(Excerpted from A Personal History of Moral Decay)

Secret Spindles

SUNDAY 1 JANUARY. Last night I did my roadwork at a slow steady pace, jogging along in the dark past the old sheds and the brick warehouses. When the rain began to fall I took off my glasses and put them in my back pocket. I felt very intense about something but I didn't know what. As I splashed through the rain I had to convince myself all over again, as I do every night, that the roadwork is really necessary for what I'm planning to do. When I got back to the house Mother and Father were in the front room watching television.

"Thirty-five years old," Mother said, "and he doesn't know enough to come in out of the rain."

"I know enough," I said. "I just don't care anymore."

"Oh pfft," she said.

I felt very intense in an empty kind of way. I more or less understood that something was going to happen. I got a change of clothes and walked through the house to the bathroom. I drew water for a bath and was undressing when it started. I had the sensation that I was in the presence of the Devil again. It was so fleeting I almost didn't catch it.

Instinctively I looked over my shoulder and there He was, like in a hallucination. He was standing inside the closed door, His arms folded across His chest, looking at me with a level gaze. Without taking my eyes from His I put my right hand on the edge of the cool bathtub to make sure I didn't go off. When He spoke it was very matter-of-factly.

"The time is come," He said.

The moment He spoke I felt myself go off. I saw a deep gorge with a tightrope stretched across it. I saw myself walking on the tightrope and I understood I was going to fall. Then I saw the inside of the bathroom door and the medicine cabinet beside the door and the face bowl. Then I saw the gorge again. In the bottom of the gorge there was a square pit. I wanted to cling to the rope with my arms and legs but I knew it wouldn't do any good because I was going to fall no matter what. In the bathroom I sat down on the floor and put my arm over the edge of the tub. I tried to look at all the things in the bathroom and not see the gorge anymore or the pit but I kept seeing them and I understood that no matter how long I tried to hold on I was going down. It was very frightening to be that sure of what was going to happen.

The thought occurred to me that it would be easier to just let go and get it over with. In that instant I felt myself plummeting downward through the darkness. Then I was at the bottom of the pit. I'd landed on my feet. I was standing there looking around. It was gloomy but there was enough light to see by. A ramp led up one side of the pit to a tunnel opening. There was straw scattered over the ramp as if a hay wagon had gone up it not long before. I thought: Others have made the journey before me. I can do it too. I walked up the ramp toward the tunnel but just before I reached it two great medieval doors appeared and swung closed before me. I understood there was something more I could do if I persisted but I didn't want to. I was tired. I began seeing the things in the bathroom then and I felt the fear recede. My legs were cramping and I felt worn out.

I took my bath and afterwards went out to the shack where the typewriter is set up. There were the books stacked up against the walls and the piles of old newspapers and magazines. There was the dirt on the floor and the paper bags full of trash. There was the broken radio and the half-finished manuscripts and the files I hadn't opened in months. I didn't know what to do. I picked up a book but I was too restless to read. I thought about going for a walk but I was too weary. I decided to go back in the house and go to bed.

All night I tossed and turned.

MONDAY 2 JANUARY. Every day I watch how little and frail my father is becoming. A wisp of gray hair falls over his brow ever so lightly. In the morning he can't find his trousers and afterwards he forgets how to put on his shoes. This morning when Mother got up she found Father in the kitchen standing first on one leg then the other, trying to tie his shoelaces. He kept falling against the drain board.

"Sit down, Henry," Mother said. "Then tie your laces."

Father looked at her steadily for a moment, then sat down.

"It's that goddamm plaster in my bedroom," he said. "It keeps falling off the ceiling and I can't remember a goddamm thing."

This evening while Mother and I watched television Father went slowly from room to room, sometimes pausing as if he'd had a thought. Wandering into the living room he picked up his ashtray and blew the ash out all over the carpet.

Mother put her face to her hands and giggled.

"Old devil-may-care," she said.

Later Mother said to me: "Seriously, Bradley, just look at that old jacket your father's got on. A bandit wouldn't wear it. Now you've got to speak to your father. You tell him you'll go with him when he gets a new suit. I've been trying to get him to buy a suit for ten years. He'll do it if you go with him. And you get one too, and a pair of shoes. I'll give you the money. What's going to happen when your father dies? Neither one of you will have a decent suit. You know all those brothers and sisters of his are going to start dying too and when they do we won't have any clothes while they'll all be dolled up like Aster's pony. You know how those Catholic funerals are. You have to spend a lot of money or you'll go straight to hell."

Mother believes that because Father is absent-minded that he's sick. He'll probably outlive Mother, but in the meantime he keeps her on edge. He throws his cigarette butts in the wastebasket under the kitchen sink and sets the cupboards on fire. Or he turns on the gas in the oven but forgets to touch a match to it. He takes a morning stroll to the corner-it's such a swell day," he says-then forgets where he lives.

This morning he was standing alone in the dining room, his shoulders hunched up against the cold.

"Father," I said, "do you want me to get your sweater?"

I watched his face light up. "Oh, sure, Son."

My father's hand is the first memory I have of life. Large, solid, hairy, it led me up the street we lived one dark windy afternoon to the top of a hill where we looked down the back slope and watched the trash blowing across the empty lots. When I recall that scene a sense of ineluctable aloneness comes over me.

I remember how Father would hold me on his lap and recite little love poems and how I would cry.

"Henry," Mother would say. "Now don't tease the child."

"I'm just telling him how much I love him," my father would say, and he would laugh softly with his deep voice and my heart would break.

Twenty years passed before I began to forgive him for-for what, precisely? And after that it took ten years more for the forgiving to play itself out. Nowadays, when I'm standing at a window perhaps, or loafing under the apricot tree, Father appears in my arms like a wraith. He's all shriveled and dried out and light as a piece of paper. I hold him very carefully, just as I would a newborn babe, and my heart warms up.

TUESDAY 3 JANUARY. Last night I dreamed I was on the floor of the ocean. There were stony-faced men there encrusted with salt. They performed a ritual dance where they churned up the water dangerously.

After breakfast I drove across town and checked into the Veteran's Hospital to have a hernia repaired. I've looked forward to being here. It would be a relief, I thought, to be among strangers, among people who are of no consequence to me, people I don't have to listen to or talk to. I could say things carelessly here, off the top of my head, and I wouldn't have to be afraid that I'd be thoroughly understood. My every word would not be weighted with a lifetime of intimacy. But how can I relax in a place like this? In the bed next to me a foot is rotting off, television sets and transistor radios are playing one against the other, men are moaning with tubes down their throats and needles in their arms, there's no air and I feel a cold coming on.

This afternoon there was a pleasant diversion. A good looking psychologist took me to her office where I answered some printed questions. The trick was to answer immediately without reflection. Right up my alley. I said that men are hairy and that women are rosy. I said the worst thing a woman can do is forget. I said that's the worst thing a man can do too, which surprised me even as I wrote it down. I said homosexuals are crazy. I said I wanted my father with me.

I asked the psychologist if she had found anything interesting. She looked at my paper smiling. She said: You seem to be unwilling to commit yourself to either loving or hating."

WEDNESDAY 4 JANUARY. The sniffles have become a real cold and surgery's been postponed a week. I passed the day thumbing through old magazines and reading Jung.

THURSDAY 5 JANUARY. Checked out of the hospital this morning with a seven day pass and went home. On the news this evening they ran some combat film from Vietnam . It made me realize that for several days I hadn't thought about how I'm planning to go there.

It's odd about the road work. Once I made the decision to go to Vietnam I began to have recurring daydreams about how when I get there that sooner or later I'll have to run for my life. I imagine myself riding in a jeep that's blown up by a mine. The Viet Cong rush out from the jungle and nothing will save me but my legs. Or I'm living with a lady in Saigon and she deceives me into the hands of the terrorists. There's a tortuous chase through back alleys until I collapse and they kill me. I feel the bayonets being shoved through my back and poking out my chest. They take my breath away. Or I'm run down like an animal and stupid with exhaustion I look on calmly while they chop off my head, after which I feel a pleasant sense of weightlessness.

One night recently I dreamed a bullet drilled a hole through my head, entering on the right and coming out the left temple. I sat cross legged on the ground while my brains came out of my head like sausage from a grinder. A soldier appeared and asked if the wound hurt. "No," I said. "Not much."

Out in the shack reading Jung, I copy out these lines: "It is not so much a question of a 'death instinct' as that 'other' instinct which signifies spiritual life. . . ."

FRIDAY 6 JANUARY. Last night I dreamed I was serving with the South Vietnamese army. One morning on patrol we were ambushed and I was taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. I was led to a village in the jungle. There, an unpaved square was bordered by shops and houses with thatched roofs. There was a bandstand in the center of the square overgrown with blooming tropical vines. I believed I was going to be executed. I was willing to tell them anything to keep from being shot. Then I was introduced to the village elder who had white hair and was very kind. He gave me the freedom of his village. Nothing was demanded of me. I couldn't understand it.

I came to know the village tradesmen. There was a printer on the square who had a one-room shop with a thatched roof. He was a big hearty dark-complected man. He printed from square wooden blocks onto thick parchments. He loved his work. I thought about how good it would be to hold those thick pulpy pages in my own hands. One morning I went to him to ask for work. I found him standing in his doorway holding a freshly printed sheaf of manuscript pages. His face was upturned and the sun was beaming down on it. He accepted me as his assistant and my heart swelled with gratitude. I realized I had found a place for myself and that I would never leave the village. I turned then and saw that the village square was flooded with a radiant sunshine.

A dull gray morning. Mooney dropped by. We sat on the back steps and talked about going to Vietnam and getting work there. We talked about how longshoring was going to be slow for a couple months and about how we are going to make enough money to get us by until it picks up again. When Mooney left I walked to the market to read the book reviews in the magazines. I passed three pretty Negro girls and when they looked at me I became conscious of how I haven't shaved for days and how I need a haircut. I was conscious of the sewn places on my jacket and that my pants aren't really clean. It surprises me, the longer I stay in south Los Angeles , how pretty the Negro girls are becoming.

SATURDAY 7 JANUARY. A bright pretty morning. Worked comfortably at the typewriter until supper time, all the while in the back of my mind wondering where I'll be this time next month, wondering what I'll be doing. I'm setting out to see the world and make my fortune, just like they did in the old days. I know I'm past the age when these things are normally taken care of, but I'm a slow starter.

In the meantime I'm living off my parents' pension checks. I don't feel guilty but I do feel ashamed. I have no money and no job and no automobile. In some peculiar way I'm so weary I don't care about being ashamed. The last three years weigh so heavily on me I hardly have the strength to move my body. My head is clearer than it was a few months ago but it's not right yet. Something very heavy is still pulling me down, weighing on me.

In my daydreams I see myself attached to a South Vietnamese regiment, or traveling with Special Forces teams in South and Central America . I'm writing for a news service and doing a book at the same time. But what's more likely to happen is that after the surgery I'll go to Las Vegas and drive a cab and try my hand at the dice tables again. I'll have so little to lose I might win. With five hundred, a thousand dollars in my pocket life would start humming again. In spite of appearances, in spite of all the trouble I'm having getting myself started again, I feel a gathering process going on inside me. I feel threads of my experience being pulled in from every quarter and wound on secret spindles. Inside me in places that are still dark I sense that forces are building, that expeditions are being provisioned. Before me as far as I can see the life appears clear of obstacles, empty, silent, ready at a moment's notice to receive into itself anything-anything at all.

SUNDAY 8 JANUARY. Dreamed I was in the back yard filling in a gopher hole when bugs started swarming out of it. I stomped my foot at the hole. The bugs grew to the size of rats and welled up out of the hole. A filthy duck-billed armadillo scurried out, then fat lizards and insects stuffed with food until they were the size of swollen cats. The thought of squashing one of them disgusted me. A dark woman dressed as a gypsy appeared and looked down into the hole. The insects and animals disappeared. I was very relieved but the woman wouldn't let well enough alone. She shoved the garden hose down the hole and turned on the water full force. The bottom of the hole fell out with a whoosh and became a crater fifteen feet across. In the bottom of the crater was an opening to a tunnel which led off toward the west. The opening was rectangular and shored up with timbers. It was large enough to walk into and I thought about exploring it, but the idea slipped my mind.

A bright morning full of sunshine. Wrote a little, gardened a little, went for a walk, getting through the day as best I could, waiting to return to the hospital.

Mother is growing steadily weaker. She has barely enough strength to go to the market and cook our meals. In the morning she does a little housework but in the afternoon she just lies on the couch in the living room. The stuffing is coming out of the couch so she's put a bedspread over it. She lays her face on a green plastic pillow and covers herself with a blanket I haven't seen since my childhood. She watches television or reads a bit, but mostly she naps. A moment ago when I went in the house and saw her on the couch I thought about how nice it would be to buy her a big soft pillow and a brightly colored lap rug. It's a wondrous thing how deep you can go into a man's psyche and still find the bonds that tie him to his mother. What surprises me is that these ties increase with understanding rather than diminish, which is not how I would have thought it to be- if I had thought about it.

After supper, time dragged. In the shack behind grandmother's rocking chair I found a half-bottle of Burgundy and that was a help. I loafed and drank the bottle. It wasn't long until I felt something pressing against my stomach. It was a feeling I'd ad a number of times before. One day last year I found out what it was. It was one of those days when something comes over me, or happens to me, and I can see myself walking on the bottom of the ocean. That day there was a cave on the ocean floor and I was going to explore it when near the entrance I saw a white rock half-buried in the sand. I had an inexplicable urge to dig it up. While I held the rock in my hands it transformed itself into a snake's egg with a leathery shell. Inside the egg I could see the form of an unborn child. My flesh crawled, and I was afraid.

I had thought that business was finished some time ago but occasionally the rock reappears, pressing suddenly against my belly while I'm out walking perhaps, or down on the waterfront while I'm working in a ship's hold and I have to go on with the work as if nothing were happening when all the time the egg with the leathery shell is pressing against my belly and the child is waiting to be born and my heart is pounding with fear and expectation.

MONDAY 9 JANUARY. I was sitting mindlessly on the back steps in the pale sunlight when Joel dropped by smoking his pipe and talking about how well the travel agency is going and saying in so many words that it ought to be very clear after all these years that I don't have much talent for being a writer and that I ought to find a job like everybody else and stick to it and who am I trying to kid anyhow? I always listen quietly when Joel talks about how I am no good as a writer. Afterwards he bought the beer and we talked about how it was when we lived together in Mexico City , and about Vietnam , and finally getting around to telling the old stories about Korea that are already fifteen years dead but are still very important and exciting if nothing's going on in your life.

TUESDAY 10 JANUARY. I'm supposed to return to the hospital tomorrow morning but my throat's getting sore again. If I don't get the hernia repaired I won't be able to go to sea and I won't have any way to get to Vietnam . I won't be able to work as a longshoreman any longer either. So I won't have any money and it could be a very long time before I would be able to begin the journey. After the last three years, I'm suspicious of everything. Out walking when I saw by the headlines that "direct contact" has been made between Hanoi and Washington . Disappointment touched my heart. At the library I read something by Kazin: "The age has finally turned all our dreams into books." I had a lot to say about that when I first read it but now I don't understand what it means. Back at the house again I went out to the shack and sat down to the typewriter but my mind was empty. For three years now, in a certain way, I have been helpless, waiting for something to happen to me. I can't act on my own. I am going to have to be thrown back into life by circumstance and events. I haven't got the will to take the first step myself.

When Mother and Father went to bed I turned off the fires and lay on the couch watching an adventure movie on television. In the movie the hero had returned to his ranch in Texas following the Civil War. His family expected him to pick up where he'd left off but he was no longer satisfied with being merely a rancher. He'd developed a craving for riches during the war, and for power and status and for association with other men who had those things. He'd discovered that it was worth his while to lie and steal and murder to gain his end. There was only one way for him, the path of his ambition, and he was willing to risk everything including his life to follow it. Why should he, the hero no doubt said to himself, why should he commit himself to an adventure whose scope was one bit less broad than that of the multi-millionaire business tycoon, or those curious men who became Senators and Presidents? Fate had given him less than his rightful share of the wealth and position of his society and he was going to dare everything he safely had for the chance to beat out his circumstances, to get everything he could picture in his imagination, in his best daydreams as it were.

I pulled my jacket over my shoulders and watched the movie intently. In my ear a voice repeated again and again: "You have lost your daring.," it said. "You have lost your daring."

WEDNESDAY 11 JANUARY. When I returned to the hospital this morning I expected surgery to take place at the end of the week. When I was told it would happen tomorrow my heart lunged. In the prep room a little Malay wearing a green smock and cap washed and shaved the "field of operation," that is, from my belly to my thigh. He washed my balls with warm soapy water, and with wonderfully great attention it seemed to me. He told me he'd been doing this work for thirty years. There were two wash tubs in the room and every few minutes one nurse or another would pop in to wash her hands. The little Malay, to protect my modesty I suppose, would lay his paw on my parts and pass the time of day with the nurses. He knew every nurse who came in. He had a wonderful way with his hand also and I had to concentrate for all I was worth to not get an erection. When there was no nurse to chat up he talked to me. He couldn't do his work without talking about something else. He didn't stop talking until the moment he stretched up my cock between his thumb and forefinger and began shaving it with a straight-edged razor. His round nut-brown face became set in an expression of such intense and conscious pleasure that it made the sweat run from my armpits.

If something goes wrong tomorrow, I wonder how much of it I'll be able to record? And when I'm old and my life is slipping away from me, how much of that will I be able to get down on paper? I want to be able to feel the necessity for recording my dying just as I do my living but that's the trouble with dying I suppose. You desire less, and then less, until finally you don't want anything at all.

THURSDAY 12 JANUARY. A restless night. This morning I started Schaller's book on the mountain gorilla. The nurse gave me an injection she said would quiet my nerves. Pretty soon I felt so good that I tossed the book onto my bedside table and just lay there in a quiet dope-ecstasy.

At ten o'clock I was wheeled out of the ward and left on a gurney in the hallway outside surgery. I look into the faces that passed to see if anyone was noticing me. My heart was still glowing from the injection. A second patient was rolled up against the wall behind me. He asked what I was going to have. His voice was tense. I wondered if he hadn't gotten his injection. I said mine was a hernia. I asked what his was. He didn't answer. I resented his not answering. He probably was going to have something serious and didn't want to associate closely with someone who was only going to have a hernia. Screw him, I thought. But I wished I was going to have something more important than a hernia. Something better. I heard him speak to a passing doctor. He wanted a glass of water.

"Doc," he said, "I'm afraid my throat's going to close up."

"Nonsense," the doctor said, not even breaking stride.

Faces passed by. When they glanced down at me I tried not to smile. It embarrassed me that I wanted them to notice me. I was wheeled into a room and given a spinal. My hips and legs began to tingle. They grew numb. An arm fell off the gurney and the Negro nurse put it back. My fingers touched something cool and doughy. She said it was my thigh. It was disgusting. The doctors were laughing. They were deciding which stitches to use, they weren't quite sure, and the Chinese or Korean doctor had made a joke. I hoped he wasn't Korean. Who knows what he might have in his heart. I hadn't heard the joke but I wanted to laugh too. My mouth twisted crookedly. The three men appeared and bent over me and the work began.

I'd thought I would be able to feel them working on me and that it wouldn't hurt, but I couldn't feel anything. I'd meant to stay awake while they were doing the work but every once in a while I'd doze off. When I would wake and realize that I'd dozed off I would feel disappointed with myself. The tall Negro nurse stood at my head looking on. She was very attractive. All my parts were spread out under the gaze of a good looking woman but I couldn't feel anything. Then my nose started to itch. I asked the nurse to rub it. She laughed and told me to go to sleep, but she rubbed it. I could think perfectly clearly, more or less, but it took all my strength and concentration to say words. After awhile I felt a tugging sensation, a pulling downward from my sternum to my groin. My flesh was being pulled downward and kneaded together. There was a little pain. I was very careful to not move. Even if I had wanted to move I couldn't have moved but inwardly I was very careful anyhow. Then suddenly the pain welled up. It was like a hillside exploding and I could feel the earth lifting up. I tried to shrink away but I couldn't move. I wanted to groan but I couldn't groan.

In the recovery room the pain was more severe than I'd expected. Some of the others were asking for injections but it was my plan to have all the pain I could get. It went on a long while. I tried to not think of anything but the pain. After awhile it was too much. I couldn't stand it. It made me feel ashamed but I was going to ask for an injection the next time a nurse came in. But before I could ask for it an orderly grabbed my gurney and wheeled me back to the ward and dragged me onto my bed.

In the ward I couldn't think of anything but the pain. I had wanted to think on other matters when the pain was at its worst and to do certain things but all I could do was think about the pain. At the same time I suspected that I could do what I wanted if only I had more will power, a stronger force of character. I thought about how one day I will suffer much greater pain than I was suffering now and that I'd have to bear it maybe very casually but it was no help because the pain I was having now was enough to deaden my spirit, to make me less than what I wanted to be. I felt degraded, as if I were in the hands of an enemy who was treating me contemptuously.

When the lights were turned off I listened to a radio playing softly in the dark. The pain was very bad but I was ashamed to call the nurse. On the radio then I heard the news coming from Vietnam . I listened to the descriptions of the latest fighting, the newest casualty figures. The war became suddenly very real for me. I could almost hear the sound of the guns. I felt it was possible that the fighting would erupt into the ward itself. I lay motionlessly, holding my breath. The pain was excruciating. The fighting was drawing closer. I couldn't quite hear it but I could feel it approaching. I could feel the tremors in the building. Then suddenly it exploded into the ward. I felt the shock of the high explosive. I saw soldiers being blown down. It was awful. Tears filled my eyes. War was the same as it had been in Korea , but I had changed. War was no good any longer. No good. I saw the old pictures again-the torn and blasted mountaintops, the scorched forests and men charred black and curled up like burnt bacon. I felt high-explosive blasting through the ward, the mortars blasting, artillery blasting, recoilless rifles blasting, hand grenades blasting. Ferocious blasts of air exploded against my eyeballs, the fiery blasting force of sound blown apart, sound itself blasting through eardrums and heads and blasting bones and splitting rock and the thin little screams of flying fragmentation.

A middle-aged nurse with popped eyes appeared at the side of my bed. "How do you feel?", she asked.

"Fine," I said.

"Do you feel any pain yet?"

"Some."

"Do you want a hypo?, she asked. "It'll help you sleep."

"Whatever's usual," I said.

FRIDAY 13 JANUARY. Slept poorly. This morning I read a little Schaller then loafed the rest of the day. At lights-out I got an injection to help me sleep. A warm glow seeped into my breast. I thought about how I had wasted the day. And then I saw a naked woman appear in the dark. She was lying on a white metal table on her back. She was beautiful. I felt confused and didn't know where I was. I turned a little on my side. It was difficult in the darkened ward to see the normal things. Then I saw the woman again. I saw a slice of green melon appear on the white metal table beside her. I saw myself get out of bed and circle the table where the woman was lying. I looked at her appraisingly. I looked like an animal circling its prey. Then the pale green melon merged into the woman and the woman merged into the melon. A spoon appeared in my hand and I watched myself eat the cool delicious flesh of the beautiful woman who was a melon but who was a woman also. It was engrossing and very beautiful seeing it but it was disturbing too. I put my hand on the metal cabinet beside the bed. I rubbed my hands over the blanket and the sheets covering me. I wanted to turn on my side but it was too painful. I picked up Schaller's book on mountain gorillas and handled it. I kept touching all the things around me in the dark that were real until I stopped seeing the melon woman.

SATURDAY 14 JANUARY. A very long restless night. After breakfast I caught up on the last two days of the journal then spent the rest of the day watching television and napping. This evening I was disappointed with my lack of discipline. No directed thinking, nothing written, distracted by other patients, made lazy by the affects of the nightly injections.

SUNDAY 15 JANUARY. Dreamed I was standing at the edge of the excavation at a huge copper mine. Square shafts appeared in the bottom of the excavation, then deep crevices and suddenly the bottom fell out of everything.

This morning when I first opened my eyes I happened to glance out a window facing east and so help me God into a "rosy fingered dawn."

I was reading comfortably in Schaller when a frocked minister stopped at the foot of the bed and asked if I were not a Protestant? I didn't want to be bothered with that sort of thing, not by someone who works for the Veteran's Administration anyhow, but I didn't want to make the man feel badly either so we had a little chat. By evening I was very restless. I had a headache and a bad stomach. I ate a laxative but it didn't work. When I weighed myself I'd lost six pounds.

MONDAY 16 JANUARY. Dreamed I had a white rat that loved me very much. It nuzzled me with its nose and pressed its face to mine. I loved the rat in return but one day I noticed that its brow line was ragged and unattractive, and that it had the mange. Then I didn't want it anymore.

There's been a lot of dreaming since the surgery but I've been to lazy to record most of it. Still, I've got to stop being so puritanical about the journal. It's perfectly normal to do less work one day and more the next. Why do I feel so guilty about the journal? So obligated? "The courage to be (I'm reading Tillich) for the Stoic is the courage to affirm oneself in spite of fate and death, but it is not the courage to affirm oneself in spite of sin and guilt. It could not have been different: for the courage to face one's own guilt leads to the question of salvation instead of renunciation."

Salvation. When I read that word I was stunned. Salvation-the coming to grips with your entire self in one fell swoop, one terrible plunge into the blackness of your own heart, into the ancient archive where all the lies of your lifetime are stored up on membranous little sheets of film, those stories that will tell the tale that has got to be told when at last I have the will to spit it out. I've known in my heart for a long time that before I'm saved I will have to surrender. But surrender to what? Sometimes it seems I understand. But what does it really mean to surrender? And how can I surrender to something I can't put my finger on? All I know is that until I give in to whatever it is I need to give in to that I won't be able to make my own gestures. I won't be able to think my own thoughts or admit to the beds my desires long to lie down in. When I think of the times I've wanted to surrender to God it makes my head spin. But God is nothing to me, aside from my desire for Him. I would be ashamed to fall to my knees before my own longing. And what does it mean anyhow when a man longs for something he hasn't been able to believe exists. But oh how I long for an easeful going under-not for an end but for a new beginning. I want a new life. I'm ashamed and disgusted with the one I have. I want literally to be reborn. I want to wipe the slate clean with a perfect acceptance. Yet somehow I can't accept- whatever it is, whatever I was. If I could accept-then I would be like the wolf at night when it turns its head to glance at the moon. I would be like the moon going down and the sun coming up. I say I can't put my finger on what it is that I've got to surrender to but that isn't the truth. I know in my heart what it is and where it lies in wait. One day if I'm ever going to save my life I am going to have to give myself up to it. I will have to close my eyes and breathe out and ease into the edge of that blackness that has no end. But what good are images like that? I sit here on my bed offended by what I see, offended by what I smell, by what I overhear, offended by my own body, picking at my toenails like an ape.

Flaubert wrote that the one quality common to all genius is vitality and I believe it. I believe it. It's not good when a man's vitality is insufficient to meet his ambitions.

Jay Cluney dropped by this evening. He's still the same tall narrow boy with the same inhibited narrow walk. The same red curly beard, the same brown eyes flecked with red. Jay's a painter, a writer, a dabbler in cocaine and marriage. It's difficult to believe he's not turned twenty-two yet. He wanted to talk about drugs tonight, about LSD and fantasy. He made me angry. I don't like his habit of belittling consciousness in favor of non-rational experience. I try to impress upon him that it's not necessary. And what's this interest he has now for the psychedelic drugs? Those things are for the triflers, for the faint at heart. A man has got to stand on his own two feet and open his mind like a can of sardines. We don't need anything more once we have found out what our desires really are.

Once I got started tonight it didn't matter what Jay might have wanted to say. I was going to contradict him. Everyone is wrong about everything anyhow. And then Jay's so easy to argue down. He doesn't argue. He frustrated me by allowing me to see my own coarseness, the rigidity of my stance, but I couldn't quit it. I found myself boring in on him as if I were under attack, as if my best defense against him were an offense. I acted as if I were being undermined, as if I had no choice but to beat back the enemy or go under.

"If you go with it," I recall Jay saying, "then there's no danger in LSD. But you have to go with it."

"Yeah."

"It's like life," he said.

When it was time for lights-out I walked him to the elevator. I couldn't stand up straight and I had to walk very slowly.

"What's the matter?," Jay asked. "Got a stitch in your side?"

"Yeah," I said. "A seven gash in my belly and I've got a stitch in my side."

I meant it for a joke but I was too hearty or something and I could see that he was embarrassed for me. The elevator doors opened and Jay stepped inside. We didn't look at each other's eyes again and the doors closed and I walked very slowly back to my bed.

TUESDAY 17 JANUARY. Dreamed last night about huge trench mortars the size of office buildings. The mortars were odd in that when they fired they didn't eject a shell but imploded, blasting out their own insides. After one of the mortars fired I saw a flower seed fall down the massive tube and bounce around on the bottom.

After breakfast I went downstairs to the clothing room and put on my street clothes. I sat on a bench in front of the hospital in the pale sunlight and waited for Mother and Father to drive up. The broad green lawns were still wet from the night. I watched the sparrows and a blackbird hopping in the wet grass among the yellow dandelions. A nurse in a white uniform smiled and said good morning as she walked past.

"Good morning," I said.

I thought about how weak I felt. I thought about how satisfied I was too and about how I had taken a significant step toward getting to Vietnam . I sat there in the cool pale air feeling very weak and very satisfied.

WEDNESDAY 18 JANUARY. Dreamed all night but made no notes. Sometimes it doesn't seem worthwhile to keep this record. Sometimes it disgusts me to think I have to sit down every day and write out what I did the day before. Sometimes it's so boring it makes me sick, or I fall asleep with my head on the typewriter. Writing down dreams is the worst, but I feel the obligation. At first it's interesting to be able to recall your dreams but after awhile it's boring and disgusting. The most fantastic dreams become as boring as any idle conversation or any of the other things that interest other people but that don't interest me any longer and are so boring I can't bear to hear about them.

And yet, as I mull over what I dreamed last night, I recall eating sandwiches stuffed with shit that somebody gave me as a joke. Afterwards I was given an assignment to murder someone-I don't know who. Then I raped a woman. Those dreams sound like they should be interesting but they just make me tired.

This afternoon I was in the kitchen looking out the window when Mother came in and tugged at my sleeve. Pulling me into a corner she giggled so that I could hardly understand what she was whispering.

"It's your father," she said, giggling crazily. "He took me in his bedroom a few minutes ago and showed me his trousers all laid out neatly on the bed. I couldn't figure out what he wanted me to look at. Then I saw that he'd pulled one pants leg down inside the other and lined up the cuffs at the bottom so they were perfectly even. We both just stood there looking at his pants like that like we were a couple of idiots."

Mother was giggling so that she could hardly go on.

"And then your father said to me. . . he said:

'Now you tell me, just how the hell am I going to hang up my pants when they're like that?'"

I thought it was a pretty good story but Mother was completely breaking up over it and holding on to me to keep from falling down.

THURSDAY 19 JANUARY. Dreamed I was back in the mountains in Korea . It was night and I was standing on a ridge line in a broken forest when in front of me a terrible wail came out of a hole in the ground. The sound of it made my flesh crawl. The scene changed and I was here in the living room of my parents' house. Mother and Father were sitting in their favorite chairs staring straight before them with unblinking eyes. They were stiff and there was something weird about them. There was something quite wrong but I couldn't figure out what it was. Something was in the air. I realized then that whatever it was, it was in the kitchen. There was a presence in the kitchen. I understood that it was alive, but was invisible to the human eye. It was a terror.

When I woke from the dream it was still dark. I needed to urinate but I was afraid to get out of bed. I was afraid that what had been in my dream had spilled over into my awake life and that it was dangerous. After awhile I got up and walked through the house to the bathroom and when I was in bed again I was still afraid. I wasn't going to be able to escape from it until it was finished. From where I was in bed I couldn't see out to the kitchen. I sat up and with my mind's eye I looked until I could see the kitchen door from where I was. I looked at it very steadily. After a moment the blood began to drain from my head. My arms and legs stiffened. Then I saw myself get out of bed and walk through the house toward the kitchen door. I was afraid. I watched myself open the door. I couldn't see well in the dark but I knew the presence was there. I was facing it. I was very afraid but I thought I'd be alright if I didn't panic and if I stayed alert. I watched for as long as I could but after awhile I gave up. I didn't have enough energy to persist against the fear.

After lunch I drove to the hospital to have the stitches removed from my belly. When I lay down on the table the sweat was pouring out of me and my hands were trembling. I didn't understand at first what was going on. Then I remembered the other hospital that other afternoon fifteen years ago. I was sitting up in a wheelchair that time and Doctor Silverman was doing the work. He was removing three dozen stitches from the hand and a couple dozen more from the ankle. I couldn't bear for him to touch the hand. My entire body trembled. My eyes twitched. It didn't hurt, but I couldn't bear it.

"Don't be embarrassed," Doctor Silverman said.

"It's only the stupid ones that it doesn't bother.

It shows you've got some intelligence."

Today the stitches were out before I knew what was happening. Walking back to the car I had to stop twice to rest.

After supper I was reading Edmund Wilson:

" Lincoln created himself as a poetic figure, and he thus imposed himself on the nation." He created himself. Those three words stuck in my mind. Ideas began lighting up in my brain like matches struck in the night. What's been the matter with me, I wondered? Everyday I sit in this shack stewing and sputtering, daydreaming about going to Vietnam or Vienna, to Africa, Guatemala, Peru or any place at all so long as it's on the other side of the earth but in the meantime of course not going anywhere, not doing anything, telling myself that if only I can get across an ocean I can become a journalist, that if I can get south of the border there will be plenty to write about there, if I can get to the Congo, Tierra del Fuego that fame and fortune will be waiting for me and all the while I sit indolently in South Los Angeles amid the ruins of the most striking and really wonderful riot this nation has experienced in modern times. So what am I doing just sitting here, I thought? I can start my real work right here, right where I am and with what I've already got.

I became intensely excited about the idea of doing something on Watts . My work was cut out for me, no doubt about it. It had been for months but I couldn't see the forest for the trees. I saw it now, I thought, and I half ran to the liquor store on the corner that had been burned down during the riot but is rebuilt bigger and more flashy then ever by its Jewish owner and bought a copy of the Sentinel, the Negro weekly. I thumbed through the paper looking for one lead, just one hint, anything at all that would get me started, that would set me running but there was nothing but the usual stories of businessmen making good and the women's clubs and the shootings. I wasn't half finished with the paper before my eyelids were closing and I was yawning. I dropped the paper in the gutter and walked home.

FRIDAY 20 JANUARY. Slept well but no matter, this morning I was tired and downhearted. Drove the folks to the market and thumbed through the magazines. Read several pieces on the tactical situation of the American military in Vietnam . It looks hopeless for the Americans. This afternoon I read a piece on Charles Pierce: "Pierce was a favorite son. He had an eminent father who attended to his early instruction and guided his study; he was subjected to rigorous intellectual discipline and was in early association with famous people who treated him like an adult; his father provided him with a secure position that left plenty of time for philosophy. As a result he began life-as John Stuart Mill put his own case-he began life twenty years before his contemporaries."

I thought about my own father. Then I thought about how I am beginning my own life twenty years behind my contemporaries. What a waste of time there's been. What a sorrowful thing it is to look back and see that I have lived my life the way I have and that now there are disciplines I will never have time to deal with seriously. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm afraid it's true. I'm afraid that all I am going to be able to do is to be persistent, examine my own experience, my life as if it were a case study of a stranger. Maybe I'll be able to restore to some few others parts of their own lives that they brush aside absentmindedly, like dandruff from their collars. I tell myself that it's not the quality of the data that is significant, but the care with which it's examined.

SATURDAY 21 JANUARY. Puttered around the shack all day. The air was bright and chilly. Toward supper time I grew apprehensive. I didn't know why. When it was time to watch the news on television my heart was pounding. I realized that I was afraid to hear that the fighting was going well and that the war would be over before I could get there but I needn't have worried. This war is like a running sore. My chances for getting to it are very good. Still, by the time the news was over my excitement was finished too and I was sitting in the same room breathing the same air I breathe every evening. I went out back to the shack. I read Wilson on Justice Holmes. While I read I felt disgusted. "I think (Holmes wrote) that the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal ideal of no validity outside the jurisdiction... and I understand by human rights what a given crowd will fight for successfully."

I watched a late movie on television. It was a costume melodrama. A man was run through with a foil and I felt myself flinch. Another man was shot down with bullets. I didn't like seeing it. When I was twenty I was able to watch real men being killed without such displays of emotion. What's happening to me?

SUNDAY 22 JANUARY. At daybreak I was still awake. I was thinking about how if I can get to Saigon and get myself attached to a South Vietnam regiment or division command that I can take the part of the Vietnamese against the Americans. I can take the first step toward making a place for myself, as father used to put it, in high society.

Tonight while Mother and Father were in the living room watching the roller derby I sat in the kitchen with the door shut between us reading Morgan on Nietzsche. Nietzche encourages me. He charges me with enthusiasm. He makes me want more than any other writer makes me want. ". . . he who demands and attains great things from himself must feel himself very remote from those who do not do that-this distance is interpreted by these others as opinion about self, but the former knows it only as perpetual work, war, victory, by day and night: of all that, the others know nothing. They talk so stupidly about pride."

MONDAY 23 JANUARY. Dreamed I was a prisoner in a Vietnamese palace. There were other prisoners too and I was in command of them. There was no one in the palace except we prisoners. There were no guards. Yet once before we had tried to escape and had failed. That was before I was in command, however. Now we planned a second escape attempt. We were to make a break for it at twelve noon . I hurried through the palace from room to room urging the men on in their preparations. The work had to be completed by noon or our plans would go to smash. All the responsibility was on my shoulders. I wanted desperately to escape but the others didn't seem to care so much. I couldn't make them understand that if they didn't hurry, the hour would come and go and we would still be prisoners. I couldn't impress upon the others the gravity of the situation. Then it was too late. A crowd of very handsome and fashionable people entered the palace and started up the marble staircase toward where we were pretending to be working. The women were tall and elegantly gowned. Their jewels sparkled brilliantly. As I watched them climb the marble stairs I thought about how much I wanted to be among them rather than among those I did live with and how I too wanted to live in a palace as a free man. Then I realized what I was thinking, what I was admitting to, and I felt apprehensive. I understood that if I gave in to that desire that I would lose more than I would gain. I tried to figure out what it was that I would lose but before I could figure it out, I gave in. I joined with the crowd that was so elegant and rich and gracious. I felt at home with them immediately. I knew I would never again want to escape. Not ever again would I have to suffer the anguish and the desperation of needing to escape and of not being able to.

First thing this morning I went out to the shack and did the journal, as I always do. Tried to review the notes I made yesterday on Nietzsche but my brain wouldn't stand for it. Read in a couple books on guerrilla warfare. I thought about those people I meet who talk so enthusiastically about insurrection and armed revolution. I always want to know who it is, in particular, they want to kill first, and if it happens to be me or someone I know then I'm not very much in favor of it. The radical however always promises you he is going to kill somebody else, somebody neither of you likes.

Browsed in a travel book on the Orient. It excited me. I paced back and forth in the shack. I told myself that I've got to get a ship for Vietnam or someplace else in Southeast Asia . I've got to get in touch with everyone I know who might be able to help me. If I can't get a ship soon, I'll have to do something different. But I have got to do something. I could do a travel book on America like Steinbeck did except that my book would be a sort of frog's eye view of the country because I wouldn't have a car or any money or a reputation or fixed ideas or a nice dog. Or I could do the Indian reservations, walk across them with a sleeping bag from one end of the country to the other. But those are old ideas. I've considered them a hundred times.

Mother expected guests today and cooked a big Sunday dinner but no one came. So we ate in the kitchen just as we do on weekday nights. Father and I sat at the little table and Mother sat at the drain board beside the sink. Father and I ate absentmindedly, without speaking.

"I'm glad you two are so enthusiastic about your dinner," Mother said.

I helped myself to another spoonful of turkey dressing. "Oh, it's really good, Mother," I said. "I always have like cooked bread."

I thought Father was going to kill himself laughing. His head actually turned red. I hadn't thought he would even get it. Mother and I watched him apprehensively, then the crises passed.

Waited all day to listen to the six o'clock news. There's been a truce in the fighting while the Vietnamese celebrated the Tet holidays. Tet was over today and the fighting should have started up again. There's also been talk of extending the truce. Everything is up in the air. But the news was good. The fighting is picking up where it left off and the worst is now expected. I breathed a sigh of relief and then I was suddenly, senselessly excited. I had to grab the arms of my chair to keep from falling over. My blood simmered. On some high level equal amounts of anxiety and excitement came together. The emotion was very intense. I had no outlet for it. I didn't know what to do. Warning signals flashed behind my eyes. My skin prickled and the blood drained from my head. For a moment I was afraid I was going to lose consciousness or maybe do something that would embarrass me.

I drew water for a hot bath. It was just what the doctor ordered. Immersed in the hot water, my eyes closed, I now felt a sense of perfect well-being. In spite of the circumstances of my birth, I thought, in spite of the bad luck, the short-comings of my family, my own failings of character, the opportunities I have missed because I haven't been brave enough and because I haven't tried hard enough, I wouldn't trade my life for that of any other man. To have been under-privileged is nothing when you know in your heart that you're fortunate and that you've got the one life that's suited to you. My life, for what it's worth, is in my own two hands. There are times when I understand that even the air I breathe is sweeter than what my neighbor breathes. I feel compassion at moments like these for every man who isn't me simply because he isn't, and I wouldn't trade my future for that of any other man alive.

After dark I was sitting in the kitchen with the door closed wondering what I will write about if I do get to Saigon . The fighting itself isn't important to me any longer. I'm not really interested in the war either. I want to go on examining my own life in new, fresh circumstances. I want to do something for all the others at the same time. I want to tell the tale of one man only but that one returning to society and contending. I need something to put my shoulder against, a partner in life so to speak. That's why I'm hanging on to the idea of Viet Nam with so much erratic excitement. If I can get there there's a chance I'll be caught up in something so powerful I won't be able to turn away from it and down into myself again. I may become a part of events that will pull me back once again into ordinary life.

When Mother and Father went to bed I watched an old movie on television about the American air force in World War Two. What a tremendous fascination there is in the mind of the public with stories about that war. That's not true about the Korean war. No writer appeared who could create out of that war the necessary romance. It was more difficult with Korea because the issues weren't clear cut for Americans and because there the problem of what evil is didn't manifest itself forcefully. It was an ordinary, everyday little war. I should have been able to do something with it. I tried but I couldn't. Now I'm getting another chance. Maybe I can make Vietnam my war. Maybe I can create a real war out of whatever is going on over there.

TUESDAY 24 JANUARY. It was a lovely morning. Chilled but full of sunshine. Typed busily all day. Toward evening I began to feel the anxiety. I watched the news from Vietnam and thought about how when I get to Saigon my job will be to make the city come alive. I'll give life to the Americans who are there and I might even give some life to the fighting. I know how war is and I know it's not coming across on the television screen or in the newspapers. I watch the newsreels and read the correspondents and listen to the politicians and none of them know how to transmit the sense of how it is when you're there. They don't have a feel for the texture of the thing. I want to be able to tell others what it is that's in the air when a man walks along a street in Saigon . I want to give readers a sense of how the women smell at three in the morning and how it is in the bars and alleys. Why doesn't someone tell me whether the floors in the temples are made of wood or are they stone? How does it feel to be kneeling in an open Buddhist temple with the afternoon breeze moving through it? I want to know how it is to be in the jungle at dawn, to hear it dripping. But more than that I suppose I want to know how it will feel now that I'm no longer a boy to hear the bullets rush and how, precisely, now that I have grown afraid, precisely how it feels when the earth blows up underneath me. I want to watch how my dreams change when I put myself into danger and find out, now that I'm growing conscious again, where my necessities are. I believe others will be interested in those things too.

WEDNESDAY 25 JANUARY. Dreamed that Pamela and I were in the yard behind my parent's house digging in the garden. Most of the garden was dead. Here and there a few wilted blooms hung down. Only one plant was flowering. The blooms were disgusting. The flowers were not blooming from the ends of green stems but out of other sickly looking blooms. Pamela dug up a life-sized sculpture of a woman in welded metal. The woman was crippled and doubled over. Then I dug up the roots of a fig tree. It was the tree I had chopped down for mother when I was a boy. The roots had been in the earth all that time but they weren't dead. They were a rich green and were budding out all over. In the dream a sense of well being came over me.

When I woke I felt dejected. I heard myself say out loud: "You should not promise a woman like Pamela that you will marry her because if you don't keep your word it will break her heart and she will become old before her time." When I realized what I had said, sitting there wide awake on the bed, I didn't understand what it was all about. I haven't spoken to Pamela in months.

Up at six-fifteen with the idea of going to work. Drove to Redondo Beach for Mooney and we went together to the waterfront in San Pedro. It's too soon for me to start longshoring again but if the marine clerks have any extra work I can do that easily enough. This morning there was nothing. Last month there was still work but from what the men say in the hall it's over now for the winter. On the way back to Mooney's I pulled into a gas station.

"Well, well," Mooney said. "I remember this place. I was going to knock it over last year, but the guy spotted me."

I laughed until I was afraid I was going to rip open the incision. I laugh a lot when I'm with Mooney: a neat, trim guy with thick black hair and pale gray eyes behind black horn-rimmed glasses. His wife is slim and blond and has her feet on the ground, which maybe is not entirely the case with Mooney. Fran keeps house for a woman and the woman's son and the two grand daughters. In exchange, she and Mooney have a cottage on the rear of the woman's property. When we got to their place Fran made us coffee.

"I hate the old bitch I work for," Fran said. "I hated her from the first day. She can't stop talking, and she's a vicious gossip. You know what she was telling me this morning? You won't believe this. 'Little Suzy has the prettiest parts,' she said. "Like Suzy is seven years old man, you know?"

"Let's have a look at the kid," Mooney said.

"Shut up," Fran said. "And then the old cunt said: 'But Mary now, Mary's another case."

"Kid's got a big hoop, eh?," Mooney said.

"Shut up, will you," Fran said. "You're as bad as she is. Anyhow, then the old bitch told me:

'Mary's got the biggest clitoris you ever saw.' That's what she told me. And we don't even know each other. Then she said she was thinking of having the child circumcised. That's how bad off the old whore is."

"Sounds like it might help the kid," Mooney said.

"Up yours," Fran said. "I mean, you know what I think about all morning when I'm working over there? How to kill her. I was going to push her off the stone steps that go down the embankment to the street but the other night she told me she'd fallen from the top to the bottom just last month and hadn't hurt herself. What can you do with an old whore like that? It just takes the heart out of you."

In the afternoon I drove back to the harbor and picked up a duplicate copy of my seaman's papers from the Coast Guard. I got my papers a long time ago but never used them. Then I lost them one night at a movie on Hollywood Boulevard when Pamela and I were still together. I think that was the night we saw a James Bond movie and Pamela said, "Look at his legs. Just look at them." But now I have the papers again and they're in my wallet and my wallet is in my pocket. So I've taken the second step. Getting the hernia fixed was the first. The new papers the second. I feel satisfied and good.

I've thought more than once about how the Devil appeared to me and how He said the time has come. I don't know what to make of it but something happened to me that night. I lost a kind of enthusiasm for Vietnam that I can't explain. I still feel excited about the idea of going but little enthusiasm, which is not the same thing. There's something to the excitement I feel that I don't want to have to think about.

Sometimes at night when I'm alone here in the shack I become so solid onto myself that I'm like a stone. With a satisfied blue gaze I watch my luck running out. Diamonds hard as fate fill my mouth.

Behind my eyes an eye opens up and in the half-light I see my ideas gleaming softly, ike silver shelled eggs. Never before could I have felt so neutral, never before could my hopes have been so high. I have found out something about what it must mean to stand on nothing, to have no foothold and to not want one, to trust precisely in life that which is most ephemeral, most unreliable. For three years now I have had one incredible piece of luck after another. Doors and windows have opened up all over my body and I have been able to wander in and out of myself whenever I wanted. Some-times I entered to the side of my kneecap and come out my ear. Other times I went down my throat and opened a window behind my heart. I discovered magic waterfalls, fairy pools that lead to underground seas so vast no man has ever seen their farther shores. I found devil trees that breathe like ordinary persons with wild shocks of white hair and lost species of reptiles that have dog-eyes and the bristled jowls of the Great Hog. I saw caves on the bottom of the ocean where tribes of flaming apes battle in constant warfare and the slimy grotto guarded by bushy spiders where the Devil rests on a stone waiting the chance to fix his eye on you-I know, don't tell me-in this day there's no use going on about the Devil but there's one thing I want to say. He's red, just like they've always said He is. One time I felt the Devil's hand on me and a touch like that I couldn't have thought existed. I saw the dead rising from stony grottos on clouds of brittle blue vapor, saw them watching me with scythes waving out of lopsided eye sockets. I saw the clothes of the dead come to life and move their flaps of cold flesh dreamily and drift with the tide in my direction. I saw mercury moons shine in cold white heat into the encrusted men, those poor souls who were turned into granite and salt in the days when God still walked the earth blowing his hot breath into the hearts of the chosen, the lucky and the unlucky alike. Hammers and scythes are the tools of God, He who never shows His face, hammers and scythes and leopard's claws. The Lord has come, you can tell it far and wide, to love the leopard. Drawing over me the dripping pelt of a freshly slaughtered leopard I sail up through a perfect blue sky into the breast of the sun. I claw at the flaming flesh. I tear my way inside expecting to see the blazing throne of the Man Himself but fiery spiders attack in waves grinning broadly with torches in their teeth and then the inner arms of the sun reach down with hammer and anvil and with every blow a giant burning spider shoots off sparks and burps up for me alone a tiny figure in green jade of the pharaoh Anknahton, the first little man on earth to see he thought the face of God shining out from the roaring flames of the sacred sky disk and you tell me, you tell me . . . . I don't want to see anymore. Not for a while. I don't wan to see it. I want to get a job and a woman and some decent clothes. I need my own place to live and a car and enough pocket money to get drunk at Barney's and pay for a cab home if I'm too drunk to drive. I've never been too drunk to drive yet.

THURSDAY 26 JANUARY. This morning I left the house at dawn to drive to the harbor. The air was cold, the sky streaked with red. There was no work and when I returned to the shack I filled out an application for "afloat employment" with the Military Sea Transport Service. I've had the application for six weeks but haven't filled it out. I don't know why. I even took it with me to the hospital because I knew I'd have plenty of time on my hands but I didn't fill it out there either. Anyhow, today I filled it out and mailed it in.

After supper I went for a walk. Thin misty clouds were blowing across the stars. Rain is predicted. Back in the shack I read some good stories by Nelson Algren. I thought about how if I can get to Saigon I'll find stories like those to write.

FRIDAY 28 JANUARY Last night I dreamed about the fig tree again. A demon was cutting it down. He was cutting off the branches fastidiously, one by one. I advised him to chop it right through the trunk and kill it all at once. The demon nodded and started following my directions. Then I thought, that's not what I want to happen. I want the fig tree to grow and to bear fruit. I want it to be a better tree than it was when I was a child. I couldn't understand why I had given that advice to the demon.

No work again today.

SATURDAY 29 JANUARY. A cold dark morning. Walked to the market for Mother and when I returned home my arms and legs were trembling. I'd thought I'd gotten my strength back but I was wrong. It surprises me that such a simple operation could leave me weak for so long. I've been more than two weeks recovering.

SUNDAY 30 JANUARY. This was a long day. Had to fight off sleep and apathy. After supper I watched a documentary on television about Ho Chi Minh, who appears to be an affectionate little guy, at least in public. In the shack I read a story by Algren titled "Stickman's Laughter." It's about a woman who's the peer of her husband and who still is good to him and loving and who on top of that retains her own self respect. The woman brought tears to my eyes just by existing. After reading the story I grew very restless. I paced back and forth in the shack. I was walking in tiny little circles. My hands were closed into fists. I needed something to do. Frustration was like a storm in me. I swore suddenly that I was not going to read any more books. I was going to do something. I was going to stop making preparations and do it.

The very next moment I picked up a book and opened it with an intensity that was desperate. Malcolm X's Autobiography. My eyes fell on a single line: "Anything I do now I regard as urgent . . . ." My heart caught. Here was a man living as I mean to live, as though the day were here. I felt ashamed. It's very moving to see a strong man expressing his hatreds forcefully. But it's not so easy to express yourself when you have no hatreds, when the problem is somewhere else entirely. I used to envy Black men. They had their work cut out for them. It was right out in the open for them. I've been afraid I won't be able to find the one thing that I should spend my life doing. What a tremendous relief it would be to know what to struggle against, what to put my shoulder to. But mine has been an easy, a favored life. No one has ever harmed me or taken advantage of me. Sometimes, when I'm most desperate, I think about taking up the causes of other men but the idea makes me feel ashamed. As if I would be evading something. I realize my task still lies before me. At times I can see it as if in haze. I catch a glimpse of a form that is so tenuous and fleeting that I can't decide afterward what it was I saw or if I really saw anything.

I was still pacing in circles in the shack. My head was spinning. I didn't know which way to turn. I felt desperate. My thoughts whirled off to China , the great adventures that have been there for the asking since the turn of the century, to Vietnam , to Africa and back again to Vietnam . My body was aching, literally, with the need to start off somewhere, to get on the road-and then suddenly I stopped short. The shack was filling up with jungle foliage. For just an instant I was confused. I looked around to get my bearings. Everything looked normal, the junk, the furniture, the trash. Then I saw the jungle again. It was dark and lush. I could see it growing and moving. Between where I stood in the center of the floor and the wall a couple feet away, dark receding distances appeared. The jungle became absolutely still, but the distances themselves moved in an uncanny way. It was then that the fear started. I thought of going up to the house where the folks were but I didn't want to go out in the dark. I sat down in the chair and looked at the manuscript I had been working on. I could see the typed characters with a perfect clarity but I couldn't read the words. Then I saw a path leading off through the undergrowth. I saw myself set out on it. I came to a flight of stone steps that led down into the earth. I went down the steps warily. At the bottom where the landing should have been there was a square hole. I looked down into it but couldn't see anything. The hole was black, big enough for a man to fall into it. Then a cloud of vapor materialized over my head. I grabbed the vapor with both hands and hurled it down the hole. Steaming smoke billowed up in my face. I realized then that the Devil was waiting for me below. In the shack I started doing deep knee bends. Then I did pushups, then more knee bends. I was very afraid. I tried to stop seeing the jungle and the hole that went down but I kept seeing them. I understood I had another opportunity to face Him but I couldn't make myself make the decision. I told myself desperately that if there were steps leading down, or a ladder or some other regular way where I could hold on that I would do it, but there was nothing to hold on to. I would have to leap down into the darkness, not knowing. I would have to risk everything. I did pushups and deep knee bends until I became dizzy, then I went up into the house and turned on the television. It took about half an hour to stop seeing the jungle and to see the television steadily without the jungle coming out of it.

MONDAY 31 JANUARY. No work at the harbor today. Stopped off at Mooney's for coffee. We were chatting about this and that when I heard myself say that I might not go to Vietnam after all. "Maybe I'll go to Africa ," I heard myself say. "Or South America . I think I might just go wherever I hear the sound of the guns."

After supper I watched newsreels of the fighting in the central highlands. I told myself that I've got to do something more concrete about getting there. I have to make contacts. Have to talk it up. I started rushing around excitedly. I shaved and changed clothes and drove to Hollywood Boulevard where I hurried from one bookstore to another. I thumbed through volume after volume as if I were looking for something in particular.

In Pickwick I heard my name called. It was Marlow. I hadn't seen him in months. His face was a mess. From going home drunk, he said, and falling asleep under his sun lamp. I recalled how Marlow is never without his sun lamp. He's endowed it with a mystique. Three years ago when he and I roomed together and we weren't working and were living on potatoes and rice, even then Marlow had his sun lamp. He'd found it in the alley in someone's trash. It had no stand so he'd tied it to a nail in the wall with a shoelace. He'd lie on the bedspring naked except for his tennis shoes and daydream of how it'd be after he was discovered by a rich fag who'd get him into the movies. He didn't expect his first fag to be a producer, but as he put it, "one fag leads to another."

"To tell the truth," he'd say, "I don't understand why it's taking so long. I know guys who came to Hollywood and got them-selves a fag the first week. I've been here a year now and I haven't had one yet. I just don't understand it. Not with this body, this profile. I mean, with my looks, I think I deserve a fag. Don't you agree?"

"Marlow," I'd say, "Listen to yourself."

"Listen to this," he'd say, jumping off the bedsprings and kicking back and forth through the trash on the floor, the sacks full of garbage. "One day I'll run into the fag who was meant for me and when he sees this body he'll start trembling like a leaf in a storm. At first I won't let him touch me. I'll just let him feast his eyes on the bod. One night then, just before he cracks, I'll give him a nibble on the golden wand. Once he gets a taste of that he'll never be able to settle for anything less. I'll have him in the palm of my hand. He'll introduce me to his fag friends in Beverly Hills . The story of Marlow's wand will travel like lightening through fag land. Everywhere I pass, fag tongues will hang out. Sooner or later I'll meet a fag producer and he'll make me a star. I'll specialize in gangster films. I'll be an idol. I have it in me. I tell you, I don't know what's the matter with Hollywood these days. Here I am, ignored, a million-dollar baby going to waste."

It was like old times strolling the Boulevard with Marlow. He works in the studios now as a carpenter and drinks up his money in the lowest bars in East Hollywood . "When I drink," he says, "I like to be superior to my surroundings. It's easier that way to pick up some old bag. You know the kind I like. Hey, Buddha, did I tell you about my cunt with the plastic tits? You have to hear this."

He asked me what I was doing with myself and I told him about Vietnam .

"You must be crazy," he said.

"Why don't you come with me?"

"You're crazy."

Passing a movie we run into Larry Lobel who owes me fifteen dollars. He's owed it to me for four years. He says he's the nephew of Bela Lugosi. I started to touch Larry up for the fifteen dollars but before I could open my mouth he'd taken out his childhood stamp collection from inside his natty top coat and was pitching it to me. Tears came to his eyes. "It's cheap," he said. "Believe me. One hundred twenty-five dollars. What do you say?" I suppose guys like Lobel will always be one step ahead of guys like me.

For old times' sake Marlow and I walked over to the YMCA on Selma hoping to run into Demeric. Sure enough, there he was, sitting alone in the lobby in the dark just like we used to find him three years ago. I have a compulsive interest in Demeric. Except that he's Jewish and dark complected, we're remarkably close look-alikes. I believe there's some significance in that.

Demeric was glad, in his own way, to see us. We asked him how things were going.

"I'm just plodding along at nothing," he said, "making sure I don't leave any tracks. Know what I mean? When I go to that great computer in the sky I want to be told I haven't left any tracks down here."

We were all silent for a moment, Marlow and I standing in the dark before Demeric's chair.

Demeric said: "A man should make it his business, don't you think , to not leave any tracks?"

End

If you liked this story you will probably like my book
Break His Bones: The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist
I will send you a copy FREE (it retails for $19 + P&H) with your subscription to my
monthly hard-copy newsletter Smith's Report
Click Here to subscribe to SR and get Bones -- FREE!