(Excerpted from A Personal History of Moral Decay)

LOVE AT THE NIRVANA ARMS

The alarm goes off at four thirty in the morning and when I get up to turn it off I see its raining so I mash a couple cockroaches and go back to bed to think things over. The next thing I know it's eight o'clock and too late to kick up the typewriter. So I dress and walk through a light rain over to Pinehurst Road and up the canyon to mother's little apartment to pick up the truck.

When I get there I decide to go in the house and make some coffee. In the kitchen the glass coffee pot is full of water and ready to go so I boil the water and make a cup of instant. It's awful. It's horrible. I sniff the milk carton, the jar of instant, the saccharine. Everything is okay. I make another cup. This time the milk curdles when I pour it in the hot water. I sniff the milk again. It's fine. I'm standing there at the stove wondering what to do next when Mother wheels her chair in from her bedroom. I tell her about the coffee.

"Did you use the water in the glass coffee pot?"

"Yes, I did."

"That pot was full of vinegar, you idiot. I was cleaning the stains out of it."

I explained how I had carefully inspected each of the ingredients that had gone into the water but hadn't checked the water itself. I had thought I was being thorough. In reality I had gone everywhere but to the heart of the matter. The glass pot looked clean. The water was crystal clear. I saw it with my own eyes. I was an eyewitness for Christ's sake. How could I have been so wrong? In her wheelchair mother is laughing, her hands to her face.

"Oh, Bradley," she says, "You're so dumb. I just don't understand how you can be so dumb."

*** I drive over to Jenny's to get the company mail. Jenny is there at the dining room table going through her purse. She looks terrific. It's odd being together in the house with her again yet being a world apart and knowing that's the way it will be the rest of our lives. I talk about how we'll finish the last house in a couple months and how I will be out of a job again. I can feel the anxiety. Jenny says maybe we'll all do something together right here in Hollywood . That's good news.

Now I start telling her about the Hoax of the Twentieth Century. It's been in the back of my mind that I have to tell her and a few minutes ago when I first saw her standing there, I think that's what started the anxiety. I speak very carefully. Her family on both sides lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust. Jenny and Sol both grew up on the Holocaust story. One night in Westwood Sol and Betty and me and Jenny watched a movie called The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis. It was about a family of cultured Italian Jews, including an elegant daughter about Jenny's age, who was rounded up and sent off to the Germans to who knows what. By the end of the film Jenny was sobbing uncontrollably. Her body was actually convulsing. It was unnerving.

This morning the first thing she says is: "Well, Bradley, where did all those people go?" she's smiling very broadly like she does when she's challenging someone and knows that the other person knows he's being challenged. I say that nobody's really looked for them yet and maybe there aren't nearly so many missing as we've been told. I say: "The Germans said they put them in the Soviet Union . Who knows? The real issue is the gas chambers. It's an easier approach to the problem. You don't have to run down six million people one by one. The gas chambers were either there or they weren't. I think Butz might be right. He says they weren't there."

She asks if I've been to the Simon Wiesenthal Center to ask the scholars in residence there what they think about Butz's book.

I say no, I haven't. We speak very quietly and carefully standing across the dining room table from each other and in the end she says: "Well, Bradley, it sounds fascinating. It really does. I don't know how it's going to add up. It's going to make trouble for you, that's for sure. But it's fascinating. I have to say that."

"I was worried about telling you."

"Were you, Bradley?"

"Yes."

"Wait until you tell Sol."

"I guess so."

"Sol won't feel the same way I do." She's smiling very broadly and challengingly.

"What worries me is that I'm afraid I'm going to be reviled."

"You will be, Bradley. You're going to be associated in everybody's mind with all the worst kind of people. It's all set up. It's all set up. It's right there waiting for you."

"I really look forward to this."

"It makes me think you've found a new way to be on the outside looking in."

*** I drive over to Sawtell Boulevard to pick up a laborer. The rain falls steadily. People are driving with their headlights on. The lights are brilliant in the rain-washed air. The traffic lights, especially the greens, are beautiful against the dark gray sky. At the Nu-Way Chile Dog on the corner of Pico I buy a couple papers and a coffee to go. Outside, raindrops pop into the uncovered coffee. The designs they make in the top of the jumping coffee are attractive and interesting. Out past Malibu at the job site in Las Virgenes Canyon the rain is very heavy. The slopes of the hills facing west are green while the those facing east are still brown and barren. At one place a lone red and white heifer grazes on a lemon green hillside. At noon it's still raining so I drive the laborer back into town and drop him off.

*** This morning at the typewriter I watch a cockroach climb up the side of my cup and fall over into the coffee. It floats there quietly, thinking things over. The roaches were here when I moved in and no matter how many I mash I can't get rid of them. One time they just got up and left. It was like they had gotten marching orders from Central Command. Weeks passed and I didn't see a cockroach. I started thinking about them, wondering where they were, what they were doing. Why had they left in the first place? I stopped changing the traps and putting the poison around, then one night in July I saw something black floating in half a glass of milk on my night stand. Even in the dark I knew what it was-they never learn-and the next morning there they were in the kitchen sink and on the drain board.

At the Nirvana Arms the most orderly and circumspect tenants are the middle-aged men. I guess I'm a middle-aged man and that may have something to do with my judgment. The worst tenants are the young Whites who dress like punks and pretend they're living dangerously. They dope, they drink, and if they forget their keys the bust through the front door of the building. But the building is a-swarm with Mexicans. They live five or six to a room and lie about it to the manager. They don't take out their garbage, they have beer busts on the fire escape and throw their bottles and cans on the lawns below. They sit at the curbing with their car radios blaring at midnight . Sometimes a dozen Mexicans will sit in the hallway outside my door drinking beer and horsing around. I don't like it when I'm typing so I put on my pants and go out and tell them to knock it off. They're very cooperative. The first time I did it I thought it might be the last my mother saw of her son, but when I explained the situation to them in Spanish they apologized and went somewhere else. I was kind of touched.

There used to be a few elderly White men living in the building but now they're gone. One died in his sleep, and the story is one put his head in his kitchen oven. A third used to have an apartment near the front entrance. One afternoon when I walked by his door it was open. The old man was sitting on the edge of his wall bed in his shorts looking around vacantly. His gray hair was uncombed and the room was a mess. As the story came out, the shower in the apartment above him had overflowed and the water had come through the old mans ceiling. And while I didn't know it that afternoon, his wife had died the day before. She'd been in a nursing home for years and every day after lunch the old man would dress in coat and tie and walk over to pass the afternoon with her. That day, when I saw him sitting there on the edge of his bed in his shorts, I thought he was being patient, waiting for the plumber. But what he was really doing was thinking about life. That night he walked over to Hollywood Boulevard , rented a room on the twelfth floor of the Roosevelt Hotel, and jumped out the window.

*** Saturday morning James calls to say it's time for Rose and him to take me out for our annual breakfast. They always take me to a natural foods restaurant, so I feel safe with them. This time we go to the Old World on Sunset Boulevard. James parks his Roto-Rooter plumber's truck around back near Old World 's garbage bins. The place smells like a Calcutta sewer. James tells me that he and Rose are moving to Medford , Oregon . Medford is considered by survivalists as one of the better places to be when the catastrophes begin. Prevailing winds will keep it clear of fallout after the nuclear exchange. The population density is low and there's a lot of farm land so when plague and starvation break out in the great urban centers, Medford will have plenty food and water. The people are mostly white so the coming race wars won't affect the community.

"It sounds ideal," I say. It's beautiful up there too. Jenny and I were in Medford one time. We were all through that country a few years ago."

"Well, Bright-Eyes," James says, why don't you come up with us. You can be a starving writer in Medford easier than you can in that tenement you live in here."

"If mother would do the right thing, I could go with you."

"What do you mean, if she'd do the right thing?"

Rose looks at me in a peculiar way.

"I like your mother,"' she says.

"I like the sensible way I live now," I say. "I live in a nice old brick building that's going to collapse in the next real earthquake. I eat processed food and food that's packaged in cancer producing containers. The city is surrounded by oil fields, petroleum processing plants, aircraft factories and nuclear and rocketry research centers so that when the commies make their move me and my neighbors will be incinerated. The air I breathe is filthy, the streets are filled with foreigners who resent the original population, the Blacks strong-arm you and shoot you and likely as not I'll step in a clump of dog shit before the day is out. You want me to move to Medford where everything is clean and people are White and treat one another decently? I don't know, James. I'll have to think about it. I may be too depressed to live in a place like Medford ."

*** This morning I'm driving up the coast toward Malibu with two laborers. I'm thinking about how I'm going to have to write something about the Holocaust. I feel kind of disgusted with myself and at the same time I see how rare and beautiful the morning is. Palm trees are outlined darkly against a Hiroshige sea, soft mists hide the horizon, a wonderful fresh air washes in through the open windows over my arms and face. Then thought recalls the summer morning when I was a child watching my father and two other men cut down the two great old palm trees in our front yard. A rope is tied high up on the trunk of one palm and father is out on the street pulling on it while the two other men chop away. A pain touches my heart as I watch my father pulling and directing everything. I wonder about it. It's not a lot of pain but what purpose does it serve?

In that instant thought recalls an image I had seen on television showing Mother Teresa comforting some old bag of bones in her death hostel in Calcutta . The man was a wonderfully sweet smile on his face as he gazes up at the wizened little nun. She'd picked him up off the pavement someplace where he was about to give it up to starvation and age. He has no family, no friends, no money, no food, and no history. No History! No one he knows, knows where he is. At any moment he'll disappear forever. As I drive up the coast toward Malibu I watch how the gazes of the two old strangers pour into each others eyes and I understand that in that one moment of the dying mans attentive and beatific smile there is no thought and no imagination so there is no desire and no loss and it's all quite alright.

North of the Rambla Pacifica turn-off a young man stands at the side of the highway thumbing a ride. Bare-chested, his shirt in one hand and a can of soda pop in the other. He's saying hello to a woman walking past. The boy has big pimples on his chest and a scraggly beard. He's a homely kid but he's laughing and being easy on the lady too and going somewhere in the cool morning air and during the instant of my glance he looks like he doesn't have a care in the world.

And thought, never stopping, asks: why are you so distraught over having to write about the Holocaust? What do you care what people say about you? What does it matter that you are not a historian? You're a man. A citizen. Why do you go over and over it? All the accusations that are going to be made, the misunderstandings that you will never be able to clear up. The way you are going to be humiliated. Why? And thought says: if you can't do it with a light heart, stay out of it.

This evening on the television I watch Meetings With Remarkable Men , after the book by Gurdjieff. An empty film.

*** Sometimes I wonder why I go on living in the Nirvana Arms. I suppose I kind of like it here. It's a nice old building that's suffering socio/economic problems like the rest of Hollywood . The room is large and has ten foot ceilings. There used to be a wall bed but that's gone. The kitchen and breakfast nook, have there own hall entrance. There are chutes in the hallway to shoot your garbage down to the basement but they're sealed up now. In 1929 this was a classy building just off Hollywood Boulevard behind the Grumman's Chinese Theatre. The Nirvana Arms was designed in the Grumman's Chinese Theatre architectural style, a school that began there and ended here.

If I didn't live here where would I live? I have no desire to live in any particular place. I don't want to improve my lot in life. I want to have enough time to do the typing and enough money to pay the rent and that seems to be about it. I still need friends and an excuse to get drunk once in a while and plenty of talk and I need a woman around. If I didn't have to work to pay the rent, that would be nice. The desire to make money and buy things is something that's missing from my character. My inclination about money is to make do. That's my inclination about almost everything. No matter how low my luck sinks, there's always a way to make do. If I came into a fortune today my life would remain largely the same. I would still have no struggle with the issue of right relationship. There would still be the problem of when to cooperate with the State and when not to. I would still feel devastated by what I found out about the Holocaust and I still wouldn't understand why. How would the money be able to change any of that? I would still want to get up at three or four in the morning and go to the typewriter and commit myself to my life's work.

After living half a century I understand that if I'm going to get to the bottom of my life with others, and to the bottom of the authoritarian ideal, I'm going to have to depend on myself. I can't count on the books taking me there. I can't count on the professors or the other intellectuals or their libraries either, no matter how much information they're choked up with. I started reading books forty years ago and here I am anyway, alone in the Nirvana Arms and feeling pretty much to home.

The variousness of the book of daily life is wondrous beyond everything we can imagine. I remember Huxley pointing out that the productions of earth are far more various and intricate than what human imagination can produce, no matter how we stimulate it, because mind is a fragment of the whole and can only be fractionally productive compared to the whole. Huxley probably explained it some other way.

When Nietzsche writes that the surface of life is more significant than what lies beneath it he's saying something similar. Maybe he and Huxley got their ideas from books, but maybe they didn't. Readers make up only a tiny percentage of those who reside on the planet. Am I supposed to write off the couple billion of us who can't read or don't want to? I haven't forgotten that Stalin could read, along with all the rest of that bunch. How are the poor and illiterate to judge what's true and false, right, wrong and good and bad? I spend sixty or seventy hours a week working in the mountains behind Malibu and in Topanga Canyon and getting there and back, and still have the same obligation as the philosopher to support the truth and dismiss what's false, according to my own best light. At the end, working men have the same responsibilities as the professors and the intellectuals. We live in a real world, not an academic one. I'm obligated to develop a sense of what's right and good and what isn't. I'm not going to leave the responsibility for understanding those things to men who have the leisure to read books.

Men who read believe it's impossible that men who can't or don't are able to lead responsible and honorable lives in a modern world. In one of Castaneda's books he and Don Juan are in a café someplace in Mexico and a couple of street kids are eating the garbage from the plates of customers who have left. Castaneda wonders how the two scavengers will be able to make a life for themselves. Don Juan comments that all those he has ever known who became true warriors were once like those two boys, hopeless and abandoned. Maybe that's the best place to start.

Tyrants today use books and intellectuals as weapons against the poor just like tyrants before them used priests and their voices from heaven. Every horror committed by the State against the people has been done in the name of books by book reading despots or despots who claim to have privileged information given to them by their book reading experts and advisors. The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kamph, the Constitution of the United States, the New Testament, Old Testament, Koran, Mao's Little Red Book-those are only a few of the writings beloved by the book reading tyrants of our age and by the professors who look down their noses at the illiterate and uninformed.

Uninformed about what?

Thousands of books are published every week in a hundred languages I can't read. Maybe the answer to my life was published recently in a book written in Swahili. A real misfortune for me, or don't you think so? On the other hand, if the answer is in books published in English only then maybe we should strike off the rest of the race. Life is full of small misfortunes. I don't see how the answer can be put in a book. You get pleasure and power from books. That's why the West is such a miracle in history. But under standing depends on something else. Something to one side of intellect and power.

In one of his books on Zen, Blythe writes that all questioning is a way to avoid the answer, which we already know. That we already understand the answer but wish we didn't. "Every man knows he must love his enemies, and sell all he has and give to the poor, but he doesn't wish to know it so he asks questions." Blythe is talking about the spiritual life but what am I talking about? When the old Calcutta man and mother Teresa lose themselves in each other's gaze at the moment of death they don't have much use for their library cards. They see the situation for what it is. They're paying attention. In that moment they have no need for dialect or the search for motive. At the moment of crises, attention is everything.

Every moment is crisis.

How do men who can't read books or don't want to lead honorable, generous and attentive lives? Isn't that really the big question for the race? It's said that Jesus said the poor will inherit the earth. As a class, the poor doesn't read and never has.

*** The alarm rings at three thirty . I get up to turn it off, then lay back on the bed again. I feel all right I just don't want to kick up the typewriter yet. I can hear some men arguing down on the street but it doesn't sound very interesting so I don't pay any attention. Then I hear a gun shot. That's interesting. I sit up and draw back the bottom corner of the window drape. Three men are in a knot, struggling in the middle of the street. Then a young Hispanic breaks away and races toward the front entrance of the Nirvana Arms.

The two other men are still wrestling. There's another gunshot and I watch a Mexican throw a big black guy down on the pavement, turn, and with measured steps strut slowly back toward the Nirvana. The black lies across the white line on his back with his arms stretched out over his head. The shooter, older than the one who had run away, struts slowly up the walk and disappears slowly into the lobby below. He walks in a way that says the guy deserved it and I gave it to him and what are you going to do about it? Just before he disappears in the lobby below he looks up and our eyes meet. I've made a mistake.

I tip-toe to the telephone and dial the operator and say I want to report a murder.

"I can't hear you," the operator says.

"I want to report a murder."

"Well, where are you? Where are you?"

" Hollywood ."

The police come on the line quickly. They want to know my name and address and apartment number and after a few minutes I watch a squad car pull up to the body, then four more squad cars arrive. The body begins to moan. I call the police back and say there are about ten officers standing around in the middle of the street while the shooters are inside the Nirvana Arms, where I am, and why don't a few of the officers come on in and have a look around?

I imagine how the shooter and his friend must be waiting until the police leave to come up here and have a chat with me because they know I know who they are. I think about all the times I've thought about buying a gun and haven't done it. I think about all the times I've run the Mexicans out of the hallway and off the fire escape. The largest weapon I have in the apartment is a kitchen paring knife. I feel like a big defenseless naked turkey. I put my pants on and look around for my shoes.

There isn't enough order in Hollywood so people say there should be more law. Law doesn't create order. What creates order is guns and love. If I had a gun for example maybe I'd go downstairs and look for the shooters. Maybe they didn't have a good reason to shoot the black guy and need to be remonstrated with. If everybody had guns everybody would have more respect for everybody else. The big issue is love but who can come up with it at a time like this? Guns are easy, so you get guns or you pay others to carry guns in your name. Everybody understands how that works. Everybody. You don't have to be a scholar. If someone makes trouble for you and you can't, if you absolutely cannot love him, you shoot him. That's the rule. We're only human. We know we're almost never going to love. We know that's something that's way out there. We've heard about love, sure, but we understand it's nearly always beyond us.

***

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