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The meat balk devoured, the paper napkin carefully thrown on the floor, belching a trifle and not knowing why or whither, I step out into the 24 carat sparkle and with the theatre pack. This time I wander through the side streets following a blind man with an accordion. Now and then I sit on a stoop and listen to an aria. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy. The woman who accompanies the blind man holds a tin cup in her hands; he is a part of life too like the tin cup, like the music of Verdi, like the Metropolitan Opera House. Everybody and everything is a part of life, but when they have all been added together, still somehow it is not life. When is it life, I ask myself, and why not now? The blind man wanders on and I remain sitting on the stoop. The meat balls were rotten: the coffee was lousy, the butter was rancid. Everything I look at is rotten, lousy, rancid. The street is like a bad breath; the next street is the same, and the next and the next. At the comer the blind man stops again and plays “Home to Our Mountains”. I find a piece of chewing gum in my pocket -1 chew it. I chew for the sake of chewing. There is absolutely nothing better to do unless it were to make a decision, which is impossible. The stoop is comfortable and nobody is bothering me. I am part of the world, of life, as they say, and I belong and I don't belong.
I sit on the stoop for an hour or so, mooning. I come to the same conclusions I always come to when I have a minute to think for myself. Either I must go home immediately and start to write or I must run away and start a wholly new life. The thought of begi
At the rail which fences off the floor I stand and watch them sailing around. This is no harmless recreation… this is serious business. At each end of the floor there is a sign reading “No Improper Dancing Allowed”. Well and good. No harm in placing a sign at each end of the floor. In Pompei they probably hung a phallus up. This is the American way. It means the same thing. I mustn't think about Pompei or I'll be sitting down and writing a book again. Keep moving Henry. Keep your mind on the music. I keep struggling to imagine what a lovely time I would have had if I had the price of a string of tickets, but the more I struggle the more I slip back. Finally I'm standing knee-deep in the lava beds and the gas is choking me. It wasn't the lava that killed the Pompeians, it was the poison gas that predpitated the eruption. That's how the lava caught them in such queer poses, with their pants down, as it were. If suddenly all New York were caught that way – what a museum it would make! My friend MacGregor standing at the sink scrubbing his cock… the abortionists on the East Side caught red-handed … the nuns laying in bed and masturbating one another … the auctioneer with an alarm in his hand … the telephone girls at the switchboard … J. P. Morganana sitting on the toilet bowl placidly wiping his ass … the dicks with rubber hoses giving the third degree … strippers giving the last strip and tease…