Me and the Devil: A Novel Read online

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  To her who must here be nameless

  If you bring forth what is within you,

  what you bring forth will save you.

  If you do not bring forth what is within you,

  what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

  —THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

  THE PAST IS A VERY BAD PLACE. IT IS NOT GOOD TO GO there. Not alone. Not like this. “Take a deep breath.” They’re always telling me to take a deep breath. But that deep breath does not come.

  Somewhere along the line, something went wrong.

  These words were supposed to have led to more words, to the beginning of what I cannot bring myself to tell.

  Now, having got up, poured myself a drink, lit a cigarette, and stood awhile at the window—seeing night and rain, feeling nothing—I look at those words and realize that I’ve just written my autobiography, the story of my life. From beginning to end, that’s it. Somewhere along the line, something went wrong. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

  But that’s the easy way out, the easy way out of saying what I cannot bring myself to say. Yes, a lot went wrong. There were a lot of wrong turns. But this one. This one.

  Let me drink.

  The label on this bottle has a lot of words on it. Some of them are invisible: lies, truth, destiny, darkness, loss, shame, guilt, the sound and fury of the idiot’s every delusion, sickness unto death of body and of soul. And courage for the coward. I have read and retched them all, these hidden things upon that label. They define what is in the bottle, and what is within me.

  Courage for the coward. Yes, let me drink, so that I can say what I cannot. Even if in the end I let the flames consume it, and can then return quietly to my lies. This thought goes well with that coward’s courage that I seek.

  But can there be any returning? Any returning to anything? Now? From here, from this final somewhere? This final somewhere of endless wrong somethings and endless wrong turns?

  Enough. Just drink. There, yes, that’s better, that’s it. Just drink and the words will come.

  IT’S THAT THING WITH THE MONKEYS. THOSE MONKEYS, THOSE dead monkeys, haunting me for all those years, and me not knowing why.

  Just the other day I was sitting on the bench outside the joint on Reade Street. Not on a barstool inside the joint, but on the bench outside the joint, not drinking. I mean a coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, that’s what I was drinking. I was just sitting there, with that coffee and a smoke, looking into the clear blue morning sky. Looking for a way out.

  “Here’s for the guys that never came back.”

  My eyes moved from the sky to where the voice came from. Him again. Some stumblebum who passed this way every once in awhile. He was standing there, drunk and weaving, looking like shit.

  “You know what I mean. You were there,” he said as he poured some of the cheap whiskey from the pint bottle in his hand onto the pavement. This wasn’t like a capful on the sidewalk for the boys upstate. It was spillage.

  “Don’t waste booze like that, you stupid fuck,” I told him.

  “We were there. We know,” he rasped.

  He was never there, I figured. He was full of shit.

  “What was your MOS?” I asked him. Everybody had an MOS. Mine had been 2531, Ground Radio Operator.

  “Communications is the voice of command.” That’s what that fucking CO said. That’s what he was supposed to say, but he said it as if he believed it. Worse: as if we were supposed to believe it, and that it was supposed to make our chests swell with pride. Sitting there nodding out in the middle of nowhere, conveying coordinates between one jackass and another on a nigger-rigged Prick-25. The voice of command.

  Yeah, that’s what I was fighting for. That’s what I was defending. The American Way. Freedom of speech. But you couldn’t use that word anymore. Shouldn’t use it. No. The “n-word.” Nigger-rigged. It was probably the one indispensable technological term in the Local 79 lexicon. Verboten.

  It was all bullshit. But everybody had a Military Occupational Specialty number. I was somehow sure that this bum didn’t even know what an MOS was. He looked at me, wove closer to me with that pint in his hand, grinned a big, drunken grin, baring dirty gums and a few dirty teeth. A mouth even worse than mine.

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill ya,” he said, hoarse with booze and bullshit, then laughed a laugh that was hoarse with booze and bullshit.

  He didn’t know what an MOS was. He didn’t know that it was just a stupid fucking number for a stupid fucking asshole. I just turned away from him, and he saddened, took a swig from that cheap pint, and staggered away.

  But the damage was done. He had brought back the monkeys. In the middle of all I was already going through, this fucking pain-in-the-ass, full-of-shit drunken bum had brought back those dead monkeys.

  The Northern I Corps. The border of the DMZ, that stupid five-mile swath. The Dead Marine Zone, we called it. One day, atop a hill, I was standing around doing nothing. That was really my specialty, doing nothing, but there was no MOS for that. I was just watching the bulldozers, encircled by a bunch of artillery idiots—grunts, the lowest MOS, riflemen—raze the ground on the top of the hill to level it into a landing zone for helicopters. I walked off into the jungle to smoke a joint, hoping I might run into somebody with some smack.

  The jungle was getting more and more bare and barren every day. That shit from those helicopters worked.

  I was out a way when I saw them. These weren’t just a bunch of dead monkeys. I had seen dead men, paused awhile to look at them, moved on, and forgot about them. But something about these monkeys affected me as nothing else ever had. It was beyond my understanding. I just stood there, transfixed, as a strange sort of horror overtook me; and breath must have stopped, or faltered, for the next heartbeat I felt came deep, hard, sudden, resounded within me, and shook my nerves with an inexplicable sense of vague, terrible presentiment.

  Many years passed before I realized what I’d foreseen in those dead monkeys, and what about them had stopped, chilled, and seized me so. It was me that I saw. Me, my future, and my fate.

  Those monkeys clung to one another in the throes of desperation, the throes of death. It was my end, your end, the common end of us all. Though the horror and haunting of those monkeys shot immediately into me and remained with me, only as age crept through me and over me did I come to see this and feel it full.

  I was closer now in years to death than to youth, and I was desperate to cling to another. I felt it long before I knew it for what it was and could express it: the desire for mortal communion with the body and soul of one still in the flush of what had ebbed and was now lost to me.

  It creeps into us, this desperation, without our being quite aware of its nature, when we enter our fifth decade of life. If we are fortunate enough to enter our seventh decade, its nature is clear to us. But society, thoughts of moral judgment, a sense of shame, even fear of public damnation and prison restrain us, and the growing compulsion devours most of us unslaked as we wend our way from life in silence and secrecy to our common end. Most of us. But I would not be one of them.

  I felt more than thought that if I could n
ot have youth again, I could at least slake myself in new life. Sustenance, moisture, deliverance.

  If I could not bear the truth, I could at least close my eyes in the comfort of a lie.

  MOST MEN BELIEVE THEIR LIVES TO BE SOMEHOW distinguished from the rest. But their lives hold as little interest as they do meaning, and are worthy only of being extinguished. As a writer I have encountered more of these men than I care to remember, indeed than I can remember. Though they do not read, except perhaps to graze on the mulch of an ill-written tabloid or the drivel on a handheld device or computer screen, they feel that writers might somehow be drawn to their drab and dreary tales of sameness. It is hard to escape them. They know nothing, least of all themselves. They go from cradle to grave seeking something. What they seek means as little to me as they do. They are a source of tedium and acid reflux, nothing more.

  Do not think that I am setting writers apart from this majority. Most of them, in fact, belong to it. But they are not writers to be read, or countenanced.

  I myself did not read much anymore. And I wrote even less. In fact, I had not written a book in years. Nothing seemed to matter. I felt that there was nothing left to write. I was a poet without pen or drum. Approaching a blank page, or even thinking of doing so, I felt disoriented and abstracted and my nerves went raw. Again and again I swore that I would stop drinking and resume writing. Again and again I drank. And when I did not, I sat and drank coffee and smoked and withdrew into myself. Yet I still called myself a writer when asked what I did for a living. Maybe I still thought like a writer. Or maybe, as George Orwell said, all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy.

  “Writing a book,” he said, “is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.” Perhaps I had lost my demon. Perhaps other demons had overtaken it. Then again, Orwell wrote those words when he was in his early forties, and he lived to be only forty-six.

  Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.

  All in the way of saying that people are often drawn to writers. Not so much as to buy or read what they write, but simply as bothersome parasites. If you’re not careful, they will drain you dry.

  Women are not so bad as men in this regard. Still they too are drawn to writers, if only because this solitary and distressed way to make a living seems to them for some reason, or lack of reason, more alluring and more attractive than the usual occupations professed in bars.

  And in bars, behind a mask that hides hatred or jealousy or fear or the unspeakable, everyone thinks he, or she, knows you, as you think you know them.

  Where they knew me, where they thought they knew me, they came near, to drain what they thought to be my life force, or to cough up the dregs of their own on me. I was anathema, accursed and consecrated. Yes. They came near. It was easy.

  We were all monkeys about to die. I did not want to die.

  Though my inchoate and unclear desires carried the air of the forbidden, they stirred in me something like what I remembered the commingled feelings of love and lust to be.

  THE OLDER WE GET, THE MORE THE GHOSTS CROWD AND claim us. Death does not deter the dead from living on within us and around us. We are under their spell. The world becomes irrevocably haunted.

  It was she who spoke to me. I don’t know why. I was old. My looks were long gone. Maybe it was because I did not speak to her. I was quiet. One of the fungus-men was trying to talk her up, and she escaped by turning to me and smiling. Some girls liked those guys. Girls seeking attention. Seeking their fathers. Those guys fell for it, bought them drinks, got suckered in.

  All I had seen was her long blond hair. Now I saw a face and a smile, and I liked what I saw. I deliberated for a moment on what I should say to her to set me apart from the others in that half-lighted barroom.

  I could not see her legs, but her breasts in her pale blue cashmere sweater seemed modest. This was good. No woman with large breasts has comely legs. I wondered if the cuffs matched the collar. She looked like a real blonde. But I was drunk, even if only I knew it. I wanted to bury my face between her legs. I could tell if the cuffs matched the collar, I could tell if she was a natural blonde by the feel of the hair between her legs, how soft it was or was not on my lips. Even drunk. Even in the dark.

  Better not to make too much sense at first. Better to lure her with a gleam of inscrutability. Something that could be taken by her to mean and pertain to whatever she fancied.

  “Thenceforth evil became my good,” I said, hoping that the hair between her legs was cornsilk blond and that she did not shave it.

  “Where’d that come from?” she asked. Her smile curled a bit and her blue eyes brightened.

  “Milton. Paradise Lost,” I lied. Milton said something like it, but he never said that. Maybe it was Mary Shelley. No matter. Better to quote Milton, even if it was a fabricated quotation. Had she ever heard of Milton? If she hadn’t, maybe she had heard of his big fat poem. As I said, I was drunk. “The words of Satan,” I added, returning to my drink.

  “I think I read that in high school,” she said. I figured that she was lying too. That was good. I wasn’t expecting what she said next.

  “Are you a Miltonist or a Satanist?”

  “Neither,” I said. “I’m just an old, old man trying to live while I can.” Lefty Frizzell said that, or something like it; but she didn’t ask.

  I made love to her in my way later that night. An old man and a young woman who was to me little more than a child. It was not what I wanted. It felt good for a moment, then left me feeling emptier and more alone than I had felt before her smile and our desultory lies.

  “How long is your refractory period?” she asked, with a giggle and a purr.

  “Forever,” I said. “Forever.”

  The shades of the night were endless. Maybe it was the booze, I told myself. But I had only been drinking beer. Maybe it was the beer, I told myself. But I knew that it was not. I had entered her, but she had not entered me. There had been no slaking. I had breathed no new life. Sustenance, moisture, deliverance were not mine.

  The blond hair was real. My hands shook the next morning after she left. I have to stop drinking, I muttered aloud. I managed to make a cup of coffee and I sat there with it, smoking one cigarette after another. My stare was vacant, as if in mourning for myself. The last time I raised the cup to my lips, the coffee was cold. I took a Valium and exhaled. I do not remember her name.

  A few nights later I was sitting at the bar at Circa Tabac with a vodka and soda and a smoke. My buddy Lee, who runs the place, sat down next to me with that inscrutable grin of his on his face.

  “Happy Candlemas,” I said.

  “Is today Candlemas?” he said. “I thought it was Groundhog Day. What’s Candlemas?”

  “The Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. Something like that. Lots of candles.”

  “Yeah? What do I know? I’m a Jew, and I don’t even know Jew holidays.”

  “Also the first of the four traditional witches’ Sabbaths of the year.” I drank and drew smoke. “What I want to know is: how did Candlemas become the witches’ Sabbath, and how did the witches’ Sabbath become Groundhog Day?”

  “It’s when the groundhog comes out of its hole.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know.” He drank and drew smoke. “You writing these days?”

  “Next question.”

  “How are the girls treating you?”

  My reaction was spontaneous. I don’t know what my face looked like, but I think I uttered “Oh, God” and managed a laugh that ended in earnest with the words “It’s sad”
and a sound of a different kind.

  At this he in turn managed a laugh.

  That was the night I met her, right there at that bar on Watts Street. Her name was Sandrine, and she liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. She was in her early twenties. If she had told me she was seventeen, I would have believed her. Maybe she was. I had not been with a redhead, not such a pretty one, in a long, long time.

  I HAD NEVER READ ANY OF THE BOOKS, BUT I GOT A KICK OUT of the old movies. Bela Lugosi was a hoot.

  I read a biography of him once. The only thing I remember from it is his craving toward the end of his days for a kind of oily peppery paprika bread that he had longed for since leaving Hungary. I remember this because I’ve been craving a kind of oily peppery paprika bread that a few of the old Italian-Albanian women in my boyhood neighborhood made in their black cast-iron ovens. I’m pretty sure it was called zallia, or something like that. The recipe seems to have died with the last of them, as I haven’t been able to find it again in more than forty years of searching, and I’m beginning to feel that I never will. What they called tarallia, pretzel-shaped anise bread, I’ve found a lackluster echo of in taralli. And what was called—though the final vowels were never pronounced—culliaccia, the rich, buttery egg bread they made in glazed braided rings, I’ve found a more distant approximation of in what has been served to me as a dismal confection called Italian egg bread. But zallia remains a maddeningly tantalizing memory. When I read about the bread the Hungarian actor so longed for, I was sure it was pretty much the same thing; and in time all I retained from the story of his life was the mention of that bread.

  In the pictures, they don’t eat. And the mere sight of garlic can bring about a seizure. They react worse than a WASP schoolgirl to it. It’s ridiculous, not only to a wop but probably to Hungarians and Romanians too. Italy isn’t the only place in Europe where they’re big on garlic soup.