No—because they broke Billie Freshette slow and ugly and they broke Marilyn Monroe fast and bright like lightning They broke Daddy and they broke Mama but shit like I mean it this time they ain’t going to break me No even if it’s greater with Simon than with any other man even if he knows more than any other man I’ve had No it can’t be him and it can’t even be Hagbard who seems to be the king of the circus the very Ringmaster and keeper of the final secret No it can’t be any man and it most certainly by Jesus and by Christ it can’t be going back to Mister Charlie’s police force No it’s dark like my own skin and dark like the destiny they’ve inflicted on me because of my skin but whatever it is I can only find it alone God the time that rat bit me while I was sleeping Daddy screaming until he was almost crying “I’ll kill the fucking landlord I’ll kill the motherfucker I’ll cut his white heart out” until Mama finally calmed him No he died a little then No it would have been better if he had killed the landlord No even if they caught him and they would have caught him No even if he died in the goddam electric chair and we went on welfare No a man shouldn’t let that happen to his children he shouldn’t be realistic and practical No no matter how good it is no matter how wonderful the come it will always be there in the back of my head that Simon is white No white radical white revolutionary white lover it doesn’t matter it still comes up white and it’s not acid and it’s not a mood I mean shit you have to decide sooner or later Are you on somebody else’s trip or are you on your own No and I can’t join God’s Lightning or even what’s left of the old Women’s Lib I mean shit that poetry Simon quoted is all wrong No it’s not true that no man is an island No the truth is every man is an island and especially every woman is an island and even more every black woman is an island
On August 23, 1928, Rancid, the butler in the Drake Mansion on old Beacon Hill, reported a rather distressing fact to his employer. “Good Lord Harry,” old Drake cried at first, “is he turning Papist now?” His second question was less rhetorical: “You’re absolutely sure?”
“There is no doubt,” Rancid replied. “The maids showed me the socks, sir. And the shoes.”
That night there was a rather strangulated attempt at conversation in the mansion’s old library.
“Are you going back to Harvard?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you at least going to try another damned alienist?”
“They call themselves psychiatrists these days, Father. I don’t think so.”
“Dammit, Robert, what did happen in the war?”
“Many things. They all made profits for our bank, though, so don’t worry about them.”
“Are you turning Red?”
“I see no profit there. The State of Massachusetts killed two innocent men today for holding opinions of that sort.”
“Innocent my Aunt Fanny. Robert, I know the judge personally—”
“And he believes what the friend of a banker should believe.”
There was a long pause, and old Drake crushed out a cigar he had hardly started.
“Robert, you know you’re sick.”
“Yes.”
“What is this latest thing—glass and nails in your shoes? Your mother would die if she knew.”
There was another silence. Robert Putney Drake finally answered, lanquidly, “It was an experiment. A phase. The Sioux Indians do much worse to themselves in the Sun Dance. So do lots of chaps in Spanish monasteries, and in India, among other places. It’s not the answer.”
“It’s really finished?”
“Oh, yes. Quite. I’m trying something else.”
“Something to hurt yourself again?”
“No, nothing to hurt myself.”
“Well, then, I’m glad to hear that. But I do wish you would go to another alienist, or psychiatrist, or whatever they call themselves.” Another pause. “You can pull yourself together, you know. Play the man, Robert. Play the man.”
Old Drake was satisfied. He had talked turkey to the boy; he had performed his fatherly duty. Besides, the private detectives assured him that the Red Business really was trivial: The lad had been to several anarchist and Communist meetings, but his comments had been uniformly aloof and cynical.
It was nearly a year later when the really bad news from the private investigators arrived.
“How much will the girl take to keep her mouth shut?” old Drake asked immediately.
“After we pay hospital expenses, maybe a thousand more,” the man from Pinkerton’s said.
“Offer her five hundred,” the old man replied. “Go up to a thousand only if you have to.”
“I said maybe a thousand,” the detective said bluntly. “He used a special kind of whip, one with twisted nails in the ends. She might want two or three thou.”
“She’s only a common whore. They’re used to this sort of thing.”
“Not to this extent.” The detective was losing his deferential tone. “The photos of her back, and her buttocks especially, didn’t bother me much. But that’s because I’m in this business and I’ve seen a lot. An average jury would vomit, Mr. Drake. In court—”
“In court,” old Drake pronounced, “she would come before a judge who belongs to several of my clubs and has investments in my bank. Offer five hundred.”
Two months thereafter, the stock market crashed and New York millionaires began leaping from high windows onto hard streets. Old Drake, the next day, ran into his son begging on the street near the Old Granary cemetery. The boy was wearing old clothes from a secondhand store.
“It’s not that bad, son. We’ll pull through.”
“Oh, I know that. You’ll come out ahead, in fact, if I’m any judge of character.”
“Then what the hell is this disgraceful damned foolishness?”
“Experience. I’m breaking out of a trap.”
The old man fumed all the way back to the bank. That evening he decided it was time for another open and honest discussion; when he went to Robert’s room, however, he found the boy thoroughly trussed up in chains and quite purple in the face.
“God! Damn! Son! What is this?”
The boy—who was twenty-seven and, in some respects, more sophisticated than his father—grinned and relaxed. The purple faded from his face. “One of Houdini’s escapes,” he explained simply.
“You intend to become a stage magician? My God!”
“Not at all. I’m breaking out of another trap—the one that says nobody but Houdini can do these things.”
Old Drake, to do him justice, hadn’t acquired his wealth without some shrewdness concerning human peculiarities. “I begin to see,” he said heavily. “Pain is a trap. That was why you put the broken glass in your shoes that time. Fear of poverty is a trap. That’s why you tried begging on the streets. You’re trying to become a Superman, like those crazy boys in Chicago, the ‘thrill killers.’ What you did to that whore last year was part of all this. What else have you done?”
“A lot.” Robert shrugged. “Enough to be canonized as a saint, or to be burnt as a diabolist. None of it seems to add up, though. I still haven’t found the way.” He suddenly made a new effort, and the chains slipped to the floor. “Simple yoga and muscle control,” he said without pride. “The chains in the mind are much harder. I wish there were a chemical, a key to the nervous system …”
“Robert,” said old Drake, “you are going back to an alienist. I’ll have you committed if you won’t go voluntarily.”
And so Dr. Faustus Unbewusst acquired a new patient, at a time when many of his most profitable cases were discontinuing therapy because of the monetary depression. He made very few notes on Robert, but these were subsequently found by an Illuminati operative, photostated, and placed in the archives at Agharti, where Hagbard Celine read them in 1965. They were undated, and scrawled in a hurried hand—Dr. Unbewusst, in reaction-formation against his own anal component, was a conspicuously untidy and careless person—but they told a fairly straightforward story:
RPD,
age 27, latent homo. Father rich as Croesus. Five sessions per week @ $50 each, $250. Keep him in therapy 5 yrs that’s a clear $65,000. Be ambitious, aim for ten years. $130,000. Beautiful.
RPD not latent homo at all. Advanced psychopath. Moral imbecile. Actually enjoys the money I’m soaking his father. Hopeless case. All drives ego-syntonic. Bastard doesn’t give a fuck. Maybe as long as 12 yrs.? $156,000. Hot shit!
RPD back on sadism again. Thinks that’s the key. Must use great care. If he gets caught at something serious, jail or a sanitorium; and can kiss that $156,000 good-bye. Maybe use drugs to calm him?
RPD in another schizo mood today. Full of some crap a gypsy fortune-teller told him. Extreme care needed: If the occultists get him, that’s 13 grand per year out the window.
Clue to RPD: All goes back to the war. Can’t stand the thought that all must die. Metaphysical hangup. Nothing I can do. If only there were an immortality pill. Risk of losing him to the occultists or even a church worse than I feared. I can feel the 13 grand slipping away.
RPD wants to go to Europe. Wants meeting, maybe therapy, with that sheissdreck dummkopf Carl Jung. Must warn parents too sick to travel.
RPD gone after only 10 months. A lousy 11-grand case. Too angry to see patients today. Spent morning drafting letter to Globe on why fortune-tellers should be forbidden by law. If I could get my hands on that woman, on her fat throat, the bitch, the fat stinking ignorant bitch. $156,000. Down the drain. Because he needs immortality and doesn’t know how to get it.
(In Ingolstadt, Danny Pricefixer and Clark Kent are still staring at each other over Lady Velkor’s sleeping body when Atlanta Hope bursts into the room, fresh from a shower, and throws herself on the bed, hugging and kissing everybody. “It was the first time,” she cries. “The first time I ever really made it! It took all three of you.” On the other side of Kent, Lady Velkor opens an eye and says, “Don’t I get any credit? It takes Five that way, remember?”)
Mama Sutra was only thirty then, but she streaked her hair with gray to fit the image of the Wise Woman. She recognized Drake as soon as he wandered into the tea parlor: old Drake’s son, the crazy one, loaded.
He motioned to her before the waitress could take his order. Mama Sutra, quick to pick up clues, could tell from his suit’s wrinkles that he had been lying down; Boston Common is a long walk from Beacon Hill; there were shrinks in the neighborhood; ergo, he hadn’t come from home but from a therapy session.
“Tea leaves or cards?” she asked courteously, sitting across from him at the table.
“Cards,” he said absently, looking down from the window to the Common. “Coffee,” he added to the waitress. “Black as sin.”
“Were you listening to the preachers down there?” Mama Sutra asked shrewdly.
“Yes.” He grinned, engagingly. “‘He that believeth shall never taste death.’ They’re in rare form today.”
“Shuffle,” she said, handing the cards over. “But they awakened some spiritual need in you, my son. That’s why you came up here.”
He met her eye cynically. “I’m willing to try any kind of witchcraft once. I just came from a practitioner of the latest variety, just off the boat from Vienna a few years.”
Bull’s-eye, she thought.
“Neither his science nor their unenlightened faith can help you,” Mama said somberly, ignoring his cynicism. “Let us hope that the cards will show the way.” She dealt a traditional Tree of Life.
At the crown was Death upside-down, and below it were the King of Swords in Chokmah and the Knight of Wands in Binah. “He that believeth shall never taste death,” he had quoted cynically.
“I see a battlefield,” she began; it was common Boston gossip that Drake first started acting odd after the war. “I see Death come very close to you and then miss you.” She pointed to the reverse Death card with a dramatic finger. “But many died, many that you cared for deeply.”
“I liked a few of them,” he said grudgingly. “Mostly I was worried about my own a—my own hide. But go ahead.”
She looked at the Knight of Wands in the Binah position. Should she mention the bisexuality implied? He was going to a shrink, and might be able to take it. Mama tried to hold the Knight of Wands and King of Swords together in her focus, and the way became clear. “There are two men in you. One loves other men, perhaps too much. The other is desperately trying to free himself from all of humanity, even from the world. You’re a Leo,” she added suddenly, taking a leap.
“Yes,” he said, unimpressed. “August 6.” He was thinking that she had probably looked up the birthdates of all the richer individuals in town in case they ever wandered in.
“It’s very hard for Leos to accept death,” she said sadly. “You are like Buddha after he saw the corpse on the road. No matter what you have or own, no matter what you achieve, it will never be enough, for you saw too many corpses in the war. Ah, my son, would that I could help you! But I only read cards; I am no alchemist who sells the Elixir of Eternal Life.” While he was digesting that one—a sure hit, she felt—Mama rushed on to examine the Five of Wands reversed in Chesed and the Magus upright in Geburah. “So many wands,” she said. “So many fire signs. A true Leo, but so much of it turned inward. See how the energetic Knight of Wands descends to the Five upside-down: All your energies, and Leos are very powerful, are turned against yourself. You are a burning man, trying to consume yourself and be reborn. And the Magus, who shows the way, is below the King of Swords and dominated by him: Your reason won’t allow you to accept the necessity of the fire. You are still rebelling against Death.” The Fool was in Tipareth and, surprisingly, upright. “But you are very close to taking the final step. You are ready to let the fire consume even your intellect and die to this world.” This was going swimmingly, she thought—and then she saw the Devil in Netzach and the Nine of Swords reversed in Yod. The rest of the Tree was even worse: the Tower in Yesod and the Lovers reversed (of course!) in Malkuth. Not a cup or a pentacle anywhere.
“You’re going to emerge as a much stronger man,” she said weakly.
“That isn’t what you see,” Drake said. “And it isn’t what I see. The Devil and the Tower together are a pretty destructive pair, aren’t they?”
“I suppose you know what the Lovers reversed means, too?” she asked.
“‘The Answer of the Oracle Is Always Death,’” he quoted.
“But you won’t accept it.”
“The only way to conquer Death—until science produces an immortality pill—is to make him your servant, your company cop,” Drake said calmly. “That’s the key I’ve been looking for. The bartender never becomes an alcoholic, and the high priest laughs at the gods. Besides, the Tower is rotten to the core and deserves to be destroyed.” He pointed abruptly to the Fool. “You have some real talents obviously—even if you do cheat like everybody in this racket—and you must know there are two choices after crossing the Abyss. The right-hand path and the left-hand path. I seem to be headed for the left-hand path. I can see that much, and it confirms what I already suspect. Go ahead and tell me the rest of what you see; I’m not afraid to hear it.”
“Very well.” Mama wondered if he was one of the few, the very few, who would eventually come to the attention of the Shining Ones. “You will make Death your servant, as a tactic to master him. Yours is, indeed, the left-hand path. You will cause immense suffering—especially to yourself at first. But after a while you won’t notice that; after a while you won’t even notice the horrors that you inflict on others. Men will say that you are a materialist, a worshipper of money. What do you hate most?” she asked abruptly.
“Sentimental slop and lies. All the Christian lies in Sunday school, all the democratic lies in the newspapers, all the socialist lies our so-called intellectuals are spouting these days. Every rotten, crooked, sneaking, hypocritical deception people use to hide from themselves that we’re all still hunting animals in a jungle.”
“You admire Neitzsche?”
“He was crazy. Let’s just say I have less contempt for him, and for DeSade, than I have for most intellectuals.”
“Yes. So we know what the Tower is that you will destroy. Everything in America that smacks of democracy or Christianity or socialism. The whole façade of humanitarianism from the Constitution onward to the present. You will turn your fire loose and burn all that up with your Leonine energies. You will force your view of America into total reality, and make every citizen afraid of the jungle and of the death that lurks in the jungle. Crime and commerce are moving closer together, due to Prohibition; you will complete their marriage. All, all this, just to make Death your servant instead of your master. The money and power are just incidental to that.”
NO—because even if you think you have it beat even if you think you can work out a reconciliation a separate peace I mean shit the war still goes on No you’re only kidding yourself Even say I love Simon and that’s all Hollywood bullshit you can’t really tell in only one week no matter how good it is but even if I love Simon the war goes on as long as we’re going around in separate skins White Man Black Man Bronze Man White Woman Black Woman Bronze Woman even if Hagbard claims to have gotten past all that on his submarine it’s only because they’re under the water and away from the world Out here the bastards are using live ammunition like it says in the old joke Maybe that’s the only truth in the world Not the Bibles or poetry or philosophy but just the old jokes Especially the bad jokes and the sad jokes No they’re using live ammunition I mean shit they never see me all of them White Man Black Man Bronze Man White Woman Black Woman Bronze Woman they look at me and I’m in their game I have my role I am Black Woman I am never just me No it goes on and on every step upward is a step into more hypocrisy until the game is stopped completely and nobody has found out how to do that No the more Simon says that he does see me the more he’s lying to himself No he never makes it with White Woman because she’s too much like his mother or some damned Freudian reason like that I mean shit No I can’t go on in their game I am going to scream with rage I am going to scream like an eagle I am going to scream in the ears of the whole world until somebody does see me until I am not Black Woman and not Black and not Woman and nothing No nothing justme No they’ll say I’m giving up love and sanity Well fuck them fuck them all No I won’t turn back the acid has changed everything No at the end of it when I really am me maybe then I can find a better love and a better sanity No but first I have to find me
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 74
