Authors: Glenn O'Brien
Then the Nabs came, and with them, the fire engines. What was it, a labor riot? Anarchists? A nigger strike? The paddy wagons and cruisers pulled in from both sides, and sticks and billies started flying, heavy streams of water splattering the marchers up and down the street. America’s responsible immigrants were doing her light work again. The knives came out, the razors, all the Biggers who would not be bent, counterattacked or came up behind the civil servants smashing at them with coke bottles and aerials. Belmont writhed under the dead economy and splivs floated in the gutters, disappearing under cars. But for a while, before the war had reached its peak, Lynn and his musicians, a few other fools, and I, still marched, screaming thru the maddened crowd. Onto the sidewalk, into the lobby, halfway up the stairs, then we all broke our different ways, to save whatever it was each of us thought we loved.
The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America
, 1963;
Tales
, 1967
Scottish-born Alexander Trocchi was a merchant seaman during World War II and later studied at the University of Glasgow. After moving to Paris in the early fifties, he edited the literary magazine
Merlin
(publishing Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett among others) and hung out with Terry Southern. He wrote pornographic novels (such as
Thongs
and
White Thighs)
published pseudonymously by the Olympia Press and acquired a formidable heroin habit. While living in New York City, the scene of his most interesting work, Trocchi wrote the 1960 novel
Cain’s Book,
excerpted here, a fictionalized and self-mythologizing autobiography. Trocchi later lived in London where he operated a bookstore and where he died at fifty-eight.
When I was three I went to bed at night with a stuffed white bird. It had soft feathers and I held it close to my face. But it was a dead bird and sometimes I looked at it hard and for a long time. Sometimes I ran my thumbnail along the split in the rigid beak. Sometimes I sucked the blue beads which had been sewn in place of the eyes. When the beak was prised open and wouldn’t close again I disliked the bird and sought justifications. It was indeed a bad bird.
T
HE
PAST
is to be treated with respect, but from time to time it should be affronted, raped. It should never be allowed to petrify. A man will find out who he is. Cain, Abel. And then he will make the image of himself coherent in itself, but only in so far as it is prudent will he allow it to be contradictory to the external world. A man is contradicted by the external world when, for example, he is hanged.
These thoughts come to mind . . . such is my drugged state, the only witness myself, only the metamorphic Count offering you eternal
death, who has committed suicide in an hundred obscene ways, an exercise in spiritual masturbation, a game well played when you are alone . . . and I write them down as I try to feel my way into where I left off.
I always find it difficult to get back to the narrative. It is as though I might have chosen any of a thousand narratives. And, as for the one I chose, it has changed since yesterday. I have eaten, drunk, made love, turned on—hashish and heroin—since then. I think of the judge who had a bad breakfast and hanged the lout.
Cain’s Book.
When all is said and done, “my readers” don’t exist, only numberless strange individuals, each grinding me in his own mill, for whose purpose I can’t be responsible. No book was ever responsible. (Sophocles didn’t fuck anyone’s mother.) The feeling that this attitude requires defence in the modern world obsesses me.
God knows there are enough natural limits to human knowledge without our suffering willingly those that are enforced upon us by an ignorantly rationalized fear of experience. When I find myself walled in by the solid slabs of other men’s fear I have a ferocious impulse to scream from the rooftops.—Yah bleedin mothahfuckahs! So help me Ah’ll pee on you!—Prudence restrains me. But as the past must sometimes be affronted so also must prudence sometimes be overruled.
Caveat
.
I say it is impertinent, insolent, and presumptuous of any person or group of persons to impose their unexamined moral prohibitions upon me, that it is dangerous both to me and, although they are unaware of it, to the imposers, that in every instance in which such a prohibition becomes crystallized in law an alarming precedent is created. History is studded with examples, the sweet leper stifled by the moral prejudice of his age. Vigilance. Dispute legal precedent.
In my study of drugs (I don’t pretend for a moment that my sole interest in drugs is to study their effects. . . . To be familiar with this experience, to be able to attain, by whatever means, the serenity of a vantage point “beyond” death, to have such a critical technique at one’s disposal—let me say simply that on my ability to attain that
vantage point my own sanity has from time to time depended)—in my study of drugs I have been forced to run grave risks, and I have been stymied constantly by the barbarous laws under which their usage is controlled. These crude laws and the social hysteria ofwhich they are a symptom have from day to day placed me at the edge of the gallow’s leap.
I demand that these laws be changed.
The hysterical gymnastics of governments confronting the problem of the atomic bomb is duplicated exactly in their confrontation of heroin. Heroin, a highly valuable drug, as democratic statistics testify, comes in for all the shit-slinging. Perhaps that is why junkies, many of whom possess the humour of detachment, sometimes call it “shit.”
We cannot afford to leave the potential power of drugs in the hands of a few governmental “experts,” whatever they call themselves. Critical knowledge we must vigilantly keep in the public domain. A cursory glance at history should caution us thus. I would recommend on grounds of public safety that heroin (and all other known drugs) be placed with lucid literature pertaining to its use and abuse on the counters of all chemists (to think that a man should be allowed a gun and not a drug!) and sold openly to anyone over twenty-one. This is the
only
safe method of controlling the use of drugs. At the moment we are encouraging ignorance, legislating to keep crime in existence, and preparing the way for one of the most heinous usurpations of power of all times . . . all over the world . . .
S
UCH
MIGHT
have been my thoughts as I walked away from Sheridan Square where I left Tom Tear. He went into Jim Moore’s. Sometimes he sat there for hours, usually in the middle of the night from about twelve till three or four; the countermen liked him and they were generous when he ordered anything. The diner, because it was open all night, was a useful meeting place. The coffee counter is composed of two U’s linked by a very short counter which supports the cash register. Its top is of green plastic. The stools are red and chrome. There is a jukebox, a cigarette machine, glass everywhere, and windows . . . that’s the advantage of the place, the huge uncurtained windows
which look out on to the centre of the square. You can only sit there so long without being seen by your little junkie friends who can see you waiting. It’s like being in a goldfish bowl in a display window of a pet shop. (In New York people look in at you through the glass windows of snack bars; Paris cafés spill out onto the street where those who are walking by are open to inspection.) It has also, from another point of view, its disadvantage. If our friends can look in, so can the police, and many of the anonymous men who sit at the counter or who lounge about outside in the small hours could conceivably fink. So it is dangerous to be seen there too often, especially if you are high. Most of us returned there eventually because we were often hung up for shit.
He had asked me to go and have a coffee with him but I knew that once I was inside I would find it difficult to leave. And all of the hours I spent, the hours of vigil I spent in that diner, waiting, were probably the worst.
I walked up Seventh Avenue and turned west on 23rd Street and made directly for the river. The bars were still open so the streets weren’t deserted. On 23rd a police car trailed me for a few seconds and then glided past. Without turning my head I caught a glimpse of the man beside the driver, his head turned my way. I wasn’t carrying anything that night.
I kept walking past Eighth, Ninth, and I walked up Ninth and turned left a few blocks later. I was walking slowly. Suddenly I was opposite an alley and in the alley about twenty yards away was the dark figure of a man standing close to a wall. He was alone under a small light near a garage door and he was exposing himself to a brick wall.
In terms of literal truth my curiosity was pointless. A man goes to a lane to urinate, an everyday happening which concerns only himself and those who are paid to prevent public nuisance. It concerned me only because I was there and doing nothing in particular as was quite ordinary for me, like a piece of sensitive photographic paper, waiting passively to feel the shock of impression. And then I was quivering
like a leaf, more precisely, like a mute hunk of appetitional plasm, a kind of sponge in which the business of being excited was going on, run through by a series of external stimuli; the lane, the man, the pale light, the flash of silver—at the ecstatic edge of something to be known.
T
HE
FLASH
of silver comes from earlier; it was a long time ago in my own country and I saw a man come out of an alley. He had large hands. The thought of his white front with its triangle of coarse short hair came to me. I thought of the mane of a wolf, of the white Huns, perhaps because he stooped. Or perhaps because my own ears were pricked back and alert. In his other hand was the glint of something silver. As he walked past me he put his hands in his pockets. I looked after him. I realised I hadn’t seen his face. Before I reached the corner he had turned into an adjacent street. I reached the intersection and he was entering a public house. I didn’t see him in the bar nor in any of the side rooms. The bar was crowded with workmen, the same caps, the same white scarves, the same boots. He was not in the men’s toilet.
Sitting there—an afterthought—I noticed that someone had cut a woman’s torso deep in the wood of the door. As big as a fat sardine. There was no toilet paper. I used a folded sheet of the
Evening News,
part of which I tore carefully from the other part which was wet. It was water, and dust had collected. It had been jammed beneath the pipe under the cistern. The ink had run. I felt a necessity to read inside the wet pages. When I peeled them apart I found nothing of interest. A well-known stage actor was to be married. The paper was more than six weeks old. I remembered reading a few days before that he had since died. I couldn’t remember whether he left a widow.
I drank one small whiskey at the bar and left. The original impulse to find him had left me. The street was deserted, and the lane. On my way home I wondered why I had followed him. I wasn’t after facts, information. I didn’t delude myself from the moment I became aware of his shadow, although in self-defence I may have pretended
to wonder, to seek safety in the problematic. I can see now I must have known even then it was an
act
of curiosity. Even now I’m the victim of my own behaviour: each remembered fact of the congeries of facts out of which in my more or less continuous way I construct this document is an
act of remembrance,
a selected fiction, and I am the agent also of what is unremembered, rejected; thus I must pause, overlook, focus on my effective posture. My curiosity was a making of significance. I experienced a sly female lust to be impregnated by, beyond words and in a mystical way to confound myself with, not the man necessarily, though that was part of the possibility, but the secrecy of his gesture.
He wore the clothes of a workman, a cap, a shapeless jacket, and trousers baggy at the knees. He might have been a dustman, or a coalman, or unemployed. The hissing gas lamp cast his shadow diagonally across the lane and like a finger into the tunnel. As I came abreast of it I glanced through into the lane and when I saw him I caught my breath. The valve slid open. The faint lust at my belly made me conscious of the cold of the rest of my body. I felt the cool night wind on my face as I sensed my hesitation. It was the way he stood, swaying slightly, and half-hidden, and it was then that I thought of his crotch, and of the stench of goats in the clear night air of the Tartar steppes, of the hairs of his belly, and of the stream of yellow urine from his blunt prick running in a broad, steaming sheet down the stone wall, its precision geometrical, melting the snow near the toes of his big boots. If I had had the nerve I might have approached him then and there instead of following him into the bar, but there was no kinetic quality in my hesitation. It lay on me like an impotence, cloying, turning my feet to lead. It was my cowardice which shattered me. The other knowledge, of the desire, came as no shock. Still, and with a sense of bathos, I found myself moving in pursuit of him when he lurched backwards into full view and passed me at the end of the tunnel where I stood. Did I invent the glint of silver? Endow him with a non-existent razor. The honing of the blade. When I couldn’t find him in the bar, and after I had applied my skill to the torso on the
wooden door, I returned to the lane and walked through the tunnel towards light. The singing gas lamp evoked memories of sensation, but faintly, and there was no element of anticipation. In the lane I looked over the wall at the windows of the dark tenements above. A pale light showed here and there from behind curtains. Above the level of the roofs the sky was darkening indigo and shifty with thin cloud. I thought: on such a night as this werewolves are abroad and the ambulances of death run riot in the streets. I kicked at the snow on the cobbles. My feet were cold. I walked home with a sense of failure, too familiar even then to shrug off easily. And then, when I entered the flat there was Moira wearing her drop ear-rings, waiting, hoping, at the portal of her day’s thoughts, and I walked past her surlily, with no greeting.