(Excerpted from A Personal History of Moral Decay)

JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE
MONSTER FROM THE DEEP

One morning when I was five years old my father rented a black automobile and he drove my aunt and me up the hill to the parking lot behind the county hospital. I watched father walk across the asphalt into the hospital and after awhile when he came out my mother was with him and they each had a baby in their arms. It was all a surprise to me and I didn't know what to think. I hadn't known my mother was pregnant. I didn't know what pregnant was. I noticed that first my aunt Grace was very happy to see them, and when they got to the car both my father and mother were very happy. Father was wearing a snap-brim hat.

Later on I came to love my brothers. Mother and father named the first-born Ronald, and the second Richard. Ronald was a little larger than Richard. On Saturday mornings mother would put a white blanket on the rug in the front room and lay the twins on it. The neighbors would come over and my grandfather came on the streetcar from Hollywood to where we lived in South Central in his black suit and vest and white shirt and tie and his white hair and everyone gathered in chairs around the blanket where my brothers were and watched them and laughed and talked.

I was just learning how to play baseball and I got the idea that when my brothers grew up and were my age that I could teach them how to play. It was difficult for me to throw the ball up and hit it at the same time I remember. Sometimes I would miss the ball and hit the little concrete incinerator with the bat. We lived in a little house then behind a large one and sometimes when I hit the ball into the screened porch on the back of the house in front a woman who rolled her stockings down over her calves would come out and speak to me and I would get angry because she was interfering with my plans for my brothers. Anyhow in the end it did not matter about the baseball because pretty soon Richard died of the whooping cough. He was seven months old. And then a couple months later Ronald died too.

When Richard died I didn't know what to think. I listened to how my mother cried. I heard my aunt say to her that it didn't help to cry and that anyhow mother still had two sons left and that was a lot. I remembered how my aunt didn't have any children at all. After a while I started crying too and no one could get me to stop.

Later on when Ronald died I cried right from the beginning. Mother sat on a chair beside the sewing machine in the bedroom and cried with my aunt's hand on her shoulder while I cried alone in the big chair in the front room.

The funerals of course were difficult but afterwards things got back to normal. We were not a family to make a great fuss over things. We went to the cemetery a few times on Sunday afternoons and then we didn't go anymore. I don't remember mother crying anymore after that, and she didn't go on about how her sons were dying or how hard life was or anything like that.

Secretly, I thought about my brothers a lot, about how it had been when they were alive and how much I wanted them back. Many times when I thought about them it made me cry. We weren't a family to go on about such things so I was very careful to not let anyone know how I felt. I was only a child perhaps but when the memory of my brothers came over me and it was necessary to cry I understood perfectly well how to go off by myself.

That's how it was for three or four years and then the memories slowed down until they hardly came at all. But one night when I was fifteen years old the memory of my brothers came to me in a dream. I woke up out of a dead sleep crying over my brothers who had been dead now for ten years. I couldn't even remember what they looked like. By then we were living in the big house on the front of the lot and I had my own little bedroom but I had been sobbing so hard in my sleep that it woke my mother and father in their bedroom and they came in to me. They were very concerned and wanted to do something for me or say something but I could not tell them and I could not stop sobbing. Afterwards I never forget that night and how it wrenched me, and many times I tried to figure out what it meant but I could never get a handle on it.

Because I loved my own brothers so much it always made me sad to meet people who resented how their parents had favored one of the other children over themselves. I know from my own experience that the love of one brother for the other could overcome anything like that. But there were always people who insisted that this could not be true absolutely, and that always made me impatient and angry. It came to be a touchy matter with me and I got so I didn't like to discuss it or have it brought up.

Now, here is where this story, which I have tried to keep very simple, begins to slip through my fingers.

When I was twenty-one, for reasons that were not entirely clear to me, I decided to become a writer. Once I began to write I never gave it up. I did a lot of other things in order to make money because it was impossible for me to write without making the money, but all that time I knew I was a writer. I thought I understood that if I tried to be something else that the one thing in me that had a chance to grow large, that thing would not grow and in the end something else would snuff it out.

I worked hard at the writing but it went bad from the beginning. I couldn't put my finger on what the trouble was. One year it seemed to be one thing, the next year something else. Over the years I came to see that I had not found out what my subject was. You can laugh if you want but I worked hard at the writing for fifteen years and I wasn't able to discover what it was I was supposed to write about. I had reached that place with the writing that I no longer made a distinction between the writing and the living out of my life.

It was incredible for me to realize that I was thirty-five years old and had no place to sleep except on the couch of a friend and that I still hadn't published my first book and that other things had started to happen with me that I didn't understand. There were periods when I wasn't able to write at all. I would get very intense. It made me feel unusually intense to see or feel things almost any day that were worth writing and yet not be able to write them. And then oftentimes, when I was unable to write, I would realize that I had started thinking about my brothers. It didn't make sense.

One evening when I was very intense about not being able to write and was thumbing nervously through a magazine, I came across a notice about a new book on Joseph Conrad. I felt a degree of excitement about the notice that seemed pointless. Thought recalled that a few months before I had read some of Conrad's letters. One line from one of the letters popped up in my mind:

"I believe that when I was a boy something came into my life and began eating it up."

When thought recalled that sentence I became so intense that literally rushed out the door onto the street. I had never felt a higher level of intensity. I hurried aimlessly up one of the back streets in Hollywood . I had learned that during the periods of highest tension the most profitable act is not to think but to focus on the tension itself until something exploded. I wound up on Santa Monica Boulevard and realized I was headed toward Barney's Beanery near La Cienega. I was walking under great pressure when I found myself opposite the Rosedale cemetery. It was commonplace for me to walk past the cemetery and I had never thought anything about it but that night it came to me that here was where my brothers had been buried thirty years earlier. At that moment I began seeing things from out of that old life.

I saw the inside of the little house we lived in when I was a child. A pale blanket was spread out on the rug in the front room and the neighbors and my grandfather in his black suit were laughing and watching Ronald and Richard scoot around on the blanket on their backs. I watched myself walk into the room, and as I did I saw my head transform into the head of a white wolf. I watched myself grab up one of the babies and eat him. I don't know which one. I was wild. I watched myself grab up the second baby tear off his arms and legs and eat them. No one there in the room dared to interfere. His head was like thin white jade, and when I shoved it into my jaws and crushed it bitter fluids poured out in my mouth.

Out there on the side walk in the dark I was afraid I was going to faint. I stopped in the doorway of a closed storefront and leaned into the corner to keep from falling. When the fluids came out in my mouth I wanted to vomit but I couldn't I stood in the doorway looking across the street at the tan-colored stucco wall that goes around the cemetery. I wanted to be certain that I was not going to see anymore. I kept seeing the scene where I had become a wolf and eaten my brothers, but I was not there any longer. After a while didn't see the scene any more and saw only the street and the cars going by with their headlights on.

As I continued my walk along toward Barney's memory recalled how, when my brothers were still alive, I had come down with the whooping cough. I remembered how mother explained to me very seriously how I wasn't to go into the bedroom where the twins were because I was sick and they could catch my sickness. Oftentimes however when mother went outside to hang up the wash say, or out front to get the mail, I went in the bedroom to see how Ronald and Richard were doing. I did tricks with my face to make them laugh, and I kissed them. I would keep one ear cocked and when I heard mother coming back on the walk I would return to the front room and start playing by myself very quietly on the floor.

After that night across from the Rosedale cemetery where I had been willing to watch myself gorge on my little brothers I thought, okay. It can be argued that it is a good thing to see, finally, what you have done that is not right and get over it. People do argue that when you were very young, and especially if you were only a child and you committed a heinous crime, that you can expiate your guilt by confessing it and by accepting the fact that what you did was shameful, and you can turn a corner with your life. That's probably true for some men, but for me it didn't do the trick.

Afterwards I was still unable to write what I should have been able to write, and I still suffered periods of intensity that were hardly bearable. I didn't feel particularly guilty about what I had remembered having done to my brothers. I understood that for years I must have felt guilty, but now that it was out in the open, I found it an interesting and unusual act for a six year old child to have knowingly, or even half-knowingly, committed. More than that, the tale was visually absorbing, it was a good story, one that I could tell at Barney's-if I was certain to make clear that the joke was on me.

Originally I had thought that my act of visual confession was the point to this story, but it didn't satisfy me. I kept thinking about it. It seemed that there should be more, or that it should be different. I couldn't figure it out. And then last night I had this dream.

I dreamed that I was on a pier and that a casket had been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean. People were standing around looking at it. The casket contained the body of a man my age. The body was completely rotted away from the waist down. The rest of him was rotted and pretty much decomposed also. His right arm resembled a big turkey wing that had been cooked and now was laying in a mess of gravy. It was sickening.

I heard one of the onlookers say: "Throw the monster back."

Hearing those words, the rotted face of the corpse took on an expression, something that resembled a smile. With a struggle that appeared to take all its strength, the loathsome thing raised itself up on its one good elbow and, the rotted face smiling sweetly, said:

"I am not a monster."

When I saw how sweetly the thing smiled, my heart melted. My feelings toward it changed from loathing its monstrous ugliness, to feelings of sympathy.

And then I heard another voice say:

"Isn't that incredible? He's been dead for thirty years, and now he's coming back to life."

End

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