(Excerpted from A Personal History of Moral Decay)

Saved by the Animals

I’ve decided to sell the typewriter. I’ve gotten rid of everything else but I’m hedging about the typewriter. It’s too heavy to lug around, I need the money, but I’m hedging. Selling the typewriter would make a clean sweep of everything I own except the change of clothes and the stuff in my pockets. The typewriter is from the old life, the one I had until a couple months ago. I want to get rid of everything that was in that life. It was a good life, but the wrong one for me.

I like to say that one place to live is as good as another but I don’t want to live in Worthington’s room any longer. I can’t work here. Marlow and Worthington can’t stop talking. Mike Katz comes down from upstairs and hangs around talking for hours on end. I like talking, I like listening to them talk, but I can’t talk and laugh and write all at the same time. I have to do them serially.

If I called Pamela she wouldn’t let on but I know she’d be glad to hear from me. At night when I’m out walking the thinking turns to Pamela again and again, to her white thighs and her rosy cunt. Thought reminds me that if I’d called Pamela earlier I could be in bed with her right now, instead of walking alone in the dark. I could be turning the pages of a magazine with one hand and diddling Pamela with the other. If she wasn’t in bed yet but was at the sink cleaning up the dishes I could stand behind her and hold her breasts in my hands. Usually she’d let me. Or if I found her stroking the cat I could go over to Pamela and begin stroking her, using the same rhythm she was using with the cat. Sunday afternoon we could go driving and I could put my right hand between her legs while I steered with my left.

“Take it out,” Pamela might say, scanning the road ahead. “You know what a careless driver you are.” Nevertheless.

In my reveries I see myself walking through the rain forests in Guatemala and Yucatan, poking through the temples at Bonampak and Tikal. I see myself walking down through Central America and on to Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. Walking over the Andes and down into the valley of the Amazon. From there I could get a ship to Africa, tramp through the jungles to the headwaters of the Nile and follow it on up to Cairo. Sometimes when I’m daydreaming about next week or next month, thought comes in and says, with just a little more effort you can be free.

I want Marlow to go to Mexico with me but he says he doesn’t believe we can live there on twenty dollars a month, which is what my army pension is. He says he wants to work a couple months first, get a bankroll. He says when he has two hundred dollars in his pocket he’ll feel secure. In the meantime he’s already lost his job with the cab company.

“I pulled into the garage this morning and the supervisor called me over to his office. He said I’m too tall to drive a cab. How do you like that one?”

“It’s your own fault,” I told him.

“I’ve already worked three nights. I feel at home there.”

“I certainly didn’t get so tall,” I said. Worthington’s tall but not as tall as you are. Katz got only half as tall as you did. You can’t blame the supervisor.”

“I know.”

“It was your responsibility.”

“I know.”

“Now you can go to Mexico with me.”

“I’m too depressed to go to Mexico,” Marlow said. “I’ve lost my job.”

***

Mike Katz was down here all evening. He was even more unhappy than he usually is. He was brooding about the woman he loves, the one he left behind in New Jersey.

“I was doing all right until I met Dorothea,” Katz said. “I was living with my parents and seeing a psychiatrist. I wanted to kill my little brother, shit like that, but I didn’t feel worried. Know what I mean? Then I met Dorothea. She had five kids and hustled on the side, but I didn’t care about that.” He made a gesture with his hands that fisherman make to describe a big catch. “The first time I saw her coming through the doorway, her shoulders out like that (like the big fish), it made me crazy. All I could think about was that I had to have her.”

Worthington and me and Marlow were laughing and enjoying ourselves.

Marlow said: “How wide were those shoulders, Katzy?”

“Laugh, you assholes,” Katz said.

“The Prince isn’t laughing at you, Katzy,” Marlow said. “The Prince loves you.”

“Fuck you Marlow.”

Worthington apologized to Katz for laughing. You can always count on Worthington to do the right thing.

Katz said: “I didn’t mind her messing around in the neighborhood. She’s a passionate woman. But one day I’m going back to Jersey and murder that husband of hers. I’m going to cut off his balls and send them back to him in the mail.”

“Oh, come on, Mike,” Worthington said, “I don’t believe you mean that.”

“I’m telling you,” Katz said. “He was against me from the start because I didn’t pay her when we did it. Do you think he paid her? Your ass he paid her. His nuts, that’s what I want.”

Katz paused, brooding introspectively. “I can see it now. The postman rings their doorbell, her asshole husband opens it, and the postman says: ‘Here are your nuts, Sir.’”

All I can think about is going to Mexico. I pace back and forth in the room, seeing myself on the highway. At night I toss and turn in the armchair, imagining myself in this village or that one, in my own room working on the book. In my imagination I have no debts and I don’t know anyone. Nobody knocks on the door, and when I go walking no one greets me or tries to talk to me. Mostly I see myself in a fishing village lying in a hammock, the afternoon breeze blowing against the bottoms of my bare feet. I can hear the surf on the sand. A gull cries. Day and night those are the images I like to watch.

Worthington doesn’t warm to the subject of Mexico but Marlow has some interest in it. He’s willing to talk it over with me. He’s willing to listen to how it is in Mexico. This afternoon I told him: “Marlow, use your head. Beer is six cents a bottle in Mexico. Women are fifty cents a throw. The weather’s wonderful, the air’s clean.” I gestured around the room at the trash and disorder. “Why live like this when we can live in Mexico?”

“It does sound good,” he said. “Maybe when I finish paying off the car.”

Somehow Marlow was able to get his hands on a used Pontiac convertible with no down and only a few bucks a month.

“I don’t want to lose my investment,” he says.

“I can understand that.” I could feel the eagerness welling up in my heart. I felt like maybe we’d be off to Mexico after all.

“How many payments have you made so far?”

“One.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake. One. What the hell kind of investment is that?”

“My car’s the only thing I have. I have a suit but it’s in the pawnshop.”

“Fuck it,” I said.

“I’m willing to go,” Marlow said. “I just have to get my financial affairs in order.”

“Fuck it.”

I walked over to Maurice’s and started talking to him about Mexico. He was at the typewriter when I got there but he got up and sat on the couch clicking his teeth while I talked. He was sitting on some of his scripts, which kind of bothered me.

“Don’t be an asshole,” Maurice said. “Take some advice from an older man, from someone who’s a lot smarter than you are. From a Jew. You’ve had your life in Mexico. You lived there three years. What more do you expect from it? My advice is this. Are you listening? Find some broad to live with and get on with your writing. Be professional about it. Any asshole can go to Mexico. Are you trying to tell me you can write better in Mexico than you can here? Are you trying to kid me? Don’t try to kid somebody who knows you as well as I do.”

“Why are you sitting on your scripts?”

“This is what successful TV writers do. They wipe their asses with their work. If you ever decide to be a successful writer, and from the way you’re talking I don’t have much expectation that you will, you’ll be able to wipe your ass with your work like the professionals do.”

***

That last year in Mexico I knocked around the mountains in Jalisco and Guerrero with a novillero named Emilo Tagores and a couple other guys. We were trying to scare up some business killing bulls at village fiestas. We were hardly making a living. Sometimes we stayed over in Guadalajara with Guillermo Sanchez. A couple years earlier, up in Aguas Calientes, a bull had removed the ligaments from Sanchez’s left elbow, which left the arm permanently crooked, so Sanchez had to retire from bullfighting. He had to make a new career decision. He decided to become a tailor. His crooked left arm worked just right to hold the material when he sewed with his right hand.

Sanchez lived and worked in a room on a dirt street out at the edge of Guadalajara where he slept on a cot and did his cutting and sewing on a solid wood table. I slept on the table. One night Sanchez offered to share his cot with me. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but in the end I joined him. The blankets were full of bed bugs. From that night on I slept on the floor on my capote. We were all the same age then, Tagores, Sanchez and me. Twenty-five. I would watch Sanchez measure a man for a pair of pants with his crooked arm and think about how his career with the bulls was finished and how mine was just starting and how I had all the luck.

In the mornings in Guadalajara I’d catch a bus to downtown and walk a few blocks in the sunshine to the old Plaza and train with the capes and the sword. Before noon I’d fold my capes and walk to a cafe on a torn up street outside the big covered market place and eat a bowl of fish soup, then I’d catch another bus out Jaime Bravo to the dirt street where we were living. There was a courtyard behind the room surrounded by other rooms where entire families lived with all their kids and in the center of the courtyard there was a well with a bucket tied to a rope. I’d take a sauce pan to use for a dipper and a towel and wash up at the well, then set up the typewriter on the cot and try to work on the Korea book. The afternoons were hot and full of flies and if I’d nod off in the chair Sanchez would prick me with a needle or a pair of scissors because it was bad for business to have people sleeping in his commercial establishment. A couple times I got pissed about the needle but I didn’t say anything because, after all, I was his guest.

***

That summer was the last time I tried seriously to do the Korea book. I was also working on a story about Elizabeth, who worked at the soda fountain in her father’s drugstore at Gage and Main in South Los Angeles the summer I got out of the army. Elizabeth was a Catholic with a religious turn who made me eat chocolate sundaes six times a week for four months before she’d let me hold her breasts. I got impatient sometimes but in the end it was worth it. Then one evening Elizabeth told me that she had seen a vision. She wouldn’t tell me what she’d seen but whatever it was changed our relationship considerably because she entered the convent. I hadn’t thought girls really did that any more. Her convent was the kind that when you get there you have to crawl in through a window and you never come out again. It wasn’t a tragedy for me, I wasn’t heartbroken, but my hands felt like something was missing.

Some months later I ran into Elizabeth’s father at the gas station across the street from his drugstore and he told me encouragingly that Elizabeth was home again. I telephoned her that afternoon and we got together at her house, which was her parent’s house. She looked about the same as she had before except her hair was short.

She laughed. “You should have seen me after they cut it all off.”

“All of it? Did you like that?”

“I liked everything,” she said. “I liked scrubbing the floors. I liked praying and fasting. Everything. After a while they resented me. They voted me out.”

“Is that how it works? They vote you in, they vote you out?”

“They resented me because I wanted to do things that were hard.”

“I thought convents were for life.”

“I was there eight months.”

I asked her what she was going to do next.

“I’m going back to work at the soda fountain. Then I’m going to find another convent.”

“I’ve had it with those ice cream sundaes,” I said. “I want you to know that.”
Elizabeth thought that was very funny, but when I tried to hold her breasts again like the old days, she wouldn’t let me.

“I’d have too much to make up for,” she said.

“You mean in Heaven?”

She closed her eyes and laughed.

“Couldn’t you spend some time in limbo,” I said? “They say it’s not that bad in limbo. Whatever we do now you could make up for there.”

“Not after you’ve had a vision,” she said soberly. “Visions change your life.”

I worked on that story for weeks but I couldn’t get it right. I gave up and tried a couple stories about killing bulls which I also could not get right and a couple about childhood and some others I invented. I couldn’t get any of them right. Occasionally I wondered about Elizabeth, where she was, what she was doing and so on. Not often.

***

Last night I took a Christian Science Monitor from a sidewalk news rack, drank a few coffees at Biff’s on Franklin and Cahuenga, then wandered back toward Worthington’s room. For some reason I felt excited, happy, full of energy. I don’t know why. I thought about the way the writing was going, all the different projects that were open to me. I thought about how sometimes I’m alert and excited for reasons I can’t identify, and how other times I feel depressed and exhausted and how I can’t explain that either.

In the room Worthington and Marlow were both sleeping. The air smelled like garbage and stale cigarette smoke mixed. I sat in the armchair and drew my jacket over me but I couldn’t sleep. The mind was extremely alert. It was racing. I couldn’t keep up with it. I went outside and stood at the corner of the building. An occasional car passed on Highland, its headlights sweeping up the black pavement. After awhile the sky grew light along the crests of the hills up above Universal Studios. At first the hills were black silhouettes against the dark sky, but as the gray light came up behind them I could make out the first shapes of the trees and houses. I thought about how wonderful it was to be standing there watching the day come into being.

I must have lost track of time, as if I’d fallen into a trance or something. I was aware of a rosy light appearing over the hills, then suddenly the sun was over the top of a ridge line and I heard a strain of music I couldn’t identify. I felt the face turn slowly, mechanically, upward toward the sun. I felt the warmth pressing against the closed eyelids, the brow, the lips, the naked throat, and then I heard a voice inside me say: “This is God’s passion,” and at that moment I saw myself soar off the sidewalk into the sky. It happened so quickly there wasn’t time to be afraid. I saw myself soar over the San Gabriel Mountains, then over other mountains I hadn’t seen before. The entire flight took only an instant. Then I saw myself sitting on a boulder at the edge of a dark lake surrounded by forests. The water in the lake was moving in a foreboding way. That’s when the fear started. I understood somehow that huge volumes of water were welling up into the bottom of the lake from underground sources. Then the lake began to throb like a great black heart. The lake was being engorged with water and needed to burst over its banks. I wanted it to happen, but the moment I thought it was going to happen the body turned cold. I was afraid that once the flooding began, I would be swept away. I realized that it was up to me, that in my heart I had to say either yes or no and that the lake would do what I wanted. I wanted to say yes, I wanted to be swept away. I longed to say it but I couldn’t. The lake went on engorging itself and the great black watery heart pounded until I thought I would lose consciousness and then at the moment it all started to get out of control I saw animals leap out of the forest and race to the lake and suck furiously at the edge of the lapping water. There were foxes and lions and deer and squirrels. I understood then that the animals were going to save me from having to decide whether to go under or not.

I felt the body relax. I knew then that I was still standing on the sidewalk at the corner of our apartment building on Highland Avenue. I saw the cars passing back and forth on the street, and across the street I saw the parking lot and beyond that the hills and the houses and trees on the hills. I remembered seeing the lake, I still felt the anxiety, but I wasn’t actually seeing it any longer. And then for a moment I saw it again. The sky above the lake was thick and dark and a rain was falling. In the lake fish had come up and I saw their muzzles sticking up through the surface of the black water while the rain fell on their wide-eyed faces. I watched white ducks lift off the water and fly off into the dark distance.

After awhile, I’m not certain how long, it was over. I walked down Highland toward Hollywood Boulevard. Bugs were coming out onto the sidewalk to sun themselves. They gleamed brilliantly in the morning sunlight. They were jewel-like. I looked away. I didn’t want to see anymore. The heat was still there, inside my chest. I turned east on the Boulevard and walked fast. I didn’t know what to do. When I started sweating I stepped inside the shaded entrance of an old office building and sat on the concrete step.

Thought was different somehow. There wasn’t so much of it and I had the sense that it was suffused with whiteness. A cockroach walked around the corner of the entrance onto the little green and white octagonal tiles. I watched the roach walk up to the shoe on my left foot and feel the leather with its antennae. With a still, empty heart, I observed the movement and rhythm of each of its legs, the differences in texture among its different body parts, its shadings of black and brown. Thought suggested that with living mechanisms, mechanization may have preceded beauty. For a moment, the idea intrigued me. Then, rather placidly, I began seeing trees. I was getting mixed messages.

End

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