The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out
strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the
beach studying the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too -
one of many, many days I spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that
really seemed to make the wheel stop. On the surface it was jolly and happy
go lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But underneath it was
fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless. I knew
very well I'd have to make a break some day; I knew very well I was pissing
my time away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do about it -
yet. Something had to happen, something big, something that would sweep me
off my feet. All I needed was a push, but it had to be some force outside my
world that could give me the right push, that I was certain of. I couldn't
eat my heart out, because it wasn't in my nature. All my life things had
worked out all right - in the end. It wasn't in the cards for me to exert
myself. Something had to be left to Providence - in my case a whole lot.
Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew
that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown
too. The external situation was bad, admitted - but what bothered me more
was the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite,
my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my
geniality, my powers of adaptation. No situation in itself could frighten
me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup,
as it were and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung in jail I had a hunch
I'd enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other
people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy
was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn't bother me nearly so
much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so
damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. And
that's why I was in a mess all the time. I wasn't synchronized with my own
destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got
home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not
even for the kid, I would turn right around and go looking for the food. But
what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no
sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the
Weltanschauung again. I didn't think of food for us exclusively, I thought
of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that
hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if
they didn't have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that
everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such
an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but
also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian Bushmen, not to
mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. I felt sorry
for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination.
Missing a meal wasn't so terrible - it was the ghastly emptiness of the
street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like
another, and all so empty and cheerless-looking. Fine paving stones under
foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and
beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy
could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be
looking for a crust of bread. That's what got me. The incongruousness of it.
If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell "Listen, listen,
people, I'm a guy what's hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the
garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?" If you could
only go out in the street and put it to them dear like that. But no, you
don't dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you're hungry
you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That's something I never
understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple - you
just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can
take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to
don a uniform and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread,
is a mystery to me. That's what I think about, more than about whose trap
it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what
anything costs ? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what
the bastards don't want you to do - to live! They want you to spend your
whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable.
That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly
perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit in your
pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn't be macadamized roads and
streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million-billion
varieties, maybe there wouldn't even be glass in the windows, maybe you'd
have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn't be French cooking and
Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when
their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there
wouldn't be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn't be
any cabinet ministers or legislatures because-there wouldn't be any
goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years
to trek from place to place, but you wouldn't need a visa or a passport or a
carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you
wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you
could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own
anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want
to own anything when everything would be free?