Tough Guys Don't Dance (36 page)

One piece appeared in the Miami
Herald
about the disappearance of Meeks Wardley Hilby III, and a reporter actually tracked me down to Key West and asked if I thought Patty and Wardley might be together again. I told him they were both out of my life but dwelling in Europe, or Tahiti, or somewhere between. I suppose that story can always flare up again.

No one ever seemed to want to know what happened to Regency. It is hard to believe, but there were almost no official inquiries to Madeleine. A man from the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington telephoned her once and she told him she and Regency had been driving down to Mexico, but Alvin disappeared on her in Laredo, so she never crossed the border. (Earlier, on our way to Colorado, we had even taken the long detour to Laredo to provide her with a motel receipt that she could show official eyes if her story was ever questioned.) I do not think, however, that anyone on the official side of the drug business was wholly unhappy to lose him. There, for now, it rests. I asked Madeleine once about Alvin's brother, but the occasion on which the photograph of those nephews was taken, happened to be the only time she met his family—one brother.

Since we had little money, we thought of selling our respective houses, but neither was in our
name. I guess they will be taken eventually for taxes.

My father is still alive. The other day I received a letter from him. It said: “Keep your fingers nice and crossed, but the chirpy birds, to their big surprise, now say I got remission. It's as big as absolution to them.”

Well, Douglas Madden's son, Timothy Madden, has his own theory. I suspect my father's present state of physiological grace has something to do with all the heads and bodies he plumbed and weighted and carried out to sea.

No wonder that cancer is so expensive to cure.

And I? Well, I am so compromised by so many acts that I must try to write my way out of the internal prison of my nerves, my guilts and my deep-rooted spiritual debts. Yet I would take the chance again. In truth, it is not all bad. Madeleine and I sleep for hours with our arms around each other. I live within the fold of her deed, not uncomfortable and not insecure, deeply attached to her and aware that all my present stability of mind rests on the firm foundation of a mortal crime.

Let no one say, however, that we escape from Hell-Town wholly unscathed. One fine summer sunset in Key West when winds from the equator were blowing across the Caribbean and the air conditioning had given out, I could not sleep for thinking of the photographs of Madeleine and Patty that I beheaded with a pair of scissors. For it came to me then to remember that I had done
it after sunset (in some dreadful act of amateur voodoo, I suppose, to keep Patty from leaving me) yes, did it just before we set out for the séance which Harpo conducted. If you remember, Nissen began to scream because he had a vision of Patty in her final state.

What can I tell you? The last news I had from Provincetown was by way of a friendly floater who passed through Key West and told me Harpo went mad. It seems he gave another séance some time ago and claimed to glimpse six bodies at the bottom of the sea. From these depths, two headless women spoke to him. Poor Harpo was committed, and from what I hear, is only to be released a little later this year.

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George and the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner's Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Tough Guys Don't Dance

Harlot's Ghost

Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

The Spooky Art

Why Are We at War?

Modest Gifts

The Castle in the Forest

On God
(with J. Michael Lennon)

Mind of an Outlaw

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner's Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.