THE RAW, DEFIANT NOVEL OF THE SIXTIES




THE SECRET






An Oratorical Novel 
by JAMES DROUGHT


Some books speak to their generation:
In the Forties, Ayn Rand's controversial The Fountainhead; in the Fifties, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; more recently Joseph Heller's Catch-22.  Each of these books made a powerful statement; and each of them was sought out and recognized by its own generation.

In the same fashion, James Drought's The Secret is being read on every campus across the Nation.  Word of mouth has spread the news of this book by a young American who is unafraid to say it.  Copies of the first privately-printed edition have been passed from hand to hand until they are worn out.

James Drought omits nothing in this slashing novel: The sleeping dogs he attacks range from big business and the military establishment to greed and apathy in private life, from our religion, morals and sexual attitudes to our dreams.

Uncomfortably powerful... a good, hard look at life and country, as real and disconcerting as the subject.  Mr. Drought has a piece of knowledge born of his vision, paid in blood.

			St. Louis Post Dispatch


"I am much impressed by this... It is more a testament than a novel... very powerful."

			Paul Pickrel, THE YALE REVIEW




All characters are fictitious











Copyright, 1963 by James W. Drought
Copyright renewal, 1990 by Lorna Carlson Drought,          J. Henry Drought, Sara Drought Nebel, W. Alexander Drought, Carrie Drought

CHAPTER 1

	It is no small discovery, this one, this hard center of a smoldering gamey life, earth, world, universe, God; and I dedicate it to no mean personalities, just a splendid son, a winsome wife and a perfect daughter, all who live under my leaky umbrella in this most inclement of climates, this Year of Our Lord, 1960.  But first --- before I reveal my find --- a bit about myself, my search, my acquaintances, my deeds, successes, failures and horrors, my life and my times, my thoughts and my conclusions, and then at long last my discovery, of course, and how I came to know it, and what it means.  You will not have to wait a great while, but you will wait a little, so resign yourself.  First I must acquaint you with the history of my search.
	On the sunny edge of Chicago, where I grew up, I began to realize that people had a crimp in their heads, a deadly furrow displacing something uncommon and substituting that common indentation called space or nothing or lunacy, which kept people from understanding anything.  For instance, they were never jarred, as I was, by lies and ugliness and the useless maudlin million products made to their rooting taste, instead they enjoyed them much, took the goods to themselves, hugging tight as if what they held was in their own likeness --- false, ugly, useless and filled with cheap sentiment, exactly like themselves.  But is this so surprising, I asked myself.  No.  How can the common man have a knowledge that is uncommon? ---of course, the answer is he cannot.  Can the barnyard goose go wild with the first wind in fall, can he spread his stumpy wings and climb out of his grubby pen?  Can the dog leave his cow-bones suddenly and go into the brush to tear down his game running?  Can the egg-laying chicken, or the chicken-laying rooster, suddenly turn into a fighting cock with a whipping kick, a fierce heart, a dying courage, a willing instinct to be great at all costs and rip feathers, skin and flesh from a jaunty similar competitor?  Of course not.
	Domestics don't take the large strides leaping from what is to what will be, these explorations are taken by the more daring, born that way and unable to be another, and it is only after the thing is done that the great and common tide comes tumbling after, unthinking, seeking only a way already proven easier, or more practical, and there is never any understanding or thought, never any consideration of the idea, the ecstatic dive into the future, that first great step, because if the common could understand they too would become distinctive for they could consider alternatives to everything, having truly understood the alternative to one thing.  But they cannot because they are after all common, and no one can ask ---for instance --- the common gnarly-rooted hedge to burst into peonies, nor the thistle to shine like an orange poppy, because the hedge and thistle are common and concerned only with survival and growth while the peony, the poppy, deliberately construct themselves with an eye toward exaggeration and beauty.  There is a great difference between selecting green and selecting from all available colors.  In the former there is no mistake possible, in the latter there can be failure as well as success.
	But any leader must be found correct by the history which pursues him or he dies out as an experimenter not on the right track.  He is judged in time by whether or not the hordes follow; and I don't say this is fair, but I do say it is true.  There are sometimes mistakes made when a daring experimenter has actually found the right way but the horde denies it and thunders ahead in the wrong direction, or may even pick the lesser leader and follow his mediocre trail into the future granting him fame or fortune or power, while his superior dies on that unfollowed lovely path that was the best one all along.  So goes the endless circle of history chasing its own tail, going nowhere but around and around in unreasonable curves because the various species progress and regress only by chance, although the superior among them continue to offer amazing alternatives.
	I felt no contempt for people, nor did I think I was better off, or anything of the kind.  (When a hundred men are cast into a sea who cares if ninety-nine of them go down immediately, while one, a better swimmer, glides effortlessly into the choppy waves before succumbing with desperate, heroic, cunning efforts failing to keep him alive?  If all men flail until they drown, who cares?)  The fact that I liked people, though, didn't keep me from noticing that what I could do and see and understand they could not.
	I grew up west of Chicago along the Salt Creek (the longest creek in the world, by God), where I caught soft-shelled crabs and then baited my hook with their bellies to catch bass and bullheads, while some of my friends unfortunately carried home their crabs like misers and denied themselves the chance for fish.  I set snares for the elusive pheasant as it pranced a few feet through brush only to shove its lovely ringed neck into my wire loop, I found its pencil-line trails poking through the yellow weeds to water, I looped the wire correctly, fastened it securely; while most of my friends could not.  I adapted to the clumsy hurtling rabbit and caught him too, I steel-trapped the muskrat and more spectacularly the mink, and I didn't find it difficult.  I found most difficult the very idea I had to accept that my friends could not do these things well, and although I made many excuses for them, soon I had to cease blaming fate and put the blame on their clumsiness, and afterward I could do nothing but smile with boredom as they discussed their theories on how to fish, snare and trap, urging me to try some so they could see if any worked.  I shot squirrels out of trees, and I had to admit I was a better shot, either because of a gifted eye, a steadier hand, a determination, or what, but more did fall to the ground, brother, when I shot than fell when my friends fired away hitting limbs, leaves and ticking houses, swearing that something was wrong with their goddamn sights, their sleeve caught, something was in their eyes, the gun was bent, etc., so I couldn't ignore their clumsiness and my skill for long.  I caught catfish, possum, coon, trout, and all the others, occasionally a dove, pigeon, a buck and once on a weekend a deer with an arrow, and another time a bear with three arrows.  I was the best hunter of all that I knew, and my friends recognized it, too, complimenting me on it with smiles and many shakes of their less confident hands.
	We were then, at least, still related by our devotion to similar interests, or to put it more truthfully my broader range of interests in part coincided with their total interests.  There were so many things I never could talk to them about.  For instance, after thinking about our differences --- and this is the first thing the uncommon man is rudely made to do, for his vast differences cannot be ignored --- I concluded that all skill is based on an intuitive ability to know instantly what comes next.  I think this intuition is the great separator between those of us who are used meanly by fate and those of us who are able to excel to the point where we can control our own future.  It is something men are born with or without, and there is nothing that can be done about it, except to reveal whether or not they have it.  The clumsy man can yearn and try and seek and work and study and reason and worry and revise, but he will never be anything but clumsy although his labor may produce competence.  The man who knows what to do and what to look for --- I like to call him a glider, because he seems to skim through life growing unhappy at only what he finds around him and never with himself --- may not know why or where or how, but he does know what, and this is enough, he sees something not seen, he understands something not understood, he can do things that aren't usually done, and all speculation takes place by others, who after observing the amazing performance try mightily to understand it, the better to reduce it to their own level.
	Only idiots contemplate themselves, trying to discover genius of one sort or another.  The real genius, I'm afraid, is brought quickly and painfully to the conclusion he is unique by the very events of his life, those tumultuous times when he knew, he saw, he understood, and he could have done the right thing, but was stopped by those who neither knew, saw or understood anything, or by the times when he succeeded gloriously in doing the proper thing, but no one was profound enough to recognize his victory, no hands applauded, no one recalled it; and, bewildered, he had to watch his great effort pass unnoticed into the past awaiting resurrection by some great soul of the future, or awaiting nothing at all but destruction.

CHAPTER 2

	I remember when the woman nextdoor hung herself.  One morning there was the shocking sight, the purple face, popping eyes, the strangely bent head, the hanging body all baggy and dead, right in the center of the picture window.  Where on a table had stood the huge porcelain lamp covered by the big window-wide lampshade, the woman had stood, then had kicked the table out from under her, swinging by one of the drapery strings from her tinkling chandelier.  I was walking by to school when I saw it through the glass all posed, for the entertainment of pedestrians, upon the window stage as if a masque presented as a last offering to the street, and I went home saying Ma, Mrs. Johnson's in her window, dead, and although there was disbelief my folks soon saw it for themselves, my Old Man phoning in a hurry, my Ma maintaining The very idea, she could have heen more private about it, what will the child think when he grows up and becomes a man, for heaven's sake; and all over the neighborhood word ran that Mrs. Johnson had hung herself right in the window.  Was it a warning of some kind from the old widow?  People were always reporting her to the police because she played her music too loud, and my Ma said that when the police broke down the locked door to get to the gently swinging figure they found the radio, the phonograph and a player-piano all going in a mad loud band.  From the outside, where I stood waiting, it had sounded like a parade coming with all its colors down the street.
	Oh how she must have hated people --- that old widow Johnson --- but she had the best flowers on the block, some blooming it seemed every day until snow covered them, and then some in bloom already when the snow first ran away.  She would snip them all before they wilted and pile them near the alley, burning them when they dried, throwing a greenish smoke over the whole neighborhood.  When the police came they thought her death might have been a trick and they asked if anyone disliked her.  They were told everyone did; at one time or another she had spilled her bitterness on all.  But when an officer asked me I told him I thought she was okay because she kept the witches away, which is what I believed always lying in my room late at night: no witches or monsters or tigers would come near because they were all afraid of Mrs. Johnson.  The reporters came, too, and I told my story until Ma grabbed me, but the next day the papers had it all wrong, saying Mrs. Johnson was "deranged" and had hung herself in "despair" adding she had been "a lonely old woman."  You can see how much they missed the point of the piano, the radio, the phonograph and all, and why she had picked the spot in front of the picture window.  I often thought she had planned it as her grand finale, a last screw you on her wrinkled old lips as she swung to and fro, never to be tucked off to a hospital where the people in white could tell her what to do, never to have to lie still while some insane neighbor-lady spooned broth into her mouth, never to have to sit watching the weeds rise above her beloved roses, never to weakly try to stop some helpful soul from shoveling the snow from her portion of the main sidewalk --- whenever someone had tried that she would scream If I want my walk shoveled I'll do it myself, so mind your own business!
	Since she had no relatives living, the neighborhood was well on its way to planning a nice funeral --- with her money --- and had picked a parlor, had even listed hostesses for each of three days, when along came a grim-faced lawyer who said it was Mrs. Johnson's wish that she be cremated and her remains scattered over "my land," which was her 50 x 90 lot.  This was the clincher for the neighbors and they no longer tried to do anything for her, avoiding even the mention of her name.  When a young couple bought the house, tore out the shrubs and flower-beds, so they could get some air, and then put in creeping bent all over to turn the lot green with no relief and very neat, the neighborhood breathed easier, sinking into its common convictions with more confidence because it found no one rejecting it anymore.
	For about a year I could uncover no substitute for old Mrs. Johnson, however, no unyielding mind strong enough or certain enough, no gnarled grip like hers on what was hers, and everyone appeared tame compared with this wild widow, hacking away at her flowers to burn them in private before they wilted in plain sight.  I missed her, and if I hadn't outgrown my belief in witches I might have missed her more, since there was nothing on our block any longer for witches and demons and monsters to be afraid of.  They could have wiped us all out if they had only tried, for Mrs. Johnson, our true mother, hateful, selfish and unpleasantly bitter because she was older like most mothers than those younger, because she could not forget that her children on the street had a chance to get singled out in the future, while she had neither chance nor future --- Mrs.  Johnson was gone, she could no longer lash out at the things that threatened her, and therefore threatened us, we were now all motherless on the street and exposed with no totally vicious champion to protect us to her death.
	I, for one, felt orphaned, while the rest of the street relaxed, finding it no longer necessary to suffer the dominance of that "deranged" mad woman.  I could do nothing about it, no change in course was open to me, so in spite of Mrs. Johnson's death I simply went on, doing the things I was supposed to do --- at least for awhile, until I lost my religion.

CHAPTER 3

	I used to serve seven o'clock mass every morning at a big brick church on a corner where everybody went to forget and pray for forgiveness; and I used to wonder about the people I saw at the communion rail --- after all, I knew what kind of people they were.  Mr. Lavek was a crook contractor, for instance, who built "El Rancho" houses and sold them for $10,500 while everybody knew they would fall apart in a few years, come tumbling down around families strapped by a big mortgage and lots of kids.  Yet every morning there Mr. Lavek would be at the rail with his mouth wide open, his eyes rolling, his tongue hanging out for the Sacred Host.  One morning, Father Souchek and I were giving communion at the rail to one pink mouth after another, when I thought I noticed something funny.
	As the people came up, all reverent with their hands folded tightly, and knelt down on the leather cushion, there was this big, wild hiss of air that came out each time damn loud with a whoosh.  I tried not to laugh, not while holding the brass plate under their chins while they looked up all holy at Father Souchek, but it started me to thinking for the rest of the mass, and by the time we were finished I had it all figured out.  I told Father Souchek about it in the sacristy.
	"You notice how the cushion hisses when the people kneel on it?" I asked.
	"Yes, son," he said.  "It will have to be fixed."
	"No, not fixed," I said.  "I got this idea here are these people falling on their knees like something big is about to come off, and all they end up doing is putting out this great big hiss of air."
	Right away he thought I was criticizing when really I thought this was something humble and fine to happen m a brick church that didn't look much different from a factory, a miracle or something, a sign from God, a piece of truth shot from the Holy Spirit; but not Father Souchek.  I suppose, though, here he had given up women and everything and had his fingers blessed not just so he could help people hiss at God.  He gave me a shocked look and then turned away to finish locking up the Sacred Hosts and put the key in his pocket.  I always liked Father Souchek but he seemed to take everything the wrong way.
	"Let's walk out by my garden," he said.  When we got out there he pointed to his radishes and carrots.  "Don't they look fine?"
	I didn't say anything, just waited like I was supposed to for Father Souchek to set me straight, to give me a wrench back to correctness, save my soul from the hellfire he saw already licking my feet, scare away my devil, call back the angels and put me back happily into the flock.  The earnest look on his face told me plainly that I had stepped out of line and that he would do me the favor of kicking me back into place before it was too late.
	"Son," Father Souchek said finally, looking right in my face, "the Holy Eucharist is a living symbol."  He paused to make sure he had my attention.  "A living symbol of Christ, do you understand that?"  I nodded my head, but I didn't exactly know what a symbol was.  "And when the people take the host why they are filled with Christ, the living Christ.  Son, the Holy Eucharist is a marvelous gift given us by God, and to mock it would be a most grievous sin."
	I nodded my head again, and he went on a little, repeating the same thing, before he let me get on my bike.  When I got home I went to the dictionary the Old Man had brought home from the printshop where he worked, and I looked up what symbol meant so I could understand Father Souchek better.
	"Symbol," the dictionary said, " (sim'bul), n. 1. an emblem. 2. in writing or printing, a conventional sign, as a letter or abbreviation, used in mathematics, physics, music etc. to represent operations, quantities, elements, sounds, etc."
	As soon as I caught on religion was covered under etc., I thought I knew what Father Souchek meant.  In communion the people were eating a sort of abbreviated Jesus who was really alive, and since as I said before I knew what kind of people they were, all of a sudden I had it, I knew what it all meant, and it was something far, far better than even Mrs. Johnson.  When Jesus was here full-size 1,943 years ago, I thought, the people went and murdered him, people just like us.  Now in communion what we're all doing is "sim'bul-iz-ing" by eating him up how people like us killed him back then.  By eating him up I was reminding myself I was the kind who stuck him up on that cross.  You know, I thought this was something really great, and I felt good about it.  I even thought up a couple other good ways we could "sim'bul-ize" what we did before and what we'd do again, if we had the chance.  Wouldn't it be fine if all of us would pick up a rock on the way to church and then as we went in we could wing it at old Jesus on the cross?  Or there could be a little statue of him at the door so that every time we walked in we could spit on him.  Or we could all curse him in a litany desecrating his goodness, we could shake our fists in a chorus of hate, reminding ourselves exactly what we are.
	But the next morning when I told Father Souchek what I had been thinking, he got angry red and puffed all up.  He shouted about how people who eat Jesus are really filled up with Jesus and they are all good and all holy while they are almost like eating something dehydrated, I supposed he meant.  He wouldn't even look at me but whirled around in his vestments and pushed me through the doorway, nudging me with his big belly until we got to the foot of the altar in front of the kneeling crowd.  I kept trying to figure out why anybody could be all gcod and all holy after eating up Jesus, and I was confused by the mix-up, when about midway through the Mass old Father Souchek let this big fat fart, right up there on the holy altar with the tabernacle open and his hand poked through the silk curtains, reaching for the Sacred Host.  When he turned around I could see his face get red and he muffed some of the Latin.  The fart had been so loud even the nuns in the first row must have heard it, and he knew, boy, was his face red.  I thought here he takes the host every morning, and he's a priest, and he sure isn't all good, he's not any different from the rest of us.  The only trouble was I started thinking about the saints, and the Virgin Mary, and even about Jesus himself.  I had never thought about them before, but as soon as I did I knew they weren't any different from the rest of us either.  So right there at the foot of the altar with my hand covering my nose and trying not to look at poor Father Souchek, I lost my religion in an instant and I let out the laughter I had always felt.  I laughed all the way home on my bike, thinking about how I had been fooled by all this Jesus business and how I was never going to be fooled again.
	But when I got home I started thinking about how strong Jesus must have been --- if he was a human being just like me --- to go forty days without food, sweat blood, and then hang all day on a cross with nails banged through his wrists.  I had to admit this was one fine, holy, heck of a feat to accomplish without any help from God or heaven or anybody else, and I hoped when I grew up I would have as much guts as Jesus.

CHAPTER 4

	Although I went to that strange school where all the lies were passed out, provided by our town to keep the young in line, I stepped off the straight and narrow here, too.  I got my real education from Charlie, a twisted but knowledgeable old man who had difficulty talking and could say only a few words at a time.  I found Charlie a mile away from home one day on my ever-widening paper route, (which I had increased from thirty-five to one-hundred-and-twenty-eight deliveries, in only five months).
	He was slumped in a porch chair when I passed by on my bike --- a mangled misshapen mass of muscles all pulling in the wrong directions, making his head twitch down to one side --- and his arms waved wildly in the air at me, his mouth curling uncontrollably and then acking and spitting, his voice all graveled and garbled, struck me with:
	"Aarghh, eyyy! ... Wait ugh ... min --- ute! EYYY! .... Papuh,ughh ... pap-HUH!  HERE!"
	I turned and rode back, watching him struggle to release himself from the chair.  He had slight control over one leg and none over the other, which he had to drag and push and pull with those great hairy arms of his, built up by half a century of pushing on crutches, so it took him a minute to even sit up and then it was an agony later that he finally stood and undulated (which is the only way I can describe his ducking, weaving forward motion) slowly, painfully to the head of the steps where he stilled himself, his head resting crazily on one shoulder and his mouth grinning, his big black eyes boring ahead beneath his black hair slicked down carefully by his mother but falling in a few strings over his flat wide forehead and thick black brows.  He waved one hand unsteadily, more dipping his head under it than bringing his hand to his head, smoothing the hairs in place as well as he could, the open-mouthed imbecilic grin remaining, as he knew I was waiting now for him to say what he wanted and the most difficult thing in his nightmare of a broken, twisted backbone was to talk, to say anything at all, let alone reduce his amazing, intricate and infinitely shaded thoughts to the minimum of words that his back allowed to tumble out of his slobbering mouth.
	"Yahhh ... argh ... I'mah ... agguu ... Sharlieeee", he said, and he thumped his wide flat chest with one great hairy hand so that the sound thunked at least a hundred feet past me.  He continued smiling, although he must have known the monstrous ugliness he struck me with, and all that could have saved him was his confidence that if he could only get me to stay, if I would only have the patience to understand those tortured few words sieved through his scrambled voice box, that I would be entertained, surprised, instructed, delighted, confused, expanded, informed, and all else, so that my over-taxed attention would be repaid for its intent effort.  Yet, Charlie must have failed a thousand times to stop someone passing for every successful convert he made to relieve the intense boredom of his imprisoned and gagged mind that continually exploded through the pinhole which led to his mouth.
	Behind him at the screen appeared an old lady with the saddest face, as if she had watched her baby son in the convulsions of death one day and then had been forced to see these convulsions continue, day after day, for years, decades, as that misshapen offspring of her flesh conducted his grim battle against paralysis, immobility, blindness, deafness --- there was no act so small that he could depend on his ability to conduct it; for instance, one morning his mother told me Charlie could not have visitors because he was unable to open his mouth.  Sometimes, he won such a victory that he was able to walk the eight blocks downtown to talk with the merchants and sweep out Mr. Lavek's office --- which was his job --- although what would have taken a normal person an hour took him four, and this would be his greatest day.
	"Ayeee, argh, Papuh!"  Charlie smilingly groaned to his mother, as spit slid from his mouth forcing him to bring that great fist up again and strike himself to wipe his chin.
	Mrs. Opie Gates addressed me with her softer smile, but like her son admitting nothing was extra-ordinary about the scene --- an admission would lead to madness and solitude.  "He wants you to begin leaving the paper," she said.  And when I had nodded my head and had written down name and address, and when Charlie had strangled out some more sounds, she added, "Would you like some lemonade?"  I said sure, and I came up on the porch and sat talking with them, Mrs. Gates translating everything Charlie said, although he could hear us perfectly.
	Like all men of knowledge the passive act of accumulation was his only easy one, and able to hear he listened to speeches, the radio, music; and able to see he read damn near everything and had taught himself six languages, while he could offer almost nothing of his reflections based on the giant heap of his vast accumulations wealthy man, who was allowed to spend very little, a weathered book that could transmit one word per page although taken whole it was a masterpiece, a genius reduced to sign language of extreme simplicity, this was Charlie, my tutor, all there was to American education, knowledge but no expression, facts unrelated, a tongue-tied system trying to dispence the hoard of the ages behind it, an epic past remembered by a child, and only by this can you imagine the frustration, the aching desire, the fantastic nightmare, the monstrous waiting that a child of the times like me must go through to tear his precious heritage from your almost sealed mouthpiece, the stricken, misshapen, grotesque and defeating cripple that is SCHOOL, or what we have of it.
		"Yahhh ... ooorgh ... yice dayeee ... anduh sunnyeeee," moaned Charlie, which his mother translated as "It's a fine, sunny day, so dry and warm --- it makes Charlie feel so much better, and for that matter, all of us, to have such a clear cloudless day."  And while she explained this, he grinned happily, vigorously nodding his huge head and patting his leg with his open hand.  "Aargh!" he added, as if congratulating the two of us for our understanding.  He pointed vaguely at the sky, then, continuing his smile said, ". . . Ta ... sun ... aargh... ardly know ... think . . . 'ploding there."
	"The sun is exploding?" I asked.
	The vigorous nod came once again, incorporating not only his head but his shoulders and a flap of his hands.
	"You'll find," said his pleased mother, "that if you listen hard you can grow to understand him."
	Charlie grinned wildly and rocked happily and nodded again.
	Each day I stopped, circling back from my route and delivering Charlie's paper last, so that we could talk on the porch that summer, sipping his mother's lemonade and laughing at things the paper said (since Charlie took exceptional delight in pointing out how one report contradicted another in the same day's paper, or how a single report contradicted itself, or how even in a paragraph a sentence drew a conclusion opposite to the one suggested by the previous facts), and most days he would have his mother mark books ahead of time and bring them out after my arrival so he could point with his crutch to pages and get his opinions across to me with a series of excerpts drawn from many different sources.  Although he never cared to have me speculate on titles and tried to hurry me to the marked passages, I noticed all the strange names.  One day there would be Stendhal, Machiavelli, the Notebooks of Leonardo, Michaelangelo's poetry, and others as Charlie grooved out a few facts about the idea of nation-states.  The next book might be Leaves of Grass, so Whitman could make the previous thoughts relative to the strivings of my own country, and then would come an especially vicious piece of satire from Adam's Democracy, written just after Whitman and describing the inane corruption of the Grant and Hayes administrations.  It is a great thing to suddenly be struck at the age of twelve that it is not enough to simply be President, but that there have been good ones and bad ones, and that the Presidency is little more than an opportunity, which itself is so rigged that it takes a desperate attempt, good fortune, great shrewdness and capacity to be a decent leader, let alone to move oneself and the country a few steps higher in accomplishment.  "Everything ... believes ... it ... blooms ... the first time," Charlie explained, as he pointed out the many great democracies which preceded ours: the Greek, English, Iroquois, Incan, among others --- surely all with limitations, he would add; then when he saw my proud smile, he would point out our own limitations: limited control of land by our vast public, and ownership by a few of our total industrial capacity.  All that could be said for us was our size.
	The most fascinating thing he pointed out to me was that while it exalted man, democracy at the same time was based on a distrust of human motives.  "The... Founding ... Fathers," Charlie mumbled, "were . . . arrrgh..... trying to protect pee... pee ... pee-PUL. . . FROM pee-PUL!"  He chuckled happily at the effect this had on me, pointing with his crutch to various pages on the porch floor.  "Read ... Heyuh!" he advised, and then moaned as some special pain struck him.  (The gist of what he showed me was that the structure of our democracy had been devised to keep any human being or group from gaining too much power over the whole, because --- as the framers of the Constitution freely admitted --- all human beings were potentially corrupt and tended to mistreat others to their own advantage.  As a matter of fact, it was the assumption that any man mainly would strive for his own advantage that was expected to make democracy work.  There were no goals held by all, Charlie said, in a democracy, there were only conflicts, and out of these arose goals held by no single group, but supposedly good for all.  In other words, the democratic form of government was nothing more than a concrete political expression of the natural conflict that arises in any group of humans.  If we have any single view of life, Charlie explained, here in America it is a belief that no truth can be contained in a single head, that truth only arises out of the fusion that results when many sincere men meet head on with singularly limited beliefs and engage in combat --- the truth, or the ideal, is the combat itself, dramatizing life which is also a combat, mankind which is combative, and giving rise to compromise actions which are best for the population as a whole.)
	"I ... spose ... yorrrr wond'ring ... arrgh . . . how mistakes 'r made then . . . . RIGHT!" Charlie asked, his crutch coming to a halt.
	Although I wasn't wondering anything in particular, I nodded my head and smiled.
	Charlie claimed that sometimes a good idea lost simply because it was championed by a weak man, and that this was how "mistakes" were made in a democracy, more a result of inaction than of action, more a result of "seeing the other fellow's point" than a result of "not seeing it," more a result of one man trying to be all things to all men than of trying to be his own man.  (The more closely each man limits his fight to purely his own interests, in other words, the better democracy works; however, only so long as all men fight hard for their own interests.  It is a symphony, where all the instruments must speak definitely in their own voices to make the music that expresses the orchestral voice of all, while not one really can be heard; it is a man-made political system based on the theory that the total is greater than any part, and greater than the sum of any or all parts, that what arises out of the interaction of groups is greater than what arises out of any single group, and out of the sum of any groups; it is a nation greater than its total people and the total of their ideas.
	(Charlie liked to compare it with a play by Shakespeare, where all the characters are distinctive and certain and exciting, but each is different, and none can be said to speak the truth.  Each has beliefs that are in conflict with the other's, and only the crescendo, the play itself, which expresses the greatness of the conflict, becomes a single work of truth, unified, all inclusive, yet with a message of its own which stands for life itself, a representation of existence, which is the nearest thing to truth we know, a description of reality, a mirror image of the world, greater than any of its parts and greater than the sum.)
	"Isn't . . . the ... high ... point ... uv-every ... play ... the . . . conflict?" Charlie asked.  (Isn't the message the resolution of this conflict?  Doesn't every actor say his lines as if they are the only ones in the play, while he knows they are not?  And after all this can't the play fail, offering nothing?  Yes, but it can succeed, too, offering a reminder of life itself.)  It is the same with government, Charlie said, and I believed him.
	Then came the wars, the inhuman arguments to death, the conflicts resulting in mass murder, the wrecking, the destruction, the wounds, the torture, the sadism --- this was conflict, too, and all that arose from it was smoke, the decomposing stink of bodies all stiff and gruesomely piled in staggering hills of flesh.  Was this not a conflict, an expression too of life?  And if so was it not death that was being expressed?  Could death be the expression of life?  Could life be a will to death?  Well, if so nobody was saying it at the time: instead all --- Charlie included --- pretended, and I listened, that this was the common war to end wars once again, that we were on the side of right, the others on the wrong, that we waved God's banner, that we (one group) were in the fold of truth, while the enemy depended on lies --- ours was the cause of humanity, the others were anti-humans.  All of a sudden we threw it all up and sang that those of us in one hemisphere were godlike, the others were offspring of the devil, and it seemed true enough, listening to the radio, reading the newspapers, and even after it was over with, inspecting the ovens and hanging the culprits.

CHAPTER 5

	My cousin's name was Melvin and he was a marine who died at Guadalcanal; another cousin's name was Ralph and he was a soldier who came home so busted up he spent the next six years in and out of veterans' hospitals before dying of his wounds in middle age --- a death that was a blessing, as Ma said, and the family agreed with her.  My older brother died by drowning when the Lexington aircraft carrier sank in the Pacific, and a cousin named George, younger than Ralph and Melvin, was a paratrooper who dropped on Normandy during D-day minus one, and was cut in two by machinegun fire before he could take a step, although a quarter of a million men followed him in boats the next day and slowly and grimly avenged his death and all the others.  I cannot glorify their heroism because I do not deserve to; more years must pass, perhaps a Centennial will be held and the scholars will give speeches, for all the blood will have been forgotten.  All I can remember is Melvin's wife crying, her remarriage that seemed so sad, my brother's clothes coming out of his closet and being given to me, Ralph's grim face in the hospital-always Sunday in the hospital during visiting hours, the echoing halls, the purple bathrobes and the tired grey faces of the vets, the visiting wives and the children afraid to laugh, the lonely lack of things to do as the adults smiled and said things while being careful to say nothing because there was nothing to say.
	The war was announced on the radio, December 7, 1941, a Sunday set aside for church, the show, a drive in the suburbs, cold-meat sandwiches at night and Jack Benny's radio show.  The previous Sunday we had driven out to Grandma's for picnic lunch and much laughter by the barbecue pit, while Uncle Walter showed us kids how he could click his false teeth, push them out clicking from his lips like a duckbill jabbering, until Grandma told him to stop it, and my aunt slapped his face.  I remember there were hamburgers left over, and Uncle Lee had made a boat which he wheeled out of the garage to show us, and my cousin Donna took off with the boy next door to neck down by the park, or at least that's what her mother, my aunt, accused her of when she came back.  But on the next Sunday, we went nowhere, and just sat by the radio listening to the news that the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor, a dirty sneaky attack while we weren't looking because we were talking with their ambassadors about peace in Washington, D.C.  My Mother cried and she hugged my Bro, while my Dad said over and over "It's hard to believe ... It' hard to believe."  From then on there was war, and I knew nothing else.
	The newspapers gave the battle reports, quoting "heavy losses" on Bataan; there were maps of New Guinea with multi-colors and ours was always contracting, and then always expanding; the Philippines were "lost" then "regained"; Europe was all grey, except for some black at Cherbourg which spreading across the Rhine like spilled ink, oozing toward Berlin.  The movies praised the killing, and I never thought of disagreeing when the pilots "came home" with their bomber groups "short," or as wreckage flamed down on the screen to bury itself and some man on their side or ours.  I worshipped the commandos, the rangers, because they were taught judo and could kill quickly with one of their million tricks; I liked the hotrod fighter pilots who made a game of killing and even kept score --- with the man making the most points seen in the newsreels, sent home to Washington for a medal; I hated the japs, shown killing and raping white women, strung up with officer's belts, their flesh as snowy as chicken-breasts; I hated Nazis who slaughtered the benevolent French Freedom Fighters; and the Italians seemed ludicrous, unworthy even of consideration, let alone hate.  I saw the movies where the japs dragged Marines out for torture in the night, making them cry out to buddies who couldn't go to their aid, and I died a little too with revulsion at the squint-eyed sadism, which could not be condoned but must be destroyed.  I cheered the sight through open bomb-bay doors of incendiaries like falling hay scattering over Hamburg, Berlin, and all those other cities.  The radio told of attacks and gloated when our losses were less than tbeirs, which I gloated about too, studying the little maps and the steadily advancing blots.  There were stamps offered in the Sunday papers, containing heroes like Colin Kelly and General Wainwright, spitfires and P-47s, B24s and B17s and Mosquito bombers, while some showed fire and smoke and attacking Marines and soldiers and were labeled GUADALCANAL and TARAWA and CORREGIDOR.  There were reports of japs being burned alive by flame-throwers, and of napalm bombs hurled over terrain in Italy which fried Nazi troops.  There were movies of the London Raids with the crumbling buildings and rubble-filled streets, and later there were the same movies of Berlin, plus the grotesque pictures of living skeletons being led out of concentration camps, and the piles of bones, bodies, and the lampshades made from human skin.
	There were photographs of headless men, bleeding men, legless men, dying babies, Monte Cassino destroyed, released prisoners blinded by torture; there were reports of pillaging by us, civilians just girls pulled out and raped until dead by Allied armies.  Then there was the Atomic attack on a Japanese city, and then another one, burning to bits everything, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, half the people, buildings, streets, along with some war plants.  There were the full-page pictures in Life of Mussolini and his mistress hanging by their feet in Rome, their faces all bloody, their clothes ripped open.  Then came the War Trials in Nurenberg and Tokyo, and the hangings.
	Kill, kill, or be killed.  Destroy or be destroyed.  There was nothing else to be considered for four years, as I was reading the newspapers for the first time, going to movies for the first time, listening to the radio for the first time.  Kill and how to it. Be killed and how it is done.  Capture and kill; be captured and die.  Blow everything to bits; be blown to bits --- and pray to God we win.

CHAPTER 6

	Meanwhile the homefront was carrying on business as usual, as if the world were schizophrenic and one face killed, the other smiled and sold and prayed and married and had children and bought homes and invested in a future that would come about only if the other face killed sufficiently.  It was as if a farm were being fertilized by dead bodies, or as if a hungry nation were eating its corpses.
	The smiling face at home that masked that of the contorted killer never changed.  It had its weddings, its dean clothes and a bath, its green lawns and houses, its families and friends, its smooth, warm and comfortable nest of congeniality and conversation, its parties and dances, its Saturday dinner out at the inn, its church and school and its shopping district with well-lighted stores, its cash and its ethics on the counter of commerce such as "pay your debts," "you get what you pay for," "a penny saved is a penny earned," "put something away for a rainy day" and "a friend in need is a friend indeed."  It was a counter-top world that excluded death, fate and anger, or at least reduced them to the point where they could be ignored; it was a mask drawn with friendship and cooperation and love and decency; and only when there was a war could it be discovered to be false, a simple expediency to handle needs, a truce declared between some men for the purpose of uniting to kill some others and perpetuate themselves.  It was no different from the den-rules by which the wolf-pack abides when it is home in the cave, opposite to the lust for killing that the pack engages in when away on the prowl --- the two-faced essence of man which results in a sensible arrangement (cooperation) to attain a goal (killing), and during the war it was all exposed and accepted without remorse by the children, although the adults must have trembled at this peek at the truth this gave the young because, after all, the values caused by the arrangement and the desires expressed in the goal are in total opposition and cannot be explained or justified or even accepted without the risk of collapse.
	(For the young it is like seeing a lovely lady, refined by a fine family, slip out one night in all her silk finery and walk into a woods erect and noble, where suddenly she crouches, rips a bird to pieces and eats it raw, shits in a hole and then kills another refined lady whom she meets at an appointed spot.  On seeing this lovely lady the next morning, listening to her music, smiling and conversing nobly, it is impossible for the children not to change their opinion, the weak tearing their hair at ruined illusions, the strong holding their breath at the revealed source of monstrous power in one so lovely.  But since most children are weak, the uncles must fear that the truth will be spoken to the fine lady, who can be fine only so long as she ignores her night-forays, for she will collapse at the truth, her reputation ruined, the illusion torn away, and all that will be left to her is the fierce life she has so successfully hidden up to this time.  After all, a few of the uncles hope she will forget her evenings so well, so thoroughly, that she will not engage in them, although more practical uncles say this is folly.  But the children have seen, and nothing can change that; they remain tranced by the dual personality of the motherland, or they hate her, or they stand in awe at he previously hidden strength --- but no matter what, her beau has a new meaning to them, and they never forget it.)
	During World War Two my country lived this schizophrene life, sending its sons out to kill on the one hand, while seeing to its own comforts on the other and pretending its way of life at home was plenty worth dying for.
	My Old Man and all my uncles were deferred during the war and they didn't have to go because they were a little too old, because there was something wrong with their health, or because --- like my Old Man --- they engineered, or they sold, or they were too skilled, and they couldn't be replaced easily.  My Uncle Homer made $45,000 in just one year, selling small motors, and while he just barely had been making enough money to live on before the war, after it was over he had the biggest house in Elgin, Illinois, and became the man everyone envied.  His daughters were the best-dressed girls at Elgin High and his wife had one of the first Thunderbirds and won the golf championship at an exclusive country club for four years straight in the Fifties.  (In 1960, Homer ran for Congress from his district and won on a platform to decrease government spending and let people take care of themselves, as he claimed he had once done, rising from an illiterate farm boy with no future and through his own efforts becoming the richest man in Elgin.)  I always did like Homer, especially when he would drive up during the war, lift open his trunk and give the Old Man a case of Scotch, and then hand Ma ten cartons of Luckies, and then to me a whole carton of Hershey bars.  He had everything in that trunk, from imported liquor to pre-war real rubber golf balls, and on one lucky day he gave my Old Man a C-card so we could get all the gasoline we wanted.  "If you ever need anything, just see old Homer," my Old Man would joke.  And Homer would just nod his head and smile.  But later Ma would tell the Old Man that it certainly must be true, because Homer was rapidly becoming the richest man in the Old Man's whole family.
	Sometimes I wondered about it all, the people at home, the war a long way off, the young men at the front, dying.  I thought that people at home should be more concerned.  There were the little grocery stores where smiling owners passed black-market meat to their favorites without stamps, while their wives passed sugar and butter furtively, and both talked proudly of sons at the front, of battles and medals and luck, of letters stained with mud and flown out of the jungles to them at home, even as they slid an extra sack of sugar into another mother's brown shopping bag.  There was the priest praying at the foot of the altar for "God to keep our boys safe and bring them back to us all victorious and whole" ---a mockery of all that was religion, but especially ironic when the collection-plate was passed as usual, not for the boys (that was the government's job) but for a new altar, or for the building of the new church, or brazenly "for Father's anniversary," once openly "for Father's Christmas table," and it wasn't unusual for those chauvanistic prayers to be followed by a priestly burp.  There were the defense plants, which had to offer high wages to attract workers, who then labored long hours, for "victory" they said but really for "overtime" pay sometimes even multiplied by two when the wife also went to work, hoarding the wages into "defense bonds" which offered the best rate of interest on the original investment.  And there were many industries, spurred on not by the war but by the chance to make big profits, so obvious because when the President suggested that even industrialists and workers be drafted and be paid "a soldiers wage," they screamed in unison that this was against "all that America stood for," and that if they weren't allowed to make huge sums of money on the war then war would be fought for nothing --- so the President backed down.

CHAPTER 7

	But through our efforts and the massive mistakes of our enemies we won the war at last without crippling every young man among us, and soon the troops were marching home to find the top jobs already filled by those who had stayed behind; and although the crowds stood cheering, their pockets bulging with profits, the troops found their girls looking guilty at least and if not that then married or in love with someone else, the more patriotic ones at most having the good sense to pick nearby soldiers when giving up far-away ones.  As in any return, from Odysseus to Johnny American, the embattled boys found themselves deposed; in the absence they had been replaced as workers, lovers, fathers, voters, leaders, land-owners, capital-holders, profit-makers; in business, at home, and in the government they found no power and no profits had been held in trust for them, and the pitifully small bonuses they were awarded could have been made in just a few months' time by any aircraft worker --- and had been made, over and over again.  A nation that feared a depression coming on, now that the "war boom" was over, told the vets they could get cheap "loans" if they bought houses and primed the profits of contractors already rich on government contracts during the war, or they could get some money if they promised to pay most of it to schools which had already grown fat on educational programs for the Services during the war and now wanted to grow fatter and expand holdings by buying up farms and stocks and bonds and all tax free, or the vets were offered free medical care for wounds they had suffered during battle and free insurance in case they died of these wounds or got hit by a car before they resumed their lives, since the government did not want a lot of vet-less families dependent on it for welfare.
	It was a very instructional picture for the young people my age to see: the nation opened its hungry arms to the veterans who survived and it pointed out immediately how the returning men could help out those who had stayed behind.  The medals were really all made of brass, and I for one realized those poor sonsabitches --- many of them heroes --- were being taken for suckers by the very people whose pockets already were lined with war bonds growing in interest.
	Even the surplus --- the equipment, clothing and vehicles --- which would have been given to the troops had the war continued, was snatched out of their hands when the war stopped and was sold to the highest bidder, or the friendliest conniver, and then was sold back in many cases to the vets themselves, now civilians, at a profit! it was pathetic to see them, their faces beaming, when they recognized equipment once issued to thern in the Pacific, Africa or Europe, as they lined up in front of Surplus Stores to buy from the fat and sweating 50-year-olds, who had bought the stuff for next to nothing from the govemment.
	The country was maintaining, as usual, business at a profit, and if there had been an opportunity would have stripped the corpses of clothing and auctioned it off to the highest bidder.  Grotesque as it was, it showed how the vets retumed home, owning nothing, forced to buy whatever they needed or wanted from those who had purchased it for much less during the war with money made by making and selling weapons to the troops.  Money made during the war and invested, doubled, tripled and went on multiplying itself, as the investments were in turn sold at higher prices to the vets: land, houses, farms, business, stocks of all kinds.  No man who had worn a uniform was exempted from this exploitation; upon their return they found themselves powerless, stripped of capital and ownership which they hadn't the time to gain, fleeced even as the parades saluted them, and before they could even put away their medals they discovered they had to start from scratch as if the war had never happened, while the others rode high on capital and investments the war had allowed them to make.
	(My cousin, Swede, who fought four years up through Africa, Sicily, Italy and across Europe, came home to Higgins, Illinois, to his wife and three children, and found he had accomplished nothing for himself; it was almost like coming home defeated.  He needed land, but an acre which was valued at $500 in 1941 was worth $2500 in 1946.  Working in a gas station and tending bar at night he saved $2500 in one year, but by this time the chunk of land he wanted had gone up in price to $3000, so he had to work three more months before he could buy the land and build his house on mortgage.  Still, when he was finished he had only his house and a job at the gas station, and --- including the war --- six years had gone by.  The man who owned the gas station had graduated with Swede from Higgins High in 1940, but staying in the town as a 4-F he now owned not only the station, but an oil distribution business and a 300-acre subdivision starting at the edge of town on a farm he had bought for $400 an acre when the old folks went bankrupt and couldn't pay a note.  Oscar was a generous man, and he took Swede into his business, for a price of course.  From 1947 through 1957, Swede paid $2000 a year from his salary to buy stock in the gas station and oil business, ending up a half-partner; however, in order to do this he had to work there steadily for a decade at the modest salary Oscar paid, and also manage the business.  Swede, a tireless two-hundred pounder, who is always smiling, has doubled the worth of the business and is continuing to raise it in value, while Oscar has withdrawn physically from the premises and no longer has to work, but has an apartment in Chicago and a house in Bermuda.  While Swede runs the oil business and fills Oscar's pocket with half the profits, another vet does the same with the subdivision, now containing 2500 units and still steadily growing as it annexes farms on all sides.  Swede once told me, sitting on Betty's new furniture in the living room of the same house he built in 1947 that Oscar is now worth roughly three-quarters of a million dollars, with investments in a dozen different industries.  "And he deserves it, too," said Betty.  "He's been mighty good to us." Swede, as I remember, nodded his head vigorously.)

CHAPTER 8

	Well, what did all this mean to me, a kid taking in the sweet cream cliches at the time he was watching all this take place in the Forties, a wet-behind-the-ears neophyte waiting to be told what was what about life, my country, my elders and the past-a pair of ears, eyes, and a brain willing to be exposed.  You can imagine how noxious the school's sweet dreams were, trying to fill me with "honesty is the best policy," "George Washington never told a lie," "America, the land of the free," "Any young lad has a chance to be President," "This is the land of equal opportunity," "The law guarantees justice to all," and numerous other homilies of crap like this.  I wouldn't have minded if these little messages had been proposed to me as ideals rather than realities, but when I was asked to observe them at work in the great nation outside the school window, all I could see was Mr. Kucera, who lived up our block, a 65-year-old toolmaker, who couldn't expect to last more than a few more years, and he was furtively stacking tires in his garage so that no matter how long the war went on his '36 Chevy, which he drove the four blocks to and from the train station, would always have wheels.  Whenever I didn't have anything to do I would hang around his garage, and if he happened to be home and saw me he would come out wild as an old Rhino and accuse me of stealing his crabapples!  I would just grin at him, never using the word "hoarder" but less crudely asking him why he kept his garage locked when his car was always outside.  "To protect myself from little thieves like you," he would cry, falling into the trap because then I would ask what he had in there that he was afraid of losing if it weren't his car, and he would sputter like his Chevy and chase me off with a broom or his rake or whatever he found handy.
	I could respect nothing I saw, and I only became worried when I was told I should respect everything.  I saw people like Mr. Kucera acting like pack-rats.  I saw people like Uncle Homer buying on the black market.  I saw older boys going off to a war where they either killed or were killed.  I saw people working like crazy in defense plants to make extra money.  I saw realtors, bankers, contractors and store-owners making and spending more money, driving bigger cars, moving into larger houses.  I saw that most of the population was devoted to taking money away somehow from most of the population, and that there were only a few people on top who got really rich and didn't lose their money right away to someone else.  I saw the politicians waving their arms at rallies every few vears while everyone smiled at them, and my Old Man said you couldn't believe a word that came out of their mouths except that they wanted to be elected.  I saw the priest planting his victory garden, accepting canned hams and a bottle of booze now and then, and I heard him ask for money like everyone else only he did it on Sunday while the others rested.  And I saw the teachers at the bottom of the heap with no money, no power, and some of them moaning that they couldn't even buy books --- these same teachers who were asking me to think of my neighbors as democratic, benevolent, responsible, charitable souls when I knew my neighbors were the opposite, all pecking at the country and each other in a determined fight to see who could get the most; and I got a little angry at being asked to rejoice about my environment, my country, when I could see on every side that it was out to screw me for the benefit of those very few who had made it to the top.  First, it tried to telI me lies in its school.  Then when I got older it planned, if the war was still on, to send me into the army like others before me and maybe get me killed while it was paying me a whopping $58 a month.  Then it planned to hold a few minor opportunities in front of my nose so I would work like hell, make a little money and spend it fast so the big guys who owned all the stock could make a killing and so I would end up with nothing and have to work harder, make more money and spend it also.  I expected someone to tell me how to protect myself, rather than telling me how well off I was supposed to be.  And, as far as freedom, I couldn't get excited about it: freedom to speak, when I didn't have anything to say; freedom to worship when I didn't want to worship anything or anyone; and freedom of the press when I never saw anything in the newspapers that rang true anyway, and in fact I thought the only reason they were needed was so the merchants had a place for ads and so the politicians could talk to reporters and tell all about how wonderful they were, and the country too, and how well off everybody was.
	Still, I had some beliefs, although they weren't the ones I was supposed to have according to the schools.  I thought that the country wasn't much good.  I thought that the people weren't much good either, because they didn't know any better.  I thought that the people surrounded themselves with lies and couldn't tell the truth if they wanted to because they didn't know what it was and nobody ever told them.  (After all, even a man like Charlie with all his knowledge and torturing himself to speak out, had to look a little absurd after the Big War, talking about how conflict was truth.)  I thought that most people couldn't do the right thing if they had to, because they didn't know how.  It was obvious, too, that they were scared shitless of each other, trying to kill each other, or fleece each other, and that's no way to live.
	I thought the bald-eagle was perfect as the symbol of our country --- no kidding, I thought it was something fine and good --- the scavenger, the killer, the winged shadow hovering above waiting to dive with its claws first.  It was a good image for the U.S.  It was our good luck, and our misfortune, our mother and our killer, our provider and our thief, our friend and our enemy, our ideal and our nightmare; it was our big chance and our certain tragedy, it said we could be, do, say, try anything, and then it made sure we couldn't, it was what promised to make us all rich and what kept us poor.  It was continually offering us possibilities but none of which we could choose, it was telling us a truth and then showing us it lied, it appeared to be noble but proved to be a savage, it was a woman who turned into a monster.  It was anything we wanted it to be, but never at the right time and never for us, it promised freedom but withheld the necessary food and shelter before freedom was possible, it needed workers but it couldn't use anything worthwhile that they did, it was huge but if you lacked the means to travel it squeezed you in a cage --- it was anything and everything, so much more than anyone could see or say, truly a screaming, diving eagle, beautiful when it was high in the sky but terrifying when it raked you with one great shadowy claw; and it was more powerful than any one person, no matter who they were, because it was always wheeling suddenly and slashing a powerful figure it had previously allowed to rise on a whim, and conversely it was always allowing some idiot to climb the highest rocks while it dove down on greater men and forced them to remain flat on the sand.

CHAPTER 9

	About this time I got a dog; and he was vicious, he bit.  I had only to look at him beside me to know why animals have failed to be friends in the past --- including animal men.  Like other dogs he was a combination of hyena and wolf, neither of which has ever been trustworthy, both meat-eaters and both fierce, with their teeth their only tools.  Dogs are dogmatic; they will refrain from killing only so long as they are being fed, and it takes only a few lean days for them to revert, even now, to cracking living bone with those teeth, when no boiled bone is offered.  Fritz was his name and he was bred by Doberman lineage to be loyal to one master whose hand proferred food, reacting to empty hands as if to danger.  If I had not fed him he would have found another master, or have ceased practicing any loyalty except to his stomach, becoming a killer quickly or be would have died, since he hadn't enough hyena in him to efficiently scavenge.
	I only had to look at his sleek head, his grinning jaws, his whip-black body, to know that he would be good only so long as I killed for myself and for him, throwing him scraps from the results of my slaughters in trade for his loyalty.  As long as there are dogs with kind eyes, in other words, we will know that man is a killer so efficient that he has something left over for his best four-footed friend, for it is on scraps that the bargain is sealed or forgotten, not on kindness which as I said Fritz treated as a danger when it came from an empty hand.
	Man can learn a lot from dogs --- about life, about himself, and even about God.
	(Man tamed animals by his efficiency in slaughter, then he tried to tame God the same way, offering raw or burned bodies stripped of fur on altars, but it didn't work; just as man would not accept offerings from dogs in trade for freedom from the collar because dog-bones are not man's idea of dinner so God turned down flesh which was all man had to give, even when man offered flesh of himself as Abraham once did.  It is our whole being the God seems to want and in return for it he throws us the scraps of his good fortune, like we throw bones to our dogs.  When good fortune lags, like our dogs we discontinue our loyalty to God, giving it back to ourselves, and we revert to killing to keep our bellies content, forgetting instantly the goodness once required of us by our God.  "Give us this day our daily bread," we say, or we will get it the only way we know how, by the blood lust that is our ace in the hole, the key to our long survival before we found the filled hand of God, our only tool being a weapon in a swinging fist which the creep of history has judged more efficient than any teeth within large jaws.  We kill with a club and always have since we lost our hair, and like the dog turning upon another we kill ourselves best over arguments about whose share of our own slaughter shall be greater.  Since good fortune is not under our control, no more than the dog can demand his meal from our hands, we either kill or restrain ourselves according to our God's grants.  Like my dog, poor man can be "good" only so long as he is fortunate; when he is unfortunate he must kill or die like a dog.  And his brain is of no more use to him than putting a bigger weapon in his hand, or thinking up new ways of worship --- depending entirely on the fortune of its master, the man, and on the will of the God.)
	Fritz would trail at my heel, he would defend me, he loved me, gave me his devotion, wagged his stumpy tail tenderly and explored my hand with his wet snout.  He even brought me rabbits and pheasant for I trained him as a retriever and he thought these prizes made me happy.  But as I got more interested in other things, I forgot about Fritz, and even skipped his meal now and then.  He soon ran away, and a few weeks later I found him at a country gas station a couple of miles f rom home.
	"He yours?" the owner asked.
	I said he was mine.
	"You oughta see him hunt the fields around here.  I don't give him anything but a burlap bag for a bed outside, but I pity anybody tries to get in here at night.  He thinks this whole area is his own and he's already killed three dogs that tried muscling in.  Just ripped them right up and layed them out pretty as you please."
	When I approached Fritz he growled at me, so I left him there with his bag-bed and his fields full of food.  With his hair all like wire and his red eyes all coarse from drinking swamp-water he frightened me, so I climbed back on my bike and went home without him.
	Like a dog, I got vicious too, when I found there was nothing for me in family, church, or school or country; I know, because I saw the streak spread in me like heat until it took over my head and I too "ripped" somebody up with the fierceness Fritz had displayed, with the same lack of concern, with the same frenzy of any four-footed fellow swinging in on an enemy and never letting up, hitting him four, five times until he bled and then hitting him again and again, feeling the joy of my fist against flesh as all the fire and hate and bitterness and bitches and impatience came steaming out to sock the figure of the enemy that threatened me and each sting I got just made me more stubborn to storm through and bang one more to the body of the bastard until he didn't move.
	I remember one night coming out of the 20th Century Swimming Club in Oak Park, Illinois (which by the way is the world's largest village), after the guy I was with had pushed some slob in the water and then muscled him out of the way when the bastard got sore.  As we walked down the street toward the car this whole slew of guys started trailing us, and when Donnie went up to unlock the door they went right for the tires of the car with their knives.
	"Get the hell away from there you bastards!" Donnie said, hopping around, but it was too late, and by the time I noticed, three tires were cut to ribbons.  There must have been about twenty-five guys there.  "Okay you bastards," Donnie said, we 'll take you four at a time."
	If he had said "two at a time" they might have just laughed and all dived at us, but the insult of "four" fascinated them so they decided to do it our way.  A big curly-headed kid said, "Okay, you guys, form a big ring," to his boys.  "The Bigtimers here are gonna fight us two apiece for fun.  Ain't that right, Wise Guy," he said to Donnie, and Donnie hit him right in the mouth turning his t-shirt to blood.  The kid started crying  --- his mouth was a mess --- but his gang lifted him back outside the ring and four of the biggest bastards I ever saw busted in on Donnie and me.  Well, we knew we were going to have to show the rest that the worst place for any of them to enter was that goddamn ring they had us in, so Donnie and I ripped right in, kicking and gouging with knuckles, elbows and knees whirling.
	When you're in a pit of people like that and you know you can't get out you just enjoy it no matter how much you get hurt.  Every new ache makes you angrier, so you begin kicking for the other guy's thigh and stamping on his spine, or anything to get him before he gets you, put him out of commission so you can even the odds.  In the middle of it with blood all over my face after one guy had booted me, I heard Donnie screaming and I looked over to see one kid had his shoulders pinned while the other was banging at his face all free.  It was the limit of what I could do to roll over and knock them both off him with a flinging body-block, but I made it and dipped one guy in the forehead so hard with my heel he went out on his back without a sound and with his eyes open.
	They were getting ready to send in their third string team when the siren finally made it, and they took off down the street.  Donnie and I dragged ourselves into the car and drove it into an alley with the tires flopping, and then when the cops had gone we babied the Chevy about ten blocks to a park that had a pond.  I remember ducking my head in that cold water and it felt so good finally I just flopped in it on my ass and lay there in about a foot and a half deep with just my chin out, listening to crickets and the sound of the fountain.  Boy, were we beat, but we felt good about giving it to those guys and we could still laugh.
	"Didja see the look on that first bastard's face when I popped him right off," Donnie said, gleefully.  "He thought it was gonna be Queensbury rules or somethin'."
	"Yeah," I said.  "He says 'That Ain't Fair', and there he is with twenty-five guys."
	"Geez I hope that bastard's okay that you kicked in the head," said Donnie.
	"Ahhh-I don't give a shit what happens to him," I said, and I really didn't.  In fact, I remember the disappointment I felt at Donnie's suggestion the bastard might be okay after all.  I wanted to think of him dead, being dragged by his twenty-five friends who sure as hell would wish they'd never tangled with us!
	Another time some guys drove up in two carloads to where I was visiting a girl whose folks worked nights, and they just tramped up through the snow and barged in to take me, knocking down her Christmas tree and smashing all the lights as they dragged me outside.  I suppose there is a special delight in having the odds so overwhelming against your favor that no matter what you do you can't win, so you should by all rights lie down and die when you see all those guys anyway.  But, unless they want to kill you --- and sometimes they do; that's when you should run --- they usually feel a little ridiculous if you face up to them.  That's what happened this night.  "It need all you guys just to take me?" I said, and although they didn't answer but just stood back and waited I knew they were along for the ride with the one guy who used to date this girl.  So I reached for him, saying, "You know what, you bastard, you tore my goddamn shirt," and I beat the shit out of him while the whole gang just stood there and watched, until he said his back hurt and they had to help him to one of the cars.  When I went back inside it took me half an hour to convince this babe I shouldn't clear out, and then it took us another hour or so to clean up the mess and get the Christmas tree presentable again.  But it was worth it, sitting there afterwards, knuckles all skinned.

CHAPTER 10

	I don't know how it was when you were young, but in the Forties on the southwest edge of Chicago life was pretty rough.  All the young hoods were angling to get into the Syndicate and they hung around poolhalls and the bars until they got asked to do something by a pro hood and pretty soon, if they did it okay --- like beat up a druggist or something --- they were in.  So most were on their way in, or in already, and everyone of them wanted to prove something. it got so I couldn't go to a carnival, a dance, a hamburger place, or even to a show without an argument blowing into a fist-fight, and then a big free-for-all among gangs.  A few guys traveled alone, though, and I was one of those, except for when I'd be with Donnie, or Eddie, or one or two others, but we never had a gang and most of the time we fought beside whatever guy we happened to be with.  We didn't mind the fighting.  It helped pass the time.
	Let's face it, people like to whoop it up a little and get in a few bangs for the price of taking some in the belly themselves.  I've been in bars where a shrimp has gone berserk, and I've seen giants throw tantrums, too.  There are no rules; you have to accept that no matter where you are there is some bastard nearby who would like nothing better than to beat out your brains and nail you to the floor with a few quick stomps.  The Forties were the time for it, too; there was almost more fighting going on at home than overseas.  Everybody seemed to be stealing something from somebody, whether it was a little ass, liquor, money, cars, or what, and there were plenty of fights in the bars all over.  The first time I went into a bar at fourteen years old --- I saw one guy try to steal another's change.  He got his hand broken when the other lifted up the hinged part of the bar, put the thief's hand in it and slammed it down.  The hand turned purple and red while everybody crowded around to see it, until the bartender made the guy jam it into a tub of cracked ice.  Mr. Broken-Hand stood behind the bar, laughing, with his hand in the ice, and pretty soon he and the other guy were buying themselves beers.  He stood there for an hour, feeling nothing, lighting bis cigarettes one-handed by holding the matches with his elbow.  I saw a man get killed, too, with a target pistol, but the cops got there so fast I don't remember much about it.  There was a BANG and everybody looked around to see this sad guy grab his gut and fall down by the bar.  I scrammed out of there because I was only fifteen and I didn't want any cops to pick me up as a witness and spot my phony identification card.
	There were a lot of rapes, too.  This pretty blonde gal got strung out with clothesline right in her home up the street from our bouse, and she got banged about four times by some 4-Fers while her husband sweated it out on the Rhine.  When he came back, everybody tried to guess whether or not she told him about it, and then Ma found out she hadn't when Dolly asked her to please not mention it.  I used to wonder how many gals had gotten it and never told their busbands when they came back, or maybe had led some guy on just for company and asked bim home and then couldn't stop him.  I know there was a lot of that stuff going on in Berwyn and Cicero, but I can't speak for the rest of the country.  One night, after hours when everyone was drinking in a darkened bar, I saw a girl get it in a booth while one guy held her arms over the backrest, and then when his buddy was finished they switched places and he got her while the other guy held her.  As I remember, she looked a little drowsy and she held this picture of some guy in her hand, while she mumbled "dead . . . all dead," and I don't think she knew what was going on, although everybody else did.  Another time in a bar on paycheck night across from Western Electric, I saw some guys take a gal's dress and slip off her and stand her up on the bartop in her bra and panties, and then while she cried and while the piano player beat out A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody the guys took her pants down until she started bawling real hard and they let her put them back on.  The Forties were a helluva mess even I got that impression, and there was a lot going on in those days that everybody tries hard to forget now.  When us kids did something small, like knocking over a gas station's set of pumps, or getting in gang fights, we didn't think we were destroying the world.
	(In fact, we didn't think much at all.  A young person thinks of nothing, really, and simply acts any way he is allowed, pushed by the ancient needs and desires programmed into his brain by evolutions of history which have finally led to him.  He feels the running feet, the need for a weapon, he fears the big jaws, he expects a fight, he depends on his muscles, he must survive and fight, he must take care of himself or no one else will, he sees immediately that he is not needed, and into his hands springs the urgent nervous need to build a place, a memorial, a marker, a fort, a vehicle, but something that will prove his presence in a hurry before it is too late.  He craves a young she-thing's thighs and must be taught she is your daughter, he requires her mouth and will stop it if it screams, he wants to win food and female and fame and fortune all at once, and his heart beats faster, his blood is richer, racing to do this, quickly.)
	We did feel that something was being destroyed, but not by us --- by our elders.  Two big bombs descended on the Japs to end the war, and suddenly the old world was as out of date as the carriage business, although filled with buzzingly busy and well-trained carriage-makers.  It was all there, stated clearly by those two explosions, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  From the mid-Forties on, everytime a man killed another in war he killed himself, not psychologically or any unseen crap like that, but truly the killer would be destroyed in time by the radioactive contamination of his murderous act, no matter how heroic.  Life, the world, would be so changed by radiation that it would no longer be the same one that produced him but would become alien, mutant, divergent, creating new conditions in which he could not survive.  The old folks in their humbling way tried hard to ignore the sudden change in times and they carefully acted as if they still lived in that old world of indulgence where what one man did had little relation to all mankind; where a war could be isolated and never felt outside its boundaries; where murder didn't always come home to roost; where cruelty could be endured as a necessity of a civilization that required a few to exploit the many; where man could win small victories over other men and over nature herself without endangering that epic age-old pact by which nature allowed men to exist --- conditions of air, earth and water a billion years in the making, which had brought man into being; where a single act, a single lie, a single man, one pompous indulgence bore no relation to the whole, the world --- the one condition that gave us our individual, precious freedom.  But that world was gone now and a new one replaced it.  One man, one act, personal freedom itself, was dangerous to man-kind, nature, and even the world at large, because of the tremendous power released by man's new tool, the atom.
	I don't say I understood this transition had taken place, but I felt it as everyone did.  Suddenly my country's freedom to do what it wished, the world be damned, was being opposed and by our most learned citizens, who acted as if fighting for our own principles was out of date and that now we must negotiate with every enemy, give and take rather than win or lose.  Victory, physical prowess, combative pride, force, emotion, faith, murder, expansion, power, and a million other words no longer had meaning.  Instead, it appeared, we were being asked to consider our aims in terms of slow progress, intelligence, flexibility, compromise, reason, hope, love, cooperation, consort, and a million other words like this.  We had a ready answer for the few souls who described the struggle in the new mild terms.  They were traitors, cowards, appeasers, and they were trading away everything we thought we had won in the war, and we hated them, expelled them, ridiculed them, jailed them, forced them from positions of trust, and in every way we could we tried to exterminate them as being the real dangers to our personal freedom, so that we could continue to ignore the fact that the world had changed, and so we could live as we always had lived.  Functioning in the old ways, we fought and won a victory over them, we beat them with physical prowess, combative pride, force, emotion, faith and power, and when we won we were more sure of the old ways than ever, although we were soon to find out that by beating the most intelligent among us we had succeeded only in beating ourselves.

CHAPTER 11

	It was odd passing through adolescence in a society that felt traitors had infiltrated it and that sought out these traitors and publicly purged them for undermining the old ways of dog-eat-dog, greed, selfishness, pride, murder and madness, a society that deliberately fired, jailed, put on trial, mocked, tortured and gagged anyone who proposed an end to conflict as a way of life, anyone who suggested it was desirable to compromise and make deals, anyone who admitted they were unsure about America's right to do what it wanted at all costs, who claimed citizenship in the world rather than in our own small country, who reproached us for wanting to kill, exploit, control, seize, advance, capture, dominate, and who instead told us we should pause, be patient, concede, cajole and relinquish.  I only know that I could no longer tell the difference between my elders and my friends.  The animal life of adolescence did not differ in the least from the stalking, hunting animal life of adults.  No change was being required of me before I would be granted entrance into maturity; where I felt a fierce young need to hate, fight and destroy the adult symbols of authority, I found that this was exactly what the adults were already doing.  We were all in the same boiling pot, young and old, and boys like me were taught to reject reason, law and order, patience, peace, cooperation, and were brought up on conspiracy, counter-revolution, force, indignation, and all the other wily means of the late Forties that were used against the few worldly men among us.
	There is nothing so willing to be animal-like as the young human animal --- you have only to let him do as he wishes, which you did, and he thrives on lust, hungrily learning to kill as quickly as possible, crudely practicing cruelty to protect himself.  Cunningly accepting no rules that are not enforced, he goes his own way, accepting nothing but what he can use or eat or screw, knowing nothing but what he absolutely wants to know, rejecting all that does not work, remembering little from the past and concerned only with the present because the future contains his death and he is concerned only with himself.  He goes his own way, not yours, but his, and it is a new one into which he was not guided but which his whims simply led him into, and so although you may think he is lost he may be well ahead of you, unseen, probing his own concerns happily in ways you cannot imagine.  If you --- my elders --- wanted to play at being killers just for fun while never really committing yourselves, you must face the fact that by your example in those nightmarish days you made real killers of us, your sons; and someday, looking around for frightened game, our eyes may turn on you.
	There is no fear like the one you will find if you suddenly remember us in the light of what you have done.  We have absorbed it all as part of our experience and now we face you with our eyes searching, measuring you in the way you have taught us, with no compassion, estimating your prowess in terms of ours as we move in for the kill slowly as in those vague days when we had four feet, a smile recalling the grinning mouthful of teeth.  We sons grew up in the days when the tiger walked the land freely, and now we are strong and have learned all that we know from the tiger.  We follow you, waiting only for the last leash to snap, or for you to drop it, or for the opportunity to bite it to bits, leaving us free to jump upon you, like a young tiger takes an old one, like the young deer replaces an aging leader, like the worst wolf makes his place at the head of the pack by killing the old grey-haired one, like a young bull elephant usurps the old faltering bull, like the apes, the mountain goats, like even the men long ago who took over the wild clans.  Your strength gets weaker every day.  Ours gets stronger.  The result is fixed, a matter only of time.  Soon you will be dead.
	Just as you are vicious, just as my dog Fritz was vicious, well then so I am vicious, and I try to be better at it than anybody around, for if I were not this way I could not survive --- it is the way society has been rigged and not by me, for killers, for animals, for greedy quick souls, for the greasy, the muscled, the crude, the vicious, the shortsighted, the money-hungry, the cruel, the filthy, the lusters, the sensationalists, the cheap, the sentimental, the rabid, the mobsters, the criminals, the haters, the whiners, the bleeders.  When you made it so if a young man was not one of you then he couldn't survive among you, then you made the young man become just as stark, tough, vicious --- a snarling specimen that knew no other way except to be the best of his kind, the quickest, fiercest, killingest animal around; and this is exactly what we became.
	So here we are for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad --- stalking, stalking anything, ourselves, our loves, our enemies, our friends, you!  We have learned all the lessons only too well, all the tricks, the rationales, the excuses, the alibis, the reasons, the prayers, the forgivenesses.  The religions even taught us we would be forgiven for anything, no matter how dreadful, and we take great heart in that, because we are dreaming dreadful things, a wild burning orgiastic blood-bath.  All will go in a screaming, gory fantastic gush of blood and flesh and arms and legs and head, all.
	It beats down deep inside now, this need to strike something, tear it to death.  In my time I have seen four kids kick a man until his body was a bag of crushed bone, because he had called them punks.  I have seen at least one carefully planned gang attack on a streetcar full of people, terrorizing them until they pulled money from their pockets and begged the kids to leave.  I have seen two boys taunt a young wife in an alleyway and when she threatened to scream they told her they would tell what they had seen, her screwing on the couch in mid-day with a salesman from up the street, so she quieted down and soon they led her back home and took their places on that happy bouncing couch.  I have seen kids tear up a classroom with no fear that their names were known.  I have seen them back a teacher into the lavatory and stick his head into the toilet, daring the authorities to throw them out of school because that was what they wanted, because they could not bear to sit through the lies, the weasling history, the exhortation of phony ideals any longer, and they wanted to get outside where their skin could stop crawling, where they could avoid people if they wished, where they could leave or smash the mouths shut when the mouths practiced conceit.  I have seen one gang go berserk on a city street and rip up stores, from one to the next, ending up at the city hall where SHIT was carved into the mayor's desk.  I have seen a cornfield burned, a barn, and even a cow go up in flames bleating before a few sat down to slice the burned flesh off and have an impromptu picnic.  I have seen people thrown into quarries at night, flailing the water and wondering what the kids had against them.  I have seen the kids afterwards stand about and shout curses at the sky trying to make just one lie come true and bring God down on them by daring Him.  I have seen a car pushed so goddamn fast that anything that got in its way would be crushed without a chance.  I have seen a cycle sent riderless right into rock, careening at a wall at ninety miles per hour after it had been stolen, and then wheels flying forty feet up from the flames.  I have seen stink-bombs set off in theatres just for fun of watching the people thrash pushing and screaming to get out.  I have seen police cars ignited with burning brooms hurled through carelessly opened windows.
	And I have seen the blood, always the blood, from faces, arms, scalps, legs, knees, blood, blood, blood, until I began to think red was the color of the world.

CHAPTER 12

	The old folks proposed sports --- work your young anger off in athletics, they said; it is what youngsters have done since America began, and oldsters too; it is a worthy endeavor, healthful, courageous, fun, and it teaches that "good old American characteristic of good sportsmanship."
	I listened, and then I enjoyed the dream of myself hitting a home run in the last of the ninth, three runs behind, two out, the bases loaded, so that amid the roar of the entire nation's throat the Yankees win the pennant on the last day of the season, proving once again it is "the old pros" alone who have honor, an intense confident skill for performing a prescribed game within all the rules and traditions, an intuitive but well-developed and virilent ability to swing a bat in a proper arc, to hit a ball far, to throw to the right base quickly, to speed faster around the marked basepath --- and thus give a fine and self-willed meaning to the greatest game on earth before millions of bellering fans on a splendid summer day amidst the grass all green and the infield dirt well-raked, the tarp ready if it rains and all the colorful signs over which my homerun sails out of the park.  But the bust-up of my dream comes when, just as I am about to tag home with the victorious run, a siren screams its warning, I freeze within a step of the plate, a stunning silence strikes out across the stadium, and within thirty seconds, while everyone quietly counts, the BOMB drops and blows us all to hell.
	When I think of myself frozen there between "victory" and nothing, I can't help but laugh at all those who say, "Save yourself by learning to do one thing well, no matter what it is." I like to call this the Artisan's Error, taking refuge in a well-defined professionalism in order to confuse life with a manmade game, learning some strange dance so well that you can no longer simply walk in out of the rain, confusing truth to mean a score, converting the world into a playing field, assuming that people can be described as players, limiting life to "keeping your eye on the ball," and worst of all teaching that a loss can be recouped by a win on a similar field tomorrow.  What has this to do with Life on Earth within Space for a Time?  Surely you join me in the recognition of this lie that is lived by so many, this inane idiocy that they will fare all right so long as they learn to participate with skill in our national game.  I have one simple message for those of our elders who sit comfortably in the grandstands waiting for us, their sons, to play ball, and this message is You can take your bats and balls and go to hell!
	I played every game there is when I was a kid and I always scored, whether over a line in a net or making it home first and breaking the tape while I stepped on the bag.  I whipped ahead faster, on skates, Keds, or spikes, and nothing in uniform could stop me if they stuck to the rules, but after a shower and a walk outside to wait for the bus or hitch a ride at the stop-sign I soon realized there was no length worth running, no pitch or pass, no scoreboard or average worth a damn in the eyes of that big wide world which has seen it all and either destroys or ignores the contests.  A friend of mine scored three touchdowns on the day his widow-mother finally worked herself to death, and he said he did it for her.  I thought he must be a clown not a hero.  Another friend was leading hitter in the conference but he still couldn't date a girl worth screwing because he was ugly; and if I learned one thing it was that the young white thighs of an early woman open for you only if you say the right things, whether you are first string, second string or fourth string, or better if you are in the stands on Saturday holding her hand, patting her knee, and whispering leg-writhing somethings into her ear, rather than far below playing with a ball.  No other occupation but sport demands more skill, sweat and strength in a moment, and none is more meaningless; it is worthless to the world, unworthy of repetition, unlike music, words or pictures.  Sport is a childish fantasy, and to see it one only has to imagine two children climbing a tree in a race to the top, while the lumberman who will cut the whole tree down watches and waits for the game to be over with.  It is a social entertainment, like two ladies playing croquet when just outside the hedge stalks the tiger within a jungle that is even at that moment beginning its onslaught on the green cut lawn and a few moments later succeeds bringing vines, trees and tiger sweeping over the neatly laid out wickets.  It is two men having lunch and seeing who can spit farthest before the foreman blows his whistle and they must get the hell back in the factory to work.  It is lefthanded or righthanded, but isolated, single, while the world is a swelling tide about to sweep over the south and the north, the field and the players, so that none will know the score or even recall what "score" means.  It is a boxing match that a huge spider watches so that when the bell rings, calling an end to the match and both gladiators head for the showers, the spider eats them up along with the referee, the managers, the audience and the arena, no matter how many scream that it isn't fair to fight after the bell has rung.
	The only athlete worth a damn is one who knows that sport is work for children and ladies, and who plays to give himself a better launch into the outside world, a man who swings his arms only so that his muscles grow and he can take on the jungle web of reality later with more strength, a man who runs only to increase his speed so that later when something is chasing him he can get away, a man who throws a ball to sharpen his aim for the day when his fist releases a rock, a man who practices winning only so that he will build up the habit of trying so that when he attempts to exist in a world that has made this impossible he will not succumb immediately or give up before he has made a small advance, a man who fills himself up with cheers so that when there is nothing but despair he will have something pleasant to remember.  But if a man continues swinging his arms in patterns, racing on a track, throwing a ball, winning and listening to cheers, without ever having left his backyard athletics and stepping out into the world, then he is a child, a fool, a Eunuch who deserves our horror instead of respect because he represents a worship of body, skill and sport without end.  He is a stunted slave who refuses to use his skill for anything of value or permanence but who grows old on the playing fields and retires right to his locker.  He is a phony who practices his duels well but never goes out at dawn for the real thing at twenty paces.  He is a splendid dog growing fat by the fire without a nose for the hunt.  He is a well-oiled amazing machine that runs all right but does nothing.  He is unusable, dispensable, laughable, an idiot with a well-shaped head, the finest cat but afraid of the basement, a glistening gun that won't go off, a long gleaming car going a hundred but with a bent steering wheel that sends it only around the block again and again and again.  He is like the movie-stars during wartime who engaged in great battles against the "enemy" while cameras ground away, like a preacher unworthy of God and scared of the devil, like a clown who never cracks a joke.  No other occupation like the athlete's symbolizes more the state of our country, riding its hobby horse around the carousel while real rustlers steal the nearby cattle.
	In 1948 on a fine summer day at Wrigley Feld, Chicago, I tried out with the New York Giants, met Melvin Ott of lifted foot and mighty swing who was managing then, shook Walker Cooper's hand and batted against --- I forget who --- in practice.  I had been brought there with two other "stars" from my conference, and as we took our cuts Mighty Mel, who himself had been discovered by John McGraw, stood behind the screen calling for curves, sinkers and speed balls, within our hearing, to see what we could do.  I remember I hit some hard groundballs, three clean singles, a double (or possibly a triple) off the green vines in left center and two homers --- one down the leftfield line and one almost due center.  They thought I was a helluva good hitter and I got ushered into Ott's dressing room before the game, where he offered me a coke.
	"You wanta play ball, kid?" he said, a slim smile slitting through the leather around his mouth.
	"Maybe," I said.
	"Whattayuh mean, maybe?  Do yah or don't yah?"
	"With the Giants?"
	"Nah.  Yah got something maybe yah can start in Class B. Maybe Three I."
	"What about school?"
	"Geezus, ya wanta go to school --- whatta yah doing here!"
	"I think I made a mistake," I said.  Here was the Mighty Mel Ott and he was just a clown.
	"Yah better make up your mind, kid."  He walked past me shaking his head.
	I got to see the game free and afterward the scout drove us home.  "Did he say anything to you about a contract?" he asked me.
	"Yeah, but Class B," I said.
	"Geezus, Class B.  You shoulda took it, kid."
	I got a couple other offers, but the shine was already worn off baseball, after meeting Ott, an average man like everybody else, so I enrolled at a cheap school near home called LaGrange Junior College for awhile and then quit that, too, and went to work as a laborer.  The next spring I went in to Wrigley Field to see the Giants and Ott remembered me once I reminded him about last year.
	"Yah ready to play ball now, kid?" he smiled.
	"No," I said, and I wasn't.  "I don't think I'll ever play ball, Mr. Ott."
	"Suit yourself."

CHAPTER 13

	Not all performances are sporting, though.  When death dances at the end of the act, it's a far jump from baseball or football, and I know a little about this, too.  After I quit attending a nearby junior college I used to ride out to Stimson airport and watch the mechanics monkey around the single-engined planes, mostly Pipers and Cessnas, and a few Beachcrafts.  It was here I met Skylark, a strange ugly guy who taught me the difference between athletics and a real performance where a man has nothing but a parachute and his guts and where the ground comes driving up a mile-a-minute while everyone screams "No," but they mean "Yes!"
	Skylark was a kind of clown who worked on the planes, gassed them, and even went out and got cokes and food for the mechanics, as if he were some illiterate handyman who didn't know where his next meal was coming from so he wanted to keep his job.  But Skylark was pretty bright in a strange, twisted way --- let's face it, the best performers who defy death aren't normal like you and me; they are weird souls whose actions have no justification.  The audience doesn't care about their performances, and can't tell something good from something phony.  There is no money to be made defying death; and usually, the better the performance, the less remuneration.  The profession, attracts strange individuals who are willing to sacrifice everything for a brief power over the audience, those few minutes when all eyes focus on the center, and at the center is a man like Skylark.
	Skylark wasn't poor, and he didn't have to work at the airport during the off season, but he claimed he liked all the guys so much, that it was his home and they were his only family, which is also why he so eagerly would run off to get them cokes, sandwiches or cigarettes if they needed them.  Then, the next day he would do his dive at the ground from five thousand feet and come so close before his chute opened that he would scare not only the handful of people who paid to watch but even the mechanics who knew him and understood what he could expect from his equipment.  He would just go up in a plane, a red cape arrangement strapped to his back, a chute attached to his belly, with black wrestling tights and a black dyed t-shirt from Sears, and he would dive out into the sky, flour spilling from a canvas bag strapped to his leg which he had previously opened and which traced his headlong descent, the cape billowing to give him control, and he would loop and glide and soar like a leaf, all drawn in the sky by the flour, but meanwhile diving at 174 feet a second, until his 20 or sometimes as much as 30-second count was dead (with him almost dead, too, so close to the ground he would be), and then he would pull open his belly chute, it would stretch out and pop, yanking him to safety sometimes within only a hundred feet of the dirt, and sometimes closer, but always just a short distance away from the handful of slobs who watched him and gave him a buck or two for the thrill, while they said wisely to their girls and their friends, "There's probably some trick to it."
	I was there the day Skylark did go all the way into the ground, as a result of trying to get closer and closer, within limited altitude, and in an instant his wiry body became a bag of bones and dirt, and when I lifted what I took to be his head it separated from the lump of him and I knelt there with Skylark's face in my hands.  I didn't know what I was doing, scraping away the dirt, and suddenly I came to his mouth which seemed to be smiling at me.  You can see why I never forgot him.
	I jumped with him often, and even went on his trips with him.  To pass the time he taught me his cape stunt.  "You just close your eyes and jump and then do your stunts and," he would smile here, "then just pull open your chute and POP it's all over with.  But don't forget to count --- always count."
	When we jumped together he would check the altitude and give me the number sequence on which to rely, and I always trusted him, as I faithfully repeated the instruction to myself out there in the open sky: "one thousand, two thousand LOOP, three thousand TURN, four thousand DIVE, five thousand GLIDE LEFT . . . " and so on, controlling movements by allowing the cape on my back to billow, and then collapsing it --- while the flour marked every move and the descent.  "It's just like drawing," Skylark would say, "and soon you'll get so you hate to quit and pull the chute."  Thank God, I never did reach that point, but I remember there was a strong urge to believe you were flying in a horizontal line, rather than diving vertically, and the wind lulled you into thinking there was all the time in the world while your mouth, like the voice of another at your elbow, some stranger, demanded: "twenty thousand PULL!"  If you wanted to live, you followed your own order and pulled.
	It taught me something for I began to think that life was like the cape stunt.  If you want to live, you have to follow your own orders --- that mouth at your shoulder telling you what to do.  If you let yourself slip for a second and go along with the tide you're swallowed up and you die, and you deserve to die because that's what life is --- following your own orders; and if you stop listening to yourself you're dead, whether you remain above ground or are buried below.  You're dead and nothing makes any difference anymore.  When Skylark died, there it was for me, all "drawn" in the sky with his flour.  One slip and anyone, you, me, Skylark, we're either walking death or a bag of bones, or a body in a box, a cross of crud, a gunnysack of glop, a miracle smashed easily as a mirror, poundfuls of pulp decomposing to pieces; and soon there is nothing left.  We have been gobbled up.
	So it goes.  Death comes at the moment of capitulation-for me, you, Melvin Ott or even Skylark --- the decision to do something too long instead of moving on to other things, which is the way of life, moving on, always moving.  Unfortunately, few people can do something new, and it is easier to join that tide of zombies called the human race, walking toward death on that flat wide road with friends and good cheer and clean sport and a cold beer and a sweet smile, while a very, very few decide to strike out into the wilderness and make a new way, although they don't know any more than the zombies where they're going, and later when these few have hacked their new proposal through the weeds successfully they look up to see the line of zombies suddenly following tbem, and history awards them the title of "leaders" --- they are called "geniuses," "the rare," "the gifted," prophets," and they are hailed by their fellow humans.  They are remembered, revered, rewarded and received back into the thundering horde, and soon historians tell the tale that all such men march a certain way because of so-an-so, and it was a damn lucky thing he pointed the new way out to his brothers.
	But there are many whose ways are just as good, differing only by the fact the horde didn't happen to turn up their new street.  These are the men who hack away, building roads on which will fall no feet, and when they die historians are unaware of their passing, no mention of them appears in the records, diaries, joumals, no rewards come, no recognition.  They are lost forever, and no one knows of their work, which since it is neither used nor reproduced soon vanishes as easily and quietly as the hand of the dead master who created it.
	Yes, it is unjust.  No, it doesn't make sense.  You're right it shouldn't be that way-but it is.  Life has ever been tolerable, only because death is worse, but this doesn't mean life is pretty or legal or neat or just or delicate or regal or sensitive or artistic or anything a human mind would bless.  Life is treacherous, evil, ugly, demanding, a cliff on which walks the individual and the fact that death is a long way below doesn't mean the cliff cares about one man's foothold.  It cannot change its craggy face for the benefit of human beings who live off it, on it and in it like flies off, on and in garbage, so it remains itself, a terror, a tragedy, a storm trumped up to tip a boat, a jungle jangling against a Jew, a herd trampling a lovely idea, an Attila killing his only balladeer without fear that bis soup will suffer.  It is a corporation dismissing its greatest inventors and later making more profits by selling the defective machines of their inferiors, it is a vicious nightmare which doesn't stop at dawn but grows more macabre in the sun, it is a fungus which is a fool on a wild wheeling ball that has no brains, it is like a frothing dog growing fat from many of bis mad killings.  It is a haphazard formless mess of murder and gluttony which lives upon itself, cultivating its own growth.  It can be a game, but only if you imagine a game that can have whatever rules, purpose, competition that the players care to construct, rules that the most powerful players can change with guns or politics, and picture only the survivor being briefly declared the winner and then being destroyed like the loser with the grass covering all and calling the game ended, if there ever was a game at all.  Life is formless except for its own growth which in the long run is a simple repetition of itself with minute changes here and there which tip the balance of power so that one species emerges as dictator, referee, director, chief scorer, priest and policeman, and just as it has got its little contest all explained the balance tips again and another species rises.  From insects to swimmers to crawlers to flyers to milk mammals and man, the balance moves at whim awarding the world to each it then destroys.  It is untameable, unknowable, unbeatable, unlovable, unthinkable and unexplainable --- Life, the living, leaping, lapping mouth that feeds itself upon itself, a monster masticulating upon its members, a snaky web of winners destined to lose to others who themselves will be eaten.  Life, whose only desire is to grow fat faster even if it means outgrowing its earthen rock.  Life, which stretches its tentacle to space and would like to contaminate other rocks, too, called moon, Mars and even Andromeda.  Life, that old lewd lecher, loving only itself.  Where will it go next?  What will be its new way?  Who, its favorites for awhile?  Who, its dinner; who, its host; and where will the banquet be held?  What will be the rules of the game?

CHAPTER 14

	The world has become no place for little boys playing bat and-ball or kick-the-pigskin or trying to hole a hoop with a hook-shot.  The world is no longer an arena, the people refuse to be performers, and no one gives a damn anymore about the score," about the "winning side" or the super stars.  Victory is impossible, there are no true contests, no skill that can be graded.
	There is only the wind, the water and the dirty world and us, all with an evil smile and intent on the destruction of its members.  There are shrieks, starving moans, the grim groans of those hurt and bleeding.  Life is no longer a game, and death has become too horrible to be called an art.  The old ways are gone forever, in spite of how a few grotesque groups try to rally support for the remnants, yelling YEA TEAM and keeping their box scores like idiots even as the tiger's howl and the jungle's screech draws closer and closer, soon to obliterate our playgrounds with glee.  No YEA ever issues from the throat of this tiger as he devours his victim, and never does he keep score or kill according to rules and regulations.
	I used to play college football with a busting fullback named Pattie, a redheaded block of freckled granite with speed and drive and a love for banging over things like guards and tackles and opposing linebackers.  We used to call him PattiePoo, short for Pattie-the-Pounder, and even the sportswriters picked up the nickname, at first gleefully because they thought it disparaging and then reluctantly when they found out Pattie not only didn't mind his light-weight monicker but liked it and took more pride in it than if it were something crude like "Brick," or "Bullets," or "Horse." (I'm afraid sportswriters are out of it and always will be no matter how hard they try to get close to the players of the game.  The most they can do is learn the rules.)
	Pattie-Poo had the admiration of a sexy little blue-eyed blonde named Mary, a millionairess who had inherited oil wells and would sign some stock over to her current interest so he would collect dividends enough to date her in style.  In the beginning no matter how much she wanted him, and no matter how much the Pounder dismissed her, she kept getting hotter and hotter about him everytime he made a touchdown, or was named to an Honor Team during off-season, and there were times when I think if he had hopped her in the middle of campus with thousands watching she would have given him everything her little ass had and sold all the oil wells just for the shame of being allowed to offer herself to him.
	But Pattie-Poo was more interested in her car than anything else.  It was a long, low convertible Bugatti beauty, all golden steel with whitewalls and red leather seats.  "Who the shit owns this!" he exclaimed when he saw it parked in front of Old Main.  "I do, Patrick," said the lovely Mary, sliding out to give him a glimpse of almond thighs and a flash of pink.  (Her body and her money had been enough to make her queen of any guy before.)  "Geezus, what a beauty," Patti-Poo said.  "Where the shit did you get it?"  He hadn't taken his eyes off the Bugatti.  "Imported," she said.  "You sure are a lucky son-of -a-bitch," said Pattie-Poo, finally glancing at her, but it made no difference.  And then he simply walked away, leaving her there by her car so stunned she looked like all the proud red blood had been sucked away.  I think it was the first thing in her life that hadn't jumped in her shapely lap; and although the loss might have been leavened for her if she had known that Pattie-Poo dismissed the Bugatti, not her, and then only because it was out of reach for the penniless son of a Pennsylvania coal miner, still she had no idea of Pattie's shortsighted desires at the time, and she took his dismissal smack in the pearly teeth all neatly displayed within the splendidly suggestive smile she had given him.  She didn't believe it, so she hopped right in and drove after him, pulling over to the curb near where he walked, smiling again and suggesting, "Want to ride in it, Patrick?"  He was so startled to find the big gold Bug following him that he refused.  "Nah, I gotta go downtown," he said clumsily.  "I'll drive you," said Mary.  "Nah," he answered, "I gotta run, good for the legs."  But when she pleaded, "Come on, Pat, you can drive it;" --- he stood with his mouth open and finally stepped in and took over the wheel.  Within three weeks she had bought him one of his own, and soon the thankful Pattie-Poo relented and gave Mary a good screwing, which was what she wanted in payment, but they both got trapped when she became pregnant through his ignorance, and she forced him to marry her the week after graduation.
	Some friends told me a few years later that old Pattie never got over it when he found that Mary had begun to cheat on him --- which she had to tell him herself or he still wouldn't know --- and he now hits the liquor regularly, is a flunky in her dad's oil business, and can no longer even drive his Bugatti but must have someone with him at all times to handle his spending money, sign his checks and see that he gets home.  Mary, I was told, has become active as an anti-communist, because she thinks the Pinkos have sapped all the strength and virility out of the good old USA, including Pattie.
	(I like to remember Pattie-Poo and Mary as the ideal American couple who know something is wrong, who feel guilty as hell about it, but who don't know quite what to do --- drown in liquor, or in respectability.  There must be a new way found or trouble will come and all is lost, marriage, motherhood, manhood, our country, the world.)
	If life is a contest and the world is a stadium, for what benefit is the game being played?  For God's, if you believe the mystics; only He knows how to keep score.  For No One, admits the Professional, but he claims the contest is good because it purifies the souls of the competitors and reveals their true nature, a view consistent with Hemingway, Kirkegaard, Faulkner and O'Neill.  For the sheer sake of Absurdity, says the Sophisticate, who accepts that there is neither audience nor rules, nor winner, but believes it is impossible to stop anything in process so the game must go on.  For the sake of Relaxation, says the Humanitarian who believes the game should continue although in a changed manner so people can enjoy it without competing with one another.  For the sake of Fame, say some who believe the game is a massive selection process which reveals leadership and bestows power to the strongest and the most intelligent.  For Diversion, say others who believe that as long as humanity has something --- anything, game or what --- to occupy itself with then it cannot take time to totally destroy itself.  The Aristocrats, having succeeded in extricating themselves from the clashing "players," sit perched on the Stadium's fence and say the game is a fitting and proper concern of the masses because it keeps them from realizing they are being enslaved by --- guess who --- the very Aristocrats who say it.
	There are other rationales for The Game, of course, but all thoughts that justify its continuance --- whether stated here or not-are founded on the assumption that the Stadium exists in a vacuum and has no enemies outside itself.  Here in the mid-Twentieth Century, this assumption is so tenderly naive that once mentioned it doesn't even have to be attacked.  In a universe containing billions of suns, one planet's plight is negligible and if it fails to sustain itself and the life upon it, no one throughout the stars will suffer or miss it.  In fact, one planet --- between Mars and Jupiter --- has burst to bits already in our miniscule solar system, causing little or no bad effect on the system itself.  In other words, our earth, Stadium, living space, or whatever name you wish, is not needed by the larger system which allowed it to come into existence, and if we are to survive possible catastrophe and oblivion it is up to us; the system will not save us, in fact it may act in ways injurious to us-which is a far cry from living in a vacuum, because on these dreadful occasions we will have to fight grimly to maintain the very existence of ourselves and our world.

CHAPTER 15

	It was more than a few months after I quit LaGrange Junior College that I went into the woods.
	The woods has always fascinated me; when I had to make money as a kid I had started a trap-line along the Salt Creek set out snares of looped wire on the thin trails down to the water that rabbits had.  They ran right into the nooses and choked themselves to death.  I thought they couldn't have any eyes, because I always put the snares on the same paths but they never learned, just kept running the same way right into the wire loops.  I wondered why they didn't go down to the water a different way.  Even when a choked rabbit blocked the path, the rest of them would just make a little detour around the body --- in the snow it was easy to see their tracks --- and then they would go on the old path again and some would run right into nooses ahead.  What else could I think about something like this, except to admit they were pretty doggone stupid?
	It was wonderful in the woods, though.  The air was always crisp and cool, except for a few days of summer, and in winter the snow stayed fresh for weeks.  When the creek froze, it froze in ridges where the current had fought the freezing right up to the end.  I used to run along the creek, checking the traps and snares, and sometimes I would dive into a snow bank, a pile of leaves or a bunch of bushes and roll around.  I got hard as stone, I suppose because I liked the woods so much; it's great what a complete lack of people will do for a place.  There was nobody there but me.
	There was this girl I would see every once in awhile on a bridge, but she just took it as a short-cut home.  I used to watch her, a little worried that she might see me and come down and ruin everything by knowing I was in the woods.  Sooner or later it had to happen; one day she did see me, and she did come down.  She had a stick in her hand that she kept poking at leaves with and she told me her name.
	"What are you doing here?" she asked me.
	I couldn't think up an answer, so I told her the truth.  "I jus like it here," I said.
	"I like it, too," she said, as if she wanted to cut herself in if it was something good.
	I turned away and walked down along the creek bank, but she followed me so we sat down together, staring across the water.  "Isn't it wonderful the way everything grows here," she said, "so easy and natural?  Sometimes I wish I were a tree, or a bush or even just a little ant, I'd be so happy to live here in the sun."
	I looked at her.  But girls are like that, you know.  Anyway, if she were a tree, she would still expect breakfast for nothing every morning and she would never ask where it came from.  Nobody waits on trees, just on girls --- but she was forgetting this, if she had ever known it at all.  If there was one thing I liked about a tree it was that I knew it didn't expect to be happy, it didn't even know what happy was.  All there was to a tree, I thought, was pull, pull, pull for food and one more day of life to grow bigger.  But when I tried to explain this to the girl she got angry and left.
	As I got older, I left the Salt Creek with my traps and snares, and I began laying out a trapline along the Rock River that runs at the far north edge of Illinois.  Here I got more muskrat, and a few more mink, and even some otter and martin, along with a couple of nice fox.  I'd take them home and string them up from a nail in the basement, and strip them, and send the pelts to Speigels in St. Paul, Minnesota, making about a hundred dollars a month off the traps, but although the money was good I liked trapping because it gave me a chance to live and move in the woods, and there were easily times when I didn't see a human face for three, four days at a stretch, heard no words, said nothing and only opened my mouth to whistle.
	It was good to do all the simple things that a guy never has time to enjoy otherwise, like breathing in the clean cold air until it stings, like feeling a breeze and a flurry of snow, noticing the colors of leaves and the way twigs have fallen, "reading" the trees (you can tell whether the landscape was a field, farm or a woods a hundred years ago by the present shape of the trees; and you can tell how long the present woods has been developing, or how old it is, by the species of trees found in it), and like watching birds play in the air or strut pridefully along a branch, and the noises, sounds, whistles, chattering, all lending to a hum that is the woods itself.  Through this world runs a river, or a creek, all spangled with life and sun and mud rising in a mixture to float in circles on the current; leaves and dead limbs in the fall, all gliding nowhere in a rush, and then winter and the slow stiffening of everything, current, trees, weeds and bushes into frozen shapes that no longer bend or flow or weave but break through brittly with a clatter and fall piecemeal, whether it be an ice-coated stick or a nub of ice swirled up that cracks underfoot; all round a walker the woods snaps, pops, cracks with things going to pieces, but then in spring everything starts all over again, buds, bulbs, greenery and bugs in a teeming thrust to conquer the water, earth and the little space, before succumbing to the weather.
	You learn in the woods that psychiatry makes no sense within the great world; you can accuse no bug or branch or bush of having a destructive wish as it gives up its green and dies cold brown before the diving temperature of late November.  You can accuse nothing of being minded toward its own bitter end; there are no complexes in a woods, no complex self-imposed agonies, no maladjusted, just all being swept unknowingly toward a frozen death, not wanting it, not demanding it, not looking forward to it.  Nothing in the woods tries for the impossible; there are no standards.  What works is right, but nothing works against the weather and the fragile die, the mighty hole up tight, while everything winged leaves.  It is mostly only the progeny that is around come spring, and the next spring it is another generation, then another, and another, a relay race in time rather than in space, the neuroses don't count.  There are neither demons nor devils, just death, silence, and then with a sigh in spring the chatter of summer begins, swells, subsides, ends.  Within the flat world of the woods is that ring-within-a-ring, within-a-ring reality that we all remember somewhere deep in our mental makeup --- the realization that we are all being moved in a gigantic pattern that has nothing to do with our own free will, that we are all both free and slave, both master and machine, artful and ridiculous, proud and absurd, a whole and a piece, distinct and indifferent.
	I learned this when I broke my foot stumbling down a ravine ten miles from anywhere, and came to rest alone in eighteen inches of snow, unable to walk, or get help, or call it quits, or say, "that's all, Charlie, I give up, now let's go get a beer and forget it."  The world closed in, swept over me, and went along fine without me; and I realized that I maintained my place only through asserting myself every instant.
	I dragged branches to me, built a windbreak, a fire, took off my pack and made coffee, heated beans, cleaned everything and put it back carefully, stoked up the fire and then forced myself to sleep.  In the morning, covered with snow that spilled off the blanket when I popped up, I went into motion again, making more coffee on a fire, more beans, and then for a long, long, long time dragging myself through the ditch to find a crutch-shaped sturdy branch, and some flat chips for splints.  It took me twelve days to come back, nibbling a little, drinking a little, making a mile or less and praying for the sight of one house, a road, a car, another whole and well figure that could help, but I must have missed them all until the odds were so overwhelmingly in my favor that I had to stumble onto somebody or make a lie out of all mathematics.  I heard an axe first, stubbing away rhythmically in the night, and I shouted and walked, shouted and walked, shouted and walked it seemed like hours, until I heard the retort "Who's there!" and he found me, took me inside, where his wife fed me, the kids gathered around, and the warmth of his house, his blankets, his Scotch brought me back to consciousness and the dignity of not needing him.
	The woods is a masterful teacher.  If you do not believe that men survive by making war on the world, try getting lost sometime.  A man's only friend is another man --- but unfortunately, not always does he have any friend at all.

CHAPTER 16

	Every small town has its War Dead Memorial, and the sad little sunny towns in Illinois are no exception, so softly quiet and quaint, and then in the middle of the grassy park a big stone with names on it of those who died.  The ones who lived and returned have the American Legion or VFW hall as their Memorial, and they line up every Friday for a fish fry with their families where the neon sign tells them they have served a cause and where downstairs there is a long bar and a few pool tables that indicate what the cause was.  The Legion and VFW clubs supply the only social entertainment in most of these uninspired little towns, along with the churches, and the Farm and Home Bureaus.  All other time passes in front of the television set, with a few breaks for fishing, the "school" play and the one Cinemascope screen, the Sunday Walk and the Saturday Shopping, and the high school basketball and football games.  Dad makes money, Mom cooks and cleans, and the kids date, dance and play sports, and that's it in Illinois, even at the colleges, where the youngsters are taught how to make money, cook, and they get more experience in dating and sports.  If there's one area in the U.S. that hasn't changed since World War II it's the Midwest, remaining calm and freckle-face, drawling, drinking at the VFW, farming and working, pretending toward godliness, a land once loaded with wild game that now finds itself trapped in a terrible boredom, troubled, confused, clutching the past with both hands fearful to let go and settle into the present.  After the war, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, the whole Midwest contained three emotions: the Booth Tarkington sentimental, small-town, family-style love of self and home and country; and the almost classic ability to accept an ugly unreasonable fate, the outlook epitomized by humorist George Ade, who suggested we not worry why some of us are stupid and rich while some are intelligent and poor, there is no sense to anything, why expect it."  But shortly after the war a third emotion grew into major proportions, although it had been held stagnant for so long, and this was simple but strong hatred for anything "un-American," the foreign-born, the foreign-made, the foreign language, the foreign ideas; anything whose birth was not wrapped in Old Glory became suspect as alien, an enemy, and especially the critics of Old Glory.  So there you have the emotional triangle of the Midwest after the war; one foot in an illusionary and sentimentally "good" past; the other foot resting upon an acceptance that nothing made any sense, that rewards had to be absurd when they were given for immorality, that punishment was laughable when bestowed on the just, and likewise all other misguided fates; while at the top of the triangle, resting precariously between these paradoxical feet sat an insecure, very unsure head that found a balance by hating (therefore giving expression to its foot in the ugly mud of knowing things were going wrong) but by hating anything foreign (and therefore protecting its sentimental love for itself and its past, which its other foot was rooted in) I and as things in the present got worse and the past, to compensate, was remembered as being more and more pleasant, the head filled with hate for anything that jeopardized the mirage, whether it be scientific investigation, objective reasoning, rational legal jurisprudence, or what.  The monster was a tripod, based on sentiment, irony and hate --- the tripod of post-war America; or at least this is how it was when I decided to try college again, this time at a small town school in Illinois --- and the monster breathed fire at all white-armored knights that appeared before it.
	The name of my school was Walton, and it was on the "banks along the Walton" river, as the song goes, in a town called Kewanie with a population of 28,000 souls mostly sinful, especially those black-gowned scholars whose purpose was to stun the unprotected, assaultable minds of the young with every cliche ever invented.  Like any other community, Kewanie spent all of its time trying to get something valuable in return for something worthless, but since no one could recognize value the trading consisted of the worthless being passed hand to hand, and it was upon this busy exchanging of useless things that Kewanic thrived, grew, raised its standard of living.  Its children were being well taught, so that --- like their parents --- they, too, could play the game when they grew up.  Round and round the futile goods went, the money was spent, and someone came out of it with a bigger car.  The college was no different, only here the useless things being exchanged were called "ideas" instead of "goods," but the transactions from scholar to student were made with the same end in mind --- the building of a bigger, richer college; or in the case of the student, the making of a brighter richer graduate.
	"You'll find that the college graduate makes nearly a quartermillion more in wages during the course of his working life," said the college president to my freshman class, "than the noncollege man will earn in the same number of years."
	President Utrecht was an ex-tennis champ, a pro, who had come to Walton from a successful tenure as athletic director of a large Virginia university, where he had handled the construction, financing, planning and administration of one of the largest athletic plants in the South.  Tall, lean, tanned and distinguished, he had gotten Walton started on a building program in 1947, the very year he took over as president, and already a new football stadium was emerging from a fresh excavation on the South Campus, paid for in part by a rich alum who had played end on Walton's 1920 team that beat Army.
	(A girl, who worked part-time as a secretary in the President's office, told me she heard Utrecht chuckle once that "Old Dingo says he'll pay for the whole damn thing, if we can't get the others to match his initial contribution, and he'll even play in the Bowl if necessary --- can you imagine that, why the old livewire must be seventy if he's a day."  Mr. Dingle had made a fortune in dishes and restaurant supplies, with a big chunk coming from a soup-plate he had invented that gripped the soup bowl securely no matter how unsteady the waiter.)
	President Utrecht was all things good in the American conscience.  He had risen to his present prominence from obscure beginnings as a ball-boy at a private tennis club outside Indianapolis, becoming assistant pro, then pro.  Then, marrying a wealthy daughter belonging to one of the members, he went to college at Indiana University until he acquired a doctor of philosophy degree in physical education.  Soon after, he and Mrs. Utrecht left for that Virginia university to bring the school into the national limelight in three sports, then the success with the gymnasium, the stadium, the new baseball diamond and a swimming pool, and then to Walton and another rebuilding program.  Mrs. Utrecht helped by pouring tea from a silver set and making businessmen --- potential donors --- feel important, while Utrecht wheedled pledges from them.  In just one year, Walton's bank balance began to boom, and the new buildings started to rise, first the athletic plant, then the dormitories, a new Student Union, and there was some talk of a new Science building and theater, although these had to ultimately be postponed because of lack of funds.
	Since there was none when he came, Utrecht had to create an alumni office at Walton, and he soon had requests-for-funds, a newsletter and a magazine in the mail to every graduate, and a staff of ten professionals to accomplish this.  He had to buy new electric typewriters, new mimeograph machines, automatic addressing-stamping-and-sealing machines, and plenty of paper, but it all worked; and many people say that if it hadn't been for the "silver fox," which is what the students called him, Walton wouldn't be around today.
	I can remember seeing him playing catch with his son on the big lawn in front of the president's house, or hurrying to catch a train to Chicago and a meeting with rich alums, or swimming with his family at the only nearby lake --- Berry Pond --- laughing and playing tricks on the college kids who were there: like sprinkling sand on our heads, dunking us, or taking our dares seriously and going off the high diving board at the raft while his wife held her breath.  We all thought he was a great guy, and since he was President we accepted the fact that he knew what he was doing.  We could hardly dispute the worth of eight bowling alleys with automatic pinspotters at the new Student Union, or the big concrete stadium, or the modern dorms, or any of his other projects, and everybody knew the student body was increasing and so was the faculty, including the ratio of faculty PH.D's which the newsletter explained was important, although no one knew exactly why.  And even the local Kewanie newspaper reported regularly the new additions to Walton's swelling coffers, which caused the town to begin to get excited about the school after fifty years of ignoring it.
	There was one grey-headed faction among the faculty, however, which remained loyal to Utrecht's recently-departed predecessor, who had been a classics scholar become President and had devoted all his energies to the curriculum, offering rare courses to as few as five students --- one of the many unsound economic practices the man had indulged in, or so it was explained by people loyal to Utrecht, and it was true that the new president had simplified the unwieldy curriculum he had inherited, as one of his first acts after arriving.  "He lumped ecology, biology and microbiology into one class --- at least for first year students called Conservation," chuckled one old scholar to me, who appeared not to appreciate Utrecht.  "That's certainly a simplification, cheaper, and it even seems to attract more students."  He chuckled again.  "But they don't learn anything in particular, just generalities.  Is that what your young world wants, lad?  Nothing in particular, but everything in general?"  I left him that afternoon still chuckling to himself, but I had a date at Berry Pond and I didn't have much time to think about what he said until a long while later when the man was dead.  Utrecht was to depose him from his grant, or "chair," as head of the English department, just when the old man had nearly finished a study of early Anglo-Saxon language, and some say he died not of an ailment but a broken heart, having to close up his notebooks and wait for a retirement that he did not even live to enjoy.
	I learned about Utrecht when I was involved in an automobile accident, which killed my three companions, including the driver.  We had been drinking after a dance and perhaps driving too fast, although we were only doing ten-miles-an-hour over the speed limit when a truck unexpectedly pulled out from an unlighted crossing in the middle of the night.  The next thing I knew I was on my way to the hospital, where I was treated for minor cuts and bruises which I had picked up when thrown from the car.  Unfortunately it made the Chicago newspapers under a distorted headline of "College Booze Party Kills Three," which was as far from the truth as you could get without uninhibitedly making up a fresh lie that had nothing to do with the crash itself.  When I woke up the next morning at the frat house I found a note pinned to the bulletin board, advising me the President wanted to see me at once.  I thought he wanted my version of the accident to counteract the newspaper headlines, so I didn't worry about the meeting.
	As soon as I arrived, I suspected something.  Utrecht sat smiling behind his big clean desk.  The fat little jolly dean of men was there, along with the college dean, a red-faced nervous man who continually laced his fingers.  On a little table behind the great president there was a tape-recorder turned on, whirring away like a warning.  As I entered the room, the three waved me to a chair in front of the big desk, and close to the recorder's little microphone which conspicuously sat next to the machine, and without waiting for any formalities, the President spoke:
	"I understand you have a reform school record.  Is that true?"
	Well, just let me say this hit me harder than the bounce on the pavement I had experienced the evening before.  My mouth sagged open, and it was a struggle to work my jaw muscles and close it.  I had never been to reform school, and as a matter of fact never so much as been picked up by the cops --- not because I was perfect, but because I had always gotten away before the cops came.
	"Is that true?" Utrecht repeated.
	"Reform school?" I murmured.
	"Come, come.  What about it?"
	"No, I've never been in reform school," I said, glancing at the two deans, who immediately avoided my look.
	"You've never been in any trouble at all?" asked the President.
	"No.  Not any serious trouble," I assured him.
	Then, hunching over his desk, Utrecht proceeded to ask me a hundred questions about the accident, all of them crudely based on the newspaper reports.  Where did I get the liquor?  Why was the driver speeding?  Had we just come from a bar, and which one?  What were we doing out so late on a weeknight, and why weren't we studying like we should have been?  Wasn't I sorry for it all now?  Did I feel anything, any remorse, at the deaths of my companions?  Did I realize the shame this incident had brought to Walton?  Did I have any idea what people thought?  Would I send my child to a college notorious for "Booze Parties?"  What could I have been thinking of?  Could I imagine how the parents of the dead boys felt?  Did I think I could get away with "Booze Parties," and such, and still remain at a respectable college?  Just what did I expect would be done with me?
	I'm sure I don't know," I said.  "I didn't expect that anything would be done to me."
	"You will be expelled of course," the Dean of Men said.  "That's imperative," said the Dean of the College.
	"I'm glad you agree, gentlemen," said President Utrecht.  You'll have to take it before the Faculty Committee and the Board, but I am sure they will agree with us after listening to this abhorrent testimony."  He flicked his hand toward the tape, pushed a button and the whirring sound stopped.  Then all three of them stood up, and I left.
	When I was outside I realized that the first accusation about the reform school had been deliberately planned to upset me, open me up, make me vulnerable to the questions that followed, eliminate from my mind all possibilities of objecting to the whole line of interrogation --- after all, what could I object to after getting stabbed right off the bat like that?  It was the first time something like this had been pulled on me, but it wasn't the last.  Since then six or seven inquisitors have launched their little meetings with a blatant, upsetting lie, and I have come to accept it as one of the tools of the inquisition trade: start with a lie and wait for a reply.
	If we have a "golden rule" today and must suppose it is in use everywhere then this is it, a cold-blooded means to attack and destroy and therefore win anything from a debate to a convert to a sale or a woman.  And there is only one way to dissipate its power and stop it from working its destruction upon you, and that is to leave, to remove yourself immediately from the situation, because if you in any way remain in consort with it you lose by the very presence of yourself after it has been said.  I suppose this is the key to its effectiveness, since in most modern situations it is impossible for a person to disassociate himself; this is the one choice he does not have, and it is the only one he can make if he is to preserve himself from disintegration; in other words, he cannot leave simply because he is already there, and he is there to be destroyed.

CHAPTER 17

	The faculty and the Board of Trustees upheld my dismissal, and I was kicked out of school --- destroyed as a college student and forced to discover a new image of myself in a hurry.  What would I be, a worker, artist, revolutionary, soldier, businessman, or bum?  I decided to go to work rather than go home and I stayed on in Kewanie, living at a small hotel and eating my at a place called "Billie's Lunch" (which was owned by a woman named Edna) and working as a section-hand on the railroad tracks in and out of this small Illinois city.  I showered at the "Y," drank beer in a bar called "Fogarty's" (owned by Fogarty), and I saw little of anyone except the vague faces of the people I worked with, drank with, ate with and bought things like cigarettes and clothes from.  Within limits, which I was never made aware of, no one cared what I did, if I were sick or well, good or bad, happy or dead, rich or poor-and this was an experience I have never really recovered from, discovering how most people in this world we're on really live, without love, purpose, friendship, pride; with neither skill nor concern, going nowhere, looking forward to nothing, expecting no change, existing without hope, happiness or help, and arriving into the next day on only their determination not to die.
	There was a grinning half-wit on the railroad gang that everyone called "Candy," because when he became violent, which he did often, the only way he could be settled down was by the profference of a caramel or a gumdrop, and since he was the brother of the station-manager and as strong as three men the others on the gang carried candy in their pockets so he could continue to work with them.  He had buck teeth and a square head coming right down past his ears to a neck as wide as his skull, and a big powerful polish-white body, which suddenly would quiver as his grin became a scowl and then he would lunge for whomever was nearest and if there was no candy it would take ten men to pull him off --- and at least twice while I was there he almost killed. (They told me he had, in fact, killed three men in Wisconsin when he was traveling with an "extra-gang" --- a boxcar of sectionhands --- but had gotten off.)  However, if you had a caramel handy, the grinning Polack became the sweetest guy around, and in thanks he would walk a mile to the water-barrel, hoisting it to one massive shoulder and bringing it back, just so you could have a drink.  "You give candy . . . " he would remember, "I bring drink ... We good friends, huh!"  The big hand would come down on your shoulder and you would look straight into a blazing smile.  "Sure, Candy, we're good friends, all of us.  Here, have another caramel."  He would take it and put it in his pocket, smiling.  "I save this one when I need . . . Don't need now."  And then he would do your work, his work and someone else's work.
	When the temperature got up that summer into the heat of hundreds, we would ride along the track on the put-put looking for weeds to cut down, and then finding a likely place we would give Candy a caramel and send him out in the sun with a scythe, while we lay flat on our backs under a tree.  When the Supervisor skimmed by on his put-put he would see the sweating Candy burned red and beating ragweed and he would mark us all down for our industry.  Candy never cared; he was happy so long as he had his caramel, and he enjoyed helping those of us who had full pockets rustling from the cellophane-covered contents, all creamy and soon to be his.  (It was a good relationship, similar to the one enjoyed with simple people by all those in power; so long as the few squares of candy are passed out, contentment and peace settle on the land.  Then, when the day comes where there is no candy, all things change and the people grow mean and murderous over nothing, toppling their leaders like tractors cutting wheat, and there is nothing that can stop this until the candy comes again into their hands.  It is absurd without glory, but it is true.  Life and death and the stability of cities rest on things like caramels.)
	One day Candy and I were left alone repairing a switch out in the country, while the rest of the gang went on to a nearby town to get water and return.  Imagine the shock I had when I reached in my pocket and found only two caramels which were soon gone.  Although the whole bag of the little square keys to Candy's well-being were kept on the put-put the crewhad gone off with put-put and caramels.  In less than an hour there was the grinning face before me, that huge open hand, and I had nothing.  Candy shuffled his feet.  "Why you mean to me?" he said.  "Why you no like me anymore?  What I do?  Why you so cruel?"  When I assured him that I wasn't withholding anything from him and that I just didn't have any caramels in my pockets he became angry.  "You always give candy before.  Why not now?"
	He walked up the track aways and squatted down on his heels, throwing stones from hand to hand, considering the problem and looking sideways at me once in a while.  I knew I couldn't run.  There was nothing --- no town, house or farm --- as far as I could see, and besides this I was a little afraid that Candy, while he seemed to be confused, would certainly make up his mind that I didn't like him if he saw me running away.  So I stayed there alone by the switch, working as best I could on it, although Candy knew a helluva lot more about switches than I did.  I kept watching him.
	After a while, he stood up slowly and walked back to me, grinning.  "All right," he said, his hand oustretched again, "you make joke on Candy, right?  Joke all over?  You give me?"
	Again I explained I had nothing.
	"Just one piece?" he said.
	I shrugged my shoulders and returned my attention to the switch.  Suddenly, he hit me in the back with a double-fist, then stomped hard on my arm as I rolled over.  It was almost as if he were begging me to give him something before he would do something terrible.  "Now!  Candy!" he demanded, and when I said nothing he kicked me hard in the small of my back.  I tried to stand up, but he motioned me to remain with a long claw-bar I had been using to remove spikes from the switchties.  Every time I moved he menaced me with the long bar, waving it just over my head.  "Candy, candy, candy, candy, candy, candy," he repeated, moving lower and lower with his circling bar.
	"All right!" I said.  "I'll give you some!  Big joke, Candy; big joke!  I'll give you some but you have to let me up!  In lunchbox, in lunchbox!  I have to get it!"
	Candy grinned and let me go get my lunchbucket where I had left it in the shade of a tree, but I knew he'd be even angrier if I couldn't produce something this time.  I had a small chance.  Once in awhile, when Edna packed my sandwiches in the morning at Billie's, she would put a surprise in for me, a sweet, a piece of pie, or a doughnut.  I hoped this time it would be something sweet, anything sweet, but God not a doughnut.
	As I opened the lunchbucket, Candy peered over my shoulder.  There were the sandwiches, the thermos of coffee, and one long waxed-paper package.  I unwrapped it slowly with Candy's face almost pressing on my hands, and it was rhubarb, but I flipped my lid and gave it to him anyway.  "Good, new candy.  Long and soft.  Good candy," I said.  "Like licorice."  He took it and chewed a piece, making a face.  I tried to think of something to do.  "No like?" I asked him, taking a stick myself and sucking on it.  "Not supposed to chew.  Suck.  Like this."  I smacked my lips, as he watched, baffled, spitting the rhubard on the ground.  I hoped for a miracle.  "Try this one," I said.  "And suck.  Don't chew.  Suck."  He sucked for a moment, then suddenly spit the second piece of rhubarb to the ground.
	"Aaachh!" he spit.  "Bitter!"
	I took off as fast as I could for the nearest phonepole and shimmied up to the footholds where I stood, just out of reach of the claw-bar swung by Candy.  Off in the distance I could see the put-put finally coming, and I talked to Candy as soothingly as I could, while he banged away at my foot.  Then he began shimmeying up, but I kicked him down twice.  He had just started up the third time when put ... put ... put ...came Otto, our foreman, and the rest of the guys laughing like hell, until Candy advanced on them, and they put their hands in the bag and filled him up with caramels, putting them in his palms, his pockets, and even directly into his mouth.
	Things were never the same after that between Candy and me (after all, how often can simple people make peace after a revolution), and we kept our distance, although like everyone else I continued making him gifts of caramels during each day.  But he distrusted me, and even when he asked me for a sweet he would not grin anymore but would grimace and talk tough, as if he expected me to refuse him.  He kept dumping my lunchbox off the put-put, trying to pretend he had knocked it accidentally, and he'd step on my foot, or bump into me, or when we were carrying a tie he'd drop his end and jar the shit out of my hands, or like once he almost put a new rail down on my foot, or like how carefully I had to watch him when he had one of the automatic tamping vibrators in his hand because once he ran one right up my leg, or he would take my shirt and run with it out into the woods after I had taken it off and hung it from a tree, or he woud throw the remains of water from the drinking cup onto my pants saying "Was wind . . . was wind!"  And all this time I was giving him candy like eveyone else, but he kept up the harassment.  And then of all things, one day he turned down a caramel from me, saying "Me not want anything from you . . . not even candy anymore," and he walked away toward someone else and got a caramel from him.
	It was all right with me; I felt free like a bird after that, as if everyone else had to carry a weight of caramels and I didn't, as if everyone else was gold-plated and I was solid gold, as if everyone else was a slave and I was the world's richest man.  But then Otto came up to me and told me I had to quit because he didn't want to take a chance on anything happening to me at Candy's hands --- he knew I was only temporary there, anyway, while Candy was a regular.  So I said okay, I understood, that after all I wasn't related to the station-manager like Candy was, and I wasn't nuts like Candy was either, and I would go and get me a good job and not have to work my ass off every day in the sun until I dropped because I wasn't nuts like Candy and the rest and even Otto, so screw you, I'll make out all right, and I did.
	I got a job as a bad-debt investigator for a loan agency in town at twice the money I was making on the railroad, and I even wore a suit.

CHAPTER 18

	I kept eating at Billie's Lunch, because I liked Edna, but I also started going over to this professor's house to eat once in awhile, too.  He and his wife were old and had no children, so they liked having me over because they were so goddamn lonely they kept about twenty cats.  In a way, they were rejectees, too.  President Utrecht didn't invite them to any parties because they were members of the old faction that hated his guts and thought he was destroying everything good that old Walton College had worked so hard to build up over the years --- standards of scholarship, love of learning for its own sake rather than just using it to make more money than neighbor Jones, emphasis on brains over brawn, on mind over matter, books over buildings --- but the main reason they hated Utrecht was because he was crude.  He knew almost nothing, and where his way worked fine on the business alums, it fell flat with the few old scholars on his "revitalized" faculty, and they usually talked to him as if he were some kid standing there with a popsicle dripping down his hand.  They were always carefully explaining to him why he was wrong --- so naturally they and he didn't get along.  But the Swansons were all right with me, because I hated his guts, too.
	The old professor's name was Lochinvar, but his wife, Mamie, called him "Swanny," because their last name was Swanson.  Since I didn't want him to think of me as a student anymore, I called him Swanny, too, which was all right with him as long as I could tell him stories about people like Charlie and Homer and Skylark and Candy, so he could laugh, his eyes twinkling behind his thick glasses and every once in a while his face getting so red he had to cough into his hand.  He's dead now; his lungs eaten away by cancer and his faulty heart couldn't sustain him.
	"But why do you think your friend Skylark loved to dive so close to the ground?" he would ask, and then not giving me a chance to answer he would add: "Because he wanted to die, of course.  All heroes want to die, and that is why they are heroes.  Those of us who want to live are called humanists, my boy.  The world of man is split into heroes and humanists; the kings and the kindly; the killers and the curers; the willful and the wise; the hunters and the harvesters; the cops and the curators . . . " He would stop only when his wife implored him: "Swanny, stop making lists like Homer.  This isn't Greece."  He would smile and mumur, "No one knows this isn't Greece as well as I do, Mamie... no one knows as I do how much Greece outdistanced us... no one knows Greece as I do."  And he was right.  He knew everything about Greece, Italy, France, England, Germany, America, Egypt, Sumaria, India, China, everything about everything, and he kept reading, probing, trying to find out more.  He once explained to me how fascinating it was for a learned man to learn something, because it knocked everything down in his head like dominoes and he had to rebuild the whole "complex castle all over again, this time including the new brick."  He was a funny guy, reading all the time, and Mamie would come in from getting a frizzy permanent and she would sit and sigh and say to him as he pored over four books at once on the dining table, "You should have been born in a different period, Swanny, because you just don't belong in this world."  And he would answer, "What makes you think that?"  And Mamie would say quickly, as if she had been saving it up, "Well, there's a big sale on stainless at Baumgartner's, and I want some stainless only if I ask you you'll laugh and say it isn't important, but I want some anyway --- that's why I wish we were in a different period where there wouldn't be any stainless, just you and your books and me, and we could be happy."  He would say, "Mamie, I want you to have some new stainless!"  And she would say, "No, we really can't afford it."  But he would answer, "Yes, we can.  I absolutely demand it!"  And she would smile and get up and say, "Well, if you insist, Swanny, Baumgartner's is having a sale and I can get it cheap if I hurry right now," and she would be halfway down the street before the screendoor banged: while he would be happy to get back to his books, since this was all he really wanted anyway, the chance to read in peace, to follow one thought through many minds, to discover an idea hadn't thought of or read before, to find one new fact that changed his perspective on all the old ones, to understand one little thing, to see something new, or hear something he hadn't heard, to not be bored, to be in contact with strange equal minds of centuries ago, to feel the surge of another's blood to the brain, to feel the speed of another's mind, to feel another's unspeakable agony and know it is so for others.  He felt so alone with Mamie, so single, so foreign, so strange, so unlike her, so dissimilarly dissatisfied; so restless, while she was calm; so conscious of the dialogue of knowledge that existed in books, while she talked with neighbors and never read; so caught up in the expression of the unexpressible, while she stammered about the commonplace --- that he wished her any satisfaction available to her, and he was only at peace when he thought she was amused because he felt so guilty.
	Swanny was the only absolutely learned man I've known; he knew the inches, the weight, the type of skull, the temperament, the family, the friends, the period, the works (yes, all about the works, everything), the dreams, the letters, the wishes, the ambitions, the loves, the travels, the successes and the failures of just about all men of importance, and when I told him I thought this was incredible, a sort of miracle of the mind, he answered that it was not so difficult to know the men of importance because since the beginning there haven't been very many of them.  There was Homer, Aeschylus, Socrates, and Plato; there was Virgil, Horace and Ovid; there was Montaigne; there was Chaucer and Shakespeare; there was Dickens and Goethe, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky there was Whitman and Melville --- and there were others he named that I can't remember, but there weren't very many that he cared about, because having known a few great ones he could not settle for less anymore, so he dismissed the minor lights as not being adequate for that monstrous darkness that he was aware of, leading back into the cave of time endlessly --- he had no use for little failures but only for the few magnificent ones.
	Well, there is no need to prolong it; in 1954 Utrecht took the kindly old man's "chair" away from him because he was a "dangerous leftist and detrimental to Walton College," although the President claimed he was only acting on a decision made by the Walton Board of Directors.  Soon after, the old man's lungs and heart got the better of him, and his books were left without him, as were his students, his friends, his proteges like me, and Mamie, too, who was left only with her stainless and a vague sense of Swanny's defeat.  Swanny died, and Walton went on and on, and is still going on today, instructing the young in the ways of skill and competence and technique, and never once missing the eminent man of knowledge who was the only thing wise that Walton ever had.  Nobody stayed long at his funeral because they didn't want to be at associated with "the dangerous leftist" too strongly, and this more than anything else pained Mamie deeply, because she thought everyone should have loved him the way she had, and she knew he wasn't dangerous and never had been, not even to her stainless, her hats, her Wedgewood dishware, her shrimp croquettes, her Belgian wine glasses, her milkglass flower bowls, her lace drapes, her Napoleonic couches, her frilly blouses --- and this after all was capitalism as she knew it, so how could they call him a "leftist" and consider him dangerous to the young?  How could they?
	(Mamie lives now with her sister in South Carolina, and there are no books in her house.)

CHAPTER 19

	More should be said about my loan company days, since in this job I felt closer to the ideals, hopes, beliefs and goals of my countrymen than at any other time in my life, perhaps because it was at this time that I began to realize completely how far I had surpassed them; I was to nose myself further into the future after this, and I was never to feel attune again with the inane lives that I was always surrounded by.
	(A man a step ahead must tolerate the crowd behind him, which, walking backwards and looking upon its past, edges its ass slowly into the future, but still seeing only its past, while the man ahead and walking forward sees the wonder of the coming day, experiences the present and watches it approach, then engulf him, and then he passes it on, used, to the people who are backing toward him; and if you think there can be any understanding between this man and the crowd you are forgetting their ass-to-ass stance, one looking forward, the others gazing upon their childhood like the good Freud says, and because their heads are pointed different ways they see differently and therefore can't understand one another --- there is a time lag which makes communication on a person-to-person basis impossible, and this is the reason for books.  In a book, the message is saved until the people are ready for it, although the person who mouthed that message may be dead by the time the scene has passed into the backward zone where the people became interested in it and would like to know more about it so, thus, they pick up the message from the person who watched it approach, understood it while he was experiencing it.  Yes, they say, that was the way it was, recalling their own experience of it as a mere tingling in their asses which was the first thing it struck, before it slipped from them into their past where they could finally be aware of its presence, although it no longer affects them.)
	Money was king in those days; it was the goal for which people used up their lives, it was the prize by which they judged their accomplishments, the energy that made their institutions grow, it was the rationale, the reality, the ring of truth, the religion, it was the one single thing that everyone wanted, respected, cherished, needed, it was the spark, the spirit, the soul of an entire age in America, and there was nothing else, no dream that could match it; when everything else had been stripped away by questions and cynicism, money still had meaning because it could change a man's entire life, give him all that he wanted, and the power of no prayer, virtue, kindliness, prestige or accomplishment could compare with it.
	Those who had failed to attain it through their own devious means or worth or wisdom came to borrow it, at "reasonable" rates, in those few places devised to rent it out --- the loan companies, banks, mortgage takers, installment plan inventors, I.O.U. takers; and, like the bouse which is rented for a fee, the lump sum also had to be returned at the end of a specified time, although unlike the house a piece of this lump sum was returned each month with the rent so that the borrower gradually paid the same amount of rent, month to month, for the use of a steadily decreasing amount of cash until in the end, on the last payment, he paid rent for nothing at all.  He had his cake, at a price, but meanwhile he had to watch someone else eat it --- and this is about the way it can be described; yet, people queued up, fought and demanded to be allowed this privilege, although once they had their cake they were not ready to give it back piece by piece, and this is where I came in.  I tracked down, cajoled, scared and threatened those who had arbitrarily forgotten their contracts to give the money back, month by month, along with the stipulated rent, or interest.
	(I felt like the avenging angel who punished, the priest who pardoned, the executioner who killed, the cop who captured, the shepherd who returned lost sheep to the fold, the scholar who separated lies from truth, the judge who decided between transgressions and honest ineptness --- I made the crippled whole and healthy and brought them back into the respectable world of good credit and honest debt reduction, I decided who should be saved and who should be given up, who could be washed white and who would remain unalterably black dismal failures that could no longer be trusted for credit by the good people of their community; I separated the lepers from the merely sick and quarantined these lepers on islands of "cash only," bankruptcy and utter disgrace.  I was the bad "debt collector," the missionary charged with either saving the "pagans" or disempowering them, converting them or condemning them, in that mythical means of salvation that the Fifties had built around money.)
	There were no longer "good" men and "bad" men; there were instead men of "good credit" and "bad credit."  Society no longer held "sinners" in contempt, rejecting them; it laid instead its contempt upon those who had transgressed their debts, and it rejected them.  The traditional priests, dispensing "grace" for "goodness," were unimportant; it was instead the bankers, dispensing "money" to those who had "good credit," who held the entry key to respectability and therefore salvation.  A man's worth was no longer judged by his life, his acts, his accomplishments, or even by his possessions; it was instead figured upon "his credit" and described in terms of the total amount this credit might allow him to borrow.  (In other words, while John might be "worth" only $1000, Steve might be "worth" loaning $10,000 --- thus, Steve was adjudged a much more "responsible" person; and there were some men "good for a million or more," and these were the men of prestige and power.)  It was the end of Ownership --- few people owned anything, including their clothes, cars and houses --- they held them in trust on credit, and this included huge sprawling corporations, controlled by men who owned as little as one percent of the stock, and included even the government itself which functioned in a deficit on credit awarded it by the trust of its own subjected people.  Please understand that I do not criticize this; I only describe it.  It was the system of ethics in the Fifties --- credit, which bought control for a specified time, a control which had to be renewed based on a re-evaluation which indicated trust, or a control which, by contract, was given up, piece by piece, by the controlees, back to that which had originally granted the control.  The former describes corporate and political power, and the latter the power of cash --- and aside from this Trinity there was nothing else, no other "divine way" to rule over human or social destiny.  Ownership, or the illusion of permanent control, no longer existed, and all control was temporary, subject to trust, and it could be terminated, which it often was whenever a person's credit changed.
	My boss was Fred Clarke, a Notre Dame graduate, father of three and secretary of his Parent-Teachers Association, with a split-level home in a tree-filled residential section, two cars (one a station wagon for long trips and the other a conventional Ford-6); he was a prominent member of the Kewanie Library Board and one of the Friends of Walton, a group of local businessmen who donated and organized "civic cultural events" in conjunction with the college; he was active in the county's Young Republican Club, as was his redheaded wife who held an office in that political organization; and both were active golfing, swimming and dancing members of the Berry Pond Country Club, which was private and for gentiles only.  Although it was inexpensive, it was the only country club in town and it attracted all the well-to-do and the powerful.
	"We need bright young men like yourself," Fred told me, "because for too long the finance business has had a black name.  There's no reason for this; in a sense, we're simply renting money to people who need it, much like some people rent cars, houses and even mink coats.  It's not our purpose to skin our customers; as a matter of fact, we want them to do as much business as possible with us, or in other words make a new loan once they have paid off the old one, and that's why we treat them with respect and never dun them unless we have to.  Unfortunately there will always be a few people who think we're in the business of giving money away and don't need it back.  These few --- and they only make up about three to six percent of our contracts-will concern you; they are the 'baddebts', and 'skips' and the 'alibiers' which you will be tracking down and urging to make regular payments.  Although everyone who makes a loan with us gives his household goods as collateral we don't want the furniture back when they can't pay, we want the money!  We'll even extend the loan and cut the monthly payments in half if we must, but we don't want any furniture --- that's the ace that we never play.  We say, 'Wouldn't you feel awful if your neighbors saw us come up in a truck marked Kewanie Finance and pick up your furniture?'  But we never want to do that, and I'll tell you why.  Furniture isn't worth a nickel, and no matter how good it is we couldn't get back a thousand dollars by selling it at auction if our life depended on it.  And when we take the furniture, in the eyes of the State we discharge their debt.  We don't want that to happen.  Another thing, usually the 'bad-debts' are poor people, and they can be our best customers if you can talk them into living up to their regular payments.  We can lend them money regularly, keep them on our books all year round forever.  You can see how important your job can be.  Now go get 'im, kid, and don't let me down."
	During the next few months I met the soft underbelly of the great free-spending American citizenry, the exploited, the used, the tricked, the scared, the defenseless, the homeless, the valueless, the confused, the creditless underground halfway along on a speedy slide to despair, helplessness and utter discrimination --- the jobless, the moneyless, the friendless, all afloat on that underground river which takes anyone in America who suddenly can't pay on a bobbing, hurtling journey from which there is rarely a return, the hungry, the motherless, the pregnant divorcee, the unemployed, the overbought, the sickly being bled of all coin by hospitals, the contemptible, the crippled, the corrupted, the criminals --- I saw them, followed them from city to city, woke them up at night, searched them for money, made out budgets for them, loaned thern a dollar for food, left them cigarettes.
	There is an acrid smell about the poor; you are aware of it as soon as you enter their rooms.  For some reason, their windows are always glazed with dirt and all light turns grey, there are always crumbs on the floor, a baby cries --- probably from hunger, and the eyes of those there are dull, follow you slowly, the hands are sad and tend to remain clasped, holding onto each other with pathetic desperateness, and beds are rarely made when you arrive because jobless people sleep later --- in fact they sleep more than any other segment of the population because you don't spend money when you are asleep: you can't eat, you don't smoke, and most important you don't have to think up something to do to make the time pass.  For some reason these people hate the sun; they stay inside, almost as if they are afraid others will point at them if they go out, and their skins take on a chalky look, a powdery dry, flaky texture that indicates sharply the unnatural weakness of their health and makes jobs even tougher to find.  They feel their own guilt eating at them, their eyes blink more and look away, and if the men have any money at all they either smoke it or drink it, trying to still those hopping nerves that jump raw because of diet, despair, defeat and a total lack of dignity.  They want most, at their worst, to simply be left alone; and if they have been out of work too long they don't even want a job and can't hold one if they do get it.
	But most have guts and search hard for a way back to respectability, a steady job, a place that's paid for, food to eat, money to spend on things not urgently needed --- that's why they opened the door when they saw my car, heard my knock.  They wanted hope, a chance to return as paying members of society, they wanted to perform work again, use their hands for something judged valuable as attested by the coins at the end of the week, they wanted to be customers again who were always right rather than suspicious cash-only burdens that the burgomeisters kicked out, they wanted the pride, the respect, the concern that only money can buy in the good old USA, whether the skin is white, black or what, they wanted a place to go in the momings like everyone else, they wanted to experience again the weekend as a short vacation they had earned, they wanted to celebrate Easter, Christmas, New Years, they wanted someone to try and sell them something saying "Sir" and "Mam" to the rattiest looking among them because their money was always good, they wanted to assuage that gnawing suspicion that their existence didn't mean a damn by making a salesman happy, they wanted once more to be able to say "No, we don't want any," instead of being limited to "Please give us some."
	I remember a girl named Goldie that I tracked down in Davenport, Iowa, in a small apartment on the third floor of a semi-commercial building near the railroad tracks and river.  I could hear the baby's cries on the other side of the door as I came up the worn steps and the sun was so grim coming in the hallway window that I was eager for the door to open so I could get out of the dirty, smoky light, but when the door did open there was the squalling thing right at ear level in its mother's arms and the same sun could be seen behind her in the hazy room.  I went inside.  There are always crumbs where there are children, and there were crumbs here surrounding a small boy squeezing a cookie on a blotchy maroon rug that was relieved by massive wrinkles.  My nose filled with the smell of the ripe remains of breakfast, still scattered on the masonite table-top at three in the afternoon.  I tried to talk to Goldie above the raking screams of her babe, as she jiggled it in her sweating arms, her face a blank, her mind a muddle, and her cigarette burning away near at hand on the table's edge.
	At nineteen Goldie had surely been pretty when she thought the whole world liked her, but now she knew the world stalked her, sent her notes in the mail threatening her, phoned her with demands until her phone was removed, then knocked daily at her door for rent, payments, always threatening to disgrace her, bar her, bypass her and go to her relatives wherever they were.  Some of her furniture had already been taken away, and in the room was only a cheap but modern low couch with gold-speckled surface, walnut steel legs and shiny brass tips, along with the "marble" masonite table and three chairs and the thin cotton rug with its permanent wrinkles.  She wore shorts and a shirt out, and she was a long, long, long twentytwo years old now, without a friend, without money, with very little food and a few cigarettes, and with a livid agonizing fear that she would live long enough to see tomorrow get worse, when she didn't even know how to get through today.  She coughed but went on smoking; she said nothing when her boy asked for a glass of milk; she jiggled the baby, trying to make what little milk she did have last the night so the baby would allow her to sleep at least a little.
	"Where's your husband?" I asked her.
	"Hummm?"  Her eyes remained on the baby.
	"Where's Jack?"
	"He's at Camp Ruckner, Alabama," she said slowly.  "He went back in the Army last week . . . he says you can't touch him there, or his wages, and he will send me some money on the first ... and I'll pay you.  We want to pay you.  We want to pay everyone.  But Jack lost his job six months ago and he couldn't find anything else ... he looked, but he just couldn't find anything so he went back into the Army.  You can't know how much he hates the Army, but he went back anyway because there was nothing else he could do.  He said he would send me some money as soon as he could and in a few months I'll be able to pay a little something to everyone ... and then he will send me enough for train tickets so we can go to Ruckner, too ... but we will keep paying you by mail, see?"
	"Why did you leave Kewanie and come all the way across Illinois into Iowa?  Why didn't you stay?"
	"We couldn't when Jack lost his job, and he heard the Armory here was hiring so we picked up and left and got this apartment and ran up some more bills here and never did get any work."  She smiled, wanly.  "I guess our luck went bad ... at least that's what Jack said.  We had bad luck.  He just lost his job for no reason ... like a lot of men, you know, he wasn't the only one ... but we didn't have any relatives, ours are all in California and we couldn't afford to go there and they couldn't afford to pay our way.  So we just got stuck here and Jack had to join the Army again."
	I looked at the card I had brought with me.  "You owe us three-hundred sixty-eight dollars, Goldie, and you were supposed to pay thirty-three dollars a month."
	"Yes, I know.  But we didn't have anything." She took another suck on her cigarette.  "We have to live and eat first and we spent up our savings and we just didn't have anything left.  If we could we would pay you, don't you believe that, but we don't have anything."
	The boy asked for milk again and this time Goldie got up and, carrying the baby, went to the sink and rinsed out a glass, giving him some water, which he took without questioning her.  Then he asked for another cookie and she told him there weren't any more, but he could have a cracker if he wanted it, which he did.  She opened a cracker box and stiffened, telling him after a long pause that he could have his cracker later.  Then she returned to the table, jiggling the baby again.
	"There aren't any more crackers," she informed me, "and there isn't a store within blocks I can go to that I don't already owe.  They would just take my money and not let me have anything.  Would you ... could you ... ?"
	"Write down what you need," I said, "and I'll go and buy it."
	"Just a gallon of milk and three boxes of crackers," she said.  She reached in her dress pocket and pulled out three one-dollar bills and gave me two, folding the third back up and putting it back in her pocket.  Then she became frightened.  "You won't just go away with the money.  I need that, until the mail comes Saturday.  Jack promised me he would send something by Saturday, and I need that until Saturday.  If it were Saturday I could give you a couple dollars, but I can't now, I just can't."
	"Don't worry," I assured her.  "I'll be back."
	"I hope so," she said.
	It felt good to get outside in the real sun and breathe the air again along the river, feel it cool me through the cheap cotton suit as it breezed down through the giant elms and stirred up dust along the old cement.  The store was one of those red sand-speckled tarpaper shacks with crates of fruit out front and flies all over, with the door wide open and no screen, while above it in big letters was JOSEPH P. GAVER, proprietor/Drink COCA COLA/The PAUSE that refreshes --- and there was a big picture of a happy girl's smiling teeth, with the green bottle at her lips.  Joe Gaver was a small gruff man whose apron was covered with red hamburger stains where his stumpy hands continued to rub.  He waited for me, saying "Yessir, what would you like?" because of my suit and he knew I was no neighbor but somebody important who might even be an inspector.
	"Two boxes of crackers and a gallon of milk," I said.  "What kind?" he said.
	"Any kind.  Whatever you have."
	"I have thern all," he said proudly.  "Nabisco, Sawyer ... anything you want.  You name it, I got it."
	"Nabisco is fine," I said.
	"Are they for the car?" he said.
	I was a little startled, but then I nodded, thinking it was easier than an explanation.
	"Then you don't want Nabisco in the car," he said.  "Sawyer's are better for snacks.  They're smaller and thinner.  Bitesize."
	"All right," I said.  "Sawyer's fine."
	"Do you want a little cheese or something, too?"
	"No. just the crackers and milk."
	He shrugged and went to the icebox, pulling out a glass gallon.  He only had one kind of milk in gallons.
	"Oh, and give me a pack of cigarettes," I said.
	He thrust the gallon into a bag, along with the crackers, and then dropped in the cigarettes with two packages of matches.  "Anything else?" he smiled.
	"That's it," I said.
	I don't have to tell you I felt pretty happy and proud of myself on the way back.  After all, I thought, I was no heartless bill collector; there were some things I could do to help besides make out new budgets, demand money, reprimand, urge and squeeze.  I could be a friend and get some crackers, for Christ's sake.
	But when I returned to Goldie's apartment no one answered my knock, and after the third time I juggled the package and turned the knob letting myself in, thinking maybe she was busy with the baby or something.
	"I'm back," I said, feeling stupid.
	There was no answer, because she had picked up the kids, with their few belongings, and had left flat for God knows where.  I never did find her.  I left the groceries there on the table that she had left behind, got a drink of water, glanced at her only couch, and walked slowly back out to my car.  About halfway down the sidewalk I turned around and went back for the cigarettes --- after all, I could smoke them, at least; although I had no use for crackers and a gallon of milk.  I was a little angry, but I could not get mad at her particularly.  Mostly I was teed off at myself.  Like a stupid ass I had been so busy convincing her I was worthy of her trust that I had forgotten to decide whether or not she was worthy of mine.  I just hadn't thought about her leaving.  Even a guy as restless as I was had to learn that some people are only five minutes from picking up everything they really own and walking up the street to somewhere else, no moving van needed, no goodbyes.  It isn't something you think of unless you're poor.

CHAPTER 20

	When I got back old Clarke gave me a good raking over, laughing like a duck.  "Why you naive, innocent Patsy, you stupid sentimental brother's keeper, you inexperienced whelp," he said, "what in hell did you expect, leaving her alone like that?  Don't you know the poor are the most cunning creatures in this goddamn wide-awake world?  Don't you know they'll take you for every living thing you've got if you give them one-tenth of an even chance?  Just how in the devil do you think they get along, poor as mice, no money, no jobs, in debt to the roots of their hair?  By taking every guy that comes along like you who has a breath of decency about him, that's how.  By ordering groceries, television sets, borrowing money, buying furniture on credit, living it up in the roadhouses on Saturday night --- for Christ's sake, that's how they get into trouble in the first place!  They take everybody and then when somebody calls a halt they're in trouble all of a sudden.  Then the tears come, the sob stories, the 'poor, little darlin' kids,' the hubbie who has lost his job and can't get another, the poor confused little woman who has no money for food.  Why you lunkheaded sucker --- you deserved to get taken.  And I'll bet you never suspected it.  It never crossed your mind she would leave did it?"
	I admitted that it hadn't.  What the hell, I had felt sorry for her, I couldn't deny it.  Otherwise what was I doing going to the store for her?
	"Well, I bet you'll think about it now, kid," he said.  "Never let them out of your sight once you've found them.  Never give an inch --- you can't afford to.  These people are smarter than you.  What the hell, they're the something-for-nothing crowd, while you're a working stiff.  If you feel sorry for them and let them off the hook, you're just making an ass out of yourself.  What the hell are you working for?  So you can pay your debts, right?  Well, if there's any excuse, any at all, that allows as how you don't have to pay your debts, then you're a fool to work, right?  Nobody likes to work.  Have a little pity for yourself, for Christ's sake."
	I just stood there.  He was making some sense, but of course not one hundred percent.  Some people are worse off than others, I thought.  But mostly he was right.  I was collecting these bills from people who had incurred the debts --- they were responsible, not me; so there was no reason for me to be embarrassed.  And I sensed that this was what Clarke was trying to get across to me.  It sure as hell wasn't my fault they were in debt.  Yet, I had to admit in a lot of cases it wasn't their fault they couldn't pay although I didn't say this to Clarke.  He was beaming at me, making his points as if he were the first person in the world to ever talk sense to me, and then finally he slapped me on the back and took me downstairs and bought me some coffee.  "Don't let it get you down, kid, it happens to everybody the first couple times.  After all, these sad stories are brand new to you.  Wait until you've heard them a couple thousand times, you'll toughen up a bit.  After all, we're not asking much to demand that people we've loaned money to tell us when they move and give us their new addresses.  You know, anybody who comes up and tells me that they're in trouble and can't meet the payments gets another better deal that they can handle, and it happens to a lot of them.  But you won't be meeting these people.  Just remember that you wouldn't be looking for your people if they hadn't run away or simply forgotten about us for six months or a year.  Everybody you'll meet will be a 'bad debt.'  Sure they'll give you sad stories.  What would you say if some guy popped up from a loan company that you skipped out on?  You'd give him a wild song and dance, wouldn't you?  They at least have the decency to do that.  But don't believe them.  If it's pouring rain and somebody says 'Good Morning' you don't think the sun is out, do you?"
	Soon he took me back upstairs, handed me another card and sent me out to try again.
	The poor, the poor, the goddamn poor --- a race apart I found, as I traipsed from one sad door to the other, experiencing their pathetic cunning like Goldie's, being saddened by their unalterable penurious imprisonment, patting their angry children on sweaty heads, smelling that dark piteous air behind the closed windows, seeing the sun drift down dusty and inhibited, the bed clothes turned back, men in bare feet in the middle of the afternoon, women who lived in housecoats for fear they would be asked outside, coffee, cigarette butts being unbent, the unshaven scratching destitute --- yes, Clarke was right they were formidable, tough, unresilient, demanding, squealing, lying, cheating, nomadic, cunning, furtive, desperate, deserted, homeless, candid, unwholesome, weaseling people with no possible way out of the indebted trap but an improbable lucky bet on the horses, a punchboard win.  Everything would change if they could only make that one big strike, they told me over and over again, that one big bet paying off, that last big loan, that gold mine they were nearing.  And yet, I was right, too, for they were pathetic and needed my help.  I tried to tell them about time, lift them out of that gray world they skidded along, get them to think about the monstrous future where they thought lay only their ultimate death and failure.  They could no longer take one step at a time, consider the long months necessary of regular pecunious work, life, money-saving that they need to make their way back into clean society.  They could not imagine that saving five dollars a week would someday net them a thousand; they could only speculate on the fifty-dollar bet that might bring them a thousand tomorrow morning, even though the chance was slight.  They couldn't wait, and this was understandable, with the phone ringing or ripped out, the thumps on the door, the smiling people asking questions, the frightening lack of money to sustain them, the job snatched out of their lives, the accusations, their names being published in the newsapers as "bad credit risks," for the protection of their local merchants, the taxes falling due or past due.  Everything was due yesterday, today or it fell due tomorrow.  How could they imagine getting out from under in a year or two by saving five measly dollars a week?  They nodded their heads when I spoke, but they believed nothing.  They took the paper on which I wrote figures for new budgets that would allow them to pay small amounts on their debts, have a little left for food, clothing, and be able to accumulate a reserve slowly; but then, five minutes after I was gone, most would go out and blow their last fifty dollars at the local bookie joint, or, or would get wildly drunk on their last ten, or the woman would get pregnant, or the men would skip work once too often and lose their jobs, or the kids would fall down and end up expensively in the hospital, or the car would break down to the tune of one-hundred and fifty dollars, or the landlord would suddenly demand six months back rent and not be satisfied with a slow retiring of debt, or the grocer would cut them off, or they would be threatened with bankruptcy proceedings by an impatient creditor.  Then, in a month, I would be back, asking why they hadn't stuck to their budgets, why they hadn't mailed in the small regular token sums that I had promised Clarke they would.
	Once on retuming to a shack at the edge of a nearby town, I tapped on the screendoor of a miner, then dodged a whistling ax that came sailing through the screen and past my shoulder.  "Ge' ta hell gone for I shovel ya unner!" came a shout.  "Don wanna see ya ... Don wanna lay eyes on ya ... don wanna lissen, never lissen again."  They felt guilty before me the second, third, fourth and fifth times, and the times after that.  They tried to avoid me, behind their doors scarcely breathing, quieting the kids --- and then a baby would cry, or the old man would fart or cough or hiccup or belch, and the fantasy would end, the door would open slowly, a resigned face would peek out, then shift into surprise --- and then they would sit as long as I liked and go through the promises, the budgets, the exhortations, all over again, until I thought they would go over the edge, throw up their hands, rip off their respectful masks and kill me, but they never did.
	(Credit is the chain that binds the men of modern days, squeezing them into jobs they hate or into a debt-filled nightmarish flight from any chance for joy or pride or celebration; it commits their future lives as well as any other slave system of the past, it binds, working from within, forms a mind urgently aware of what it must do in order to be able to pay and pay and pay and pay.  In the past the order has been work, work, work!  Now it is pay, pay, pay!  And in order to pay a man must do work for which he in turn is paid, thus slavery or exile are his only choices, the same as those two sad fates of a baser past when there were whips instead of warrants, clubs instead of contracts, overseers instead of collectors, laws instead of lawyers, and when the penalty for reluctance was death instead of despair.
	(An old man has borrowed $1000 to help his son remain in school, offering his meager household possessions as a bind and promising to pay $50 a month for three years, and then he gets sick and can't work, can't even afford to get better, and soon I appear at his door.  I already know that he can't pay because of the fact that he has not paid, but yet I appear to remind him that he must.  He explains that he cannot pay, a fact I already know.  I explain that he must pay, a fact he is already haunted by, even in his sickness.  When he throws up his hands in despair, I must explain that if he does not pay my company will approach his son.  No, no, he says, because he knows his son will quit school immediately and return home to a futile job and the same kind of slavery which has trapped the old man.  No, no, I want something better for my son, he explains.  But you cannot afford it, I say, again calling to his attention a fact he already knows.  And your son cannot afford it either.  You are right, the old man agrees, but let me tell him, let me call him home from his school to work to slave to pay.  All right, I agree; certainly Clarke will allow this.  But a month later I am back, learning that the old man has not called his son, as he had promised.  How can I, he says?  You must, I say; you must do it now or my company will inform him today --- there is no way out of it.  But I promised him, the old man pleads, that he could learn to be somebody valuable, not like me, but something; how can I break my promise?  But sooner or later he does, because he must, and you know and I know and everyone knows that from then on his son and he hate one another as reminders of a personal failure they would each rather forget.
	(A young man has borrowed $500 to help his ill wife, paying for an operation she must have whether he can pay for it or not or she will die, so he borrows it at a compounded interest which over three years doubles the amount he borrowed until he is returning $1000.  His wife recovers and lying still on the livingroom couch she smiles at him and he feels proud, but then he cannot pay and so I come.  She needs medicine, he tells me, and I didn't figure on that; and she needs a person to stay with her while I'm at work, and I didn't figure on that either --- so I have nothing left to pay you.  I tell him he must pay me because my boss has threatened to exercise the wage garnishee that the man signed, allowing us to go to his employer in case he is unable to pay and to force his employer to withhold our payments from the man's check and send them along to us.  But you can't, says the man; my employer will fire me before he goes through all that trouble!  I know, I say, and that is why you must find a way to pay, quickly before it is done.  But I can't, he says; I have borrowed from everyone I know and I have no more money, and everything I'm paid must go to doctors and druggists and the landlord and the grocer --- or my wife and I cannot live.  I remind, I urge, I explain, but the man is insistent that payment is impossible --- so a few weeks later his employer is contacted and he is fired as a result.  Now he stays home, out of a job, staring at his young wife on the couch, and he hates her, she hates herself and him, and there is nothing but hate which will never change because they have both failed each other, or at least they feel so.
	(A young girl has borrowed money to help her boyfriend, and now her boyfriend has disappeared and she has neither money nor payments, and her angry parents kick her out of their house when they are told of her irresponsibility.  She is now a bar-girl in Chicago, operates a 21-game and fleeces drunks, but sends her payments regularly until her debt is paid.  Unfortunately, the debt owed her by Men, she feels, can never be paid; and she continues to prey upon them for revenge, winding up a call-girl in a cheap hotel on Chicago's South Side.
	(A desperate man holds up a gas station the evening after I leave him, and sends us a payment which we must turn over to the police a week later when he is apprehended, convicted and then sent to the State pen for armed robbery.  His wife sends us a letter, promising she will try hard to pay a little each month, if only we will be careful and promise never to tell her three children about their father; because she has moved now away from friends and family and will start a new life.  She sends three payments and then nothing, and I go looking for her, finding her in a cheap room surrounded with her children, and a few months later she kills her kids, one at a time, and then gasses herself, leaving a note accusing her husband of their murders, saying she hopes the news kills him, too.)
	Well, it is not a new story; debts and slavery are as old as the human race and will always be with us.  It should surprise no one that today finds us just as busy at our enslaving endeavors, corrupting the young, exploiting the poor, squeezing the helpless, milking the milked, forcing the free, tricking the innocent --- it is the same old goddamn story of greed, money, power, and of the ravages these three indulge in at the expense of the slaves.  There is no other value for a dollar than the measurement of labor needed to acquire it; and when you see unsweating people with lots of dollars then you know that somewhere the balance of sweat is being paid off by poor tricked innocent people who will get nothing for their efforts when the day is done.  It is a law more final than gravity or thermodynamics; it is the human law that says for every one who eats but does not work there must be one, maybe two, three, or ten who work but do not eat!  Think of this when you see the fat-cats riding high in their shiny cars, burping deep inside their mounds of flesh; think of this when a rich man like Rockefeller or Kennedy gives a speech telling of his concern for the poor; think of this every moment of every day, be watchful, cynical, be cunning, or you will become one of the slaves who work so the rich can ride and be comfortable and be free, while you sweat and pay and pay and pay.  Think of this when you look at your children --- simple slaves of the future.
	If there is one thing you can be sure of it is this: no rich man can ever help the poor unless he feels he is extending charity, and this is the most absurd, cruel joke of all.  If there are two men and one steals from the other, tricks him, enslaves him, exploits bim, makes him work and makes him pay --- and then one fine day the former decides to extend a little charity, doling out a few coins to the man be has ruined, must we be asked to thank the rich man!  I say no.  I say drag the rich man round the neck and pull him into the gutter with the rest of us for a few years, make him work, sweat, labor, think, all for nothing, all to line some other man's pocket, and then turn him loose with his freedom, and that alone, no money, no inheritance, no factories, stocks and bonds, just his freedom to continue to work, sweat, slave and pay for the rest of his life.  Will he make speeches then about the "needs of the people"?  No, my friend --- and that is how you can tell the rich man.  It is a better sign than listening to the jingle of his coins or counting the rolls of his fat, or looking at the perfection of his women.  If he talks about the "needs of the people" he is a rich man, and he knows no more about the people than a Marsman knows about earthmen.  The poor man will never use the word "need."  Instead he will talk about "rights."  He doesn't respect the people, he doesn't feel sorry for them, he doesn't revere them; but he does know they work hard and long and that their work is worth something; he knows they are getting the living shit screwed out of them, that they are supporting the worthless rich, the pompous powerful, the hypocritical, religious, and all the other phony, useless, vermin that feed upon the flesh of the poor and the driven and the slaves; and he simply wants to inform these poor slobs that they have a right, not a need, to the benefits of their own work; that they have sown; that they have a right to harvest what they have sown; that they have a right to sell what they make; keep what they want --- and that they are fools if they bestow the right on someone who does nothing at all but maybe inherited ownership of factory, materials, slaves and therefore products from a father or from family or from God-knows-what-else.

CHAPTER 21

	On one of my trips through Illinois I met a girl and she was pretty and shy and a little confused, but shapely with a wishful knack for attractive positions, whether it be sitting on a swing or in a car, walking, running, or on a couch with her knees up under her chin.
	Dark eyes she had and dark hair and a wide warm face, and on the third date I knew she loved me because she told me so, her arms around my waist, her face pressed to my chest, and she said she needed me as much as she knew that I needed her, and when I heard this my brain almost popped with the urgency of finding a place where we could be alone with a rug and chairs and a kitchen and a bedroom and a phonograph and a coffeepot.  She agreed on what we needed, although she had endless additions to make, silverware, sheets, blankets, towels, dishes, lamps, tables, bedspreads, pots and pans, and a lot of names I had never heard before, like "a spatula" for pancakes and a "noodler."
	For months, my happiness was her smile and her pleasure, a kiss at night, her warm voice and her hand, as she lured me quite gently but deeper into love and more love, until if I couldn't look upon her I was in painful misery and there was no sight or face that could substitute for her void.  So I proposed marriage and she accepted.  There was a brief talk with her fat father while her birdlike mother hovered in the shadows; there was a ring, a rehearsal; then a tense, stomach-jangling ceremony before grinning strangers and friends, there to remind us of our vows forever; and then there was escape to a lodge for a weekend, where all her mysteries were solved and where warmth built cascading up to wildness, a frenzy of envelopment, of heart-stopping plunges, and then hard real capturable joy --- the real ceremony of marriage, the pleasurable not the ritual, the ring of flesh rather than of silver, the actual union, the physical give and take.  It was more than I imagined, or ever knew; not sex, but an expression of what we felt, and since I had never had anything to express before, and never felt love just relief, it was a first time for me, too, and I felt just as much a virgin as she.
	We house-hunted and found a white place just three blocks away from the finance company, within walking distance and an easy access for lunch when I was in town.  She was a vision, yet she was cruel sometimes, as I was to her, but we swore out our arguments without ever assuming that they would not end.  We were together for good, and we never assumed anything else, no split was possible, tolerable, except for moments.  We were each other's only alternative.
	How can I describe her laugh, her look, her contentment. her love, her play and her labor of cooking and cleaning, her happiness and her sour pensive anger at slights, insults and crudity, her conceits, her abilities strange and common.  I give up ever transmitting the exact magic of her walking, talking, thinking loveliness to paper, and I say just that I got more than I bargained for, depths I could not even see, grace I would never have imagined was there, secret talents for pleasure which shocked even me, and a defiance which could bend, flex, change, capitulate, without once losing its rigidity or its insistence on being considered.  I began to pity other men, because of their less lustrous prizes, for mine was the black earth, the blue sky, the why and what of all comfort, the beat that enhanced my melody, the pressure that surrounded my push, the practical reason for my ideas, and it seemed my poor friends had nothing in comparison.  As the months went on, I felt luckier and luckier, and I could only justify the correctness of my original blind choice by manufacturing some superior instinct which I supposed had made me pick her for reasons I came to discover were plainly superficial and did not touch the magnificence of her offering in the least.  How had I done it?  I had simply deserved her, I concluded, and I never thought of it again for fear of not measuring up.
	We took long walks at night, and she had her favorite spots: "our bend in the river," she called one; or "our grass by our tree;" or "our hill."  She made a place for us wherever we went; either in her mind --- with a saying; or with her hands --- by spreading out a picnic, or sometimes spreading on the grass no more than her skirt.  "What are you thinking about?" she would ask me, and I would preen my mind for her and show all the colors and shapes of my ideas, and she would never fail to say, "that's so beautiful," whether she thought so or not.  She never judged me; I suppose she believed she had made one massive judgment when we were married and it was useless to consider standards at this late date, and I think she was only interested in discovering the whole nature of what she had won, since I must have been as unknown to her at the moment of that legal union as she was to me.  I perceived this because she always asked her questions of me with a little fear as to what I might answer, since she had to accept any answer that came, and I felt the responsibility to her of making my speeches, if not good, at least true and certain and confident and thoughtful and workable.  I avoided the easy, the pompous, the dangerous, the terror, the fright, the impossible, whenever I could; although there were times when it would sneak out ("Jesus, I don't know what to do, honey") and then I would be sorry seeing the explosion of terror fill her eyes, and I would try to take all the uncertainty back by manufacturing confidence (..."but you can damn well be sure that I'll do the right thing when the time comes, I'm certain of that!"), and she would relax in the circle of my false strength.  Sometimes I realize that women are question-marks, at their happiest, in search of exclamation points, and if men deny them there is no dialogue for marriage, there will always be something missing.  A man cannot counter with another question-mark but must counter all interrogation with an answer and the courage to make one up.
	"Will we settle here?" she asked once.  "No, near Chicago," I said.
	"Why?"
	"Because it is the best place for us," I said.
	"Why the best place?"
	"It's our birthplace, and the land we know best, and it is what produced us, and I like it and I know you like it, too, and it will be a good place to raise children, and jobs are plentiful, and the climate is good, and I know where there is land that will satisfy us, where we can build our house and be happy."
	She rocked back in that round, round way she has, and stretched her arms.  "I've always liked Chicago, too," she said.  "Isn't that strange?"
	"No," I said.  "It doesn't seem strange to me."
	Then I knew I had to make it happen, so I worked a transfer to one of the loan company's branch offices in Chicago, so we could live nearby, as I had promised her.  It is to my credit, I think, that I was not amazed when I discovered soon after our arrival, or return, that it was the correct move for us after all.
	We had two children; the first, a boy, before we left Southern Illinois, and the second, a little girl, soon after we settled in Chicago.  My wife made them with the same excellence and to my complete satisfaction --- that she achieves when she turns her hand to anything, except that since she is at her best working unconsciously she made the children a little better, perhaps.
	Unfortunately, I still could not help hating my job, and there was a tough time for awhile that we had to pass through.  All her attention went to the children, except late at night and even then she was so tired she wished only to go to sleep without me.  I didn't so much dislike this, but I had to adjust to it, while keeping the money coming in, in a way I detested, and so we drew apart a little, stretched by the two very small bodies we had produced from our love.  There appeared things I didn't tell her; things she was happier not to know.  I could never quite accept money as a way of life, and being paid for doing something was not the total justification for doing it as far as I was concerned even if the money was used, as it was, for maintaining a home and wife and family that I loved very much.  A hatred grew in me, not of them or of myself but of what I was forced to do --- track down non-paying clients of my goddamn loan company and somehow make it appear more attractive to them to pay up their debts; and I began to realize that I had never liked my job at all, right from the beginning, but had only been distracted from it for awhile.  But, if not the loan company, then what else?  No one had ever asked me to do one particular thing, just something, anything, enough money to survive was all that had ever been demanded of me, and I couldn't feel this was unfair.  But what?  I could think of nothing more satisfying than the loan company, and this was my problem, so big and yet so small, so important and yet so insignificant.  I looked, and I judged, and I could find nothing that would give me any more satisfaction than I already had, which was damn little.  It seemed that nothing which returned money to the doer was worth doing in the first place, except for the very money which it returned.  I know I am not unique in finding this out, but I also know my conclusion afterwards --- "Things should not be this way!" --- was rare.  Craftier men than myself when stumbling on my discovery have rationalized that the very stamp of maturity lies in the ability to accept this absurd situation, and then have settled down in their discontent and accepted it.  I could not.  I drifted without accepting it.  I could only treat it as temporary, a situation that would soon change, a problem for which I must find a solution, a wall to get over someday, an adversary which must someday be faced, an inclement condition that I found myself in, and I knew that it had to change because I could not.  I asked for no one's understanding of this; I asked for their help, and I got nothing in retum, growing angrier and angrier and angrier.  It gnawed at me, the helplessness of it, and as I grew to realize that no one else could do anything about it because the very nature of their compromise with it was to ignore it and by ignoring it they could neither accept it or join me in combating it, well then I got angrier than ever.  If others would not be my allies then they would be my enemies --- it was as simple as that!
	Withdrawing from all companionship, I began to see people again for the slobs they were, intent on sustaining themselves at all cost and any other considerations they displayed were obviously superficial.  They had no thoughts that weren't servants to themselves, no thoughts whatsoever.  They had no goals beyond their own condition, none.  They cared only about themselves and their own, and any indication they gave otherwise was a mockery of truth.  This is why they could do anything for money; since they had no pride, only desires, they would do anything for the power to satisfy these desires.  They had no conception of themselves, except in light of what they could buy, but none in what they could do.  I shouldn't have been surprised, I told myself, after all hadn't I seen as a child that most people could not do anything well?  Then why was I surprised that their image of themselves, their very destinies, had to be figured upon what they could buy rather than make, what they could acquire rather than create, what they could seize rather than offer, what they could imprison rather than grow?  They had to be after that which already existed because they didn't have the ability to imagine anything.  They were witless creatures with big hands, willing to lie, cheat, steal, do anything to get what they foresaw as their very existence.  Well, was I any better?  Could I create my destiny out of my own head?  And, if so, how?  That was the nature of the problem, not its solution, so I continued to drift, uncommitted either way, unable to create a place for myself and undesirous of seizing another's place.  I stiffened for awhile in time, paralyzed by indecision, hate and anger, gliding for awhile because I had no idea which way to steer, floating in no special direction, demanding nothing, preparing nothing, enjoying nothing, accomplishing nothing, expecting nothing.  It was as if I had nowhere to go but down, and I might as well flatten out and stay at the apex as long as I could.
	"What's the matter?" asked my wife.
	"Nothing," I would answer.
	"Yes, there is.  I'm sure of it."
	"No, nothing."
	"Why can't you tell me?"
	"I don't know.  Don't worry."
	"But I do worry.  What is it?"
	"Nothing," I said.
	"All right, but I wish you would tell me."
	"Maybe someday I will."
	A knife had come down from outside us, had split us, and now its steel was between us, and there was no way to lift it; it had to be lifted, as it had come, from the outside.  The dialogue had ended, while the form remained.  We were still married, only there was something between us; we could no longer trust each other to feel as one felt, know as one knew, see as one saw.  We were two again and not one simple equation.  I suppose it is something that happens to others as well, but it happened to us and so it was important to us.  We both knew it had happened, but neither of us knew why.  Why had I lost my place on the outside?  How could I see everything, hear everything, accept everything that others before me had accepted, and then end up different from them, so different that there was no place for me amongst them?  What could I do to bring my family back into the scope of things, hooked by me from their small circle to the big circle of the world, and now unhooked since I had lost my grip?  What was the next step, now that the present stance had grown intolerable?  I didn't know.
	"Are you going to keep working for the finance cornpany?" my wife asked, her face very warm and saying any alternative would be all right with her.
	"I don't know."
	"How can you say that?" she questioned.  "Anything but that."
	There comes a time in every man's life, I suppose, when he must stop and consider not what is next but what he wants to come next, and this is a difficult time that some men never pass.  They stand transfixed by their own immobility, and this is the very way they are trapped.  Since there is nothing they can think of to do but what they are already doing, they continue to do the same although they hate it, are ashamed of it, and would quit tomorrow if another way were offered to them.  But a very few men mark off a path that will take them out of the pain, and these are our heroes, our leaders, our stalwart men of power, who become god-like only because they are not slaves, who are looked up to only because they are above, who are respected only because they are better off than the rest of us, who are listened to only because they have time to stop working and talk.  What are the steps that will take me there, I wondered?  What can I do to haul myself out of the morass of slavery that I was born in, the penniless, illiterate heritage that my country believes is the condition for freedom, the onestep away from the chains which are proffered to everyone no matter what country they find themselves born in --- and ours differing only by the fact that the chains can be rejected, if a man can come up, with an alternative, which he is free to choose.  But since all money can be mined only from the muck, then how does a man stay clean?  Where does he get the money, if he becomes what he wants to be?  Where does he work?  What does he do?
	It was a problem that took up my time, absorbed my thoughts completely, tied my hands, fixed my gaze, and I seemed to have no time for anything else --- I must be about the solution, or I was wasting valuable minutes, so I became gruff and quick.  I refused to talk, unless absolutely necessary; I refused to go anywhere; I sat still if possible so that I could think and I would tolerate no interruptions from anyone, induding my son, my daughter, my wife, my friends, my customers, my parents.  I was a man locked in desperate battle, first with himself and what he was to do, then with time itself, which seemed to slip away giving him no opportunity to think, to concentrate, to find an answer, to plot out a first step and another and another that would lead to a solution.  There was no time to read, to sleep, to relax; there was no time at all --- something had to be done.  The clock ticked, minutes slipped away unused, days passed, weeks, months, and the tension tightened.
	Every instant not thinking about what must be done was lost forever and could never be recaptured.
	"Come to bed, dear.  Please?" my wife would say.
	"I want to stay up and think."
	"But you're exhausted.  You've been driving all day."
	I know, I'll be there in a minute.  Just give me a few minutes."
	"Why don't you rest?"
	"I can't.  I must decide something and soon."
	"Can't it wait until morning?"
	"No.  It can't wait at all, that's the trouble."
	"All right.  Don't forget to turn out the light."
	"I won't."
	In the darkness I would sit, thinking, mulling, growing angrier, banging my hands, rubbing my head, trying to discover what I could do.  But there was nothing.  I could not create a place for myself in a community which had excluded me.  I could not accept myself, pay myself, and use myself for ends that I would call worthy.  I couldn't be both employer and employee at once, unless I began my own business and I had no money; in fact, a lack of money was the reason I had to find a job in the first place.  I could not prepare a way for myself over which I could then come; I could not be both ahead of myself and myself at the same time; I could not preclude myself.  (If a man wishes to worship he cannot first build a church, then preach, then sit in a pew and listen to himself --- all becomes absurd unless he can be part of the effort to worship in common.)  I desired worthy work; something to do which I would think valuable, something lasting, something to which I could give myself and my thoughts up to, my energy, my sweat, my time, something that had meaning beyond the practical day-to-day existence which I was gradually beginning to conclude had no meaning in its own right, it must represent something of aspiration, it must have a spirit beyond survival, some idea to it which raised it above the needs of day-to-day men.
	Soon in my mind there grew a silence, a bitterness, a coldly calculating cynicism, a mocking critic of everything, induding me, a sneer, a suspicion, a feeling that I was separated from all I saw, that it was not for me, that it all was some cunning trick devised to snare me and which I must avoid at all costs.  If reality was a trap, if jobs, families, communities were all prisons, then I meant to escape somehow, become footloose and free; outside the walls is where I would remain, watching, laughing, waiting --- for if I could not create a new place for myself at least I could avoid the one they had planned for me.  I could wear the job at the loan company like a uniform under which I would be a spy, a foreign agent, not one of them, with different plans up my sleeve than those they thought.  I would try to tell myself the truth, with no need to rationalize that I was doing the right thing.  I would be a conscious sinner, and therefore be a saint.  I would always withhold part of myself from reality so I could know what it was.  If I could not be my own man, then I would not be entirely anybody else's either.
	There were times when I thought I was losing my sanity, but even then the cold and clear view of everything that I had gained convinced me that I must be the only sane man among those gone mad long before.  Around me I saw urgency without purpose, the mediocre made king, the unskilled hailed with praise, the kindly being tortured and the sadists being rewarded, idiots commended for their intelligence and genius cast aside for being too obvious and crude, I saw the slow called quick and the quick being impeded, right was made wrong while wrong became the mode because it succeeded in accomplishing some objective that was evil in the first place.  I saw people racked with pain and being ignored; I saw hypocondriacs being treated with all the facilities that modern science could muster, while the truly sick died.  I heard the ugly called wondrous and exceptonal, while the beautiful passed unnoticed underfoot.  I saw the destruction of truth and the institutionalization of lies.  I watched God made a salesman while heaven became a store and religion incorporated as the exclusive distributor of grace on earth.  I saw tyrants make their earthly enemies into the image of the devil and then extoll religious crusades against the "evil."  It is amazing what people are like if you look at them with no notion in your head.  It is fantastic what they do, although you can see it if you will only disengage yourself long enough to watch.  It is frightening to discover the direction of man, but easy if you simply add up the total of his actions.  It is a great relief not forcing yourself into a mold of your own model and instead simply sitting back and discovering what mold you were born into, what shape you were given by that massive evolutionary hand extending into the present from the past.  You begin to understand how man has endured the ages; he is, after all, the mean mammal that gets what he wants at all cost and what he wants is power over others, sex, food, shelter, and once he has these he wants more and more and more and more, that's all, just more of the same please or you will feel the gnash of my teeth.
	"I can't believe that you hate everything as much as you sound like you do," said my lovely wife one day.
	"I don't hate anything," I said.  "I just don't feel as if I have to lie about it anymore.  You asked me how I liked my job nowadays, and I just said that it was all right now that I have accepted that its object was to steal money from people."
	"But if you think that way about it why don't you do something else?"
	"Everything else is the same.  Take doctors, they don't save people's lives, they just treat people and some of the people live while some die.  All jobs are methods of separating someone from his money and getting it for yourself, all things that are sold are for the same purpose."
	"Why is this hateful?  I don't understand you anymore."
	"I don't say it's hateful, you do.  I just call it what it is, worthless, unnecessary, and in some cases --- like poisoning our food with chemicals so we will buy more --- detrimental.  Everything that is done in this country is done for the purpose of making money, and for no other reason."
	"Not having babies," she laughed.
	"I'm afraid babies are needed strictly for the new labor force as replacements," I said.

CHAPTER 22

	The unfortunate thing that I discovered next, in the years of the Fifties, working like a slob for the finance company, not much different from the slobs I was trying to pump some money out of --- was that the fat-cats are not content to exploit us, bleed us, work us for the rest of our lives at their benefit, but they want us to win them some glory, too.  This is why every once in a while they start a war for us to fight in.  Like everybody else, I suppose, I read about the North Koreans invading the South Koreans, and just like everybody else --- including the South Koreans it turned out later --- I just didn't give a shit.  Somebody was always invading somebody in our God-forsaken world and I couldn't keep up an interest in who was taking over who.  And I can tell you this:  I sure as hell didn't think this invasion was a threat to me, my family, my country, or even the whole goddamn world.  But Harry Truman did.  He decided that Americans --- under the age of twenty-five of course, which left out him and the Congress and the businessmen and doctors and teachers and scientists and ministers --- that we were going to defend South Korea.  "We'll teach those bloody Communists!" Harry said, waving goodbye to the troopships; and Congress agreed and began appropriating all kinds of money to pay to the businessmen for weapons and war materials --- plus a profit, of course.  It's a funny thing, but a lot of the experts say we were surely headed for a Depression if it hadn't been for the Korean War; and the shot in the arm that this war gave to production, to business, and even to religion --- since right away everybody returned to church to pray for their brave sons overseas --- was something that the fat-cats had to have or they might have gone under and suddenly become poor folks like the rest of us --- a situation they are quite ready to try anything to avoid.  So suddenly we were at war, although the term applied was a little more subtle --- "a police action," Harry called it; but still it was the same old thing, the flag-waving in the newspapers and on the movie-screens, the speeded up draft, the processing centers, the crazy uniforms, the guns, the firing ranges, the squad-training, the troopship --- and then war, death, murder for all under twenty-five, while Congress resounded with virulent speeches, much chest-thumping, and the artists began to "soul search," and the businessmen pocketed the profits, as did the elderly war workers, the housewives, the physically unfit, the "professional patriots," and the grey-haired ministers who gleefully led their flocks again in something worth praying about.  Again the fine and free Americans were being inflated with death.  Oh, there was much band-playing and march-tingling and "we'll-kill-them" shouting, and everyone including General MacArthur predicted the war would be over in a few weeks.  The military journals explained "Korea will be a useful testing ground for our young field commanders," and everyone expected to gain something --- except, that is, those under twenty-five.  And even for these younger souls, slipping into their uniforms provided them at a tidy profit, there were voices like old Ernie Hemingway's which told them that war gave them a one in a million chance, a way to test their manhood, their courage and all that was in them.  You can tell how great you are, the young were informed, by how willing you are to give up your life, to charge the blazing guns for your buddies and for your country; and when it is over you will never be afraid again, because you will have discovered yourself.  Nobody mentioned what those would discover who lay ripped open after the battle, bleeding, dying, dead from monstrous wounds.
	I took my Basic Training at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in 1951, along with other suckers of my kind and age.  We learned a simple skill, how to make war and how to murder and how to hate and how to obey orders no matter what --- a fine and splendid Basic Training for the future mature citizens of this our great democracy, no?  Well, this is what we were taught; and I hope no one ever tries to lie to me again for when I see the beautific expression beginning, the hands held high, the head thrown back and the voice starts to say "we are the finest, the most splendid . . . " then I remember Fort Campbell and what I was taught and I must laugh at the speaker who thinks we are all so fine and splendid.  Please do not think I am telling you something you never knew, or something you are against, or something you abhor; please accept that I, we, the young, did what you told us and nothing else.  First we were given guns, fine and shiny and new M-1 rifles that clicked easily and worked, and we were taught how to walk with them, drill with them, take care of them, shoot them straight at silhouettes of men, and then clean them so they would be ready to shoot again.  "Sometimes you may have to kill with your hands," said the realistic sergeant, and he taught us how to do that, too --- at your direction; and we learned it all as well as we could.  Some of us made poor killers, some of us fair ones, and some of us good ones, and a very few made excellent killers, but we were all trained to be killers, the quick and slow of us, and nothing else.  There was no pretense of freedom in the army.  "You must obey the orders of your superior instantly with no thought, because the lives of your entire unit, including your own life, will almost always depend on it," they taught us, and who among us knew whether or not they were right?  No one of us could say for sure, so we listened and learned and accepted, because if we didn't we were dead.  They were going to throw us into a war --- everybody knew that for sure --- and we knew we had to learn quickly how to survive the situation they were going to place us in.  When someone tells you they are about to throw you into the water, you listen hard when they tell you how to swim, whether you want to learn how to swim or not; when someone tells you they are going to lower you into a pit of snakes with a gun, you listen hard as they tell you how to work the gun --- or your days are numbered, because you can be damn sure they are not going to change their minds about where you are headed.
	Basic training is a simple school, devised to tear down any moral instruction or inclination an individual might bring to it: It must teach him to kill, while unteaching him "thou shalt not kill," and convincing him he will not be punished by the electric chair or God or anyone; It must teach him to obey unthinkingly, while unteaching him that he knows right from wrong in his own mind, and convincing him that his group is much more efficient if he gives total obedience to an appointed dictator who has been through West Point or Officers Training School; It must teach him to be willing to die, while unteaching him how free and fine it is to live, and convincing him that it is better to be a good soldier than to be a good human being --- why? --- because the time, his country, his "loved ones" require it of him, as well as his "God," who has given His word that it is the young man's flag which is right, and not the flag of the other young men he is sworn to kill.  If he fails to comply he is thrown into jail, executed, or dishonorably discharged in disgrace; if he refuses to perform the role of killer, he is branded a coward and punished; if he disobeys, he is punished --- so he learns and he accepts and he obeys and he complies and he performs as a professional killer, and that is it.
	He is taught to fire a rifle, pistol, machinegun, artillery piece, bomb cities, sink ships and all the rest; he is taught to keep good ranks, to march, to make his bed and to keep himself, his clothes and his weapons clean and ready; he is taught to think only when he is told to, speak only when spoken to, go where the others are going, and all the rest of that, too.  And on Sundays he is sent to church where he listens to a chaplain made an officer, and he prays when he's ordered to pray and kneels when he's ordered to kneel.  When he can be trusted not to surprise his superiors he is placed on a ship and sent to the war.
	We had a guy in my training barracks named Elmer --- and where was he from? --- Davenport City, Iowa, I think.  He was always rumpled and saying the wrong thing, and on weekend passes when we'd all get dressed up in civies Elmer would put on tennis shoes.  I can remember talking to him: "For Christ's sake, Elmer, get hold of yourself, and wear normal shoes and look alive!" --- but he never could make it.  He was only five-foot-four and somehow he looked like the world's worst soldier.  He was always afraid.  One day he disappeared rather than pull KP, not because he was lazy but because he was afraid to pull KP and walk into the messhall.  He knew he would do the wrong thing so he ran away.  When they found him hiding under the barracks with mud up to his ears, they decided to punish him, and they made him walk around with his rifle on his shoulder guarding some empty boxes for twenty-four hours.  When he was almost finished I saw him, like a ghost walking, and he couldn't even talk.  I don't know what was keeping him up, unless he thought he deserved it, no matter how lousy he felt.  He just moved through the night, clumping along, not even knowing where he was, around and around the empty boxes.  When they let him go he clumped into the barracks and fell on his bed, still holding the rifle, so the sergeant who was a nice guy let Elmer stay behind and get some sleep while the rest of us went out to the machinegun range where we were scheduled.
	When we came back that afternoon for lunch, Elmer was hanging by his belt from the barrack's rafter near his bed, and he had been dead for a couple of hours.  I guess he thought he deserved to die, after the way he screwed up, and nobody had bothered to remind him that like everyone else even he had a right to live.  I had the honor to cut him down, and the next weekend I got the truck-detail to take the pine box into the railroad station at town.  It was shipped home to Davenport City, Iowa, and I bet the folks there weren't in the least surprised.  Elmer was the kind who was probably a screw-up since the day he was born.
	There was another guy named Van Strappen, and he must have been at least five years older than the rest of us, because I remember he had all his teeth out in the first few weeks when they offered it for free, and then he got the free glasses, too.  He was tall and skinny, and he said he had twins at home with his wife.  Although he tried hard to laugh and make jokes and sing songs and get high on three-point-two beer, and although he was a model of a soldier, sometimes he'd tell us how they had screwed him.  In the late Forties he had served eight months in the army, stationed in Italy, and then they forced him home.  At the time he had told them that he wanted to finish his hitch because he didn't want to be called later when he had started his family and everything, but they informed him that he had to get out, and go home, and that there was nothing to worry about --- the war was over.  He had gone home in 1946 and married his Bohunk sweetheart in Berwyn, Illinois, and then gone into the bulldozing business with his brother.  Twenty thousand bucks they had laid out between them to get two bulldozers, and they were in hock up to their ears, although they were making a lot of money digging holes.  Then, as Van Strappen told it, his brother had gotten hurt by somehow taking a bulldozer blade in the back when some idiot started it up by mistake, and Van Strappen had had to work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, keeping both 'dozers busy, supporting both his family and his brother's --- and then along came the army and told the skinny guy he had to go back in and serve a full hitch of two years.  He got documents showing the debt he owed on the 'dozers, and he had his twins which were proof enough he was needed, but in that great goddamn fairness of mind and idiocy the army was determined to take him.  So here he was at Fort Campbell, getting new teeth and new glasses, and telling everyone how he was getting his money's worth; and then when he'd get drunk he'd tell how he had to sell those 'dozers for a fourth of what they were worth, and how he was still in debt up to his ears for them although he didn't even have them anymore, and how he had to send extra money home for his brother's family, when his own was not eating too well on the allotment dough as it was.
	(Everybody got screwed in the army.  There were ball players sitting out the two best years of the only ten they could make money playing ball.  There were husbands, fathers, farmers, storeowners, all of whom had to sell out everything in order to come into the goddainn nation's service.  There were skilled workers carrying rifles; there were lawyers carrying machineguns; there were engineers pulling KP; there were inventors and artists, the crafty and the gracious --- and all were just sitting on their asses, killing time until they could kill or be killed for the greater glory of South Korea.  There were scholars carrying cans; mathematicians peeling potatoes.  There were historians cleaning the johns; accountants carrying flags.  There was only one rule that I ever heard of: those who wore glasses became clerks and those who didn't became infantry or artillery.  It didn't make any difference about skill or intelligence or education or desire or what. just whether or not you wore glasses.)
	Meanwhile we were getting cookie boxes from home, and letters from Mom saying, "Everyone asks about you, son;" and notes from Dad saying, "Just do what they tell you to do son; and you'll never be in any trouble."  The homefront was solidly behind us we were told; it was the nation that had put us where we were --- so we accepted this, and for the bastard mess we were in we blamed (that's right and why not?) the whole damn nation.  When they told us that it was the nation itself that spoke through the voices of our officers (and that this was why our officers deserved our unthinking obedience), we looked at our officers and saw right through to their pompous and shaky stupidity, and we knew right away that our nation was pompous, shaky and stupid.  And when the young girls in the towns near our camps were buttoned up by frightened fathers and mothers and were told never, never to date a soldier because a soldier couldn't be trusted --- well, we knew the nation was a little afraid of us, too.  And when we counted our money each month, we knew the nation was exploiting us, there was no doubt about that; and when we bought a car or insurance or beer or a sportshirt or what-have-you in town at high prices, we knew the nation was also out to con us out of everything we had, from our blood to our time to our money.  Gradually, we came to have little respect for our nation, and I hope this piece of information won't shock you.  Don't choke up and say, "My word," or any horseshit like that.  You know, as well as we do, in your guts that you were out to use us and nothing more --- so if you are shocked then it is your own guilt that shocks you and not anything I am saying.  We were never as stupid as you thought we were, and I think you always knew it.  You must have known that someday you would have to answer for how you turned us to your own profit, while you were waving the flag and we were marching a long way off to war.
	The Korean War was a blinding nightmare of muck, blood, strange and slant-eyed faces both in front of us trying to kill us and behind us begging from us, offering us women and wine for money.  The Chinese charged with trumpets blaring, as if they were fighting in the Fifteenth Century, and although they went down, wave after wave, they kept right on coming and no money or bright metal could stop them.  They overran us, surrounded us, killed us, captured us --- and all after we had won the war and forced the Koreans way up to the Yalu.  The only thing we could remember about our brief victory that Christmas was the running, running, running, leaving behind the legless, armless, headless, bleeding bodies, leaving behind the dead and the captured.  And then we turned at the 38th Parallel and fought war to a standstill, digging in with all the fine and expensive modern weapons that government money could buy at home from the homefront.
	All day and all night in the same goddamn hole, going nowhere, dying a little bit, killing a little bit, standing there on either side of a valley like two great trees brushing each other in a static urgent fight for life, always a little bit, day by day, with no daring, no great movements, no spectacular attacks, just small patrols, the taking of a hill then the losing of it, the blowing up of one square patch and then watching it get rebuilt, always on the alert for an attack that never really came, probing, nothing but probing, losing a little here and winning a little there.  It was war fought on a continuous basis, as if no victory were possible as well as no defeat; it was more a boxing match from across the valley --- but then suddenly someone would die and you realized this game could kill you.  There was no pretense here.  War was being fought for the sake of war, not for the victory of one nation over another, not for right against wrong, not for rescue, not to free a people, just the red-line tracers jabbing across a worthless space, poking out lives as easily as removing checkers from a checker-board, losing lives in return.  It was all supposed to be so important, but it was absurd.  There were strange rules which had nothing to do with "liberating a captive people" like you can bomb this but you can't bomb that and you can win this but you can't win that and you can go here but you can't go there.  They even called us "The Army of the United Nations," because it pleased them, when the truth was we were an American army, fighting with a handful of Allies.  They called it a "Police Action," too, rather than "War," also because it pleased them.  It was a game of Monopoly fought for real estate but with weapons as well as money, an athletic contest where the losers were taken out under the stadium and shot, a play where the actors fired real guns while the audience applauded one side or the other, it was a game of odds that you played with your own life as a stake almost as if you held your gun at your own head and fired at random.  You couldn't win, you could only survive.  You couldn't be defeated, you could only die.  You couldn't quit playing, you could only be captured.  You were in a helluva mess that meant nothing and you couldn't get out, you had to play; it was like a nightmare with someone waiting to chop your legs off if you didn't run the 100-yard-dash fast enough, only you never woke up, it never ended, you were there, day after day, and you knew that the longer you played the higher the odds became that you would make a mistake and die.
	There was even a "time-out" or a kind of "half-time" respite --- they called it "R&R," and you were "rotated" to Japan for some rest leave where you could relax, see the sights, drink, screw the Jap women, take a bath; and believe me, it was odd to be in a ditch in Korea one day and then be walking the streets of old Tokyo the next.  It wasn't war, it was an "exercise" in strategy, a contest played for time, a kind of hot psychological battle, a political contest that needed gunfire to prove its importance, a training grounds for the more military-minded, a testing terrain for new weapons and fresh men, a splendid Maneuver Area in which to practice under ideal conditions that were only too real, a human safari for both sides, a weird, sadistic, reverence of the deepest reflex of mankind-killing for the sheer excitement of killing, and for the breathtaking anxiety about being killed yourself.  A new general came every few months to lead us in the sport, so the Pentagon could test his mettle, and we were his pawns, we had nothing to lose but ourselves.  It was all so clear and cold, after they told us we couldn't bomb the enemy's supply depots north of the Yalu River.  "We are not at war with the Chinese," said our government in Washington, "and we don't wish to be."  The Arena was limited to Korea, because that way it could never become dangerous to "the folks at home," and nobody knew this better than those of us who were there, young, risking death every day, the goddamn gladiators of the free sparkling moneymaking Western World.
	When we were asked to believe that we were fighting for such wondrous things as "the freedom of mankind" it sounded more than just a little absurd.  Like all gladiators, we were simply fighting so that each of us (the poor saps who had been thrown into the Arena) would survive in order to get the hell out of the Arena and return home where everyone else was.  We weren't even allowed the dignity of being mercenaries, because we were paid very little for our trouble.  The absolute end, the only thing we could gain, the best we could ever hope to get was simply Out!  We weren't allowed to conquer, we were denied victory, we couldn't expect fame or loot, we weren't even decently paid.  We had been placed deliberately in an intolerable situation for no reason that we could understand, and the very best we could hope for was someday to get Out!  It was like telling a boxer that he had to step into a ring and fight fifteen lousy rounds to a predetermined draw, during which time he and his opponent would try to kill each other, and when he asked "Yes, but what for; what do I get" you tell him that if he does well and survives then he won't have to do it anymore.  When the fifteenth round is over, you ask him to fight five more, and when these are finished you say "Don't worry, it will all be over soon, just a couple more rounds."  Well, as you can imagine, before long your boxer ceases counting the rounds, and he stands in the ring dull and uninspired, hammering away at his opponent, who thank God is just as dull and uninspired as he is, and if some slob yells from the sidelines "Give him a good one in the gut for the freedom of mankind," --- well, my friend, you have the very picture, the allegorical image, the representation of all that was the Korean Conflict.  I hope that it grinds in your guts as much as it grinds in mine.
	But I have to tell you the story of Frank Nolan, because his is a typical case; if you can't understand what I'm talking about at least you will have to accept Frank Nolan as I do, because he is a friend of mine and a fellow citizen of yours.  He was young and was drafted and was made a soldier, and he fought in Korea.  Let me tell you about him.
	Like the rest of us in Basic at Campbell, Frank Nolan came from the Midwest, as a matter of fact, Chicago on the Southside.  He was born of poor folks.  I think his father was a taxicab driver.  His mother had a plain, straight face that looked blank and undisturbed.  There was a sister who had gotten into trouble a couple of times and then married a salesman, before moving to the West Coast.  Frank had come from this drab, dreary life, all freckles and bone and brown hair, with a slightly tilted face and a small round nose, and a way of being awed by the Army, the officers, the Post and by all of us whom he considered his new friends.  "I'm the luckiest sonofabitch," he would tell me.  "If it hadn't been for the army I would've never met you guys or had the chance to do any of these things."  He was convinced that, like the rest of the kids on his block, he would have gone to work for the big Ford plant on the Southside of Chicago, and without the draft Tokyo would always have been just a name to him, while here he was walking the streets of this bright, wild city, a conquering hero to be bathed by women, followed by boys, and going out with us, laughing and drinking and carousing, as if he were as good as anyone.
	He was trained as an infantry rifleman, like the rest of us, and be worked hard at it and was a good shot, took care of his weapons with great skill, shined his shoes and kept his uniforms neat and sparkling, as well as his bunk wherever he was and his footlocker, too.  When we got to Korea and were all busted up to be sent as replacements to different regiments, Frank almost cried at leaving, and I remember the lug standing there in the Repo Depot with his big duffel bag slung over his shoulder, pumping my hand and telling me he would write.  The next time I saw him was in a hospital in Pusan just before be was shipped back to the States, and there wasn't a tear or a smile or even any emotion left in him because his right leg was gone.
	Bit by bit it came from him what had happened.  He had worked hard, done all the right and brave things, and he had ended up a squad leader on the line, taking his goddamn patrols out every fourth day and somehow making it back with his notes that never seemed to mean anything to anyone.  Then one day the word went down the line that four Congressmen were "coming to observe conditions," and immediately the men had been set to work building a fine and safe concrete bunker facing a nondescript hill that the Gooks had been allowed to occupy since they did hardly any shooting from it, just sat there looking.  But the politicians had come to observe the fighting conditions and so some good fighting had to be whipped up for the politicians to see.  An attack was planned weeks in advance for a regiment of ours to take the hill, and even programs containing the schedule of events were printed so the big-wigs would know exactly what was going on and when and where and why and how.  The only trouble was that, naturally the Gooks up on the hill got hold of copies of these programs, too, and everyone knew it, but if the attack plans were changed then the programs would be useless, not only to the Reds, but to the politicians, too, so it was decided to go ahead.
	The day came and there was a big inspection, while the Congressmen walked down the line and shook hands with everyone, especially firm and heartwarming with those GIs from the areas of their constituency, and then the politicians were handed helmets, led to the bunker and the show began in front of them.  Frank was in that show.
	For hours the hill was blasted with artillery, mortars and skip bombs, napalm and all the rest.  Then in the beginning dark, up went the infantry to secure the position.  They got slaughtered.  The Gooks had zeroed in on all the routes and raked through the ranks at long range until there was nothing to do but fall back down the hill defeated.  Frank lost his whole squad, and he figured he was the luckiest slob on God's earth just to make it back down the target range of the slope of that hill with puffs of death kicking up all around his heels and mortars blowing caves in the ground ahead and behind.  It was like running through lightning, he said, and when he got back to his emplacement he sat down and cried and it was an hour before he could even bring himself to take a drink of water.  It was a bad show all around, and especially bad for the politicians to see.  So it was decided that the next morning in broad daylight the whole lousy scheme would be tried again, and this time there had better not be any running back until the hill was secured!
	By the time the regiment could be pasted together for another assault, the whole hill was sunlight coming right over the top into the eyes of the upward advancing GIs.  Frank said that little more than a platoon of men made it to the top, and then only because the Gooks withdrew down the other side.  Frank wasn't one of the inspired handful who made the rock's pinnacle.  He lay instead in a ravine with his hand covering the bloody right mess where his leg had been.  It was as if the whole hill was groaning, speckled with the bleeding figures of the rest of the regiment, while down in the bunker the Brass shook hands with the four Congressmen who now had something swell to report when they got back to Washington.  Although the battle had taken only about two hours' running time, some sixteen hours were spent by the Medics dragging the bodies off the hill, Frank included, although he didn't remember leaving since he had passed out soon after the cheers went up.
	He came out of it in the hospital.  Soon the general himself walked in with his staff and pinned the bronze star and the purple heart on Frank.  Two days later word hit the field hospital that the hill had been given back to the Gooks as "untenable," and it was all over, positions had slipped back to exactly the same place they were before the Congressmen had come.  Frank, along with the many, many others who would never be whole again, was shipped to the big hospital at Pusan, from where he was to be sent back to Hawaii and then Seattle.
	"I told the cocksuckers they could cram all the goddamn medals up their ass," Frank told me.  "You know what they did?  They smiled at me.  They said they understood."
	"Understood what?" I asked him.
	"I don't know.  The dirty cocksuckers just patted me on the shoulder and said they understood."

CHAPTER 23

	Unlike Frank, I was one of those who survived in good condition, with all of my arms and legs, my eyes, and no disability, and even before the war was over I was sent back to the States on assignment to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  Here I entered the 82nd Airbome Division as a jumper, and participated in a thing called "constant readiness," which meant that all 18,000 of us had to be ready to pack up and go anywhere in 16 hours.  The only trouble was they didn't have the planes to load us and take us, but we had to be ready anyway, training away to a fine edge for nothing because there were only a handful of planes used just for training jumps.  It was the same thing as Korea all over again, only a quiet or more subtle death surrounded by peace.  While Eisenhower rattled his saber at the Russians, threatening to send the 82nd here, there and everywhere, "to put out any fires the Reds might start," we got ready to go, but without any planes; they were expensive and Eisenhower wanted to cut the budget.
	So we jumped from rattly old C-119s, bundled up with full field equipment, once a month to show the newspaper reporters we were ready, and always there would be the chutes that didn't open, the few screaming bodies dropping down through a quiet sky to thud apologetically into the ground, death in service of the country --- or, at least that's what the chaplain and I would tell the sobbing wives surrounded by their children, when we went to inform them of their husbands'passing away.  "The country will remember what John (Jack, Henry, Ira, Ray) did for it," the chaplain would say, clasping his hands and leaning over to reach the sadly nodding wife's ear.  "Now, I'm sure he would want you to face the future with courage and think of the children."  I would disappear into the tiny, dimly-lighted kitchen and make coffee.  I had to do something before I got sick, listening to the chaplain.
	All the planes were defective; they could just barely fly us three miles to the dropzones, let alone take us to Europe, the West Coast, Hawaii, or Indo China.  The pilots would make jokes about them, as we climbed in at the marshaling area.  "Well, I hope we get there and back," the pilots would say; and we would laugh and say, "Don't worry about getting back, just get us there."  Flying the empty crates back, the pilots were always crashing down, leaking gas, and more C-119s landed in nearby fields than the airforce cared to admit.  Once I saw an empty one, after discharging its jumpers, go right into an empty messhall.  A couple of us guys ran over to congratulate the fly-boy for not killing anyone.  All smiles, we got the side door open and hollered in, and then we heard his clumping and soon the pilot appeared standing on stumps where his feet had been.  I'm telling you I'll never forget that sight: This nice, young-looking guy standing there in the doorway about twelve inches too short with blood all squirting from his legs.  In spite of "Father Ike's Budget" and "the tremendous burden of over taxation to the businessmen" it does seem like you could have afforded to give us decent planes to play our games in.  After all, we were playing at your command so chesty John Foster Dulles could use us to bluff the communists.
	Whenever a plane cracked up, they would courtmartial some airforce ground crew slob, saying he had failed to tighten a screw, or that he had filled the plane up with kerosene rather than gas, or that he had failed to inspect and had let a "faulty" plane go up in the air.  Have you ever noticed that in this country there must be an excuse for any tragedy?  They made up their excuses and then pinned them on us.  After all, they couldn't very well admit that all the planes were full of shit, so they picked out some slob and threw him in the stockade to rot.
	It was about this time, 1953, as you remember, that our country went nuts again, looking for a scapegoat for the lack of victory in Korea, insanely accusing any obstinate soul in its midst of subversion, attacking, smearing, anything but admit that national cowardliness on the homefront's part had been responsible for the Korean stalemate.  I saw it first take place in the army when the U.S. POWs were sent across the 38th Parallel by the Reds and were shipped home to the arms of a waiting public.  When their 30-day leaves were up they reported for assignment at Fort Bragg to wait discharge, and since I was in PIO by that time my job was to make them accessible, the first few days back, for interview by the press.
	"Why didn't you try to escape?" a reporter might ask.
	"I didn't have any warm clothes, and I knew I'd freeze to death even if I made it outside the camp," an ex-prisoner would answer.
	The reporter would smirk: "That never stopped the captured GIs in World War Two!"
	Some newsmen even wondered out loud how a one hundred percent American could have allowed hitnself to be captured in the first place.  Wouldn't death have been more patriotic?  Why didn't a one hundred percent American prefer to die rather than allow hirnself to be used "to smear his country's image?"  Wasn't the country's image more important than the life of any American?
	Most of the reporters, having been fed and raised on mythical stories of football players sacrificing legs and arms and heads for the "glory of old Siwash University" couldn't figure out why the myths hadn't worked out in the reality of war, and they were very angry at those who had shown themselves to be human beings, rather than "heroes," who had been concerned with themselves rather than "images," and who wanted to live rather than "die" for the glory of "good old America;" and whenever the reporters reminded the ex-prisoners about good old America," a sneer passed around on the faces of those who had returned, as they remembered how quickly "good old America" had given up the opportunity of advancing and overrunning the prisoner of war camps where some fellow Americans sat confined after their capture.  They had assumed there was no mystery about why they had given up protecting the image of "good old America," once "good old America" had given up ever trying to advance and set them free.  It was like asking orphans why they hadn't been loyal to their parents, and the orphans stared quizzically and then answered that they had no parents.
	"Why did you sign documents saying the U.S. was using germ-warfare in Korea?" the reporters asked.  "When you knew it wasn't true?"
	"Because they tortured us until we did sign," the prisoners answered.
	"But didn't you know the signed statements would be used against your country in propaganda broadcasts?" the reporters queried.
	"We didn't think anybody would believe the propaganda broadcasts.  Did you believe them?"
	"No," answered the reporters, "but that isn't important.  It's the principle of the thing.  You lied against your country to save your skins."
	"But weren't our skins important to the country?" asked the prisoners.  "It seemed to us that the country had forgotten about that.  If the country had given up saving our skins, then we had to save our skins alone, and the way to do that was to sign a useless piece of paper."
	"What happened to that good old American spirit?" asked the reporters.  "Why didn't you tell the Gooks to just go screw themselves, like the GIs told the Germans and japs in World War Two?"
	"We don't know," said the prisoners.  "What happened to that good old American spirit here at home?  Why didn't you tell the Chinese and Russians to go screw themselves and let us bomb across the Yalu and try and win the war, like you did the Germans and Japs in World War Two?"
	"You were cowards," said the reporters, "and you betrayed us."
	"You were cowards," said the prisoners, "and you betrayed us."
	There were many stories printed in the newspapers.  What had happened to American courage?  Why did some of our soldiers become "turncoats" when they were captured?  Why had they allowed themselves to be "brainwashed" by their captors?  Who was responsible?  But none of the stories told of the counter-accusations that the prisoners had directed at the country itself.  Soon the same "America" which had promised the GI prisoners that nothing would be held against them on their return, decided to reverse itself under public pressure, and many of the ex-prisoners were courtmartialed as "traitors" and sentenced to prison, and in some cases hung.  I could hardly believe it was happening; it was more like a nightmare from a Kafka novel that was being acted out on some stage; and somewhere the stage ended and the audience and real life began --- somewhere there was an end to the actors, the plot, and the written word, and there had to be somebody, some real people, who said "Wait a minute, let's look at the facts, is this really what happened?  Who is to blame?  Is anyone?  Or have things changed so that the old standards of courage and heroics and betrayal no longer apply?" --- but these were words that no actor could speak or the play was ruined; and the fact was that the stage didn't end, everyone bad become an actor, and all spoke the words written for them to say.  Booklets appeared offering reasons why the GI prisoners had capitulated to their captors: "They didn't know what they were fighting for!  "This generation of Americans hasn't the courage of the past generations of Minutemen, and the reasons why!"  "American boys don't know what America really stands for and therefore they can be brainwashed to think and do anything!"  "We must be tougher and more demanding because our youngsters have become too soft!"  "The Sissification of the U.S. Army!"  Nobody spoke out and said that all these pronouncements were simply rationalizations for why we failed to win the Korean War, and nobody remembered that the whole country had deliberately decided not to try to win the Korean War because the risks were too dangerous.  The country had been betrayed by someone, anyone but itself: Its Army, its politicians, its teachers, its scientists, the Commies.  It all became very simple.  Anyone who questioned the country's motives was a Communist, and the idea was to get rid of him and everything would be all right.  Anyone who thought the country existed for his benefit was out; and those who reminded us that we existed for the country's benefit were in.  And what did the country's benefit turn out to be?  Protection from criticism.  Good citizenship meant absolute loyalty to the country even if it meant the sacrifice of self.  Good soldiering meant absolute loyalty to the Army.  Good employees meant absolute loyalty to the corporation.  Good teachers and good students had to be absolutely loyal to the school.  There could be no questions, only obedience.  To question was to be disloyal; no new answers were needed, the old ones were good enough.  If you weren't sure that "good old America" stood for all that was fine and right, then there was something wrong with you, because there could be no doubt that "good old America" stood for all that was fine and right.  If you didn't like "good old America," well then by God you could leave.  What the hell did you think, that America belongs to you?  Yes, some people reminded us, this was what the Constitution guaranteed, this was a country by the people, of the people and for the people.  Not so, they were told.  The country is not for the people; the people are for the country, and what's right for the country is right for the people.  A few souls warned: the country is for the soldiers, even for those who lied to save their skins.  Not so, said the country; the soldiers exist for the sake of the country, not for the sake of their skins.  Everything, even life and even death, must be for "good old America," and if you deny "good old America" anything then you are a traitor.  It was a madness, an hysteria, and there was one probe after another to eliminate the "bad" people, the "dangerous" people, "the people who weren't loyal," the people who had betrayed the country for the sake of themselves.
	Had there been any betrayal at all?  No.  Where the whole country had decided that it was better to survive than risk atomic attack just to win a useless little war, the soldiers had done the same thing.  They had decided it was better to survive than to win a useless little argument over a piece of paper.  The image of the country was never even at stake.  To say that America had used germ-warfare in Korea didn't mean that America had used germ-warfare in Korea, and signing a piece of paper to that effect didn't make it so.  There was nothing to worry about.  If some warped minds wanted words on a paper in a trade for life, then why not give them words on a paper?  Hadn't our country always stood for the importance of life over words, freedom over efficiency, survival over death  --- no matter what name in which death was called for?  Wasn't it better --- within the very Christian traditions that were ours --- to save one lamb's life at the risk of the whole herd of sheep, than to sacrifice the lamb for the benefit of the herd, and didn't Jesus Christ himself say this when he gave the parable of the good shepherd?  Wasn't the acceptance of what the prisoners had done the very image of our country, that one person's life was more important than any lie?  Doesn't the country at bottom believe that one buman life is more important than any headline in the world's newspapers?
	Well, in the 1950s it was obvious to people like me that the country had changed.  Because of the way it treated the prisoners, it was obvious that my country thought headlines were more important than humans.  I had to accept that no outcries were heard against the Gooks who had in fact tortured our GIs; instead all outcries were directed against the GIs who had succumbed to that torture.  When you see this taking place, when you read the newspapers, listen to people saying it; wben you see the bodies of the ex-prisoners swinging from a rope because they had succumbed to torture, well then you have to accept it.  You have to conclude that your country has run amuck, that the people responsible are insane, that you can not trust your leaders, your President, your general, your parents, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, your police, your town, your state, your country, anymore because it is liable to turn on you for no reason at all, except that for its own security it needs a scapegoat, any scapegoat induding you, and there is no appeal possible.

CHAPTER 24

	Just before I was to get out of the Army, we had to make a mass jump for the benefit of the reporters, showing once again we were ready to go anywhere, do anything, kill anyone for the benefit of those kind folks at home and for freedom and for America.  We loaded up the planes in full equipment, about a thousand of us, and we took off in a giant "V" from the marshaling areas and headed for the big sandy dropzone where all the reporters and photographers were gathered in grandstands, watching and waiting to report what they saw.  As we came over one plane behind lost altitude, and it was too late to do anything because the guys ahead were already spilling out, their chutes were opening and they were hanging helplessly in the sky.  Right through them the dropping plane cut, propellers whirling, cutting, ripping, tearing.  There were screams and curses, and the sound of shredded cloth, the motors buzzing, as the plane moved right through the dropping men, their equipment hugged to their shapes, their empty guns strapped to them, and the reporters below standing up and running around excitedly, popping their flash cameras.
	(Oh, it was a fascinating sight from above, looking down at the death-dives my buddies were taking in full view of the nation's press; gladiators in a spectacle get more applause when they die, and I could almost hear the presses at the big newspaper plants beginning to whir and get ready to applaud "these heroic youngsters who went to their graves so good old America could be ready to defend itself."  Watch the men die, watch the men die, isn't it fun to watch the men die, watch the men die, isn't it fun --- and it's right, because they are dying for a good reason that we made up; whoopie, watch the men die!  Bloodthirsty crowd fed on kidnappings, murders and rapes, now reading about the slaughter of its own young, whoopee, how the crowd loves it, see them buy the newspapers, one, two, three, like happy children, see them look for blood that the photographers found, see them relish the twisted limbs, the split figures, the smashed heads, see their eyes moving slowly across the replica of ripped flesh and then return, see them shudder and then look again so they can shudder once more and then look again and again and again.)
	The photographers knew their job; they scrambled to get the pictures, and the bloodier the better, as far as their paychecks were concerned.  While a man screamed at their feet, they stood and photographed him, because it was their job to do this, it was what their readers wanted, that crowd, that homefront, that America which feasted its eyes on bloody bodies.  I saw it all on the way down; I floated through the sky at the end of my canopy and I saw it all beneath me, the squirming bodies, the still bodies, the running photographers and the shrieking ambulances, all, all at my feet, the people, the killed and the killers, the gladiators and the spectators, the living and the dead, the trickers and the tricked, the con-men and the slobs, the hunters and the hunted, the audience and the actors, the crowd and the corpses, the users and the used, all.  I floated down to it.
	There was little time to think as I hit the ground and bundled up my chute.  I threw the silk and hamess on a passing jeep and ran to help the medics.  There were bodies everywhere across the huge expanse of sand; and yet from above it had looked like there were few bodies specked out across the earth because that expanse was so big.  Chawed faces looked up at me with no cheeks; the top of one head was scalped back.  There was an arm; here was a leg, and over there the body, the torso still wiggling in its harness.  Oh my God, have you ever seen men in chunks?  Well, here they were.  A shoulder was sliced off.  A man was split.  There were about fifty of them, and I ran trying to find one I could help.  Right through the middle of fifty the plane had flown, its propellers ripping flesh as well as chutes, and now the aftermath was all over the ground, screaming, pleading, silent, wobbling, whining, whimpering, cursing, shouting --- and the voices of many were already gone.  It was like only one thing I had ever seen before --- butchering day on a chicken farm, when for fifty yards there was nothing but white headless bodies flopping and scrambling in blood --- but I got a sick feeling when I remembered these were men like me, thinking, doing, painfully feeling, with strings of relatives branching out from them, and here they were like so many chickens, for no reason, sliced up and groveling on the sandy dropzone, dying, unwhole, gasping, and suddenly feeling finity catching up with them, passing them by, leaving them dead, nothing, ended, all over with, and no way to come back again as if from a dream because this was it, death.  I hated what was happening to them; I detested it!  I swore at it too --- "Jesus Christ!" --- but it kept right on happening.
	Why in God's name, I thought, was the whole world intent on destroying its young?  Why were they so determined to hunt the young men down, me, people like me, killing them, until there was nothing left?  Why must there always be a red face over my shoulder --- death --- chasing me, making me run faster and faster, until it caught me like it caught all the rest?  Why?  Why?  Why?  The world, the country, the people, were after me, swinging that big blade, trying to cut me down --- I could have just as easily been in that first plane as in any other.  It was only luck that I was still alive, and I knew they would get me sooner or later, setting up endless possibilities, putting me in an infinite number of desperate situations until finally, like the bloody bodies I saw now all around me, they would get me, too.  All along I had been trying to defend myself against vague dangers and never against the real enemy --- other people --- the real monstrous face behind all situations I found myself in, and now I had to make up my mind, decide forever, or I was as doomed as Mrs. Johnson, Charlie, Melvin, Frank Nolan, and all those cut to ribbons that I saw now on the sand, their blood feeding red energy into the grey dust, their deaths a secret delight to all the folks at home.  I had to finally look hard, accept the past and present and then decide what it meant for the sake of myself and all those who miglit come after me.  I had to accept what people really were, what they had in mind for me, what they wanted to use me for.  For once, I had to look and see the red monstrous face at my back, fiercesome, insane, murderous, amoral, human, gruesome  --- it, they, all were trying to kill me for no reason but that to kill was the way of life.  Murder was both sport and reality, both entertaining and essential, both the artful and the awful; to murder meant success, while to die meant failure.  It was both heaven and hell, depending entirely on which side of the knife you were on.  God was a killer and the devil was death.  And what was man, that creature in the middle?  God was a killer and the devil was death, then man was the infinite sacrifice, the body on the altar, the offering, the Christ.  Man was always Jesus Christ, crucified.
	(And then I had it, the whole truth, the way things were, the reality, the past and the present and the future --- I had the infamous Trinity of all existence by the tail; I had finally seen it, accepted it, felt it, known it, swallowed it, advanced into the middle of it.  It was old and it was new; it was known always and it was never known by anyone; it was always there and it had just appeared now; it was a three-headed monster, eating of itself, and it was real, it was everything, it was me.  I could even describe it, coldly and mercilessly.  GOD was everything, the father of all, determined on murder, a killer on the trail of his son JESUS CHRIST, who was one man, individual, doomed to die, to be killed by the father, the people, the country, the world in all its infinite might, and who when dead was resurrected as the HOLY GHOST, the perfect complete sacrifice that could be born only by death, that could be called into existence only when the man ceased to exist himself.  I could phrase it, the simple reality of every situation, and the complex reality of all situations: "Everything kills a man leaving only his spirit!" --- and that dear friends, young and old, is what is.  Everything kills, including man.  Everything dies, including man.  But only a man can be sacrificed and no other thing, because only a man KNOWS he is being killed for the benefit of GOD, and it is this knowledge that makes his sacrifice holy --- a HOLY GHOST, all knowledgeable, and without which GOD would die.  The past is dead, the present is a sacrifice, and the future is possible only when it is made holy by the spirit of sacrifice, by a man's willingness to die, his spirit, his soul, the eternal seed that contains miniscule chromosomes which in turn programme, literally create, the world of the future.  Reality is a trinity of past, present and future; there is birth, death and rebirth --- a gigantic three-headed, red-faced monster which gives a man life, then demands the man's death as a sacrifice to itself so the monster can live on.  Mankind, the earth, the world, the sum total of everything there is, GOD, demands our death so that it can continue, and the nature of our sacrifice becomes the future.)
	If man wishes to predict the future, he has only to ask himself what he is dying for.

CHAPTER 25

	Illinois was all white and the streets were icy from the last snow of the year, as I drove in with all my clothes to my lovely wife, and I was convinced all things would change.  I believed  --- like many, I suppose --- that the quickest, reddest blood flowed in America, and I expected to see all that I yearned for: a driving demand for greatness, a fierce desire for perfection, an exaggerated sense of goodness and evil.  No matter what, ugly or beautiful, I expected to find something forceful or demanding in America, some genius previously hidden from me in my childhood, some spark or dream or intelligence or taste or view or labor more powerful than anything I could imagine, because I had seen a lot of lives go down the big bloody drain and I wanted to know what for; I asked what was to be the bone of my future, what burned at the green root of this old stump that would again give meaning and shape to all things.  It would have to be evident in America, the greatest country in the world, and I would find it, recognize it, touch it, accept it, and thus be a part of the future with a running start on everyone else.  Once I had the secret I could function without doubting that the world would soon catch up to me, I would know I was on the right road that would be well-traveled in the future, I could pioneer the way, building, clearing, fighting with confidence that people were coming behind me.  After all, if life was a race between me and death, I wanted to be positive that I was racing the right way, that when the time came that I must pass on what I had done to my son for a good foothold from which he could start.  I wanted to be sure my son would not be on a lonely side road petering out in nothing but instead would take pleasure in an advance position on the main way along which was coming all life.  I had to be right, and I would make my decision on coming home.  In this liveliest of all countries I would see the signs of the future, the beginnings of what would come for all of us, of where we were all going, of something new about to be fashioned, a reason, a purpose, a goal, a direction, a prediction, a prophecy, a proposal, a hope, a demand, a signal, an order, a dream, a vision, a plan, a vanguard, a new beginning, a fresh thought, a positive statement, but something, anything, a seed, a piece, a shred, a small bit, a promise, no matter what, something, there must be something I thought and if there is it will be evident in America where there exists the strong, the smart and the lovely, the most determined, the luckiest and the charmers, the victors in three wars, the cheaters, the most criminal, the fastest and the shrewdest, the wizards, the saints, the artists, the builders, the moneymen, the retired commanders, the actors, the doers, the very best that the whole world could create, the total genius of my nation which had brought the land from sea to sea to its knees and told it what to do, what to make, what to be like, what to respect, what to worship, how to live and where to go.  America was the capital of the world and it held the secret of the future, and I would soon discover what this secret was.
	Oh, I knew that it wouldn't be easy; no one gives up a secret except reluctantly, it is like giving up power or land or money, after all, and you cannot expect anyone who sits high within sight of the future to simply look down upon you and tell you what he sees.  I was smarter than to think the information, or let's call it the tip, that I sought would be given to me freely for the asking.  I knew, too, that the tips would not be exposed; the signposts of the future were not everywhere, not easily come upon, for if they were then everyone would know and there wouldn't be such mass confusion about it as there is now.  I was even prepared for false signs, those deliberately misleading arrows set up by some conniver or another who wanted people to move in a direction beneficial to him, although not to them, signs like trained lambs leading sheep to slaughter for the benefit of some butcher, or "turn here" signs which led to a deadend where sat a restaurant and a motel eager to bill people who found it was too late to turn back, or theories like "how to succeed," or "how to win" at a game that no longer existed and that taught a degree of competence in a skill there was no use for, or prophets who said "all you have to do is sell more," when what was being sold was no longer needed, or engineers who said "we must make more, produce more," when what was being made was already being rejected, or businessmen who urged that the future would take care of itself if everyone would only "buy more," when no one already had any money to buy anything, let alone more, or of educators who predicted our future was safe, "if only we all learned more," and then proceeded to tell us that what we had already learned was no longer true and that what we would learn now would not be true in the future, or the priests and ministers who told us all "to love more" was necessary for our safety, while I knew that more murders were committed within families than by criminals already, and that love had created more problems than it was worth.  I was no naive ex-soldier, who was so unknowledgeable as to accept the first thing he saw, heard or read.  I could not afford to be wrong, because I was the head of a lovely family, which included a young wife and a fine boy and a pretty daughter, and if I was fooled, they would be fooled, too, and so would their children and their children's children, and I was not about to let this happen --- the death, all that death had to be for something.  I would not allow myself to be rooked by any self-styled expert, when so goddamn much was at stake.  I was determined not to fail, and I would look at everything with a cold careful eye and a whipsaw brain, and a guarded heart, and I was not to be fooled, not only for my sake, but for my namesakes, and for their namesakes.  I knew how careful I must be and that I could accept no easy answers that would turn out to be rubber or mud or balsawood, or nonexistent, so that I and all who came after me would be exposed to the resurgence of a wilderness through which only we had come, while all others had flowed elsewhere in a mighty rush leaving us high and dry in our minor explorations, like sideshoots within which no branch had fattened in the future, like seeds fallen on rock, like deadend streets that lengthen into no highway, like old and crumbling foundations over which no house was ever built, like islands over which the water rises, like lost children unfollowed, like shipwrecked sailors, like young poets of a dead language, like skilled carriage-makers watching cars, like magicians alone with only themselves to fool, like hockey players in a jungle.  My God, it was dangerous, and oh how I knew it.  I was easily awake and cautious, but also very desperate.
	My young wife was happy to see me, but she was a little scared, too.  She needed to accept whatever I told her and that now more than ever the answer was necessary as soon as possible, so she was scared that I might not find it or that being human I might make a mistake and lose everything for her and for her children and their children and so on in the process, and she wondered if I were as able as she thought, and if she had selected the very ablest offered to her, and she felt almost sick hoping I would be correct for her sake, while she could do nothing but wait like the bettor who puts his money on a horse and then must wait while the race is on, with no way to help or hinder, but only to hope, because for the bettor it is all over with as soon as the bet is made and there is nothing more that can be done for it is out of his hands.  She felt like this, I know, because she smiled as if still holding her breath when I came back to her.  Had she opened her legs to a winner or a loser, a wiseman or an idiot, a king or a bum, and would her children be doomed or favored, paupered or rich, high or low, or what?  When the woman wonders, she hears the little ones whisper, sees their hopeful faces and she must urge her husband to please be right for Godsake because of the children.  She will not accept defeat from her mate for instead she will simply get a new one who will do better for her and the children, and that is exactly as it should be, you know.  No woman should be made to cheer failure at the expense of her brood, since this would be the end of the race, or species, the end of the little two-legged, brain-carrying, hopeful human who wants to know everything, including the future, while he looks at the past and lives in the present.
	She has brown hair, my wife, and she is perfect for me, and I for her, and she is sweet and quite hot in bed and has good kisses and a warm nest, and she makes our children fine and well and keeps them fat and growing, and she hustles around the house encouraging everything, keeping it clean and making meals and laughing, making everything wonderful, while at night she is all mine alone now, and no one else has ever felt the pleasure of her legs, her circling belly, her darting little tongue, or made her wince or groan or shout, but me.  Of course, it is for all these privileges of having her and giving her children that I pay that price of anticipating the future, the secret of which I had to find now that I had returned to our house and all its warmth and charm and good smells of food and a woman, and all her laughter and smiles, her lovely responses, the scent in her hair, the splendid sight of her after a shower, the fine lines of her breast, her hip, or the vision of her on the beach being received by Lake Michigan, or tumbling into bed all white with no choice but to receive me willingly.  She has lovely high arches, is crazy about flowers, frightened of bees, likes luxury but doesn't whine for it --- and this is enough knowledge of her for you to have, the rest will remain mine, but at least you know I had more reason than myself to succeed.
	Of course, it was nothing new.  Our fathers had counted on money; how many dollars a man had to pass onto the future would tell the story of success for sons and daughters --- or so the old folks thought, and maybe they were right.  Those born rich in an earlier day found it difficult not to be ahead as everyone scrambled to catch them, be rich too, and nobody gave a damn what they did.  All respect became focused on the youngster who had inherited four million bucks and had skillfully run it into a hundred million dollar cash value fortune which controlled as much as a billion, sometimes, in assets.  Money bred money, and while this was good enough for a time, in the final years when the vets came home from World War Two and looked at the fat faces and bulging pockets of the patriots they had left behind, money no longer talked.  Money was all right, but what else?  A man was rich?  Fine, but what did he do?  The U.S. was materially well off?  Good, but what else did the U.S. result in; after all, a lot of blood had gone down the French drain again, and surely it had resulted in something more than a bigger car for everyone.  But what?  From then on what will we value, the vets asked, and failing to come up with an answer they put aside their fears, waded into the great money-pit and fought for their share, but when they had it at the age of forty-five they cracked up because it wasn't what they really wanted.  But what did they want?  They never found out.  They now walk around, the hollow, dismal failures, while their fathers bloat up with pride at the money they make, never knowing the sons are rotting from the inside out with a vague insecurity that they were never able to assuage.
	I am not of this generation, thank God, but of the one that followed it, fought in Korea, and came back to find the same thing had happened, the fat faces were fatter, the greedy and shrewd were greedier and shrewder, and all were saying everything was okay because we were "the richest nation the world has ever seen" --- right from Ike's mouth, but this time we weren't fooled.  We hadn't died merely to guard the bank, dad, and all your bitching about taxes and prices gets no sympathy from us.  We are tigers on the prowl for the reason we all died, the promise you were to make good on in the future, or the one you were to allow us to make good on in the future.  What is it, we want to know?  What is that valuable thing around which we will build our lives, our families and our new country?  What in the devil is it?  Don't show me a dollar bill.  That was all right in your day, dad, but the buck is worthless now!
	Bucks were no good in Korea, just as they weren't any good in World War Two, although unfortunately in World War Two nobody had the guts to notice.  Bucks can't buy anything worth a damn, dad, and surely you have a vague apprehension of that already, as you try to pile up more and more and more, insatiably, trying to put off old age and, ultimately, death.  I want the answer, dad, and I want it now, right away, and don't give me that sly smile and tell me there is none, that I saw all those bodies blown up, that I listened to last shrieks on earth while a machine gun ripped up Joey so you'd be safe, that I got my arm shot up so I can't move it when it rains, that I went through all those deadly puffs of smoke, did all those things I hated, like killing, bayoneting, bombing, raping, gorging, cursing, hating and then sighting in still one more and shooting off another face, no, don't tell me I did all that just for the right to question, while you sat smugly at home, warm and safe and rich and comfortable and fucking the right woman instead of any filthy tail that happened along, no, I will not accept that because if I do I become a murderer for nothing and there is no reason to stop.  Unfortunately, old man, you would be my next victim, so don't pull your sophistication on me and tell me you have made me a chump, a patsy, for nothing more than to save your own fat ass; tell me the answer, the reason, and tell me fast, explain to me the difference between us and all those Chinese I killed, and make it good, make it very good; show me the pearl that sets us apart from those dirty Nazis, those atheistic Commies, the barbarians in the Congo, the savages of Japan, the North Koreans, Cubans.  I am waiting, searching, listening, expectantly anticipating your revelation because you must, you absolutely must have figured it all out because you sent me to kill and to be killed if necessary and I did not question then, I went and squeezed the life out of many yellow throats and now I am back and I want to know, why, how, where and what for, and I especially want to hear of that great special formula, that elixir which will wash the blood off my hands, and move me clean now into the future, that thing you told me was valuable, necessary, the heart of all mankind, whatever it is, that thing you said was locked up safe here at home which I was defending, which I could not allow them to capture because they would destroy it, remember?  Now for God's sake don't tell me you cannot name it, that it isn't really here, because don't you see if it isn't, if there is nothing, then that makes me a common cheap paid killer, and I trusted you, I trusted you, I trusted that you knew what you were doing, that there was something special about us worth defending.
	When I came back I found all the grey-headed sociologists rattling on that all peoples were the same, that one was like any other, that all social systems were relative, that there was no scale running from moral to immoral, and while I listened, with the blood still on my hands, horrified, sickened, guilty, convicted, you were smiling and telling me now there was absolutely nothing to worry about any longer because the war was over and we were the strongest and we had built a bigger better bomb that could now blow the world to bits if anyone so much as dared to break the peace, and when I asked you what it was we had that could be so important we must threaten to blow up the world to preserve it, you said son we have the freedom to do and say and be whatever man is capable of, the finest, the highest, the richest, the strongest, the smartest, the kindest.
	When I told you that I saw no men doing and saying and being what they were capable of, you smiled and said it was not the country's fault, and then you agreed that you were a failure, too.  The year I came home, we lost the Olympics, and when I waited for the explanation of why we were no longer physically the strongest, the fastest, the soundest, the answer came from the wire services, implying athletics were no longer important and that brains would be the key to the future.  The next thing I knew, we were beaten into space by Sputnik, and the careful examination of our school system which followed showed we may rank as low as tenth; while some historians, breathing easier and more freely, picked this time to explain how most of our eminent scientists, practitioners and purists alike, were the products of foreign schools nothing like ours, as were ninety percent of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, constructed our Constitution and molded our politics in the beginning.  You looked at me sheepishly saying that at least we were richer than any others in the whole wide world, implying it was the bank that we got shot up for, the cash-box we were guarding with our lives, and whose money was in it, dad?  I learned that one percent of the people of the U.S. have controlled thirty-three perecent of the wealth for the past one hundred years, and they continue to do so today, and that if you add another smattering of just nine percent you include about the whole kit and kaboodle in the bank right now; so it was their money, not ours, which we guarded, and what for, what for, what for?  No, I won't accept that; I can't believe any nation of mine could be that cruel, because if you could have seen them, dad, flopping around like chickens when their heads were blown off, stumbling on stumps cut off at the thighs, bleeding, gouged, dying, you would understand why I believe there is something few people know about, some secret key, some power, some belief, that was here all along making it all worthwhile, even if you do not know what it is.
	So I had to learn for myself, and I did, and by God I will tell it, setting it down in black and white just the way it happened and what I thought and who I saw and what I heard and what I concluded.  It will be here with no corrections, no editor trying to make it neat or happy or positive, but the truth, just the way it happened no matter what and let the critics and the students and the teachers and the typists and the editors and the publishers, let them all go to hell on wheels greased with the blood of naive Americans, so they will not be allowed to take us all in ever again, goddamn it, because this is for my wife and my son and my daughter and that string into the future which will carry my genes and my name.  It is for no one else.  Let others keep their facile hands off it.  I want it to be crude and real and direct and true, or I want it burned to bits when I finish.  I want it to be crusted over with minor mistakes making the whole pie of truth.  I want it certain, deadly, aiming, and with a whittling sting that repeats and repeats the one thing I looked for and found and know.  I want it heavy and racing, cagey, alert, clumsy, a jigging crazy amorphic mass that moves and frightens; I want it to produce horror, uneasiness, a queasy quickening of whatever guts you have left that aren't numbed with over-nourishment.  And let no blind, leaning bastard tell me it does not fit the current form, or that it is incorrect for the "market," or that it satisfies no consumptive taste, or that it fails to be exact, because I would not take a piece of shit for it when it is finished and I want or need no money, which by the way is its very point.  I am setting it down for my own records, like a man watching tides, counting birds, numbering cards of green; I am taking the measure of my own life and I need no one to tell me how and what to do, just as I do not need help to eat, piss or shit, to screw my lovely wife, to hold my son and hear his heart flutter on its own when it so shortly was mine, and just as I need no help to guard my daughter or pet my dog.  I say keep your preying hands off what is mine, look but do not touch, or you shall feel my spit slide down your over-anxious nose, my finger shall penetrate your eye, my knee shall split your groin, and it shall happen more than once and many times again.
	Now, if it is possible --- on my terms, and I smile at this --- don't be afraid and run before you must, because you will miss everything if you do.  Stay frozen there awhile with only your ears open and I will pour in the metal from my deepest furnace and turn you to iron all over so you will never be afraid of anything at all again, and there will be no trick so subtle you can't ride consciously above it, playing the dupe or the master, whichever you wish, no lie you will not recognize shortly, whether you like it or not, no mirages will last before your stronger eyes nor penetrate your more perceiving brain.  Now, listen; and hold onto your guts.

CHAPTER 26

	There is only one battle worth fighting and that battle is with death itself.  Friends, only idiots think it is cowardly to resist death, for in fact it is the bravest thing a man can do since he must suppose his opponent is superior and will beat him sooner or later, but sometime.  And only if a man resists death does his inevitable loss to it give spiritual meaning to the future.
	Recognize, when someone is exhorting you to war, that the brave man fights war itself, since war is death, and if they send you off to war you have already lost your fight.  War, remember is no proving grounds, but a pit into which you are enticed, sent, thrown, or lured; and you can win nothing once you are in it.  Once you have taken the hook you can struggle all you want but the line still leads toward shore and the net.  Put up a fight against those who would have you killed, fight first with those who would have you sent to war, struggle first against the exploitation of your life.  This is the important battle.  Delay your death whatever way you can.
	Do not put your life on the line for any cause, remember the only cause worth dying for is life and so any risk that can't reward you with escape from a death already present stands to cost you more than it can ever give you.  Do not place yourself in danger but try to avoid it, and only risk death when you are in actual danger of death.
	This is the great secret that I searched the world for: a man's death is holy only when he dies while trying to avoid death and live; a man who "gives up his life" for anything no matter what is a fool, a man used, exploited, tricked, a slob not worth sympathy or concern.  If you are living then you are successful, no matter what level you live at, and if you are dead you have been defeated, no matter what you died for.  So the only worthy death is one suffered by mistake, one that leaped upon you with neither your knowledge nor your consent, or one that overtook you while you were running from it.
	Oh, all those old mouths will try to dissuade you from this; they will say "a man must be willing to lay down his life" for this and that, and they will call you a coward if you refuse.  Remember, they are out to kill you, and their words are their weapons used to place you in a hopeless situation.  The truth of the matter is that "a man must be willing to risk laying down his life to avoid death," and there is no other risky act that has any meaning, no other cause that deserves your loyalty, although the fat-cats will go to any lengths to convince you to risk your life for their ends.
	Remember, all other people, all other things in this world, are out to kill you, rub you down until you die, scrape you thin until you disappear, use you until you break down, consume you and swallow you and spit out your soul, trick you until you are so confused you cease to exist, exploit you until you have nothing left to offer --- so if you would last and this is your only objective then you must conserve yourself, keep most of yourself hidden, refuse them the use of yourself, give your loyalty to no one and be enveloped by nothing, remain silent so you can't be tricked, and give nothing of yourself to any project, cause, or greater body.  You will be treated to mighty sham --- reasons why you should throw away your life for this and that, but if you understand that the executioner's blade lies behind every exhortation then you will keep your life for yourself, as long as you can.
	I can hear the ministers, the priests, the rabbis, now screaming in their God-given robes that God can demand the life of any man, that we must all give our lives to God, offer ourselves up to His trust, do what He tells us to do in the "Good" books, which strangely enough are all written in the language of men.  As I said before, I don't deny that God, or everything, demands our lives, stalks us at every moment trying to spill our blood for the benefit of those we will leave behind, but I do say that unless we put up a grand fight, tricking God as long as we can, playing the game with Him for our own benefit until we lose, then when we do lose and die, knuckling under to His butcher's instincts like cows capering down a stockyard gangway, we have made our deaths meaningless and of no use to the future, spiritless, unholy, leaving a void for the nucleus of all those things to come.  But if we smash God in the grinning face, slip out of the way of that religiously swinging knife, trip Him and slip away to live for a few more days, escape again and again, cunningly slide from His grasp and disappear from His view, slip around Him, over Him, under Him, hanging onto our lives at all costs, then when He finally does get us, and He will, for everything is so much mightier than one thing, then He will have the sacrifice of a worthy opponent, a man who never asked for pity, who succumbed at the end in spite of himself, and lingering on in the absence of a body will be the gigantic spirit of one man's effort, to belong to no one but himself, whole and complete, memorable even in defeat, distinguished even in death, leaving the ghostly presence of his pride, his will to be, his hatred of death and all ends, and this Holy Ghost will give the future such a forceful start it will be off and running before God can kill it again.