy to understand, because he was a tight, scrounging bastard himself. One day, however, a brilliant idea occurred to him. “You want some more dough, is that it?” he says to her. “All right, then, I’m going to give you some dough-but first you’ve got to slip me a piece of tail.” (It never occurred to the poor bastard that he might find another woman who’d enjoy a bit of fucking for its own sake). Well, anyway, the amazing thing about it was that every time he slipped her a little extra she’d manage to screw like a rabbit. He was astonished. Didn’t think she had it in her. And so, little by little, he got to working overtime in order to lay aside the little bribe which would make the frigid son of a bitch come across like a nymphomaniac. (Never thought, the poor sap, of investing the money in another gal. Never!)
Meanwhile the friends and neighbors were discovering that Bill Woodruff’s wife wasn’t such a cold proposition as she had been cracked up to be. Seems she was sleeping around like-with every Toni, Dick, and Harry. Why the hell she couldn’t give her own spouse a little piece on the side, gratis, nobody could figure out. She acted as though she were sore at him. It started out that way right from the beginning. And whether she was born frigid or not makes no difference. As far as he was concerned she was frigid. She’d have made him pay until his dying day for every piece she handed him if it weren’t for the fact that somebody put him wise to her.
Well, he was a cute guy, Bill Woodruff. A mean, scrounging bastard if ever there was one, but he could be cute too when necessary. When he heard what was going on he didn’t say a word. Pretended that things were just as always. Then one night, after it had gone along far enough, he waited up for her, a thing he seldom did because he had to get up early and she was used to coming in late. This night, however, he waited up for her and when she came sailing in, chipper, perky, a little lit up and cold as usual he pulled her up short with a “where were you tonight?” She tried pulling her usual yarn, of course. “Cut that,” he said, “I want you to get your things off and tumble into bed.” That made her sore. She mentioned in her roundabout way that she didn’t want any of that business. “You don’t feel in the mood for it, I suppose,” says he, and then he adds: “that’s fine, because now I’m going to warm you up a bit.” With that he up and ties her to the bedstead, gags her, and then goes for the razor strop. On the way to the bathroom he grabs a bottle of mustard from the kitchen. He comes back with the razor strop and he belts the piss out of her. And after that he rubs the mustard into the raw welts. “That ought to keep you warm for tonight,” he says. And so saying he makes her bend over and spread her legs apart. “Now,” he says, “I’m going to pay you as usual,” and taking a bill out of his pocket he crumples it and then shoves it up her quim…. And that’s that about Bill Woodruff, though when I get to thinking on it I want to add that light of heart he sallied bravely forth carrying the pair of horns which his wife Jadwiga had given him.
And the purpose of all this? To prove what has not yet been demonstrated, namely that
THE GREAT ARTIST IS HE WHO CONQUERS THE ROMANTIC IN HIMSELF.
Filed under R for rat poison.
And what by that? you say.
Why just this…. Whenever it came time to visit Tante Melia at the bughouse mother would do up a little lunch, saying as she laid the bottle between the napkins-“Mele always liked a drop of Kiimmel.” And when it came mother’s turn to visit the bughouse and say to Mele well Mele how did you like the Kummel, and Mele shaking her head and saying what Kummel, I didn’t see any Kummel, why I could always say she’s crazy of course, I gave her the Kummel. What was the sense in pouring a drop of Kiimmel down Mele’s throat when she was so goddamned disoriented as to swallow her own dung?
If it were a sunny day and my friend Stanley commissioned by his uncle, the mortician, to carry a stillbirth to the cemetery grounds, we would take a ferry boat to Staten Island and when the Statue of Liberty hove in sight overboard with it! If it were a rainy day we would walk into another neighborhood and throw it down the sewer. A day like that was a festive day for all the sewer rats. A fine day for the sewer rats scampering through the vestibule of the upper world. In those days a stillbirth brought as high as ten dollars and after riding the shoot-the-chutes we always left a little stale beer for the morning because the finest thing in the world for Katzenjammer is a glass of stale beer.
I am speaking of things that brought me relief in the beginning. You are at the beginning of the world, in a garden which is boxed off. The sky is banked like sand dunes and there is not just one firmament but millions of them; the crust of every planet is carved into an eye, a very human eye that neither blinks nor winks. You are about to write a beautiful book and in it you are going to record everything that has given you pain or joy. This book, when written, will be called A Prolegomenon to the Unconscious. You will dress it in white kid and the letters will be embossed in gold. It will be the story of your life without emendations. Everybody will want to read it because it will contain the absolute truth and nothing but the truth. This is the story that makes you laugh in your sleep, the story that starts the tears flowing when you are in the middle of a ballroom and suddenly realize that none of the people around you know what a genius you are. How they would laugh and weep if they could only read what you have not yet written because every word is absolutely true and so far nobody has dared to write this absolute truth except yourself and this true book which is locked up inside you would make people laugh and weep as they have never laughed, never wept before.
In the beginning this is what brings relief-the true book which nobody has read, the book which you carry around inside you, the book dressed in white kid and embossed with letters of gold. In this book there are many verses colossially dear to you. Out of this book came the Bible, and the Koran, and all the sacred books of the East. All these books were written at the beginning of the world.
And now I’m going to tell you about the technical aspect of these books, this book whose genesis I am about to relate….
When you open this book you will notice immediately that the illustrations have a queer pituitary flavor. You will see immediately that the author has forsaken the optical illusion in favor of a post-pineal view. The frontispiece is usually a selfportrait called “Praxus” showing the author standing on the frontier of the middle brain in a pair of tights. He always wears thicklensed spectacles, Toric, U-31 flange. In ordinary waking life the author suffers from normal vision but in the frontispiece he renders himself myopic in order to grasp the immediacy
