The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  THE PAST is to be treated with respect, but from time to time it should be affronted, raped. It should never be allowed to petrify. A man will find out who he is. Cain, Abel. And then he will make the image of himself coherent in itself, but only in so far as it is prudent will he allow it to be contradictory to the external world. A man is contradicted by the external world when, for example, he is hanged.

  These thoughts come to mind . . . such is my drugged state, the only witness myself, only the metamorphic Count offering you eternal death, who has committed suicide in an hundred obscene ways, an exercise in spiritual masturbation, a game well played when you are alone . . . and I write them down as I try to feel my way into where I left off.

  I always find it difficult to get back to the narrative. It is as though I might have chosen any of a thousand narratives. And, as for the one I chose, it has changed since yesterday. I have eaten, drunk, made love, turned on—hashish and heroin—since then. I think of the judge who had a bad breakfast and hanged the lout.

  Cain’s Book. When all is said and done, “my readers” don’t exist, only numberless strange individuals, each grinding me in his own mill, for whose purpose I can’t be responsible. No book was ever responsible. (Sophocles didn’t fuck anyone’s mother.) The feeling that this attitude requires defence in the modern world obsesses me.

  God knows there are enough natural limits to human knowledge without our suffering willingly those that are enforced upon us by an ignorantly rationalized fear of experience. When I find myself walled in by the solid slabs of other men’s fear I have a ferocious impulse to scream from the rooftops.—Yah bleedin mothahfuckahs! So help me Ah’ll pee on you!—Prudence restrains me. But as the past must sometimes be affronted so also must prudence sometimes be overruled. Caveat.

  I say it is impertinent, insolent, and presumptuous of any person or group of persons to impose their unexamined moral prohibitions upon me, that it is dangerous both to me and, although they are unaware of it, to the imposers, that in every instance in which such a prohibition becomes crystallized in law an alarming precedent is created. History is studded with examples, the sweet leper stifled by the moral prejudice of his age. Vigilance. Dispute legal precedent.

  In my study of drugs (I don’t pretend for a moment that my sole interest in drugs is to study their effects. . . . To be familiar with this experience, to be able to attain, by whatever means, the serenity of a vantage point “beyond” death, to have such a critical technique at one’s disposal—let me say simply that on my ability to attain that vantage point my own sanity has from time to time depended)—in my study of drugs I have been forced to run grave risks, and I have been stymied constantly by the barbarous laws under which their usage is controlled. These crude laws and the social hysteria ofwhich they are a symptom have from day to day placed me at the edge of the gallow’s leap. I demand that these laws be changed.

  The hysterical gymnastics of governments confronting the problem of the atomic bomb is duplicated exactly in their confrontation of heroin. Heroin, a highly valuable drug, as democratic statistics testify, comes in for all the shit-slinging. Perhaps that is why junkies, many of whom possess the humour of detachment, sometimes call it “shit.”

  We cannot afford to leave the potential power of drugs in the hands of a few governmental “experts,” whatever they call themselves. Critical knowledge we must vigilantly keep in the public domain. A cursory glance at history should caution us thus. I would recommend on grounds of public safety that heroin (and all other known drugs) be placed with lucid literature pertaining to its use and abuse on the counters of all chemists (to think that a man should be allowed a gun and not a drug!) and sold openly to anyone over twenty-one. This is the only safe method of controlling the use of drugs. At the moment we are encouraging ignorance, legislating to keep crime in existence, and preparing the way for one of the most heinous usurpations of power of all times . . . all over the world . . .

  SUCH MIGHT have been my thoughts as I walked away from Sheridan Square where I left Tom Tear. He went into Jim Moore’s. Sometimes he sat there for hours, usually in the middle of the night from about twelve till three or four; the countermen liked him and they were generous when he ordered anything. The diner, because it was open all night, was a useful meeting place. The coffee counter is composed of two U’s linked by a very short counter which supports the cash register. Its top is of green plastic. The stools are red and chrome. There is a jukebox, a cigarette machine, glass everywhere, and windows . . . that’s the advantage of the place, the huge uncurtained windows which look out on to the centre of the square. You can only sit there so long without being seen by your little junkie friends who can see you waiting. It’s like being in a goldfish bowl in a display window of a pet shop. (In New York people look in at you through the glass windows of snack bars; Paris cafés spill out onto the street where those who are walking by are open to inspection.) It has also, from another point of view, its disadvantage. If our friends can look in, so can the police, and many of the anonymous men who sit at the counter or who lounge about outside in the small hours could conceivably fink. So it is dangerous to be seen there too often, especially if you are high. Most of us returned there eventually because we were often hung up for shit.

  He had asked me to go and have a coffee with him but I knew that once I was inside I would find it difficult to leave. And all of the hours I spent, the hours of vigil I spent in that diner, waiting, were probably the worst.

  I walked up Seventh Avenue and turned west on 23rd Street and made directly for the river. The bars were still open so the streets weren’t deserted. On 23rd a police car trailed me for a few seconds and then glided past. Without turning my head I caught a glimpse of the man beside the driver, his head turned my way. I wasn’t carrying anything that night.

  I kept walking past Eighth, Ninth, and I walked up Ninth and turned left a few blocks later. I was walking slowly. Suddenly I was opposite an alley and in the alley about twenty yards away was the dark figure of a man standing close to a wall. He was alone under a small light near a garage door and he was exposing himself to a brick wall.

  In terms of literal truth my curiosity was pointless. A man goes to a lane to urinate, an everyday happening which concerns only himself and those who are paid to prevent public nuisance. It concerned me only because I was there and doing nothing in particular as was quite ordinary for me, like a piece of sensitive photographic paper, waiting passively to feel the shock of impression. And then I was quivering like a leaf, more precisely, like a mute hunk of appetitional plasm, a kind of sponge in which the business of being excited was going on, run through by a series of external stimuli; the lane, the man, the pale light, the flash of silver—at the ecstatic edge of something to be known.

  THE FLASH of silver comes from earlier; it was a long time ago in my own country and I saw a man come out of an alley. He had large hands. The thought of his white front with its triangle of coarse short hair came to me. I thought of the mane of a wolf, of the white Huns, perhaps because he stooped. Or perhaps because my own ears were pricked back and alert. In his other hand was the glint of something silver. As he walked past me he put his hands in his pockets. I looked after him. I realised I hadn’t seen his face. Before I reached the corner he had turned into an adjacent street. I reached the intersection and he was entering a public house. I didn’t see him in the bar nor in any of the side rooms. The bar was crowded with workmen, the same caps, the same white scarves, the same boots. He was not in the men’s toilet.

  Sitting there—an afterthought—I noticed that someone had cut a woman’s torso deep in the wood of the door. As big as a fat sardine. There was no toilet paper. I used a folded sheet of the Evening News, part of which I tore carefully from the other part which was wet. It was water, and dust had collected. It had been jammed beneath the pipe under the cistern. The ink had run. I felt a necessity to read inside the wet pages. When I peeled them apart I found nothing of interest. A w
ell-known stage actor was to be married. The paper was more than six weeks old. I remembered reading a few days before that he had since died. I couldn’t remember whether he left a widow.

  I drank one small whiskey at the bar and left. The original impulse to find him had left me. The street was deserted, and the lane. On my way home I wondered why I had followed him. I wasn’t after facts, information. I didn’t delude myself from the moment I became aware of his shadow, although in self-defence I may have pretended to wonder, to seek safety in the problematic. I can see now I must have known even then it was an act of curiosity. Even now I’m the victim of my own behaviour: each remembered fact of the congeries of facts out of which in my more or less continuous way I construct this document is an act of remembrance, a selected fiction, and I am the agent also of what is unremembered, rejected; thus I must pause, overlook, focus on my effective posture. My curiosity was a making of significance. I experienced a sly female lust to be impregnated by, beyond words and in a mystical way to confound myself with, not the man necessarily, though that was part of the possibility, but the secrecy of his gesture.

  He wore the clothes of a workman, a cap, a shapeless jacket, and trousers baggy at the knees. He might have been a dustman, or a coalman, or unemployed. The hissing gas lamp cast his shadow diagonally across the lane and like a finger into the tunnel. As I came abreast of it I glanced through into the lane and when I saw him I caught my breath. The valve slid open. The faint lust at my belly made me conscious of the cold of the rest of my body. I felt the cool night wind on my face as I sensed my hesitation. It was the way he stood, swaying slightly, and half-hidden, and it was then that I thought of his crotch, and of the stench of goats in the clear night air of the Tartar steppes, of the hairs of his belly, and of the stream of yellow urine from his blunt prick running in a broad, steaming sheet down the stone wall, its precision geometrical, melting the snow near the toes of his big boots. If I had had the nerve I might have approached him then and there instead of following him into the bar, but there was no kinetic quality in my hesitation. It lay on me like an impotence, cloying, turning my feet to lead. It was my cowardice which shattered me. The other knowledge, of the desire, came as no shock. Still, and with a sense of bathos, I found myself moving in pursuit of him when he lurched backwards into full view and passed me at the end of the tunnel where I stood. Did I invent the glint of silver? Endow him with a non-existent razor. The honing of the blade. When I couldn’t find him in the bar, and after I had applied my skill to the torso on the wooden door, I returned to the lane and walked through the tunnel towards light. The singing gas lamp evoked memories of sensation, but faintly, and there was no element of anticipation. In the lane I looked over the wall at the windows of the dark tenements above. A pale light showed here and there from behind curtains. Above the level of the roofs the sky was darkening indigo and shifty with thin cloud. I thought: on such a night as this werewolves are abroad and the ambulances of death run riot in the streets. I kicked at the snow on the cobbles. My feet were cold. I walked home with a sense of failure, too familiar even then to shrug off easily. And then, when I entered the flat there was Moira wearing her drop ear-rings, waiting, hoping, at the portal of her day’s thoughts, and I walked past her surlily, with no greeting.

  MOIRA WAS sitting opposite me. This was before our divorce and before either of us came to America. I had put the incident of the man in the lane out of my mind. It was nearly ten o’clock. Two hours until the New Year. One day followed another. Relief at having attained the limit of the old year made me uneasy. It wasn’t as though I were walking out of prison.

  Moira was hurt at my isolation. I could sense the crude emotion run through her. It was abrasive. She said I was selfish, that it showed in my attitude, on that of all nights. I knew what she meant.

  She felt the need to affirm something and in some way or other she associated the possibility with the passing of the old year. “Thank God this year’s nearly over!” she said.

  That struck me as stupid so I didn’t answer.

  “Do you hear what I say?” she demanded.

  I looked at her speculatively.

  “Well?” she said.

  She began to speak again but this time she broke off in the middle. And then she walked across the room and poured herself a drink. She moved from one event to another without ever coming to a decision. It was as though she were trapped outside her own experience, afraid to go in. I don’t know what it was she was going to say. She poured herself a drink instead. I watched her from where I was sitting. Her thighs under the soft donkeybrown wool were attractive. She has still got good thighs. Her flesh is still firm and smooth to the touch; belly, buttocks, and thighs. The emotion was there, at all the muscle and fibre. And then she was opposite me again, sipping distastefully at her drink, avoiding my gaze. She was trying to give the impression that she was no longer aware of me and at the same time she sensed the absurdity of her position. That made her uncomfortable. For her the absurd was something to shun. She had a hard time of it, retreating like a Roman before Goths and Vandals.

  It occurred to me that I might take her. She didn’t suspect. She didn’t realise her belly was more provocative when it had been run through with hatred. Hatred contracts; it knitted her thicknesses. She was hotter then, only then. As she began to doubt my love she became a martyr and unlovable. But anger sometimes freed her; her muscles had experienced excitement. . . . To walk across to her. She would pull herself up defensively and refuse to look at me. But her distance was unconvincing. She was not inviolable. That was the moment when I had to be in control of myself, for my lust tended to become acid in my mouth. I preferred her anger to her stupidity. It was something against which I could pit my lust. When I was confronted by her stupidity there took place in me a kind of dissociation, like the progressive separation in milk as it turns sour. I was no longer, as it were, intact, and she was no longer interesting.

  I thought of the man in the lane. I had suddenly felt very close to myself, as though I were on the edge of a discovery. I was perplexed when I couldn’t find him in the bar. I supposed he must have left while I was in the lavatory. The torso was cut deep in the wood, an oakleaf of varnish left where the pubic hairs were. I touched it with my forefinger, scratching varnish off with my fingernail. It struck me that it was too big. My wife had a big cunt with a lot of pubic hair, but not as big as that. It was heavily packed into her crotch. When I thought of it I always thought of it wet, the hairs close at the chalkwhite skin of her lower belly and embedded like filings in the pores. That made me think of her mother. I don’t know why. The torso held my attention. I ran my fingers over it. The pads of my fingers were excited by the rough wood. I felt a slight prickling at the hairs at the back of my neck. I hadn’t known wood so intimately before. I participated. I leaned against it. It felt good. That was when I first thought of my wife that night, more particularly, of the elaborate “V” of her sex, standing with my thighs close to the door, touching. I took one drink and left. There was no sign of any man. I looked up and down the street. I felt it was going to snow.

  My memory of that New Year’s Eve joins those two together, my ex-wife Moira, at her most abject, and the Glasgow proletarian my mother feared, and whose image in the lane under the gaslight, with a thing of silver in one hard hand, elides mysteriously into myself. I often thought it must have been a razor, Occam’s perhaps.

  It occurred to me she was wearing those new ear-rings her cousin brought her from Spain. That was the second time I noticed the earrings that night. She had had her ears pierced a month before. The doctor did it for her. She said she thought drop ear-rings suited her.

  It was New Year’s Eve. Moira felt she was about to step across a threshold. The ear-rings represented her decision to do so. The date was marked on a calendar. I had wondered why she was wearing them. She had said earlier she didn’t want to go to a cinema. Actually I had forgotten the date. I was surprised she was wearing the ear-rin
gs when I got back to the flat.

  She was standing in the middle of the room, facing me. I felt she was waiting for me to say something. I had just come in. I was to notice the ear-rings. When I had done so we were to step hand in hand into a new calendar year. But I didn’t notice them. I was still thinking of the man in the lane. And Moira herself got in the way, standing in the middle of the room, looking stupid, like she did in public when she thought no one was paying attention to her. Her eyes, as they say, expressed polite interest, indefatigably. At nothing, nothing. At the beginning I didn’t see it. Perhaps it didn’t exist at the beginning. I don’t know. Anyway, it came to be as obtrusive as her mother’s respectability. It had a murderous emphasis. As I say, I didn’t see it at the beginning. I even looked the other way. But gradually it became clear to me that she was, among other things, stupid. A stupid bitch. And she had become a boring lay, unimaginative, like a gramophone. And so I didn’t notice the ear-rings and my foot was not poised with hers on any threshold and my attention wandered.

  I felt she was growing impatient, sitting there, nursing her drink, that she was not sure whether to make a scene, maintain her brittle composure there in the room, or go out quietly. The last move alone would have been authentic . . . or if she had offered me a drink . . . but she was incapable of making it. I think she thought she gave the impression of being dangerous. But Moira was never dangerous, or certainly wasn’t at that time. She was not in the least improbable. When the clock struck twelve I heard chairs scraping across the floor of the flat above and the muffled noise of a woman’s laughter. When my wife heard it . . . our chimes clock now continued its monotonous tick . . . she stiffened, and at that instant I caught her eye. I had seldom seen her so angry. She lunged out with her foot and kicked over the table. The whiskey bottle splintered on the hearth and the whiskey seeped out underneath the fender on to the carpet where it made a dark stain. For a moment, contemplating it and then me, she tottered like a skittle, and then, bursting into tears, she threw herself out of the room. She had removed her body with her anger. I felt suddenly quite empty.