Sexus (69 page)

During the intermission, while the girls went to the lavatory to see dear old mother, Ned and I stood on the iron stairway which adorns the exterior of the theater. From the upper tiers one could look into the homes across the street, where the dear old mothers fret and stew like angry roaches. Cozy little flats they are, if you have a strong stomach and a taste for the ultraviolet dreams of Chagall. Food and bedding are the dominant motifs. Sometimes they blend indiscriminately and the father who has been selling matches all day with tubercular frenzy finds himself eating the mattress. Among the poor only that which takes hours to prepare is served. The gourmet loves to eat in a restaurant which is odorous; the poor man gets sick to the stomach when he climbs the stairs and gets a whiff of what's coming to him. The rich man loves to walk the dog around the block—to work up a mild appetite. The poor man looks at the sick bitch lying under the tubs and feels that it would be an act of mercy to kick it in the guts. Nothing gives him an appetite. He is hungry, perpetually hungry for the things he craves. Even a breath of fresh air is a luxury. But then he's not a dog, and
so nobody takes him out for an airing, alas and alack. I've seen the poor blighters leaning out of the windows on their elbows, their heads hanging in their hands like jack-o'-lanterns: it doesn't take a mind reader to know what they're thinking about. Now and then a row of tenements is demolished in order to open up ventilating holes. Passing these blank areas, spaced like missing teeth, I've often imagined the poor, bleeding blighters to be still hanging there on the window sills, the houses torn down but they themselves suspended in mid-air, propped up by their own grief and misery, like torpid blimps defying the law of gravitation. Who notices these airy specters? Who gives a fuck whether they're suspended in the air or buried six feet deep? The show is the thing, as Shakespeare says. Twice a day, Sundays included, the show goes on. If it's short of provender you are, why stew a pair of old socks. The Minsky Brothers are dedicated to giving entertainment. Hershey Almond Bars are always on tap, good before or after you jerk off. A new show every week—with the same old cast and the same old jokes. What would really be a catastrophe for the Minsky gents would be for Cleo to be stricken with a double hernia. Or to get pregnant. Hard to say which would be worse. She could have lockjaw or enteritis or claustrophobia, and it wouldn't matter a damn. She could even survive the menopause. Or rather, the Minskys could. But hernia, that would be like death—
irrevocable
.

What went on in Ned's mind during this brief intermission I could only conjecture. “Pretty horrible, isn't it?” he remarked, chiming in with some observation I had made. He said it with a detachment that would have done credit to a scion of Park Avenue. Nothing anyone could do about it, is what he meant. At twenty-five he had been the art director in an advertising concern; that was five or six years ago. Since then he had been on the rocks, but adversity had in no way altered his views about life. It had merely confirmed his basic notion that poverty was something to be avoided. With a good break he would once again be on top, dictating to those whom he was now fawning upon.

He was telling me about a proposition he had up his sleeve,
another “unique” idea for an advertising campaign. (How to make people smoke more—without injuring their health.) The trouble was, now that he was on the other side of the fence nobody would listen to him. Had he still been art director everybody would have accepted the idea immediately as a brilliant one. Ned saw the irony of the situation, nothing more. He thought it had something to do with his front—perhaps he didn't look as confident as he used to. If he had a better wardrobe, if he could lay off the booze for a while, if he could work up the right enthusiasm . . . and so on. Marcelle worried him. She was taking it out of him. With every fuck he gave her he felt that another brilliant idea had been slaughtered. He wanted to be alone for a while so that he could think things out. If Marcelle were on tap only when he needed her and not turn up at odd hours—just when he was in the middle of something—it would be ducky.

“You want a bottle opener, not a woman,” I said.

He laughed, as though he were slightly embarrassed.

“Well, you know how it is,” he said. “Jesus, I like her all right. . . she's fine. Another girl would have ditched me long ago. But———”

“Yes, I know. The trouble is she sticks.”

“It sounds rotten, doesn't it?”

“It is rotten,” said I. “Listen, did it ever occur to you that you may never again be an art director, that you had your chance and you muffed it? Now you've got another chance—and you're muffing it again. You could get married and become . . . well, I don't know what. . . any damned thing . . . what difference does it make? You have a chance to lead a normal, happy life—on a modest plane. It doesn't seem possible to you, I suppose, that you might be better off driving a milk wagon? That's too dull for you, isn't it? Too bad! I'd have more respect for you as ditchdigger than as president of the Palmolive Soap Company. You're not burning up with original ideas, as you imagine, you're simply trying to retrieve something that's lost. It's pride that's goading you, not ambition. If you had any originality you'd be more flexible: you'd prove it in a hundred different ways. What gripes you is that you failed. It was probably the best thing that ever happened
to you. But you don't know how to exploit your misfortunes. You were probably cut out for something entirely different, but you won't give yourself a chance to find out what. You revolve about your obsession like a rat in a trap. If you ask me, it's pretty horrible . . . more horrible than the sight of these poor doomed bastards hanging out of the windows. They're willing to tackle anything; you're not willing to lift your little finger. You want to go back to your throne and be the king of the advertising world. And if you can't have that you're going to make everybody around you miserable. You're going to castrate yourself and then say that somebody cut your balls off . . .”

The musicians were tuning up; we had to scoot back to our seats. Mona and Marcelle were already seated, buried in a deep conversation. Suddenly there was a full blare from the orchestra pit, like a snarl of prussic acid over a tight tarpaulin. The red-haired fellow at the piano was all limp and boneless, his fingers falling like stalactites on the keyboard. People were still streaming back from the lavatories. The music got more and more frenetic, with the brass and the percussion instruments getting the upper hand. Here and there a switch of lights blinked, as if there were a string of electrified owls opening and closing their eyes. In front of us a young lad was holding a lighted match to the back of a postcard, expecting to discover the whore of Babylon—or the Siamese twins rolling in a double-jointed orgasm.

As the curtain went up the Egyptian beauties from the purlieus of Rivington Street began to unlimber; they flung themselves about like flounders just released from the hook. A scrawny contortionist did the pinwheel, then folded up like a jacknife and, after a few flips and flops, tried to kiss her own ass. The music grew soupy, alternating from one rhythm to another and getting nowhere. Just when everything seemed on the verge of collapse the floundering chorines did a fadeout, the contortionist picked herself up and limped away like a leper, and out came a pair of incongruous buffoons pretending to be full-blown lechers. The back curtain drops and there they are standing in the middle of a street in the city of Irkutsk. One of them wants a woman so bad his tongue is
hanging out. The other one is a connoisseur of horse flesh. He has a little apparatus, a sort of Open Sesame, which he will sell to his friend for nine hundred and sixty-four dollars and thirty-two cents. They compromise on a dollar and a half. Fine. A woman comes walking down the street. She's from Avenue A. He talks French to her, the fellow who bought the apparatus. She answers in Volapuk. All he has to do is turn on the juice and she flings her arms around him. This goes on in ninety-two variations, just as it did last week and the week before—as far back as the days of Bob Fitzsimmons, in fact. The curtain drops and a bright young man with a microphone steps out of the wings and croons a romantic ditty about the airplane delivering a letter to his sweetheart in Caledonia.

Now the flounders are out again, this time disguised as Navajos. They reel about the electric campfire. The music switches from “Pony Boy” to the “Kashmiri Song” and then to “Rain in the Face.” A Latvian girl with a feather in her hair stands like Hiawatha, looking towards the land of the setting sun. She has to stand on tiptoe until Bing Crosby Junior finishes fourteen quatrains of Amerindian folklore written by a cowpuncher from Hester Street. Then a pistol shot is fired, the chorines whoop it up, the American flag is unfurled, the contortionist somersaults through the blockhouse, Hiawatha does a fandango, and the orchestra becomes apoplectic. When the lights go out the white-haired mother from the lavatory is standing by the electric chair waiting to see her son burn. This heart-rending scene is accompanied by a falsetto rendition of “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” The victim of justice is one of the clowns who will be out in a moment with a pisspot in his hand. He will have to measure the leading lady for a bathing suit. She will bend over obligingly and spread her ass so that he can get the measurements absolutely correct. When that's over she will be the nurse in the lunatic asylum, armed with a syringe full of water which she will squirt down his pants. Then there will be two leading ladies attired in negligees. They sit in a cozy furnished flat waiting for their boy friends to call. The boys call and in a few moments they start taking their pants off. Then the husband
returns and the boys hop around in B.V.D.'s, like crippled sparrows.

Everything is calculated to the minute. By the time 10:23 strikes Cleo is ready to do her second and final number. She will have just about eight and a half minutes to spare, according to the terms of the contract. Then she will have to stand in the wings for another twelve minutes and take her place with the rest of the cast for the finale. Those twelve minutes burn her up. They are precious minutes which are completely wasted. She can't even get into her street clothes; she must show herself in all her glory and give just one little squirm or two as the curtain falls. It burns her up.

Ten twenty-two and a half! An ominous decrescendo, a muffled two-four flam from the drums. All the lights are doused except those over the “Exits.” The spotlight focuses on the wings where at 10:23 to the dot first a hand, then an arm, then a breast will appear. The head follows after the body, as the aura follows the saint. The head is wrapped in excelsior with cabbage leaves masking the eyes; it moves like a sea urchin struggling with eels. A wireless operator is hidden in the carmined mouth of the navel: he is a ventriloquist who uses the deaf-mute code.

Before the great spastic movements begin with a drumlike role of the torso. Cleo circles about the stage with the hypnotic ease and lassitude of a cobra. The supple milk-white legs are screened behind a veil of beads girdled at the waist; the pink nipples are draped with transparent gauze. She is boneless, milky, drugged: a medusa with a straw wig undulating in a lake of glass beads.

As she discards the tinkling robe the pompon becomes the tom-tom and the tom-tom the pompon.

And now we are in the heart of darkest Africa, where the Ubangi flows. Two snakes are locked in mortal combat. The big one, which is a constrictor, is slowly swallowing the smaller one—tail first. The smaller one is about twelve feet long—and poisonous. He fights up until the last breath; his fangs are still spitting, even as the jaws of the big snake close about his head. A siesta in the shade now follows in order to give the digestive processes full sway. A strange, silent combat
produced not by hatred but by hunger. Africa is the continent of plenty in which hunger reigns supreme. The hyena and the vulture are the referees. A land of chilly silences split by furious snarls and agonizing screams. Everything is eaten warm and uncooked. Life so abundant whets the appetite of death. No hatred, only hunger. Hunger in the midst of plenty. Death comes quickly. The moment one is
hors de combat
the process of devoration sets in. Tiny fishes, mad with hunger, can devour a giant and leave him a skeleton in a few minutes. Blood is sucked up like water. Hair and skin are instantly appropriated. Claws and tusks make weapons or wampum. No waste. Everything is eaten alive amidst bloodcurdling snarls and screams. Death strikes like lightning through forest and river. The big fellow is no more immune than the little ones. All is prey.

In the midst of this ceaseless tussle the remnants of the human kingdom stage their dances. Hunger is the solar body of Africa, the dance is the lunar body. The dance is the expression of a secondary hunger: sex. Hunger and sex are like two snakes locked in mortal combat. There is no beginning nor end. One swallows the other in order to reproduce a third: the machine become flesh. A machine which functions of itself and to no purpose, unless it be to produce more and more and thus create less and less. The wise ones, the renunciators, seem to be the gorillas. They live a life apart: they inhabit the trees. They are the most ferocious of all—more terrible even than the rhino or the lioness. They utter piercing, deafening screams. They defy approach.

Everywhere throughout the continent the dance goes on. It is the ever-repeated story of dominion over the dark forces of nature. Spirit working through instinct. Africa dancing is Africa trying to lift itself above the confusion of mere reproduction.

In Africa the dance is impersonal, sacred and obscene. When the phallus becomes erect and is handled like a banana it is not a “personal hard-on” we see but a tribal erection. It is a religious hard-on,” directed not towards
a
woman but towards every female member of the tribe. Group souls staging a group fuck. Man lifting himself out of the animal
world through a ritual of his own invention. By his mimicry he demonstrates that he has made himself superior to the mere act of intercourse.