Cain’s Book (9 page)

I nodded.

His tone softened as it usually did after he had bawled me out. “I’d stay and help you,” he said, looking at his watch, an inscribed timepiece from the president of the
corporation, “but I’ve got to get over to Brooklyn. There’s a bloody boat sinking over there. Bloody captain’s gone ashore and can’t be found.”

“I’ll get the water out, Irish.”

“OK then, and remember always to report things, Joe. We can claim later then.”

He went away, climbing laboriously over two other scows towards the dock.

– Shit, I thought, work. And Irish knew damn well it wasn’t so easy to report something. If you put in a report you’re putting in a report against the tug captain and you have
to tell him at the time you’re doing so. You are even supposed to get him to initial it. The tug captain can make life a misery for you in a hundred ways, or he can make it easy for you. So
you don’t put in a report if you can avoid doing so.

It was one of those unseasonal days of early February when the sun is shining and it seems as though spring has begun. The river seemed very broad and it was busy with slow-moving tankers,
floating railway stock, and a wide assortment of tugs. The ferry from 42nd Street was moving like an old tramcar towards the Jersey shore. The water at the pier was filthy with all the refuse of
the waterfront, rotting cork, food in varying degrees of decomposition, boxwood, condoms, all coated with scum and oil and dust. A man was working a pneumatic drill at the new heliport. I watched a
few of the other captains go ashore. I would have gone myself after I had pumped out the bilges, but I was broke. – I must do that soon, I thought.

I got up from the bollard on which I had just sat down and returned to the cabin. It hadn’t changed, but I was in the mood to notice things. As soon as I stepped across the threshold out
of the bright winter sun it was into a dirty grey-and-white cabin which was for a split second unfamiliar, and a moment later, after my eyes had adjusted themselves to the dimmer light, I sat down
at the grey table in front of cigarettes, matches, the dregs of a cup of coffee. I opened the drawer and found the pill bottle in which I kept my marijuana. I hesitated. It was not that there was
anything ominous in the thought of turning on; it was, vaguely expressed, a feeling into the possibly profound transition the drug represented, the transition in space, in time, in consciousness.
Whether it was nobler in the mind to do what? And what kind of assassin was slung under the belly of the sheep called nobler?

I looked at my pipe for a long time. It was an object over which I had spent some creative hours. Moulded to the bowl was a small bit of desert wood which I had painted in the colours of heather
and Scots glen. It was shaped like an eagle with an extended wing and was hard and of intricate lacquered surface interesting to close sight and touch. It was a slim, long pipe and I should
describe the workmanship as primitive Cellini.
¹⁰

As I filled the pipe I was already leaning over myself and when I had smoked I was at the brink of an experience I had already described in a note:

I had that familiar feeling of regarding my whole life as leading up to that present moment before which I halted as before a kind of cosmic interrogation mark. At that moment I
was at the mercy of whatever distraction, voices outside, the sound of footsteps, a hooting tug, the sense of my own shadow there in the cabin. It didn’t seem to matter. Whatever increase of
entropy in the external world, my response was relevant. The universe might shrink or expand. I would remain aware, a little pocket of coherence in the city of dreadful night. Or would I? The drug
can be treacherous, leading through all the hollow recesses and caves of panic. An identity slips away and one can no longer choose to be immersed in it, voluptuously to be duped. I remember I was
forced to lie down and close my eyes.

I was unable to return directly to my thoughts, whatever they were, and my former identity paled and disintegrated like the reflection of a receding face on the broken surface of water. If I had
looked in a mirror and seen no reflection there I feel I wouldn’t have been unduly startled. The invisible man... For an indefinite time I existed as passively as a log, and on a correlative
level of experience, as moving sap lives, darkly, in the veins of wood, and then, gradually or suddenly, later, I was involved in a spiritual excitement provoked by some object, still anonymous,
out of the external world, and that naked excitement was both the occasion and the means of my denominating it XYZ to which I was forthwith committed. Thus an identity becomes, and his new created
world.

Kafka said: “My doubts stand in a circle round every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I don’t see the word at all, I invent it.”

...Alone on the scows for long periods of time I sometimes find myself searching for topics to think about, or round, for although I enjoy the certainty of many discoveries, when my thought is
like an engraving of tablets, there are moments... and the present is always suspect... when it is entirely frivolous, when, in barely connected sentences and unresolved paragraphs, I shit idiocy
and wisdom, turd by turd, thinking impressionistically, aware of no valid final order to impose. Whatever I write is written deep into my own ignorance. And I find myself cultivating a certain
crudity of expression, judging it to be essential to meaning, in a slick age vital to the efficacy of language.

It was still morning. At least I supposed so. It occurred to me that I was alone. And then it occurred to me how often that thought occurred to me. Sometimes it was as though I could only come
to exist by writing it down on paper: –
I am sitting alone.
It had occurred to me that I was mad. To stare inwards. To be a hermit, even in company. To wish for the thousandth-making
time for the strength to be alone and play. Immediately there was a flower on my brow, Cain’s flower. Tomean everything and for everything to be a confidence trick, tasting power coming into
being for others; I had often thought that only through play could one taste that power safely, if dangerously, and that when the spirit of play died there was only murder. One could be in
another’s world anyway only indirectly; one had recourse to a kind of expression appropriate to that ambiguity, was masked always, even at the moment of discarding the mask, because for
another the act of exposure stood equally in need of interpretation...

As I lay there it occurred to me that my thoughts were becoming incoherent, which wasn’t unusual. Sustained for a phrase or two, they splintered, and I imagined my mind as a kind of faulty
lavatory system. It flushed unexpectedly and took some time to fill up. And one fill was pretty much identical to the next.

I began to think about Tom.

“
Go away
,” I said to the dog.

A growl came from somewhere near his palpitating underside. – Why, I thought, do I have to put up with this? The dog was just part of it, the last straw; when Tom relaxed and stopped
bugging you... only on horse... the dog came in as an understudy.

In the junkie world there are many such last straws. One finds oneself of necessity giving the other man more latitude. There is no one whom Fay hasn’t burnt. But she continues to see
everyone from time to time, when a man is desperate. Junkies in New York are often desperate. To be a junkie is to live in a madhouse. Laws, police forces, armies, mobs of indignant citizenry
crying mad dog. We are perhaps the weakest minority which ever existed; forced into poverty, filth, squalor, without even the protection of a legitimate ghetto. There was never a wandering Jew who
wandered further than a junkie, without hope. Always moving. Eventually one must go where the junk is and one is never certain where the junk is, never sure that where the junk is is not the
anteroom of the penitentiary. A Jew can stand up and say: “Yes, I am a Jew and these are my persecutors.” There is always a possibility of effective resistance because there were always
some gentiles who were not profoundly shocked when a Jew said: “It is not necessarily bad to be a Jew.” Such tardy hope as is held out to junkies is that one day they will be regarded
not as criminals but as “sick”. When the AMA
¹¹
wins the peonage will be less harsh, but the junkie, like the peon, will still have to buy at
the commissary.

Thus there is a confederacy amongst users, loose, hysterical, traitorous, unstable, a tolerance that comes from the knowledge that it is very possible to arrive at the point where it is
necessary to lie and cheat and steal, even from the friend who gave one one’s last fix.

Tom loves his dog. He wrestles with it. It is for him the only being who doesn’t present a threat. If it ever turns on him he can always kill it. It was the dog that decided me at one time
that I couldn’t live with him. It is an angry extension of himself, a weapon.

Except when we are under heroin our relationship is tense and unpredictable. It is only when I have fixed that I can forgive Tom everything, even the painful slowness, the hothouse movements of
his fixing before me. Tom always fixes before me. He doesn’t insist upon this. He simply observes a common ritual which I have always refused to observe.

Sometimes we make swift covert journeys at night through the backstreets of Harlem to cop. Tom has good contacts in Harlem and he likes to take me along. If you are a member of any underground
in a hostile city it’s good for one’s morale. In the moonlight as we descend the dark stairs which lead downwards through a certain park I wait for him to say: “I go
first.”

I know that he will give me several moments in which to stake the prior claim and I doubt whether he’s ever been convinced that I won’t do so, even though I’ve said to him
again and again that I don’t give a damn who goes first once we’re safely locked up in whatever pad and told him he gave me a pain in the ass when he carried on like that. I’ve
waited for a long time for Tom to say: “You go first, Joe,” but he never has and I doubt if he ever will. I have asked him why the ritual is so important to him. His answer is the usual
one. “You never know when the Man will bust in. If they come, I want to have the shit in me.” But that’s not good enough. It’s not always necessary to be a mouse, even if
you’re a junkie in New York. This kind of promiscuous creation of tension in a situation which is God knows far too intense already makes me very angry.

Unless I am in physical pain it is immaterial to me who goes first. Tom pretends it isn’t that way for him. He’s lying. The urgency doesn’t exist. To pretend that it does is to
prostrate oneself hysterically before a malicious fiction. It is quite unlike the hysteria experienced by all of us in the day-to-day danger of our situation... (coming down the stairs at two
o’clock in the morning onto the deserted subway platform at 125th Street, followed, it seems, by two unidentified men... don’t panic... looking at us now from the other end of the
platform... if they come within ten yards get rid of it). It is a submission to the very ignorance that has led to the branding of the junkie as a social menace.

“Dog,” I said, “you’re a mad dog. I know how you play. If I take that bone away from you you’ll get real mad and bite. Who taught you to bite, dog? You know what
happens in this world to dogs that bite?”

I don’t know what it was that first attracted me to Tom unless it was that I felt him to be attracted to me. We just met, scored, and passed a few days together turning
on. Most of my friends, especially those who don’t use heroin, disliked him from the beginning, and I have often found myself rushing emotionally and intellectually to his defence. At times,
after we had fixed and blown some pot, with a sleek thrust of my own soul, a thrust of empathy, I used to find myself identifying with him. I seldom do it now because Tom bores me nowadays, but I
did so, often. But gradually I came to realize that he didn’t think like I did, that he took my rationalizations too seriously or not seriously enough.

For example, he still talks about kicking, and at the same time he denies that he is hooked, and yet he has agreed with me again and again that if you simply put heroin down you are avoiding the
issue. It isn’t the horse, for all the melodramatic talk about withdrawal symptoms. It is the pale rider.

When Tom says: “I’m gonna kick,” I say: “Bullshit.” He becomes hurt and sullen. He feels I am deserting him. And I suppose I am.

He says he kicked before, the time he went to Lexington.

“Sure, and when you got back here you went straight up to Harlem and copped. A man doesn’t kick, Tom. When he thinks in terms of kicking he’s hooked. There are degrees of
addiction, and the physical part has nothing to do with it. The physical bit comes soon and I suppose that then technically you’re hooked. But with the right drugs you can kick that in a few
days. The degrees of addiction that matter are psychological, like intellectually how long have you been a vegetable? Are you riding the horse or what? The trouble with you, Tom, is that you really
put shit down. You use it most of the time, you dig it, but all the time you’re putting it down, talking about kicking. It’s not the shit that’s got you hooked. You shelve the
problem when you think in those terms. You talk all the time about copping and kicking. Talk about copping. Don’t talk about kicking. Get high and relax. There are doctors, painters, lawyers
on dope, and they can still function. The American people is on alcohol, and that’s much more deadly. An alcoholic can’t function. You’ve got to get up off your ass and stop
believing their propaganda, Tom. It’s too much when the junkies themselves believe it. They tell you it’s the shit and most of the ignorant bastards believe it themselves. It’s a
nice tangible cause for juvenile delinquency. And it lets most people out because they’re alcoholics. There’s an available pool of wasted-looking bastards to stand trial as the
corrupters of their children. It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of
their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies.
John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That’s the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he’s lucky he can creep
round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn’t the junk that made him creep. You’ve got to sing that from the rooftops!”