I plug on … It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don’t have the feeling of being an American citizen any more. The part of America I came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it’s beginning to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though some one’s got a gun against my back all the time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear. If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent. I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks – they look me through and through as though I were juicy and edible. I’ve got to walk another thousand miles or so as though I had a deep purpose, as though I were really going somewhere. I’ve got to look sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It’s depressing and exhilarating at the same time. You’re a marked man – and nobody pulls the trigger. They let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself.
Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corpse out they found it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say – because I wanted to electrify the cosmos! I meant by that a very simple thing -The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, the Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very naturally – what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else was taking it seriously. I was the only man in the community who was truly civilized. There was no place for me – as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me, that there were other men in the world like myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse myself of my spiritual body, as it were.
When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of responsibility. And if it weren’t for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. The world was like a museum to me: I saw nothing to do but eat into this marvellous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped on our hands. It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself. Their logic was that art was very beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a living and then you will find that you are too tired to think about art. But it was when I threatened to add a layer or two on my own account to this marvellous chocolate layer cake that they blew up on me.
That was the finishing touch. That meant I was definitely crazy. First I was considered to be a useless member of society; then for a time I was found to be a reckless, happy-go-lucky corpse with a tremendous appetite; now I had become crazy. (Listen, you bastard, you find yourself a job… we’re through with you!) In a way it was refreshing this change of front. I could feel the wind blowing through the corridors. At least “we” were no longer becalmed. It was war, and as a corpse I was just fresh enough to have a little fight left in me. War is revivifying. War stirs the blood. It was in the midst of the world war, which I had forgotten about, that this change of heart took place. I got myself married overnight, to demonstrate to all and sundry that I didn’t give a fuck one way or the other. Getting married was O.K. in their minds. I remember that, on the strength of the announcement, I raised five bucks immediately. My friend MacGregor paid for the licence and even paid for the shave and haircut which he insisted I go through with in order to get married. They said you couldn’t go without being shaved; I didn’t see any reason why you couldn’t get hitched up without a shave and haircut, but since it didn’t cost me anything I submitted to it. It was interesting to see how everybody was eager to contribute something to our maintenance.
All of a sudden, just because I had shown a bit of sense, they came flocking around us – and couldn’t they do this and couldn’t they do that for us? Of course the assumption was that now I would surely be going to work, now I would see that life is serious business. It never occurred to them that I might let my wife work for me. I was really very decent to her in the beginning. I wasn’t a slave driver. All I asked for was carfare -to hunt for the mythical job – and a little pin money for cigarettes, movies, et cetera. The important things, such as books, music albums, gramophones, porterhouse steaks and such like I found we could get on credit, now that we were married. The instalment plan had been invented expressly for guys like me. The down payment was easy – the rest I left to Providence. One has to live, they were always saying. Now, by God, that’s what I said to myself – One has to live I Live first andpay afterwards. If I saw an overcoat I liked I went in and bought it. I would buy it a little in advance of the season too, to show that I was a serious-minded chap. Shit, I was a married man and soon I would probably be a father – I was entitled to a winter overcoat at least, no?
And when I had the overcoat I thought of stout shoes to go with it – a pair of thick cordevans such as I had wanted all my life but never could afford. And when it grew bitter cold and I was out looking for the job I used to get terribly hungry sometimes – it’s really healthy going out like that day after day prowling about the city in rain and snow and wind and hail – and so now and then I’d drop in to a cosy tavern and order myself a juicy porterhouse steak with onions and French fried potatoes. I took out life insurance and accident insurance too – it’s important, when you’re married, to do things like that, so they told me. Supposing I should drop dead one day – what then? I remember the guy telling me that, in order to clinch his argument. I had already told him I would sign up, but he must have forgotten it. I had said, yes, immediately, out of force of habit, but as I say, he had evidently overlooked it – or else it was against the code to sign a man up until you had delivered the full sales talk. Anyway, I was just getting ready to ask him how long it would take before you could make a loan on the policy when he popped the hypothetical question: Supposing you should drop dead one day – what then? I guess he thought I was a little off my nut the way I laughed at that. I laughed until the tears rolled down my face.
Finally he said – “I don’t see that I said anything so funny.” “Well,” I said, getting serious for a moment, “take a good look at me. Now tell me, do you think I’m the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he’s dead?” He was quite taken aback by this, apparently, because the next thing he said was: “I don’t think that’s a very ethical attitude. Mr. Miller. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your wife to …” “Listen,” I said, “supposing I told you I don’t give a fuck what happens to my wife when I die – what then?” And since this seemed to injure
