Cain’s Book (3 page)

My anger, I realized, stemmed from my memory of that earlier Trocchi, my brother, of what he promised versus what he gave. I was angry at the junk that destroyed him – for destroy him it
did. I was angry at the thought of the books he could have written and did not. To which Trocchi, again, would reply that it was not junk that destroyed him. Junk was but a tool, freely chosen and
fully justified. It is a conversation we had had many times before, but, like the believer and the atheist, we had long since ceased to have any common ground for an unimpassioned discussion.

And yet, putting all this aside, and rereading
Cain’s Book
once again after all these years, there is no doubt of its importance. With William Burroughs’s
Naked
Lunch
, it ranks as one of the best works to deal seriously and honestly with the subject of drugs. And as in the case of Burroughs’s masterpiece, what some critics at the time of first
publication attacked as its “formlessness” emerges as an integral and essential element of its enduring value. It is a book not to be taken lightly. It has, as James Campbell notes,

“There is no more systematic nihilism than the junkie in America,” wrote the Scotsman Trocchi. In fact, as a description of that life, and that stance,
Cain’s Book
is without peer in contemporary literature.

– Richard Seaver, 1992

Cain’s Book

M
Y SCOW IS TIED UP
in the canal at Flushing, NY, alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction
Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinder blocks of the main building of the works, has turned them pink.
The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.

Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix.

I stood the needle and the eye-dropper in a glass of cold water and lay down on the bunk. I felt giddy almost at once. It’s good shit, not like some of the stuff we’ve been getting
lately. I had to be careful. Two of the workmen in wide blue dungarees and wearing baseball caps were still hanging about. From time to time they crossed my catwalk. They were inquisitive. They had
heard the noise of the typewriter during the afternoon and that was sufficient to arouse their curiosity. It’s not usual for a scow captain to carry a typewriter. They lingered for a while,
talking, just outside the cabin. Then, a few minutes before five, I heard them climb back onto the dock and walk away.

Lying on the bunk, alert to the sudden silence that has come over the canal, I hear the buzz of a fly and notice it is worrying the dry corpse of another fly, which is half-gouged into the plank
of the wall. I wonder about it and then my attention wanders. A few minutes have passed. I hear it buzz again and see that it is still at its work, whatever it is, settled on the rigid jutting legs
of the corpse. The legs grow out of the black spot like a minute sprout of eyelashes. The live fly is busy. I wonder if it is blood it wants, if flies like wolves or rats will eat off their own
kind.

– Cain at his orisons, Narcissus at his mirror.

The mind under heroin evades perception as it does ordinarily; one is aware only of contents. But that whole way of posing the question, of dividing the mind from what it’s aware of, is
fruitless. Nor is it that the objects of perception are intrusive in an electric way as they are under mescalin or lysergic acid, nor that things strike one with more intensity or in a more
enchanted or detailed way as I have sometimes experienced under marijuana; it is that the perceiving turns inwards, the eyelids droop, the blood is aware of itself, a slow phosphorescence in all
the fabric of flesh and nerve and bone; it is that the organism has a sense of being intact and unbrittle, and, above all,
inviolable.
For the attitude born of this sense of inviolability
some Americans have used the word “cool”.

It is evening now, the temperature has fallen, objects are growing together in the dim light of the cabin. In a few moments I shall get up and light my kerosene lamps.

–
What the hell am I doing here?

At certain moments I find myself looking on my whole life as leading up to the present moment, the present being all I have to affirm. It’s somehow undignified to speak of the past or to
think about the future. I don’t seriously occupy myself with the question in the “here-and-now”, lying on my bunk and, under the influence of heroin, inviolable. That is one of
the virtues of the drug, that it empties such questions of all anguish, transports them to another region, a painless theoretical region, a play region, surprising, fertile and unmoral. One is no
longer grotesquely involved in the becoming. One simply is. I remember saying to Sebastian before he returned to Europe with his new wife that it was imperative to know what it was to be a
vegetable, as well.

...the illusory sense of adequacy induced in a man by the drug. Illusory? Can a... “datum” be false? Inadequate? In relation to what? The facts? What facts? Marxian facts? Freudian
facts? Mendelian
¹
facts? More and more I found it necessary to suspend such facts, to exist simply in abeyance, to give up (if you will) and come naked to
apprehension.

It’s not possible to come quite naked to apprehension and for the past year I have found it difficult to sustain even an approximate attitude without shit, horse, heroin. Details,
impressionistic, lyrical. I became fascinated by the minute-to-minute sensations, and when I reflected, I did so repetitively and exhaustingly (often under marijuana) on the meaningless texture of
the present moment, the cries of gulls, a floating spar, a shaft of sunlight, and it wasn’t long before the sense of being alone overtook me and drained me of all hope of ever entering the
city with its complicated relations, its plexus of outrageous purpose.

– The facts. Stick to the facts. A fine empirical principle, but below the level of language the facts slide away like a lava. Neither was there ever a simple act; in retrospect I
couldn’t isolate such a thing. Even while I lived in my act, at each phase, after the decidings, it unfolded spontaneously, and frighteningly, and dangerously, at times like a disease run
riot, at times like the growing morning sunlight, and if I find it difficult to remember and express, and difficult to express and remember, if sometimes words leap up, sudden, unnatural, squint
and jingling skeletons from the page, accusing me and amusing me with their obscene shakes and making the world mad; I suppose it is because they take a kind of ancestral revenge upon me who at
each moment is ready to marshal them again for death or resurrection. No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends,
things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats... these are the facts. It’s a
fact that in the America I found nothing was ever in abeyance. Things moved or they were subversive. I suppose it was to escape this without going away, to retreat into abeyance, that I soon came
to be on a river scow. (Alternatives: prison, madhouse, morgue.)

I get up off the bunk and return to the table where I light an oil lamp. When I have adjusted the wick, I find myself fumbling again amongst the pile of notes, extracting a certain page. I hold
it close to the lamp and read:

I find myself squirting a thin stream of water from the eye-dropper through the number 26 needle into the air, cooking up another fix, prodding the hardened cotton in the
bubbling spoon... just a small fix, I feel, would recreate the strewn ramparts of Jericho.

A
T
33
RD STREET
is Pier 72. At the waterfront there are few buildings and they are low. The city is
in the background. It has diners at its edge, boxcars abandoned and stored, rails amongst grass and gravel, vacant lots. The trucks of moving and storage companies are parked and shunted under the
tunnels of an area of broad deserted shadows, useful for murder or rape. The wharves jut forward into the Hudson River like the stunted uneven teeth of a prehistoric jaw. The George Washington
Bridge is in the north. After eight, when the diners close, the dockside streets are fairly deserted. In winter the lights under the elevated roadway shine as in a vast and dingy shed, dimly
reflecting its own emptiness. An occasional car moves in from the dark side of the crosstown streets, turns into the feebly lit dockyard area, travels ten or twenty blocks south, and then moves
out, outwards again into the city. Walk three blocks east to 9th Avenue and the lights get brighter. A woman bawls her husband’s affairs to a neighbour in the street from the window in which
she leans thirty feet above your head as you walk along.

Pier 72 is the one immediately north of the new heliport which lies in the southern end of the basin formed by Piers 72 and 71. The remainder of the basin is used to moor the scows of a stone
corporation with quarries at Haverstraw, Tomkins Cove and Clinton Point on the Hudson River. Piers 72 and 73 are close together. Nine scows at most are moored there. Looking in from the river you
see the gabled ends of two huge and dilapidated barns perched on foundations of stones and heavy beams, with a narrow walk round three sides of each. The gable end of Pier 73 is a landmark from the
river because it is painted with red, white and blue stripes representing American Lines. At the end of Pier 72 there is a small landing stage set with bollards and cleats of cast iron. A little
wooden box painted green is nailed to the gable end of the shed. It houses lists from the dispatcher’s office of the crushed stone corporation, lists which pertain to the movements of the
scows.

An hour ago I smoked some marijuana which came from Chile. It was particularly good. But for me it is an ambiguous drug. It can induce control or hysteria, and sometimes a terrifying and
enervating succession of moods, new beginnings, generated spontaneously in the unwatched part of oneself... slow, quick, switchback, tumbling away from oneself in a sickening fashion, and then,
suddenly, being in control. This can be exhausting. Intense concentration on an external object suddenly shatters, and one has a fleeting, ambiguous glimpse of one’s own pale face. The cause
of what is to be shunned is the junction of the seer and the seen. The ordinary logic of association ceases to be operative. The problem, if one takes the trouble to pose it at all, is to find a
new criterion of relevance. Understandably, at such times, the list in the box at the end of Pier 72, indicating as it does the hour at which a tug will arrive to take one’s scow in tow, has
a fatality about it. One had hoped to go into the Village on arrival at the pier but on reading the list one finds one’s scow amongst those to be picked up immediately.

This particular night – it was in the middle of winter – I was not on the list. I went over it twice very carefully, running my finger down the column of scows, O’Brien,
Macdougal, Campbell, O’Malley, Matteotti, Leonard, Marshall, Cook, Smith, Peterson: Red Star, on arrival; Coogan, Baxter, Haynes, Loveday: Colonial, with the tide. There were a few scowmen
hanging around the end of the pier, mostly those who were going out at once.

I went back to the scow. In the cabin I stowed away some things that were lying about, my hashish pipe, a bottle of Benzedrine, locked the cabin and climbed over four scows and onto the pier. I
walked along the huge beam which provides the narrow footpath parallel to the shed as far as the dock. I walked slowly, using a flashlight to guide my feet. On my left the corrugated iron of the
shed, on my right, about fourteen feet below me, the still dark water of the basin reflecting a few naked lights. Its surface was smeared with oil and dust. Finally I reached the dock and walked
between some parked boxcars to the street under the elevated road. I cut diagonally across town and at 23rd Street on 8th Avenue I took a taxi to Sheridan Square. I telephoned Moira from the
drugstore that sells all the paperbacks. She told me to come over.