An American Dream (34 page)

Lived in this second atmosphere for twenty-three hours of the twenty-four—it was life in a submarine, life in the safety chambers
of the moon. Nobody knew that the deserts of the West, the arid empty wild blind deserts, were producing again a new breed of man.

Stayed at the dice tables. I was part of the new breed. Cherry had left a gift. Just as Oswald Kelly once went to sleep knowing which stocks would be on the rise by morning, so I knew the luck in the hand of each man who came to the table, I knew when to go down on the pass-line and when to bet the Don’t Come. I was flat with the dice on my own, I dropped them quick as I could, but I kept an eye for the losers and worked up the fortune there. In four weeks I made twenty-four, paid my debts, all sixteen plus the loan for the car, and got ready to go on. There was a jungle somewhere in Guatemala which had a friend, an old friend, I thought to go there. And on to Yucatán. The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. I was not good enough to climb up and pull them down. So wandered farther out to the desert where the mad before me had come, and thought of walking into ambush. Eyes had been on me four full weeks, eyes collecting more and more—the news was out of who I was and verdicts were waiting. But I was safe in the city—no harm would come to me there—it was only in the desert that death would come up like a scorpion with its sting. If anyone wished to shoot me, he might have me here. But no one did, and I wandered on, and found a booth by the side of the empty road, a telephone booth with a rusty dial. Went in and rang up and asked to speak to Cherry. And in the moonlight, a voice came back, a lovely voice, and said, “Why, hello, hon, I thought you’d never call. It’s kind of cool right now, and the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello. We get along, which is odd, you know, because girls don’t swing. But toodle-oo, old baby-boy, and keep the dice for free, the moon is out and she’s a mother to me.” Hung up and
walked on back to the city of jewels, and thought before I left the spires, might go out to call her one more time. But in the morning, I was something like sane again, and packed the car, and started on the long trip to Guatemala and Yucatán.

Provincetown,
New York,
September 1963–October 1964

Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, N
ORMAN
M
AILER
was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books.
The Castle in the Forest
, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel,
The Naked and the Dead
, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative,
The Armies of the Night
, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for
The Executioner’s Song
and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.

The Naked and the Dead

Barbary Shore

The Deer Park

Advertisements for Myself

Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)

The Presidential Papers

An American Dream

Cannibals and Christians

Why Are We in Vietnam?

The Deer Park—A Play

The Armies of the Night

Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Of a Fire on the Moon

The Prisoner of Sex

Maidstone

Existential Errands

St. George and the Godfather

Marilyn

The Faith of Graffiti

The Fight

Genius and Lust

The Executioner’s Song

Of Women and Their Elegance

Pieces and Pontifications

Ancient Evenings

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Harlot’s Ghost

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

The Gospel According to the Son

The Time of Our Time

The Spooky Art

Why Are We at War?

Modest Gifts

The Castle in the Forest

On God
(with J. Michael Lennon)

Mind of an Outlaw