Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (21 page)

Cabot next read the section headed, “
Swear it, Swear it, U. S. A
.”:

“The great thing about the American consumer is that it is filled before it is ever empty, glutted without knowing the feeling of either hunger or satiety, the organs of America so easily manipulated and ready for any surgical, plastic, or other adjustment the Master Masturbator may believe ready. Thus faggots are in charge of sexual makeup for women and men, stimulating the gonads of baseball players, prizefighters, captains of industry, farmers, and small-town grocery clerks saving up to become drag-queens on Manhattan’s West 72nd Street, to say nothing of decreeing that women shall resemble lead pencils without a hole for refills.”

“The true sexual orgasm in America takes place today in the popcorn bag in the movie theater on your right, before a baseball game on TV while chewing 80 percent fat hamburgers.

“Pleasure died 40 years ago in America, perhaps further back, in a wave of carbon monoxide, gasoline, cigarettes for dames, the belief in everything and everybody, tolerance for the intolerable, the hatred of being alone in silence for more than 20 seconds, the assurance that immortality was Americans eating all-cow franks, with speeded-up peristalsis while talking to a crowd of fifteen trillion other same-bodies eating sandwiches, gassing cokes, peristalsing, and talking, while baseball-sound-movie-TV tomorrow’s trots off-track betting howled roared farted choked gagged exploded reentered atmo honked bawled deafened pawed puked croaked shouted repeated repeated
REPEATED
, especially
SAY IT AGAIN LOUDER SAY IT AGAIN,
stick that product in every God-damned American’s mouth and make him say
I BOUGHT IT, GOD, I BOUGHT IT AND IT
’
S GREAT IT
’
S HOLLYWOOD IT
’
S MY ASS GOING UP AND DOWN AGAIN, IT
’
S USA, GOD,
and if you can’t get it in his mouth and make him swear it swear it usa, stick it in his anal sphincter (look it up in the dictionary, college graduates, on account of you didn’t have time to learn it in the College of Your Choice).”

Under the section of the
Sermons
titled “When the Day was Shorter the Moon was Nearer,” Cabot read of Mr. Warburton’s taking the subway on those rare occasions when his chauffeur was ill, or he was in a crotchety mood and needed anonymity. It was the sight of Miss Subways ads which may have contributed to his suicide. These “girls” in early middle-age, photographed in wigs, wanting to make the grade if the price is right: “I will do anything within the framework of advertising, radio and Money-Street; will mortgage my pudendum and that of my Mother and Sister (the latter a confirmed nun).” Miss Goona Hartshore, for instance, Madonna Subway of the Week, says she has dabbled in pianoforte, handball, easel painting, wigwam handicrafts, advanced underwater breaststroke, and now works in a dental surgeon’s office as bill collector, but of course hopes to make her debut on Broadway soon, with a little luck.

Deafened by the songs and choruses of the laughing hyenas of disk-jockeys blaring out their cancerized larynxes in the corridors leading up out of the underground, Mr. Warburton continued on the case of Miss Subways: “She will consider any reasonable offer. Morals or big salary no obstacle. Sings and dances. Performs normal or irregular coitus. Will do anything, absolutely anything to make her debut. Stop. She has just been informed by the Patriotic Bunting Society that this can be construed as American. Question: “Will coitus be a group sport of the future?”

“You won’t believe me,” one
Sermon
began, “when I tell you because nobody sees American anymore but me, but I’ll tell you anyhow. One day walking down one of the narrowest streets in the Wall Street section, one of my mindless strolls, I stopped before a violet window-display, saw a sign in a private ladies’ Swedish massage parlor, a sign not meant to be seen presumably by the general public, certainly not by men of my walk of life. I saw these words:

“A beautiful potential screen star* whose name cannot be revealed until the house lights go on, not yet 20, will perform the entire operation of scientifically cleaning her anus with our new love-petal facial tissue on our private TV-for-ladies screen. Live. She will demonstrate that only with Love Bloom tissue can one’s fundament be scientifically cleansed but not stimulated or chafed. Learn true scientific daintiness know-how & be safe for that special date or business appointment, ladies. In our Wilma Thomson Memorial Auditorium. 8 star coupons honored in lieu of admission fee.”

And thousands of paragraphs later, Cabot read the section of “Faggot-fever, or virility-fantasy: Common to many a Wall Street executive, many American men are now so unsure of their erectile tissue, their virility, they are afraid to be seen in public in the company of another man or even other men, unless a banquet is in progress. I call it faggot-dementia, a term of my own, as I long ago (ten minutes) planned to sever connection with that Bohemian mountebank on whom the Nazis have bestowed their own mentality, Dr. Bugleford. An executive now should be accompanied by a woman. Any pair of tits will do in a restaurant or lunch-counter. Makes a better impression with silk stockings in public. Fear of reality, America. No country ever put on such a false front over the human mask. And they say it is falling. Fell ages ago. Take this headline: The model agencies complain that the male and female models (faggots all) are still not thin enough, and Dr. Clancy Ridgeway O’Brien Fuchs has settled that, I have just learned, like this. He combs away with a newly invented surgical knife any suggestion of excess flesh on the face, and a little accident of his has spelled fortune for himself and his clients; the agency went mad over it. Fuchs uncovered a bone under the buccinator muscle so that the model was actually photographed showing a tiny bit of his and or her calcium there (this model later posed for all the men’s wear, she is duo-sexual ad-wise). A success everywhere. Most models now undergo this safe and painless surgical operation on their
os zygomaticum
. Their
os nasale
remains covered, I’m informed.”

“Consider these United States,” Mr. Warburton wrote. “It’s the time when the country has less virility than ever before, when the men are more faggoty than all the frogs who ever lived, and the women dyed-in-the-wool irregular anaesthetic whores, and the whole communication media devoted to sex-unsex. All America talks of nothing but sex, my boy, and there isn’t a stiff pecker or a warm box in the house.

“I feel like a man too weak to turn off the radio which goes on through all eternity advertising trading stamps, beer, and tasty fags to Jewish-Negro-hot-box music. Am I responsible for the stinking level of American life to any degree? I must answer, I am. I know what is coming, Wall Street in Moscow or the Congo, New York a Black Metropolis, with the Negroes speaking in an Irish-Jewish-Italian accent, and the few white men left, in the role of male nurses.

“My book of
Sermons
perhaps may be found one day, and the truth told, but I fear not. There will be only the radio advertising purple & blue stamps, and cancer papers. Even garbage will beam radio messages.

“I used to know the rich when the men were men and the women people. I can still see
them
. Can’t really focus on the freak parade that’s them today. And then everybody’s rich who can raise his right hand and screw somebody. Put on your glare-goggles and take a look at them today, see their Florida tan in the winter, their South-American ski-slide burn in the summer, their jewels, their fish-eye gaze, their big air of ‘Heard this before, Joe,’ their mountain sickness from going up to the Waldorf Towers.

“Under all their diets, vitamins & makeup, their reducing-rooms and mental love courses, their 2,000 mile a day travel schedule, today’s rich, skinny as skull and cross bones, look fat and are. They’re fat and getting fatter and the Rich’s secret is to look like anybody today; their children gaunt undernourished, shabbily clad, their model a Harlem pusher. It’s all part of the Rich being bigger and greater, hoggier and nastier than the first Rockefeller, Carnegie or Ford ever dreamed. They want to be in to stay, even if in masquerade, and so they look fatter than ever, dirtier and blacker and more like nobody than nobody who ever lived.”

At the end, Cabot read a baseball hero’s testimony that Warby had clipped from a newspaper: “I try to get my thinking straightened out before every World Series game and during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, I close my eyes. My prayer is gratitude, gratitude I am a citizen of this wonderful U.S.A. and that God has given me the ability to do the thing I like most: Play ball. I don’t believe in asking for help to win.”

“Play ball!” Cabot continued, and suddenly rising, he saluted an imaginary flag. “Peace to your ashes, you mixed up old mummy,” he intoned.

* Goldie Thomas

15

THE YOUNG PHILANTHROPIST

A
fter the death of Mr. Warburton, Mrs. Bickle heard from the rapist’s own lips, Cabot Wright became not only a well-known philanthropist donating rent-free flats to derelicts, but continued his own special philanthropy, raping his victims with disinterest and tender unconcern. The police kept a list of “possible” suspects. Cabot himself might as well have worn a different disguise for each criminal attack, so various were the forms and faces attributed to him by those whom he attacked—a Black Muslim, a Puerto Rican degenerate, a longshoreman amuck on canned heat, an Atlantic Avenue dope addict, an escapee from numerous penitentiaries, and a noted Jewish nightclub comic.

Cabot’s prey always knew his touch, his presence, his tarry laugh, ending in whees and giggles.

He was called the Anonymous Coon, the Kosher Jack, the Eternal Tar Baby, working with his weapon into the far hours of the night. Somebody’s disillusioned lover, husband, daddy, a pimp to the unknown of his own body, who patiently unsheathed his dagger in the night.

Cries echoed cries as dark settled over Brooklyn.

A woman falls behind a hedge and shouts “Mucker!”

They are waiting by the river
,

They are waiting late tonight
,

For his tool is hard as cobalt
,

His dagger gleams like light
.

“Unsheathe your dagger!”

Cries go up as hallelujahs tell everybody it’s happening again. Boats whistle, there is the rumble of the subway down in the guts of Brooklyn, a scavenger lets fall the lid of the garbage can, muggers drop their brass knuckles. “
RAPIST IS OUT! ANONYMOUS COON STRIKES AGAIN.
”

“Many of my victims thanked me, however
,” Cabot went on to remember, still talking to Mrs. Bickle. “Take Bertha McIntosh as an example. Bertha had been connected with the Department of Health for many years, and she was certain that too many people were living under my roof. On the death of Warby, I began filling up my brownstone, which I had purchased, with people, friends, or finally, strangers who needed free rent.

“One early fall morning Bertha McIntosh rang my buzzer. By some odd chance, I had not yet gone to my Wall Street office. My arrest was in the air. I was paring my toenails after having had a really rough time trimming the nails of my right hand—the battle to appear decent in public! Had my Abercrombie and Fitch socks on, but had not adjusted the garters which rested on the cow-hide high shoes I affected, though to tell the truth I walked the Brooklyn Bridge better without them.

“‘Wrong door,’ I told Bertha. She showed her inspector’s badge.

“‘Cup of black?’ I offered her the pot and nodded to a cup and saucer.

“‘Why, maybe I might,’ Bertha McIntosh said. Boldly she poured herself a cup, took it in her hands, ‘I merely wanted a confirmation or denial from you, Mr. Wright, if you were allowing more than three persons to occupy any of your rooms. You are the landlord, I am told.’

“‘Who were you told by?’ I grinned. ‘I mean you make it sound so goddam passive.’ Bertha McIntosh began to feel uneasy when I grinned and giggled.

“‘I don’t rent rooms, Miss McIntosh, sir. This is all church property, so to speak. The Islamic Federation come and go all hours. I don’t receive a penny intake from them or nobody. Hardly hear a word of English all day long and believe you me my English was going downhill the day I moved to Brooklyn. But seriously, unemployment in America has its biggest headquarters right here. I came into an inheritance not long ago. Warby’s suicide you’ve read about. Gilda not expected to live either. Well, take a look at an heir, Bertha, not a landlord.’

“‘To get back to regulations,’ Miss McIntosh said, consulting a sheet of instructions which a superior had handed her that morning. ‘You say you’re on church property here,’ she wrote down the statement.

“‘I’d say so,’ I nodded.

“‘All right then,’ Miss McIntosh tried to smile, showing her bridge. She drank her hot black coffee. I grinned at her.

“‘I could show you some of the church rooms,’ I told her.

“‘You call yourself, I believe I am right in saying this, a philanthropist,’ Miss McIntosh went on. She waited awkwardly for my reply.

“‘Someone has written down here,” she consulted her notes, ‘that you have so listed yourself.’

“‘Where?’ I wondered.

“‘On the telephone,’ Miss McIntosh said. ‘To my superior.’