Last Exit to Brooklyn (35 page)

Abe was dragged from sleep with the hardening of his prick. He had trouble focusing his eyes and could feel something brushing lightly against his thighs and stomach. He raised his head slightly and could see the fine nipples of Lucys tits caressing him as she sucked his cock. When she saw his head move she got up and sat on his dick and rotated, smiling at Abe, his eyes opening wider with each gyration. She sat on it grinding away and leaned over and took two cigarettes from the table, stuck one in her mouth and one in Abes, then lit them. You want a drink daddyo. Abe shook his head, moving automatically in perfect time and rhythm with her grinding. He took a few drags of the cigarette then put it out and started to fuck with concentration …

The sun rose behind the Gowanus Parkway lighting the oil filmed water of the Gowanus Canal and the red bricks of the Project. Church bells announced the beginning of services. Ada looked out her window for a while before starting breakfast; Louis got up planning on getting out as early as possible, alone, and going for a ride; Irene woke up before Mike and laid in bed listening to him grumble and wondering how he would feel when he woke up; VINNIE GOT UP FIRST AND YELLED FOR THE KIDS TA KEEP QUIET, YEAH? AND DRAGGED MARY BY THE ARM ACROSS THE BED AND TOLDER TA GET UP: Nancy woke, scratched her crotch then smelled her finger and yelled for the kids to shutup. When ol Abe got home the kids were sitting at the table yelling and eating and he told them to be quiet, he wanted to sleep and went into the bedroom, staggering slightly, his eyes red and barely open. He carefully took off his clothes and hung them up, put on his hairnet and went to bed. Nancy came in and lay down beside him and started
tickling his asshole. He shoved her away, laughing at her, and told her to get the fuck out and leave him alone. She told him she werent goin, that she was gonna have some cock and he backhanded her across the face and toler ta go get a banana and she called him a noaccountblackniggabastard and he punched her in the motherfuckin face, knocking her off the bed, and toler ta get her ass outta there or I’ll bust ya apart woman, and rolled her out of the room. She crawled out to the kitchen and pulled herself up, holding onto the edge of the sink, still yelling he was a blackniggabastard, then let cold water run over her head. Her daughter came over to help her and Nancy continued yelling and then the frustration started her crying and her daughter told her not to cry, Jesus loves us Mommy. Nancy told her to get the fuck away from her.

Abraham slept.

Afterword by the Author

I started writing because I did not want to die having done nothing with my life.

I had gone to sea when I was 15, as a merchant seaman, and at the age of 18 I was taken off a ship in Germany and the doctors said I couldnt live more than a few months. I had TB and both lungs were extremely diseased. I came back to the States and went into the Marine Hospital. This was in October of 1946, and streptomycin was an experimental drug being used to treat TB, but none was available for merchant seamen. My family was able to buy it at an incredibly inflated price and brought it to the hospital, where it was administered. It kept me alive, and healed enough of the disease so I could undergo surgery. The toxic effects of the streptomycin were strong and it impaired my vision, my hearing, my inner ear was almost totally destroyed and I couldnt walk properly and I would fall down in the dark, and all my muscles were petrified from the drug. I also went wacky … or perhaps I should say, wackier. But I was alive.

By the time I got out of the hospital I had spent 3 years in bed, had 10 ribs removed, one lung had been permanently collapsed and a section had been cut out of the other one. And then things got worse. All in all I have spent a lot of time and energy, as well as money, just staying alive. But here I is.

I had been out of the hospital for about 5 or 6 years when I was suddenly back in with asthma. A ‘specialist’ told me I cant live, I simply do not have enough lungs to survive, so I should just go home and relax. I got a second opinion in the next hospital. I have a rather defiant attitude and refused to die just because a doctor told me I cant
live. Actually I started to die 36 hours before I was born, so dying was a way of life for me.

I was married at this time and our daughter was about 2 or 3 years old. We were living behind a barber shop in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn. It was the Christmas Season and my wife had a part-time job at Macys while I stayed home. One day I had an extraordinarily profound experience, one more ‘real’ than any I had ever had. I experienced the fact that some day I was going to die, not almost, as had been happening, and managing to survive, but I was really going to die, and just before I died two things would happen: One, I would regret my entire life; Two, I would want to live my life over again, and then I would die. This experience terrified me. The thought that I would live whatever number of years and look back on it and see I hadnt done anything with my life, had wasted it, was something I just could not live with. So I decided to write.

As I recall my reasoning at the time, all these years later, I wanted to be a composer, but knew I could never go to school long enough to learn how, but I did know the alphabet so I figured I/d be a writer. I had to do something!

It seems to me I was less equipped to be an artist than any other artist who has ever lived. I only had 9 years of schooling, and when I was a kid I was completely physically oriented. I never read, never studied, never thought of writing. Actually, I have no natural talent in any area, including mechanics, electronics, or any thing else. I was a pretty good football and hockey player in my early teens, but was not an exceptionally talented athlete either. The one thing I have always had is determination and a hard head. At times these attributes have caused me great pain, but they have also saved my life.

Actually I started reading shoot-em-ups in the hospital, reading everything from S. S. Van Dine to Mickey Spillane. Then eventually I started reading novels. When I got out of the hospital I started hanging out with a few guys in my neighborhood who were going to Brooklyn College and had been reading since they were very young. One of them is Gil Sorrentino, who became my literary mentor. Hes one of those nuts who read
The Iliad
when he was 6 years old, and had been writing poetry since he was a kid. I would listen to these
guys talk about books and writers and try to remember as many of the names as possible. The next day I would sneak, literally, over to the library and get the books. I was hooked.

Having made the decision I got a portable Remington typewriter and looked at it. I had no idea for a story, or anything else. So I looked at it for a few weeks, then wrote a letter to someone. They answered and I wrote again. I think my first piece of fiction was a suicide note in which I attacked every institution I could think of. Eventually I started to write a story. I would read what I had written each day to my wife and we got a lot of laughs out of it. After about 12 pages I realized I had no idea what I was doing. So I threw everything away and thought about it for a few days and became aware of the foundation of my life as a writer.

I realized that everything, for me, is in the story, the people, but I had to do more than just tell a story. If you want to hear a great story, go to any candy store in NYC, or poolroom, or street corner, and youll hear stories that will knock your socks off. But I had to do more than that. I was aware that we all have a million stories, so why was a particular one in my mind? It seemed to me simple enough: that was the one I was supposed to write. I realized that for me I had to understand the essence of the story given me to write, and for me that meant to get to the heart of the matter, the true dynamic, and from that essence create a work of art. Obviously this required me to go as deep into the darkness as possible and bring it back to the light. Just as obviously, there is always the chance that you will go too deeply into the darkness and not come back. So far I have, but there is no guarantee I will continue to do so.

I was also aware that the primary responsibility of the artist is to get free of the human ego. I have no right to impose myself, in any way, between the reader and the people in the story. It is my job, as a writer, to fulfill the responsibility to the story that has been given me to write. So often I will see these people making decisions, and taking actions, that will lead to a disaster and want to change the story, but I do not have the right to do that. I must simply honor their lives and allow them to follow their own path, and not interfere in the natural evolution of their lives.

I also knew that I was a frustrated teacher, and a frustrated preacher, and had to work very hard to get them, as well as all my opinions, out of the work. If there is a message in the work it is in the lives of the people, their story, and how they live it. Who cares what I think about such matters. I/ll leave that to the experts and professionals, they always do a much better job of telling people how to live.

So I sat with this typewriter and started teaching myself how to write. I quickly discovered that thinking of a story is not the same as getting a line of prose to say exactly, and simply, what needs to be said. How do you get Harry from the living room to the bathroom? Seems simple, but can be impossible. You can end up either forgetting about it or having him wet his pants. So I came face to face with the biggest terror a writer faces, a blank piece of paper, but, thank God, we do have a wastepaper basket!

I read so many different writers at the same time I did not have to work off any influences. Also, never having gone to school I didnt have to unlearn all the lies a person can learn in school about how you should write. I was unaware of the ‘rules of writing’ as proclaimed by individuals who had never written an original line in their lives. Fortunately, I had no recourse but to find my own way.

I was influenced by many writers, certainly Melville, Joyce, and Babel, but the only ‘conscious’ influence I had as a writer was Beethoven. I dont mean I was trying to put his music into words, but the power of his music really inspired me. He has the ability to make everything so simple it becomes profound. He knows, to perfection, how to hammer a phrase into your mind, repeating it over and over, yet always stopping at precisely the right time. And his work is beautifully inevitable, yet never predictable, no matter how many times you hear it. And there are times when his music is so exquisitely lyrical it makes you cry. He really stirs up the emotions and makes it possible for you to make sense of what you are feeling.

The gestation of a story may start years before Im aware of it, but when it starts to come to the surface of my mind I can feel it. Then I have an image of it, and can hear it. Then I sit down and try to find the word that perfectly describes what I see, hear and feel.

It took me 6 years to write
Last Exit
because I had to learn how to
write. First I had to become aware of myself as a writer, and I realized that I wanted to put the reader through an emotional experience. I wanted the reader to ‘feel’ what the people were experiencing even if they were unaware of it. I did not want to limit the readers imagination, but to give them room so they could experience the story from their own POV, from their own lifes experiences. So again, I had to get out of the way.

Because I write by ear, I had to develop a typography that would work as musical notation. I believe all the senses are involved in our experiences, so the way a story ‘looks’ on the page is important. Forcing the eye to move an extra space will provide the ear with the necessary musical effect.

Dialog was another difficult task. I have always been enamored with the music of speech, and the streets of NYC are certainly rich with this music. But if I were to simply put the speech down as spoken it would be incomprehensible. Profanity was the foundation of much of the speech I was dealing with and would be a bore if simply transcribed. Also, every area, at times every street corner, has its own vernacular, all of which would be unintelligible to the reader. Yet I had to be true to the people in the story. So I had to find a way to edit the speech so the same flavor was there as well as reflecting the psychodynamics of the people, and to make the various idioms self-explanatory. Not easy.

I also had to create the natural flow of the conversations, which meant I had to eliminate all the conventional ‘he saids’ so I could create the feelings of the streets and people of the streets. This meant concentrating on the specific vocabularies and rhythms of speech of individuals so the reader doesnt get bogged down in trying to figure out whose talking … they will either know or it wont make any difference to them.

This also had to be reflected in the narrative; e.g., when Vinnie is the subject the language and rhythms reflect him with their harshness; and with Georgette the sounds and rhythms are sibilant, soft, feminine, a lot of alliteration, the images romantic.

I came to realize that I did not know how to sit and think these things out, that my thinking was deceptive. I could believe I had found
an answer, believing I had gone from A to D, when in reality I was still stuck in A. Ultimately the only way I could figure things out was by writing; i.e., thinking out loud. I ended up throwing away a lot of paper. What I was doing was struggling to find what the problem that needed solving was in a particular work. I believe we do not just learn everything at once, that at various times we are learning different aspects of writing. One time it may be structure, or dialog, or narrative, or balance or anything else. But once I could see clearly what it was I had to understand, the story usually flowed. ‘Tralala,’ which is about 20 pages long, took 2 1/2 years to get to that point. The story starts with a very short, flat line, then starts to open and flow as she does, until eventually the line never ends as she starts to disintegrate and the final line is a couple of pages long, having the feeling of utter chaos, and never really ends, but stops.