Tornado Pratt (27 page)

And that—so what was it, Horace? Why did I recall my first true love just then? Was there some point I wished to illustrate? I can’t think of one. I guess it could have been the—krerr—change of perspective, how things seem to be one thing and then just flip over into their opposite. There are two aspects here: first, I thought women didn’t dig sex and after that afternoon I knew this was not true and I embarked on my career of making love to many women. Mandy and I had a long affair and although I felt kind of nervous about her husband, and a bit sheepish when I met him some place and he was friendly, I never felt one atom of guilt. But finally the Piers gave up their crummy farm and went back East. The totally unrealistic hope of maybe bumping into Mandy again helped reconcile me to leaving home myself a few months later. Oh yeah, now I recollect the second aspect: it was God. Mandy’s gasps of pleasure that afternoon just puffed him out of the universe as far as I was concerned. All my pa’s thunder was drowned out by her first moan of bliss and I could never again accept a deity who said that people were wrong to do that marvellous thing together. So, you see, Horace,

Yeah, right—I mean—it was yesterday—everything that happened to me. It was yesterday I shot my first squirrel, yesterday I lay on top of Mandy Piers, gazing proudly down on her sweet,
love-flushed
face. It was yesterday I hit Chicago and dollars and dames flew to me like scrap to a magnet. It was yesterday, I stood over that old Jap, who’d fired and missed, and hacked him to bits. All those moments. Are they the life of Tornado Pratt? Am I a cloud of moments, Horace, and if so in what are they suspended? In
God? Mandy blew him out when I was sixteen but he got switched on again when I was about fifty, and now—crazy. God is crazy but no-God is just as crazy.

Right, right, right! Quit saying right. Maybe it is right at first when the gift of life to a kid in a truckle bed seems infinite in duration and potential. But they roll it up behind you, boy, until a lifetime is just one rug in a palace the size of a galaxy. And don’t say “right” again.

Thanks, pal. And I agree—I support what you’re saying one hundred per cent! God is juvenile stuff, to comfort the kiddies, the grown-up kiddies in the infancy of mind. Hell, you don’t believe, Horace, that Jesus was God’s son and that he came down to earth to be crucified and redeem you of sins. You don’t believe that crap because it’s full of absurdities and inconsistencies. Why would God have a son? What is He, some kind of family freak? Right. It’s crap. It’s a kind of weird allegory. It’s for the kiddies. Trouble is—

So is the scientific universe. Are you aware, Horace, as I became aware when, returning from the Pacific Theatre of Operations, I delved into science and philosophy, that the model of the sidereal universe the scientists have built is simply a shimmer? That’s a fact. The basic equations which describe the observable behaviour of matter are wave-function equations. You know what we really are, without God, Horace? I’ll try and put it in a metaphor your intellect can handle: what we are is a kind of buzz in a clamour, a ripple on an agitated surface, a wisp in a cloud.

I guess I was going through the male menopause when I got back from Tokyo, Horace. I had no ambition, hardly even for sex. I think, looking back on it, I perceived the horror that was looming ahead but only as you might, out hunting, get just a hint of foul weather below the horizon. It seemed to me I needed to understand. How had they evaporated Nagasaki? What were we? Monkeys that could wield the sun. As a kid I knew the horse as the chief motor of my species. Now we were getting ready for voyages to the moon. 

I settled in New York because Alex was there and I wanted to
be near her. I got a modest apartment on East Thirty-eighth Street, just off Park Avenue. My bank account was okay for a few years and, as I said, I just had no more ambition for money-making.

But then fear began to creep over me. At first it was very faint and, as I have learned from my later reading in psychology, psychopathology and psychoanalysis, would probably be clinically assessed as “anxiety”. But I prefer to call it fear because that’s what it was. A diffuse kind of fear as if something was about to pounce. I’d suddenly glance to my left with a shiver. If I was at a party I might get struck silent by apprehension. Someone would ask, grinning:

“Hey Tornado, seen a ghost?”

And I’d grin back but feel my scalp ripple.

And I know one thing: it wasn’t physical fear. I know that because of a curious thing that happened one night. Well, the thing in itself isn’t all that unusual in New York: I was set upon by two young punks, one white and one black. What was curious was my reaction, both to the anticipation of the event and to its aftermath. I was able to anticipate the event, if only by a few seconds, because, walking home from Alex’s one night, looking for a cab, I was passing up one of the long blocks on the West Side when I sensed what was going to happen. It was about three in the morning. There was no one else on the block and I was walking beside a corrugated iron fence, screening off a building site. About fifty yards ahead of me was a small shed jutting out on to the
sidewalk
and next to it was a narrow alley leading back on to the site. As I approached, I caught a quiver of movement in the alley, just a shadow stirring in shadow, but, on the instant, a pulse of joy shot through me. I knew I was going to be jumped and it made me exult. I began to breathe hard and sharp and I strove to keep my pace even and not reveal that I’d been alerted. I didn’t think
anything
except: right. With vision and hearing keyed up to exquisite pitch, I paced steadily on until, just after I’d passed the dark alley mouth, I caught a breathed: “get him.” Then I spun round and side-stepped. I wasn’t as good as I had been on Guam but I was good enough for them. The first got a chop on the neck that laid him groaning on the sidewalk while I sparred with the other. They didn’t have knives or guns, surprisingly, and, in a couple of minutes, I’d got the black kid, a lout of about eighteen, in a headlock and was dragging him up towards Seventh Avenue. The white thug had recovered enough to stumble off in the other direction and I let him go. But no sooner had I won than I had qualms. I stopped,
hanging on to the kid. He was yelling: “Cut it out, man, cut it out!” And that was his undoing because, if he’d kept his trap shut, I’d probably have let him go. As it was, his yelling brought one or two doughty spirits out on to the street and, in a little while, we had quite a crowd and soon after that a patrol car.

It was then I began to feel the fear and it increased over the next few weeks as I had to make depositions and appear in court. What scared me was that, as near as I can express it, I’d blown my cover. Oh hell, I wasn’t scared of that kid or his big brother or any mobster buddies he might have. I was scared of the universe. I’d brought myself to its attention again. Does that sound crazy, Horace? Well, that’s the kind of fear I was suffering from, the fear that God might peep over the Chrysler building one afternoon and point a finger at me. Since I’d hit New York, I’d been laying pretty low. I read most of the day, took my meals in a restaurant, visited a hooker in the village once or twice a week and spent as many evenings as I could with Alex. I avoided making new acquaintances or cultivating old ones. I was downright rude to a general who turned up at my apartment one day to invite me to join a clandestine, ultra-right circle called: The New Minutemen. Shit, I wouldn’t have joined anything reactionary like that in any case but I’d have declined politely, especially since Sandy
Hammond
, the general in question, had once been a friend.

Meanwhile, I was reading science and philosophy. And one day I suddenly realized what was wrong with it and that led me to understand what was right with it too. I was reading Hume and it struck me that when Hume analysed the structure of reality, he couldn’t be right because all he produced was a series of words. How could a series of words, any imaginable series of words, be congruent with the universe? How could even the most resonant verbal evocations of reality be on the same plane as the reality itself which included the processes which generated the mind writing the philosophy? All human philosophy would necessarily be a function of human social history and not of the structure of the cosmos. If one could imagine a panoramic vision of totality, something that could legitimately be called “the truth”, quite probably human beings and their philosophy, perhaps their whole galaxy, would hardly be visible. Imagine an intelligent red blood corpuscle trying to write the fundamental truth about the world. All it could ever know would be the stream of plasma in which it lived, and all we can know is the stream of cosmic plasma in which we live.

*

There was a girl called Opal Zinovich, I think—or Zinovinsky, anyhow kind of Russian—whom I met in Chicago at an auction before I took off for Europe for the first time, so I’d have been about twenty-four, twenty-five. She was a caucasian blonde and a feast for the eye. After the auction, where we bid against each other and so got acquainted, she took me to her automobile and drove me to her place. As the door of her swell apartment clicked shut behind us, she swung me into a kiss and her hand fluttered about my loins.

She was probably the most voluptuous girl I ever met and the next dawn found us still ingeniously coaxing sensation from each other’s flagging bodies. It was such an exciting night that, during the afternoon, its memory lured me from my office to the john to try to recapture its flavour with the help of friction. Opal went travelling and I didn’t see her again for about a month but naturally when she got back I phoned for a date. I took her to dinner at some expensive joint and during the meal she revealed such a peevish, snobbish and humourless nature that all my lust vanished and I tried to drop her without screwing her. But she pulled me back into her pad again and when our haunches met it was another blockbuster.

All of which—what? I was going to say: what was I going to say, Horace? Oh yeah, I was going to say that with Alexandra Wilks—sure, sure, I begin to figure the connection between
Alexandra
and that much-forgotten blonde. It’s less a connection than a contrast. The point is, I got to know that blonde better in one night than I—in two nights I should have said—than I ever knew another human being—physically. But it turned out that I didn’t know her at all. So I have to conclude that physically—oh yeah, one night was right because after the first night I found out what she was really like and so it doesn’t apply—that physical, carnal knowledge is a very superficial thing. There’s some truth in the vulgar gag: all dames are alike in the dark. And the lust of the body
is
the dark, the dark of mindless protoplasm. The most
shameless
and prolonged intimacy of which the body is capable is
compatible
not only with indifference to the personality but actual dislike. But Alexandra Wilks—what? Why do I keep breaking down, Horace? Why can’t I organize the life of Tornado Pratt into a great banner of truth? Why can’t I gallop to the horizon of my mind? Why—

*

Devotion? I guess that’s the right word but—that wasn’t—she—was a journalist when—with maps—when—

I don’t think I can do it, Horace. I know it’s important. I don’t want to leave anything out but I can’t tune in at present. Maybe I’m scared. Scared of the phosphorous layers glimmering below and that if I sink down into them I’ll get burned. Boosted by the drugs—they keep feeding me drugs, don’t they?—my brain could heat up to incandescence. Of course, there was no physical heat the first time. Oh, sure, I felt devotion to Alexandra Wilks. I’d probably have perished without her.

It set in in the late forties. At first it took the form of
dissatisfaction
with philosophy. One night I was thinking about philosophy as I walked through Gramercy Park and I stopped dead with a shudder, at the thought:

“If philosophy dries up on me, what’s left?”

I had been counting on philosophy to combat the nervousness inspired in me by Manhattan. That city seemed increasingly putrid. You might think I could have made a trip to England or some place else but those places seemed dried up in a different way. The only place I wanted to be in was the hopeful land of philosophy and at that moment in Gramercy Park I perceived that it didn’t exist.

I turned to Bertrand Russell’s
History
of
Western
Philosophy
and found the wit refreshing but also disturbing. I read paragraphs with mental shivers which sometimes took the form of actually making me physically cold. Several times, at the end of a chapter, I found I’d turned the heating up so high that I was pouring with sweat.

Then one night I had a bad attack. I read the chapter in Bertrand Russell about Kant and it made me grin several times. Then one time, just after I’d grinned, I threw the book away as if it was a primed grenade and sat shuddering with fear and gazing at it with revulsion. It seemed like a coiled snake. I had to kick the fat volume out of sight under the lounger and then, so potent was the dread, fish it out again and rush it to the garbage chute.

Then I sat in my room, trembling and sweating although the room was cold. I felt like a cumbersome monster. I switched on the radio and listened to Bob Hope. But he sounded evil so I switched off the radio and conquered an impulse to send the radio after the book. I achieved a state of calm which was really congealed terror
and held me catatonic for three or four cigarettes. Then I realized that I had a need to be with people. At once the correct spot lit up in my mind. It was called Debby’s and was a chow-house with a bar in the Village. I phoned for a cab and took off for Debby’s.