Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Book I

by Henry Miller

  I paused a moment to get my breath, rather surprised that I hadn't received a clout. Ned had a gleam in his eye which might have been interpreted as friendly and encouraging—or murderous. I was hoping somebody would start something, throw a bottle, smash things, scream, yell, anything hut sit there and take it like stunned owls. I didn't know why I had picked on Marcelle, she hadn't done anything to me. I was just using her as a stooge. Mona should have interrupted me ... I sort of counted on her doing that. But no, she was strangely quiet, strangely impartial.

  Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I resumed, let me apologize. Marcelle, I don't know what to say to you. You certainly didn't deserve that. That's all right, said she blithely, I know something's eating you up. It couldn't be me because ... well, nobody who knows me would ever talk that way to me. Why don't you switch to gin? You see what water does. Here, take a good stiff one ... I drank a half glass straight and saw horse shoes pounding out sparks. You see ... makes you feel human, doesn't it? Have some more chicken—and some potato salad. The trouble with you is you're hypersensitive. My old man was that way. He wanted to be a minister and instead he became a book-keeper. When he got all screwed up inside my mother would get him drunk. Then he beat the piss out of us—out of her too. But he felt better afterwards. We all felt better. It's much better to beat people up than to think rotten things about them. He wouldn't have been any better if he had become a minister: he was born with a grudge against the world. He wasn't happy unless he was criticizing things. That's why I can't hate people ... I saw what it did to him. Sure I like my nookie. Who don't? as you say. I like things to be soft and easy. I like to make people happy, if I can. Maybe it's stupid but it gives you a good feeling. You see, my old man had the idea that everything had to be destroyed before we could begin to have a good life. My philosophy, if you can call it a philosophy, is just the opposite. I don't see the need to destroy anything. I cultivate the good and let the bad take care of itself. That's a feminine way of looking at life. I'm a conservative. I think that women have to act dumb in order not to make men feel like fools...

  Well I'll be damned! Ned exclaimed. / never heard you talk this way before.

  Of course you didn't, darling. You never credited me with having an ounce of brains, did you? You get your little nookie and then you go to sleep. I've been asking you to marry me for a year now but you're not ready for that yet. You've got other problems. Well, some day you'll discover that there's only one problem on your hands—yourself.

  Good! Good for you, Marcelle! It was Mona who suddenly burst out with this.

  What the hell! said Ned. What Is this—a conspiracy?

  You know, said Marcelle, as though she were speaking to herself, sometimes I think I really am a cluck. Here I am waiting for this guy to marry me. Suppose he does marry me—what then? He won't know me any better after marriage than before. He's, not in love. If a guy's in love with you he doesn't worry about the future. Love is a gamble, not an insurance racket. I guess I'm just getting wise to myself.... Ned, I'm going to stop worrying about you. I'm going to leave you to worry about yourself. You're the worrying kind—and there's no cure for that. You had me worried for a while—worrying about you, I mean. I'm through worrying. I want love—not protection.

  Jesus, aren't we getting rather serious? said Ned, baffled by the unexpected turn the conversation had taken.

  Serious? said Marcelle mockingly. I'm walking out on you. You can stay single for the rest of your life—and thrash out all those weighty problems that bother you. I feel as though a big load had been taken off my shoulders. She turned to me and stuck out her mitt. Thanks, Henry, for giving me a jolt. I guess you weren't talking such nonsense after all....

  22

  Cleo was still the rage at the Houston Street Burlesk. She had become an institution, like Mistinguett. It's easy to understand why she fascinated that audience which the enterprising Minsky Brothers gathered every night under their closed roof garden. One had only to stand outside the box office of a matinee, any day of the week, and watch them dribble in. In the evening it was a more sophisticated crowd, gathered from all parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island and New Jersey. Even Park Avenue contributed its clientele, in the evening. But in the bright light of day, with the marquee looking like the aftermath of small-pox, the Catholic Church next door so dingy, woe-begone, so scroungy-looking, the priest always standing on the steps, scratching his ass by way of registering disgust and disapprobation. It was very much like the picture of reality which the sclerotic mind of a sceptic conjures up when he tries to explain why there can be no God.

  Many's the time I had hung around the entrance to the theatre, keeping a sharp eye out for some one to lend me a few pennies to make up the price of admission. “When you're out of work, or too disgusted to look for work, it's infinitely better to sit in a stinking pit than to stand in a public toilet for hours—just because it's warm there. Sex and poverty go hand in hand.

  The fetid odor of the burlesk house! That smell of the latrine, of urine saturated with camphor balls! The mingled stench of sweat, sour feet, foul breaths, chewing gum, disinfectants! The sickening deodorant from the squirt guns levelled straight at you, as if you were a mass of bottle flies! Nauseating? No word for it. Onan himself could scarcely smell worse.

  The decor too was something. Smacked of Renoir in the last stages of gangrene. Blended perfectly with the Mardi Gras lighting effects—a flushed string of red lights illuminating a rotten womb. Something disgracefully satisfying about sitting there with the Mongolian idiots in the twilight of Gomorrah, knowing all too well that after the show you would have to trudge it back home on foot. Only a man with his pockets cleaned out can thoroughly appreciate the warmth and stench of a big ulcer in which hundreds of others like himself sit and wait for the curtain to go up. All around you overgrown idiots shelling peanuts, or nibbling at chocolate bars, or draining bottles of pop through straws. The Lumpen Proletariat. Cosmic riff-raff.

  It was so foul, the atmosphere, that it was just like one big congealed fart. On the asbestos curtain remedies against venereal diseases, cloak and suit ads, fur trapp ... , tooth-paste delicacies, watches to tell time—as if time were important in our lives! Where to go for a quick snack after the show—as if one had money to burn, as though after the show we would all drop in at Louie's or August's place and look the girls over, shove money up their asses and see the Aurora Borealis or the Red, White and Blue.

  The ushers ... Ratty, jail-bird types, if male, and floozy, empty shits, if the other sex. Now and then an attractive Polish girl with blonde hair and a saucy, defiant mien. One of the dumb Polaks who would rather earn an honest penny than turn up her ass for a quick fuck. One could smell their filthy underwear, winter or summer...

  Anyway, everything on a cash and carry basis—that was the Minsky plan. And it worked too. Never a flop, no matter how lousy the performance. If you went there often enough you got to know the faces so well, not only of the cast but of the audience too, that it was like a family reunion. If you felt disgusted you didn't need a mirror to see how you looked—you had only to take a glance at your neighbor. It should have been called Identity House. It was Devachan hindside up.

  There was never anything original, never anything that you hadn't seen a thousand times before. It was like a cunt you're sick of looking at—you know every liverish crease and wrinkle; you're so goddamned sick of it that you want to spit in it, or take a plunger and bring up all the muck that got caught and the larynx. Oh yes, many a time one had the impulse to let fire—turn a machine gun on them, men, women and children, and let ‘em have it in the guts. Sometimes a sort of faintness came over you: you felt like sliding to the floor and just lying there among the peanut shells. Let people walk over you with their greasy, smelly, shitty shoes.

  Always a patriotic note too. Any moth-eaten cunt could walk out front-and-center draped in the American flag and by singing a wheezy tune bring down the house. If y
ou had an advantageous seat you could catch her wiping her nose on the flag as she stood in the wings. And the sob stuff ... how they liked the mother songs!

  Poor, dopy, dog-eared saps! When it came to home and mother they slobbered like wailing mice. There was always the white-haired imbecile from the Ladies’ Room whom they trotted out for these numbers. Her reward for sitting in the shit-house all day and night was to be slobbered over during one of the sentimental numbers. She had an enormous girth—a fallen womb most likely—and her eyes were glassy. She could have been everybody's mother, so goofy and docile she was. The very picture of motherhood—after thirty-five years of child-bearing, wife-beating, abortions, haemorrhages, ulcers, tumors, rupture, varicose veins and other emoluments of the maternal life. That nobody thought of putting a bullet through her and finishing her off always surprised me.

  No denying it, the Minsky Brothers had thought of everything, everything which would remind one of the things one wanted to escape. They knew how to trot out everything that was worn and faded, including the very lice in your brains—and they rubbed this concoction under your nose like a shitty rag. They were enterprising, no doubt about it. Probably Leftwingers too, even though contributing to the support of the Catholic Church next door. They were Unitarians, in the practical sense. Big hearted, open-minded purveyors of entertainment for the poor at heart. Not a doubt about it. I'm sure they went to the Turkish Baths every night (after counting the money), and perhaps to the synagogue too, when there was time for it.

  To get back to Cleo. It was Cleo this night again, as it had been in the past. She would appear twice, once before the intermission and a second time at the end of the show.

  Neither Marcelle nor Mona had ever been to a burlesk before; they were on the qui vive from start to finish. The comedians appealed to them; it was a line of filth they were unprepared for. Yeoman work they do, the comedians. All they need are a pair of baggy trousers, a piss-pot, a telephone or a hat rack to create the illusion of a world in which the Unconscious rules supreme. Every burlesk comedian, if he is worth his salt, has something of the heroic in him. At every performance he slays the censor who stands like a ghost on the threshold of the subliminal self. He not only slays him alive for us, but he pisses on him and mortifies the flesh. Anyway, Cleo! By the time Cleo appears everybody is ready to jerk off. (Not like in India where a rich nabob buys up a half dozen rows of seats in order to masturbate in peace.) Here everybody gets to work under his hat. A condensed milk orgy. Semen flows as freely as gasoline. Even a blind man would know that there's nothing but cunt in sight. The amazing thing it that there is never a stampede. Now and then some one goes home and cuts his balls off with a rusty razor, but these little exploits you never read about in the newspapers.

  One of the things that made Cleo's dance fascinating was the little pom-pom she wore in the center of her girdle—planted right over her rose-bush. It served to keep your eyes riveted to the spot. She could rotate it like a pin-wheel or make it jump and quiver with little electric spasms. Sometimes it would subside with little gasps, like a swan coming to rest after a deep orgasm. Sometimes it acted saucy and impudent, sometimes it was sullen and morose. It seemed to be part of her, a little ball of fluff that had grown out of her Mons Venus. Possibly she had acquired it in an Algerian whore-house, from a French sailor. It was tantalizing, especially to the sixteen-years olds who had still to know what it feels like to make a grab for a woman's bush.

  What her face was like I hardly remember any more. I have a faint recollection that her nose was retrousse. One would never recognize her with her clothes on, that's a cinch. You concentrated on the torso, in the center of which was a huge painted navel the color of carmine. It was like a hungry mouth, this navel. Like the mouth of a fish suddenly stricken with paralysis. I'm sure her cunt wasn't half as exciting to look at. It was probably a pale bluish sliver of meat that a dog wouldn't even bother to sniff. She was alive in her mid-riff, in that sinuous fleshy pear which domed out from under the chest bones. The torso reminded me always of those dressmaker's model whose thighs end in a framework of umbrella ribs. As a child I used to love to run my hand over the umbilical swell. It was heavenly to the touch. And the fact that there were no arms or legs to the model enhanced the bulging beauty of the torso. Sometimes there was no wickerwork below—just a truncated figure with a little collar of a neck which was always painted a shiny black. They were the intriguing ones, the lovable ones. One night in a side show I came upon a live one, just like the sewing machine models at home. She moved about on the platform with her hands, as if she were treading water. I got real close to her and engaged her in conversation. She had a head, of course, and it was rather a pretty one, something like the wax images you see in hairdressing establishments in the chic quarters of a big city. I learned that she was from Vienna; she had been born without legs. But I'm getting off the track.... The thing that fascinated me about her was that she had that same voluptuous swell, that pear-like ripple and bulge. I stood by her platform a long time just to survey her from all angles. It was amazing how close her legs had been pared off. Just another slice off her and she would have been minus a twat. The more I studied her the more tempted I was to push her over. I could imagine my arms around her cute little waist, imagine myself picking her up, slinging her under my arm and making off with her to ravish her in a vacant lot.

  During the intermission, while the girls went to the lavatory to see dear old mother, Ned and I stood on the iron stairway which adorns the exterior of the theatre. From the upper tiers one could look into the homes across the street, where the dear old mothers fret and stew like angry roaches. Cosy little flats they are, if you have a strong stomach and a taste for the ultra-violet dreams of Chagall. Food and bedding are the dominant motifs. Sometimes they blend indiscriminately and the father who has been selling matches all day with tubercular frenzy finds himself eating the mattress. Among the poor only that which takes hours to prepare is served. The gourmet loves to eat in a restaurant which is odorous; the poor man gets sick to the stomach when he climbs the stairs and gets a whiff of what's coming to him. The rich man loves to walk the dog around the block—to work up a mild appetite. The poor man looks at the sick bitch lying under the tubs and feels that it would be an act of mercy to kick it in the guts. Nothing gives him an appetite. He is hungry, perpetually hungry for the things he craves. Even a breath of fresh air is a luxury. But then he's not a dog, and so nobody takes him out for an airing, alas and alack. I've seen the poor blighters leaning out of the window on their elbows, their heads hanging in their hands like Jack-o'-Lanterns: it doesn't take a mind-reader to know what they're thinking about. Now and then a row of tenements is demolished in order to open up ventilating holes. Passing these blank areas, spaced like missing teeth, I've often imagined the poor, bleeding blighters to be still hanging there on the window-sills, the houses torn down but they themselves suspended in mid-air, propped up by their own grief and misery, like torpid blimps defying the law of gravitation. Who notices these airy spectres? Who gives a fuck whether they're suspended in the air or buried six feet deep? The show is the thing, as Shakespeare says. Twice a day, Sundays included, the show goes on. If it's short of provender you are, why stew a pair of old socks. The Minsky Brothers are dedicated to giving entertainment. Hershey Almond Bars are always on tap, good before or after you jerk off. A new show every week—with the same about old cast and the same old jokes. What would really be a catastrophe for the Minsky gents would be for Cleo to be stricken with a double hernia. Or to get pregnant. Hard to say which would be worse. She could have lockjaw or enteritis or claustrophobia, and it wouldn't matter a damn. She could even survive the menopause. Or rather, the Minskys could. But hernia, that would be like death—irrevocable.

  What went on in Ned's mind during this brief intermission I could only conjecture. Pretty horrible, isn't it? he remarked, chiming in with some observation I had made. He said it with a detachment that would have done credit to a s
cion of Park Avenue. Nothing anyone could do about it, is what he meant. At twenty-five he had been the art director in an advertising concern; that was five or six years ago. Since then he had been on the rocks, but adversity had in no way altered his views about life. It had merely confirmed his basic notion that poverty was something to be avoided. With a good break he would once again be on top, dictating to those whom he was now fawning upon.

  He was telling me about a proposition he had up his sleeve, another unique idea for an advertising campaign. (How to make people smoke more—without injuring their health.) The trouble was, now that he was on the other side of the fence nobody would listen to him. Had he still been art director everybody would have accepted the idea immediately as a brilliant one. Ned saw the irony of the situation, nothing more. He thought it had something to do with his front—perhaps he didn't look as confident as he used to. If he had a better wardrobe, if he could lay off the booze for a while, if he could work up the right enthusiasm.... and so on. Marcelle worried him. She was taking it out of him. With every fuck he gave her he felt that another brilliant idea had been slaughtered. He wanted to be alone for a while so that he could think things out. If Marcelle were on tap only when he needed her and not turn up at odd hours—just when he was in the middle of something—it would be ducky.