Authors: Henry Miller
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the curtain is rising on the cleanest, fastest show ever produced in the Western Hemisphere. The curtain is rising, ladies and gentle men, on those portions of the anatomy called respectively the epigastric, the umbilical, and the hypogastric. These choice portions, marked down to a dollar ninetyeight, have never before been shown to an American audience. Minsky, the king of the Jews, has imported them especially from the Rue de la Paix. This is the cleanest, fastest show in New York. And now, ladies and gentlemen, while the ushers are busy squirting and fumigating, we will pass out a number of French post cards each and every one guaranteed to be genuine. With every post card we will also pass out a genuine German hand-made microscope made in Zurich by the Japanese. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the fastest, cleanest show in the world. Minsky, the king of the Jews, says so himself. The curtain is rising … the curtain is rising…
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 is always falling to sleep with the fast pace. You start out with the sublime and you end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.
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.