PARTISAN REVIEW
199
proof room two detectives lectured me on the American way of
life, and I was charged with the crime of nothing.
A.
New York cop
told me that detectives were called "defectives."
I had an automobile accident. I did the mambo.
In Ann Arbor, a few years before the advent of Malcolm X, a
lot of my friends were black. After Malcolm X almost all my
friends were white and they admired John F. Kennedy.
In the fifties I smoked marijuana, hash, and opium. Once I
drank absinthe. Once I swallowed twenty glycerine caps of peyote.
The social effects of "drugs," unless sexual, always seemed tedi–
ous. But I liked people who inclined the drug way. Especially if
they didn't proselytize. I listened to long conversations about the
phenomenological weirdness of familiar reality and the great spir–
itual questions this entailed--for example, "Do you think Wallace
Stevens is a head?"
I witnessed an abortion.
I was godless; I thought the fashion of intellectual religiosity
more despicable and wished that I could live in a culture rather
than study life among the cultured.
I drove a Chevy Bel Aire eight-five miles per hour on a two–
lane blacktop. It was nighttime. Intermittent thick white fog made
the headlights feeble and diffuse. Four others in the car sat with
the strict, silent rectitude of catatonics.
If
one of them didn't
admit to being terrified we were all dead. A Cadillac, doing a
hundred miles per hour, passed us and was obliterated in the fog. I
slowed down.
I drank old fashioneds in the apartment of my friend Julian.
We talked about Worringer and Spengler. We gossiped about
friends. Then we left to meet our dates. There was more drinking.
We all climbed trees, crawled in the street, and went to church.
Julian walked into an elm, smashed his glasses, vomited on a lawn,
and returned home to memorize Anglo-Saxon grammatical forms.
I ended on my knees, vomiting into a toilet bowl, repeatedly
flushing the water to hide my noises. Later I phoned New York so
that I could listen to the voices of my parents, their Yiddish, their
English, their logics.
I knew a professor of English who wrote impassioned sonnets
in
honor of Henry Ford.
