At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing around. This is no harmless recreation… this is serious business. At each end of the floor there is a sign reading “No Improper Dancing Allowed”. Well and good. No harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompei they probably hung a phallus up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn’t think about Pompei or I’ll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving Henry. Keep your mind on the music. I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have had if I had the price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I’m standing knee-deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn’t the lava that killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that predpitated the eruption. That’s how the lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were. If suddenly all New York were caught that way – what a museum it would make! My friend MacGregor standing at the sink scrubbing his cock… the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed … the nuns laying in bed and masturbating one another … the auctioneer with an alarm in his hand … the telephone girls at the switchboard … J. P. Morganana sitting on the toilet bowl placidly wiping his ass … the dicks with rubber hoses giving the third degree … strippers giving the last strip and tease…
Standing knee-deep in the lava beds and my eyes choked with sperm; J. P. Morganana is placidly wiping his ass while the telephone girls plug the switchboards, while dicks with rubber hoses practice the third degree, while my old friend MacGregor scrubs the germs out of his cock and sweetens it and examines it under the microscope. Everybody is caught with his pants down, including the strip teasers who wear no pants, no beards, no moustaches, just a little patch to cover their twinkling little cunts. Sister Antolina lying in the convent bed, her guts trussed up, her arms akimbo and waiting for the Resurrection, waiting, waiting for life without hernia, without intercourse, without sin, without evil, meanwhile nibbling a few animal crackers, a pimento, some fancy olives, a little head cheese. The Jew-boys on the East Side, in Harlem, the Bronx, Carnarsie, Bronville, opening and dosing the trapdoors, pulling out arms and legs, turning the sausage machine, dogging up the drains, working like fury for cash down and if you let a peep out of you out you go. With eleven hundred tickets in my pocket and a Rolls Royce waiting for me downstairs I could have the most excruciatingly marvellous time, throwing a fuck into each and everyone respectively regardless of age, sex, race, religion, nationality, birth or breeding. There is no solution for a man like myself, I being what I am and the world being what it is.
The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. The haughty one with the statuesque figure is probably a cold turkey fuck, a sort of con anonyme plastered with gold leaf and tin foil. Beyond despair and disillusionment there is always the absence of worse things and the emoluments of ennui. Nothing is lousier and emptier than the midst of bright gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical epoch, life maturating in a black box, a negative tickled with add and yielding a momentaneous simulacrum of nothingness. At the outermost limit of this momentaneous nothingness my friend MacGregor arrives and is standing by my side and with him is the one he was talking about, the nymphomaniac called Paula.
She has the loose, jaunty swing and perch of the double-barrelled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist, and clutch, the eyes going tic-toc, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac’s arms. I watch the two of them as they move spasmodically inch by inch around the floor; they move like an octopus working up a rut. Between the dangling tentacles the music shimmers and flashes, now breaks in a cascade of sperm and rose water, forms again into an oily spout, a column standing erect without feet, collapses again like chalk, leaving the upper part of the leg phosphorescent, a zebra standing in a pool of golden marshmallow, one leg striped, the other molten. A gold marshmallow octopus with rubber hinges and molten hooves, its sex undone and twisted into a knot. On the sea floor the oysters are doing the St. Vitus dance, some with lockjaw, some with double-jointed knees. The music is sprinkled with rat poison, with the rattlesnake’s venom, with the fetid breath of the gardenia, the spittle of the sacred yak, the bolloxed sweat of the musk-rat, the leper’s sugar-coated nostalgia.
The music is a diarrhoea, a lake of gasolene, stagnant with cockroaches and stale horse piss. The drooling notes are the foam and dribble of the epileptic, the night sweat of the fornicating nigger frigged by the Jew. All America is in the trombone’s smear, that frazzled brokendown whinny of the gangrened sea cows stationed off Point Loma, Pawtucket, Cape Hatteras, Labrador, Camarsie and intermediate points. The octopus is dancing like a rubber dick – the rhumba of Spuyten Duyvil inedit. Laura the nympho is doing the rhumba, her sex exfoliated and twisted like a cow’s tail. In the belly of the trombone lies the American soul farting its contented heart out. Nothing goes to waste – not the least spit of a fart. In the golden marshmallow dream of happiness, in the dance of sodden piss and gasolene, the great soul of the American continent gallops like an octopus, all the sails unfurled, the hatches down, the engine whirring like a dynamo. The great dynamic soul caught in the click of the camera’s eye, in the heat of rut, bloodless as a fish, slippery as mucus, the soul of the people miscegenating on the sea floor, pop-eyed with longing, harrowed with lust.
The dance of Saturday night, of cantaloupes rotting in the garbage pail, of fresh green snot and slimy unguents for the tender parts. The dance of the slot-machine and the monsters who invent them. The dance of the gat and the slugs who use them. The dance of the blackjack and the pricks who batter brains to a polypous pulp. The dance of the magneto world, the spark that unsparks, the soft purr of the perfect mechanism, the velocity race on a turntable, the dollar at par and the forests dead and mutilated. The Saturday night of the soul’s hollow dance, each jumping jigger a functional unit in the St. Vitus’ dance of the ringworm’s dream. Laura the nympho brandishing her cunt, her sweet rose-petal lips toothed with ballbearing clutches, her ass balled and socketed. Inch by inch, millimetre by .millimetre they shove the copulating corpse around. And then crash! Like pulling a switch the music suddenly stops and with the stoppage the dancers come apart, arms and legs intact, like tea leaves dropping to the bottom of the cup. Now the air is blue with words, a slow sizzle as of fish on the griddle. The chaff of the empty soul rising like monkey chatter in the topmost branches of the trees.
The air blue with words passing out through the ventilators, coming back again in sleep through corrugated funnels and smokestacks, winged like the antelope, striped like the zebra, now lying quiet as the mollusc, now spitting flame. Laura the nympho cold as a statue, her parts eaten away, her hair musically enraptured. On the brink of sleep Laura stands with muted lips, her words falling like pollen through a fog. The Laura of Petrarque seated in a taxi, each word ringing through the cash register, then sterilized, then cauterized. Laura the basilisk made entirely of asbestos, walking to the fiery stake with a mouth full of gum. Hunkydory is the word on her lips. The heavy fluted Ups of the sea-shell. Laura’s lips, the lips of lost Uranian love. All floating shadow-ward through the slanting fog. Last murmuring dregs of shell-like lips slipping off the Labrador coast, oozing eastward with the mud tides, easing starward in the iodine drift. Lost Laura, last of the Petrarques, slowly fading on the brink of sleep. Not grey the world, but lustlack, the light bamboo sleep of spoon-backed innocence.
And tins in the black frenzied nothingness of the hollow of absence leaves a gloomy feeling of saturated despondency not unlike the topmost tip of desperation which is only the gay juvenile maggot of death’s exquisite rupture with life. From this inverted cone of ecstasy life will rise again into prosaic skyscraper eminence, dragging me
