Answered Prayers

Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: "Scared?" Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny's derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a born bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn't free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I'd have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn't want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.

So I told him to take the cure. But added: "Let's not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that's my destiny." How optimistic I was in those sheltered days! — battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I've since withstood.

Alice Lee Langman had several nieces, and once the eldest of them, a polite young country girl named Daisy, who had never left Tennessee, visited New York. I groaned when she appeared; it meant my having to move out of Miss Langman's apartment temporarily; worse, I had to cart Daisy around the city, show her the Rockettes, the top of the Empire State Building, the Stat en Island Ferry, feed her Nathan's Coney Island hot dogs, baked beans at the Automat, all that junk. Now I remember it with a salty nostalgia; she had a great time, Daisy did, and I had a better one, for it was as though I'd climbed inside her head and were watching and tasting everything from inside that virginal observatory. "Oh," said Daisy, spooning a dish of pistachio ice cream at Rumpelmayer's, "this is crackerjack"; and "Oh," said Daisy, as we joined a Broadway crowd urging a suicide to hurl himself off the ledge of a window in the old Roxy, "oh, this really is crackerjack."

"That's why I drug: mere dry meditation isn't enough to get me there, keep me there, keep me there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his Outcast of yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, thousands, him and all the other dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except the price is too high, I'm killing myself." Then, scrapping the sleazy stand-up-comic tone: "I am, you know. But meeting you has made me change my mind. I wouldn't object to living. Provided you lived with me, Jonesy. It means risking a cure; and it is a risk. I've done it once before. At a clinic in Vevey; and every night the mountains collapsed on me, and every morning I wanted to drown myself in Lac Léman. But if I did it, would you? We could go back to the States and buy a filling station. No, no foolin'. I've always wanted to run a filling station. Somewhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Last Chance for Gas. it would be real quiet, and you could write stories."

Woodrow said: "I see a light flickering. This book—it's about Kate McCloud, and gang."
"I wouldn't say it's about them—though they're in it."
"Then what is it about?"
"Truth as illusion."
"And illusion as truth?"
"The first. The second is another proposition."
Woodrow asked how so, but the whiskey was at work and I felt too deaf to tell him; but what I would have said was: as truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion—but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion)—and of the two, the illusion is the truer.