Think of something else, he panted. As soon as he would get to 119th Street, duck down into a cellar, anybody’s cellar: Take a leak. Between Madison and Park. Owoo. Jack and Jill went up the hill — No! Yes. That made it easier. Jill was Jack’s sister. So up he got and home did trot. Yeah, yeah. He got into bed, he got into bed, he got into bed; my poor brother, she said, my poor brother, she said. . So. . My poor brother, she said. Hurry up before. . Where was their mother? Where was their father? So hurry up before: working in the delicatessen store. Puffing, he reached 119th Street. Get home. Just a little more. That holds it back. Get home before. Gee, a kid, when you could stand on the curb and pee. But now that sticking out; but even without. Hurry up! Park Avenue, yeah. Park Avenue, yeah. Under the Cut.
He was running full tilt when he reached Park Avenue, dashed under the trestle, past the cross-braced pillars: Right here; peed a hundred times here— But suddenly he had to dodge a car speeding toward him out of uptown shadows, a shadow itself without lights. He was duly cursed at by the driver — and afforded respite by his own start of fear, his own scare. Chest still heaving, he slowed his gait to a walk. All right. Nearly home.
Against the background of twilight to the east, indigo above the black band of the Third Avenue El, Weasel stood in front of the tenement stoop whirling a tin can on a loop of wire, flames spurting from vents in the bottom. Odor of woodsmoke conjured up sadly a lost state, past autumns when he’d done the same.
“I seen you runnin’ in front o’ the auto. You wanna look out,” Weasel said. Weasel himself walked with a limp; he had tried jumping from the stoop stairs to the cellar floor, and broken his foot.
“Yeah, the bastid didn’t have any lights till just before. I didn’t even see him,” Ira said.
“What wuz you runnin’ for?”
“I had to take a leak.” Ira raised his hand in parting.
“Go down the cellar,” said Weasel. “Why don’tcha go down the cellar?”
“Nah, I’m nearly up to my house already.”
“Go on down the cellar,” said Weasel. “It’s faster. Come on, I’m goin’ down, too.” He set his little improvised oven on the curb.
And suddenly the urgency returned — imperiously. Ira shoved the wrought-iron gate open before him, ran down the cellar steps, tore open his fly, and began urinating against the wooden, battered cellar door. Weasel followed.
XXX
I would like to finish that, Ecclesias. I have so much to do: puttering mostly: a new window fan to install; a knob to affix to the copper teakettle lid, which my darling M forgot and left empty on top of a high-gas flame (the copper looks as if it had smallpox now); and some sort of shelf beneath the stand on which I’ve set the printer, a shelf that would hold the box of fanfold paper. Such things. And I have already spent part of the morning — of April 17, ’85, a Wednesday — at Entre, the shop where I bought the IBM PC jr., on which I learned to use the word processor. In another hour from now I leave, or rather, M will drive me in the car to Dr. David B, my rheumatologist, for a general checkup and the renewal of a few prescriptions, Percodan, mainly, a strong analgesic, which requires a new prescription each time renewed. So the day is and is about to be spent, and I shall scarcely have to get done with this disagreeable incident, alas, more than disagreeable: odious.
The damned things that happen to innocence, or ignorance, in the slums, that happen in alien slums, in heterogeneous ones, that probably might not have happened in homogeneous ones, at least, so I fancy, in ones dominated by orthodoxy, like the East Side, or by folkways, like Little Italy. And of course, they wreak havoc with the personality. That does not exclude similar traumatic episodes that may affect scions of the middle-class or the wealthy; given the terrible vulnerability, impressionableness of pubescence that exempts no one from irreparable damage at that period in life. I wonder how such things are dealt with in China, the Soviet Union, in other socialist states?
I am grateful for this electronic device. My gratitude should be extended or generalized into gratitude for modern science or technology (I write this the following day), despite the detractors of modern science and technology, such as one whose pronouncements I read recently, whose name I have forgotten for the moment but it is well known, who seems able to solve the Joycean three-dimensional crossword puzzle with relative ease, but referred to the personal computer as so much expensive junk cluttering up the house — or words to that effect. The gentleman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The short period of discipline necessary to gain sufficient control over the device has repaid itself immeasurably (nor do I believe I speak for myself only); it has made possible a new — or renewed — bond between the one who would express his feelings and thoughts and the vehicle for that expression.
Even the preliminary fussing, sometimes less, sometimes more, required to set the “machinery” in motion: the slightly disconcerting message of “BOOT FAILURE,” or even when all goes well, the routine requests for time and date and the need to answer them, the ascertaining of the number of “bytes” still available on the disk, provide a warming-up process for the mind as well, for the incomparably more subtle organic computer in front of the electronic one. What is man’s future? One cannot help asking oneself, coming away from radio dispatches of battles between two Moslem sects in Lebanon, leaving some fifty dead and three times that number wounded — at the same time as men in space dramatically attempt, though they fail, to reactivate a nonfunctioning satellite. Will man’s cortex prevail over his hypothalamus?
And so many other notions, considerations, come up between the writer and his narrative, beginning in the morning, notions drifting through the mind, as M helps her rheumatically wracked husband sit up in bed, plants a morning kiss of affirmation on a brow, grotesque, I’m sure, in its graphic signals of pain: What to do about all those people, all those “characters” I have introduced here, dealt with, whose ends I know, and others to come, whom I have survived in the flesh and won’t in the narrative; and of the years I shall never live to deal with, nor care to, for that matter, years following my marriage to M, years in machine shops and tool rooms during the Second World War, years, vicissitudes in Maine, and the four-year tenure of employment in a psychiatric hospital in Augusta, the years spent raising waterfowl, the years of M’s and my ludicrous, bitter summer seasons with our pathetic, feckless, impossible tenant: Pop, my father. . years that I shall not have time for, that I shall not have time to attempt to render into literary form. M (who is at her desk this moment writing music — to meet a deadline: that of submitting it to her coach this coming Saturday) — M is all about me, M is part and parcel of my consciousness. She is part and parcel of the trials and tribulations of my attaining to my present consciousness. She, more than anyone, confers the kind of purpose that holds me to my task as a writer; she imbues me with a sense of worth, and above all, unity, a mighty fortress that defends the present from the past.
XXXI
Two streams of urine flowed in an intertwining chain down obscure door and jamb, dripped to gritty threshold. “You got a piss hard-on, ain’t ye?” Weasel observed.
“Yeah, ye can see? I couldn’t help it.”
“You pull off a lot?”
“No.”
“You don’t?”