ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
523
again, and he had that thrill of fright so common to medieval al–
chemists, psychics, drug addicts, and perhaps available to a few of
you: that exquisite terror of sensing oneself at the edge of secrets
no other being has been brave enough to invade. For there it was:
the tips of the fingers were for touch, as indeed was the snail valve
(obliged to close at the lick of danger) and so for touch were all the
other natural spirals he knew-he was by profession an accomplished
familiar to the intricate double helix in the vaginal expansion, and
the other holes of women, and for that matter, men; so he accepted
the logic of his intuition: the natural spiral, wherever
it
appeared,
was the mark for a complex of feeling, and if parts of the night sky
disported in a spiral, there was sensation behind them, light years
of space vibrating with sensuality and anguish, desiring . .
.?
But this
was another question, too vast. Temporarily he gave up the investi–
gation-in truth the form of his thought was also spiral: he would
have to make that
all
but circular voyage through experience before
he would come back to contemplate the spiral again.
Which perhaps is why I have chosen
this
way to introduce so
active a man as a master pimp.
If
one is interested to begin to under–
stand one's own life, the first of the useful axioms
is
that genius ap–
pears in all occupations, and as a pimp, Marion Faye was a genius.
The proof is that he made a million dollars in a few years. Just how
is a matter of such interest that it will later concern us in great
detail, for one can explore such minutiae only by discovering the
psychic anatomy of our republic.
Good. He was a millionaire, and still young, and he owned
several houses in different parts of the country and one in Acapulco,
and he had his private plane which he flew himself, and various
cars, accoutrements, servants, jewelries, larders, and investments. Not
to mention several going businesses and the two endowed lovers who
attended him, man and woman. He had done this all in a few
years, after coming out of prison without a penny, and he was of
course not nearly satisfied, at least not at the moment I describe.
Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitions and wide as
the Renaissance in their talents, he had instincts about the nature
of growth, a lover's sense of the moment of crisis, and he knew, per–
haps as well as anyone alive, how costly
is
defeat when it
is
not
soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of
