The Adding Machine (2 page)

This inspired me to write some crime stories ... ‘Here’s to crime!’ he shouted and raised a glass of champagne, but he crumpled like a pricked balloon as the heavy hand of Detective Sergeant Murphy fell on his shoulder.’.. . ‘Joe Maguire regarded the flushed face of the dealer with disfavor. “A coke bird,” he decided. “Better cut him off the payroll; get coked up and shoot a good client.’”

I did a short story too, with a trick ending about this gangster who goes to a fortune-teller... ‘This man is a criminal,’ she thought shrewdly, ‘a gangster, perhaps ... he must have made enemies.’ ‘I see danger,’ she said. The man’s face twitched — he needed to snow. ‘I see a man approaching... he has a gun ... he lifts the gun ... he —’ With an inarticulate cry the man leapt to his feet and whipped out an automatic, spitting death at the fortune-teller... blood on the crystal ball, and on the table, a severed human hand.

After reading Eugene Aram’s
Dream
— which I committed to memory and recited to the class in sepulchral tones — I wrote a series about murderers who all died of brain fever in a screaming delirium of remorse, and one character in the desert who murdered all his companions — sitting there looking at the dead bodies and wondering why he did it. When the vultures came and ate them he got so much relief he called them ‘the vultures of gold’ and that was the title of my story,
The Vultures
of Gold,
which closed this rather nauseous period.

At fifteen I was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School for my health, where they later made the first atom bomb. It seemed so right somehow, like the school song...

Far away and high on the Mesa’s crest I was forced to become a Boy Scout, eat everything on my plate, exercise before breakfast, sleep on a porch in zero weather, stay outside all afternoon, ride a sullen, spiteful, recalcitrant horse twice a week and all day on Saturday. We all had to become Boy Scouts and do three hours a week of something called C.W. — Community Work — which was always something vaguely unpleasant and quite useless too, but A.J. said it was each boy’s cooperative contribution to the welfare and maintenance of the community. We had to stay outdoors, no matter what, all afternoon — they even timed you in the John. I was always cold, and hated my horse, a sulky strawberry roan. And the C.W. was always hanging over you. There were crew-leaders, you understand, many of them drunk with power — who made life hell for the crew.

This man had conjured up a whole city there. The school was entirely self-sufficient, raised all the food, etcetera. There was a store, a post office, and one of the teachers was even a magistrate. I remember once he got a case which involved shooting a deer out of season and he made the most of it, went on for days. He had founded the School after he quit the Forest Service because some inspirational woman told him ‘Young man, there is a great constructive job waiting for you and if you don’t do it now you will only have to do it later under much more difficult circumstances.’ So he rubbed a magic lamp of contributions ... ‘I know what’s best for boys,’ he said, and those Texas oilmen kicked in.

What I liked to do was get in my room against the radiator and play records and read the Little Blue Books put out by Haldeman-Julius, free-thinker and benevolent agnostic... Remy de Gourmont... Baudelaire ... Guy de Maupassant... Anatole France... and I started writing allegories put in a vaguely Oriental setting, with dapper jewel thieves over the wine, engaged in philosophical discussions I prefer not to remember.

‘To observe one’s actions with detachment while making them as amusing as possible seem to me...’

‘Very interesting,’ said the imperturbable detective popping up from behind a potted rubber plant. ‘You are all under arrest.’

I had a bad rep with the other boys ... ‘burns incense in his room ... reading French books .. .’ Later at Harvard during summer trips to Europe I started satirical novels about the people I met; one of them begins “’But you see I don’t know much about love,” she said coyly, twisting an old-fashioned.’

Then I had an English period, gentlemen adventurers and all that...

‘My god, that poor old chief!’ He broke down sobbing.

The other looked at him coldly and raised an eyebrow: ‘Well after all, Reggie, you didn’t expect him to
give us
the emeralds, did you?’

‘I don’t know what I expected, but not
that piranha
fish!’

‘It was much the easiest and most convenient method.’

‘I can’t stick it, Humphreys, Give me my share, I’m clearing off.’

‘Why certainly.’ He took seven magnificent emeralds from the side pocket of his yellow silk suit and placed them on the table. With a quiet smile he pushed four stones to Reggie.

Reggie was touched. ‘I mean, hang it all, it was your idea, Humphreys, and you did most of the work.’

‘Yes Reggie, you funked it.’

‘Then why?’

‘I am thinking of Jane.’

Reggie made a hasty exit, ‘I can’t thank you enough’ over his shoulder. Humphreys leaned forward, looking at the three emeralds quizzically.

‘You’ll be missing your mates, won’t you now? ... Ali’

‘Yes master.’

‘A white man has just left. He is carrying four green stones. I want those stones, do you understand Ali?’

‘Yes master I understand’. Exit Ali, fingering his kris.

And
then
I read Oscar Wilde. Dorian Gray and Lord Henry gave birth to Lord Cheshire, one of the most unsavory characters in fiction, a mawkishly sentimental Lord Henry ... Seven English gentlemen there in the club, planning an expedition to the Pole:

‘But
which
pole, Bradford?’

‘Oh hang it all, who cares?’

‘Why Reggie, you’re as excited as a child!’

‘I am, and I glory in it — let’s forget we were ever gentlemen!’

‘You seem to have done that already,’ said Lord Cheshire acidly.

But it seems the cynical Lord Cheshire had more kindness in him than all the others put together when the supplies gave out... ‘Poor Reggie there, rotten with scurvy, I can’t bear to look at him, and Stanford is cracking, and there have been rumors about Cuthbert... Morgan drinks all day, and James is hitting the pipe ...’ So I leave him there on an ice floe, rotten with scurvy, giving his last lime juice to Reggie and lying bravely about it.

‘Have you had yours?’ said the boy softly.

‘Yes,’ said Lord Cheshire, ‘I’ve had mine.’

And I wrote a story for
True Confessions,
about a decent young man who gets on the dope. He was grieving the loss of a favorite dog, sitting on a park bench looking at the lake, smell of burning leaves ...

‘Hello kid, mind if I sit down?’ The man was thin and grey with pinpoint eyes, the prison shadow in them like something dead. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you look down in the dumps about something.’

In a burst of confidence the young man told him about the dog. ‘... he went back inside the burning house. You see, he thought I was in there.’

‘Kid, I got a pinch of something here make you forget about that old dead dog...’

That’s how it started. Then he fell into the hands of a sinister hypnotist who plied him with injections of marijuana.

‘Kill, kill, kill’. The words turned relentlessly in his brain, and he walked up to a young cop and said ‘If you don’t lock me up I shall kill you,’ The cop sapped him without a word. But a wise old detective in the precinct takes a like to the boy, sets him straight and gets him off the snow. It was a hard fight but he made it. He now works in a hardware store in Ottawa, Illinois ... the porch noise, home from work... ‘And if any kind stranger ever offers me some pills that will drive all my blues away, I will simply call a policeman.’

A story about four jolly murderers was conceived in the Hotel La Fonda on a rare trip to Santa Fe when I was feeling guilty about masturbating twice in one day. A middle-aged couple, very brash and jolly; the man says, ‘Sure and I’d kill my own grandmother for just a little kale .. .’

‘We have regular rates of course,’ the woman observed tartly.

I formed a romantic attachment for one of the boys at Los Alamos and kept a diary of this affair that was to put me off writing for many years. Even now I blush to remember its contents. During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis, so my things were packed and sent to me from the school and I used to turn cold thinking maybe the boys are reading it aloud to each other.

When the box finally arrived I pried it open and threw everything out until I found the diary and destroyed it forthwith, without a glance at the appalling pages. This still happens from time to time. I will write something I think is good at the time and looking at it later I say, my God, tear it into very small pieces and put it into somebody else’s garbage can. I wonder how many writers have had similar experiences. An anthology of such writing would be interesting.

Fact is, I had gotten a real sickener — as Paul Lund, an English gangster I knew in Tangier, would put it...’A young thief thinks he has a license to steal and then he gets a real sickener like five years maybe.’

This lasted longer. The act of writing had become embarrassing, disgusting, and above all
false.
It was not the sex in the diary that embarrassed me, it was the terrible falsity of the emotions expressed. I guess Lord Cheshire and Reggie were too much for me — for years after that, the sight of my words written on apage hit me like the sharp smell of carrion when you turn over a dead dog with a stick, and this continued until 1938. I had written myself an eight-year sentence.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1938 ... I was doing graduate work in anthropology at Harvard and at the same time Kells Elvins, an old school friend from John Burroughs, was doing graduate work in Psychology. We shared a small frame house on a quiet tree-lined street beyond the Commodore Hotel He had many talks about writing and started a detective story in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler line. This picture of a ship captain putting on women’s clothes and rushing into the first lifeboat was suddenly
there
for both of us. We read all the material we could find in Widener’s Library on the Titanic, and a book based on the Morro Castle disaster called
The Left-handed Passenger.

On a screened porch we started work on a story called
Twilight’s Last Gleamings
which was later used almost verbatim in
Nova Express
. I was trying to contact Kells to see if he had the original manuscript and to tell him that I was using the story under both our names when his mother wrote me that he had died in 1961.

I see now that the curse of the diary was broken temporarily by the act of collaboration. We acted out every scene and often got on laughing jags. I hadn’t laughed like that since my first tea-high at eighteen when I rolled around the floor and pissed all over myself. I remember the rejection note from Esquire: ‘Too screwy and not effectively so for us.’

I liked to feel that manuscript in my hands and read it over with slow shameless chuckles. The words seemed to come through us, not out of us. I have a recurrent writer’s dream of picking up a book and starting to read. I can never bring back. more than a few sentences; still, I know that one day the book itself will hover over the typewriter as I copy the words already written there.

After that I lost interest again and the years from 1938 to 1943 were almost entirely unproductive. In 1943 I met Kerouac and Ginsberg. Kerouac and I collaborated on a novel based on the Carr-Kammerer case, which we decided not to publish, and again I lost interest in writing.

I can remember only one attempt between 1943 and 1949. I was living in Algiers, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans. I was on heroin at the time and went over to New Orleans every day to score. One day I woke up sick and went across the river, and when I got back I tried to recapture the painful over-sensitivity of junk sickness, the oil slick on the river, the hastily-parked car.

Next set is Mexico City 1948-1950 where I started writing
Junky.
Once again we had trouble with the middle-class Mexican neighbors, who suspected me to be a dope fiend, and and the children screamed at me in the street:
‘Vicioso.’
We lived in a two-story house behind Sears Roebuck, off Insurgentes. I was attending Mexico City College on the G.I. Bill, studying Mayan and Aztec history and Mayan language. The Mexico City College boys hung out in a bar called the Bounty where I once shot a mouse with a .22 pistol in Mexico I always carried some sort of gun.

This was during the reign of Presidente Aleman, and the
mordida
was king. A vast pyramid of bribes reached from the cop on the beat to the Presidente. .. ‘Your paper very bad Meester.’ And for every real cop there were two or three professional brothers of cops with huge badges in their pockets and .45s stuck down into the inside holsters as I have seen only in Mexico. These holsters clip on the belt with the holster part inside the pants and so were easier to conceal with the coat buttoned. Many times I have been woken up by some friend from Mexico City College at the door with two or more cops who have caught him with some weed or a gun. He is taking up a collection to buy them off.

On this set an unpublished novel called
Queer
was also written. I remember the editor of Ace Books who published
Junky
said he would go to jail if he ever published
Queer.
I have been looking through it. Charles-Henri Ford’s and Parker Tyler’s
The Young and Evil
is shocking by contrast. Thanks to Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon,
Junky
was published in 1953. I was in South America at the time and the account of this trip became
The Yage Letters,
These were typed out from handwritten notes in offices where you use a typewriter for so much per hour in Bogotà and Lima.

Late 1953 I spent in New York sharing an apartment with Allen Ginsberg. At this time I first met Gregory Corso. In January of 1954 I went to Tangier and settled in a male brothel at no. 1 Calle de los Arcos kept by the famous Tony Dutch. I was on junk and did very little writing at the time. There were, however, a few fragments that were later used in
Naked Lunch.
Understandably there was some neighbor trouble: ‘You like beeg one Meester?’ And Tony constantly moaned, ‘My house is so watched at by the Arabics.’