(Excerpted from A Personal History of Moral Decay)

OLD MANUSCRIPTS: OLD LIVES

Everybody wants to put a little something away for his old age. I'm no exception. I'm not nervous about getting old but when you're fifty-one you think about it sometimes. You see yourself living alone in a room, you can't walk too good because of the extra weight, in fact you need special supports in your shoes or you can't walk at all, and sometimes your back goes out and you have to crawl to the kitchen table or the bathroom. From the outside it doesn't look like much of a life but still you don't want to give up on it. Though you can't explain why, you want to go on.

Alicia says she'll take care of me when I no longer can take care of myself. She'll let me lean on her shoulder when I have to go pee-pee. She'll wipe the mush off my chin when I dribble and don't notice it. But women come and go, like the years, like friends even, and there's no calling them back.

One afternoon fifteen years ago Jenny and I were embracing in her hallway when suddenly her body stiffened and she gasped.

"Oh my God," I said. "What's the matter?" Her eyes were huge and dark.

"I just had the thought that one day we might not be together anymore. Bradley, I just don't think I could stay alive without you."

Her words had brought a sob from me at the time, but where's Jenny now? Just a few blocks from here to tell the truth. She lives with a script writer who's dark and likes to wear nice clothes. She and I had a beer at the bar at Musso Frank's the other day. She gave me the new biography of Walt Whitman. I'd wanted to give her something too but as usual I couldn't think of anything good.

I've never had any money but I've never worried about the future because for years now I've been putting books in the bank. Good as money I've always told myself. I've even told others about them. They're not finished books, but four or five thousand pages of manuscript in metal files, the carbon copies in cardboard boxes in Mother's dining-room closet. Most of the manuscript is diaries. Every once in a while I take out one or another of the diaries and edit a few pages. Getting it into shape, I tell myself, for that day when I'll need it. No need to worry about a thing.

A few days ago I took out the 1966 diaries. They describe how I worked my way to Viet-Nam on a tramp steamer intending to jump ship there and become a famous war correspondent. They tell about what I did instead, how the visions trailed off, how I met Jenny. Interesting material. It used to be interesting material. For the first time I am willing to admit the diaries bore me and that I think they will bore others as well. Seventeen years of work. What has it come to?

I don't want to describe the old World War II victory ships again. I don't want to go over even one more time my feelings about the Greeks, the Puerto-Ricans, the Blacks, the White Southerners, the Italians and Polacks who make up the crews on American tramps. The diaries are all anecdote, no scheme. What was I thinking during all those years? What was I in relation with? I was absorbed by the movement of my own feelings, the thinking that was without direction. I had dedicated myself to observing the organism move about, like those splashy carp I watch for hours in Japanese bars. There was no point to the diaries other than observation, just as there was no point to the living itself. No direction, no idea, no polemic, no story. The story was there but it trailed the fact, like the silver slime of a snail. I was bemused for years with the idea that I should restrict myself to the fact, to the moment. I think now I defeated myself as a writer with that idea.

*** That June I shipped out on the S.S. Explorer. I was confident I could jump ship in Viet-Nam and become a famous war correspondent. I don't know what Marlow had in mind. Every morning we'd drive down to Wilmington to the Maritime Hall and throw down our work cards for every ship routed to Southeast Asia . We got beat out every time by seamen who had older work cards than ours.

One morning I couldn't raise Marlow on the telephone so I drove to the Hall alone. When I got there the work board looked so good I called him again. This time I caught him in.

"I'll have to begin my life as a seaman some other time," Marlow said. "I've got my broad with the plastic tits up here. I can't just walk off and leave her. She needs me."

"I'm serious, Marlow. I think we can both get out on the same ship."

"Do you think they'd let me take her with me? I'd keep her out of the way. I could put her in one of those stand-up lockers. If they'd let me take her the rest of the crew could use her too."

In the background I heard a woman's voice say: "Asshole."

"I wouldn't let the niggers get in it, but the captain could use her in exchange for special shore privileges."

"You asshole," the woman's voice said.

Marlow affected a worried tone.

"Do you think the Captain's a nigger? Small chance, eh? That'd be all right though. Nigger officers are usually half-White anyway."

The woman's voice said: "Asshole, asshole, asshole."

"Bring her along," I said. "Just get down here before the first work call."

I hung around the Hall keeping to myself and an hour later Marlow walked in. He agreed the work board looked very good. The first regular work call would be at one o'clock . We had three hours to kill. We walked to the nearest bar and drank a couple beers. We walked to the Greek delicatessen and ate lunch. There was still an hour to kill. We hopped in Marlow's car and drove to Cabrillo Beach .

At the edge of the sand there were trees and picnic tables. Some little girls were playing on the sand in the sunshine. We sat on one of the tables in the shade of a tree. There was the expanse of clean white sand, the sunshine, the little girls playing happily and beyond them the blue sea and the empty, bright sky.

Marlow eyed the little girls. "I'd like to round up a bunch like that and put them on a farm to ripen. When they got to be about fourteen I could jam it in and listen to them scream."

I didn't say anything.

"I could record the screaming and later I could listen to the recordings."

Marlow made me laugh as much as anybody I've ever known. He had the custom of revealing the anarchic jumble of his real thoughts and feelings. Bernard Shaw noted some place that there is nothing so funny as the truth.

This morning however when I came across the entry in the diaries about the little girls I felt disgusted. There's a trial going on in Los Angeles this very day where a man is charged with torturing, raping, and killing teen-age girls. He recorded the cries and screams of the girls on tape and now the court has the tapes. They're terrible. How many of us in our dreams have done something similar?

*** I caught a ship that afternoon but Marlow was beaten out by men with older cards. I took the physical then drove to Long Beach where the S.S. Explorer was tied up and signed aboard formally. The Captain was an old Norwiegen-Marlow needn't have worried. He told me the cargo was beer and coffins and small-arms ammunition. I thought: "Just the right mix for Viet-Nam." Then I drove back to the house to pack. I was thirty-six years old but between jobs, between moving from one place to the next. At that time I was staying with the folks in the bedroom where I'd grown up. When I was home I'd work in the garden and do the typing in the shack out back.

That night I telephoned Marlow to get him to drive me to the ship next morning. He decided to come over for the night. "I can't trust myself to show up if I don't sleep there," he said. He sat in the living room with the folks and talked to Mother. Father looked on happily. Marlow enjoyed my mother. He had his own back East but hadn't spoken to her in ten years, not since he'd been thrown out of college for stealing watches.

"It'd be too embarrassing," he told me once. "What would I say to her? Hi, Mom, this is your son, the thief? The one who couldn't get away with it?"

I stayed in the bedroom and listened to them chatting. I thought about how lonely I felt. I thought about how lonely it would be for Mother and Father when I left. I thought about how lonely it would be on the water.

The next morning I got up to the alarm at four o'clock. I went in the living room to wake Marlow. He was sleeping on the couch with his hands clasped behind his head, his legs hanging off the other arm. When I spoke his name his eyes opened and without pause for reflection he said:

"Have you thought about the things you'll be able to smuggle in from over there? Or are you going into this with your head up your ass?

"Smuggle?"

"Have you thought about the hasheesh, the dirty pictures, the diseases?"

"Good ideas," I said. "Why can't I think of things like that?"

"I wish I was going with you. I'd make a fortune in one trip. I'd show you how to make one too."

"Maybe something will happen," I said. "Maybe you'll get on board today."

"Shit."

I went to Mother's door and woke her. She got up slowly and went in the back bedroom to wake Father. She was pretending it was all right that I was leaving again. I went in the kitchen and put water on for coffee. I could hear her trying to wake Father.

"Frank? Frank? Wake up. Bradley's getting ready to leave."

"I'm awake, Mom."

"Don't call me Mom. Don't you know who I am?"

"I'm getting right up, Mom."

"All right now. Don't daydream."

"I won't. Say, Mother? Is your head swelled up?"

"What are you talking about now? My head's all right. Now get up and put your robe on. You don't have to get dressed."

"All right, Mom."

"Damm it, Frank. Call me Gladys."

"Is Bradley still here?"

"Yes, but he won't be if you don't get up."

"All right."

"Now get up. Here, I'll help you."

"All right."

"Here. Put your legs over the side of the bed. Now get a move on, will you?"

"Mother?"

"Yes?"

"Did you catch any fish yet?"

"Goddammit, Frank. I'm going to get dressed and when I come back in here I expect you to be out of bed."

"Sure thing, Gladys."

When Mother came in the kitchen she was laughing, so I laughed too. She was still very pretty when she laughed.

*** Some of the stuff in the diaries is fine, but I don't want to go over it all over again. Illuminado Garcia with his silver teeth and big cock. Washington the Black First Cook ("listen," he shouted, "you know wha this job is, don you? you washes dishes and you waits tables and you scrubs the mutherfuckin deck. you understan? tha's yo job. you don't like tha work? then get off the ship now. don wait till we gets out on the water then change yo mind and say no one tol you nothin."

"Sounds good to me," I said politely. I knew what was going down. It was pure race.

"we goin get over there in tha viet-nam and these mutherfuckin bums is goin drink tha booze and come in here and shit all over your mutherfuckin tables and you goin clean it up. That's yo job. Now, you wan the job or not?"

"that's why i'm here," i said evenly.

"ah'm goin tell you xactly how ah feel. Ah hates seamens. Ah've hated them bums all my life and ah'm goin hate em till the day ah die. Seamans is bums. That's what they are. They's no good mutherfuchers and they's bums. Now you wan this mutherfuckin job or don you?"

"Sounds like honest work," I said politely.

I don't want to type out the anecdotes again about the fat, drunken Third Cook falling out of his bunk all the way to Viet-Nam and back. Or about the Carolina brothers setting up their still in the engine room, or the Steward who wanted me to come up to his foc'sle so we could compare typewriters. I don't want to write anymore about the Greek pantryman who only knew three words in English and shouted them out in a high-pitched whine whenever he was spoken to: "WHO ARE YOU?" Or the blond, steely-eyed pistolero just out of the Virginia State Prison, or the electrician who looked like a frog and put one elbow in his food while he ate, usually the left one.

The time is past for all that.

I don't think about myself so much as I used to. I'm more interested than I used to be in the others, what they're doing and why they think they are doing it. I've discovered I can still be shocked by an idea. I can be more accepting too. I can read racist pamphlets now without going into a rage. I can listen to the anti-Semites and understand what they are getting at. I can refuse to pay income taxes, refuse to fund programs for nuclear "retaliation" where it is guaranteed the innocent will be incinerated for the deeds of the guilty, without being contemptuous of those who do pay. I can consider the proposition that it would be best if the Union were to dissolve without feeling insecure or having my patriotism insulted. Does that make me more than I was before? I don't know, but I like it well enough this way.

*** The other day I had a plumber in to Mother's house to clean out the plumbing in the bathroom. There was no garbage or trash clogging the pipes, they were full of rust and corrosion. I thought about replacing the old steel and cast iron plumbing with new plastic lines. Some say that water passing through plastic carries cancer with it. What the hell, I thought, it takes twenty years for a cancer to develop. Mother sure won't last that long, and I'll be seventy years old by then. Seventy-one. What difference will it make? Then I thought: Who knows? Twenty years from now the brain might still be functioning. There might still be someone pleasant to talk with. I might still be able to see the day break out of the darkness and the way the worms come out on the concrete walks to sun themselves. I may still be able to feel things and know more or less what it is I am feeling.

*** We were still in port in Long Beach taking on stores and cargo. I'd finished my day's work and was sitting alone in the crew mess drinking coffee when Marlow put his head through the hatchway.

"Fellow Mariner," he said.

I felt touched that he'd driven all the way to Long Beach to pass the time with me. Then he stepped through the hatchway and I saw he had a suitcase in one hand.

"Are you kidding me?"

"The bedroom utility got sacked," Marlow said. "I was hanging around the Hall when the job was called out."

"What a stroke of luck," I said happily.

"It was five-thirty this afternoon. There wasn't anybody in the Hall except a few niggers and me. Every one of those spades threw down for the job. You should have seen the expression on their faces when I walked over and took it."

"I can't believe you're going," I said happily.

"I can't either."

"Why were you even in the Hall so late? Hardly anything gets called out that time of day."

"I don't know," Marlow said. "You know how I am. I don't know why I do anything."

[end]

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