Andy nodded. “Oh, my back,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, this is murder!”
And then, despairingly, he said, “I wish I was dead.”
23
Andy watched the door close.
He was alone.
It was very good to be alone. The idea of being alone excited him. There was no one to watch him now, no one to snap at him and yell at him, no one to see. He was alone, and that was how he wanted to be, and yet the apartment was deathly still and ominously bleak, and he dreaded his aloneness while relishing it. Alone, he thought. Alone. He rubbed his fists into his eyes.
His eyes burned very badly now. His body ached as if someone had spread him on a medieval torture rack. He could feel the aching, and the burning of his eyes, and the headache, and the itching, and the words “cold turkey” rushed through his mind over and over again until he could almost see the plucked turkey hanging in a butchershop, stripped of everything but its flesh, naked to the world.
He was naked to the world.
He had thrown it all away, all of it, and now he was naked to the world, trying to wipe the slate clean, and it seemed in his aloneness that he would never wipe it clean, never in a million years, never in a million light-years. He was alone and naked, and he was sick. And he knew why he was sick.
He was sick because he’d taken a shot, and now there was nothing else to take. He was sick, and he was very low. He was so low he had to reach up to tie his shoelaces. There was a monkey on his back, and, gee, ain’t that a jazzy way of saying it, real gone, a little organ grinder’s monkey in a sharp red jacket perched on his back. How clever, how George, these hopheads sure know how to put things, hey!
But it’s not a monkey, kid, it’s not a cute little organ grinder’s monkey at all. There’s no tambourine involved here, kid, and you don’t feed this monkey with pennies left over from an ice-cream soda, kid, because he’s not a monkey at all.
He’s a gorilla.
I don’t know if you know very much about gorillas, kid. Gorillas aren’t very friendly animals, not my gorilla. I tell you the truth, I don’t know anything about the African variety of gorilla, I only know the New York variety, the kind who is on my back. He’s not friendly at all. He gets angry as hell for no good reason, and he’s liable to rip you all to pieces with his sharp teeth and sharp claws if you don’t feed him.
And it costs a lot of money to feed this gorilla of mine.
He’s got a special-type diet, and there are men trained to prepare his food, and they’ll give you all the food you want — provided you have the money. You have to have the money because this gorilla, he’s pretty attached to you, you know? He’s right there on your back, and he’s very heavy, not like an organ grinder’s monkey at all. He’s so heavy that sometimes you think you’ll fall flat on your face from carrying him, flat to the sidewalk, and he’ll still be on your back, smelling of gorilla sweat, smothering you with his jungle breath. He never gets off your back. He sits there with his sharp little fangs, and he looks almost human, this gorilla of mine, but he’s not human at all, he’s the most inhuman beast there is.
And he gets so hungry, so very goddamned hungry, and when he begins to bellow for his food, dad, you’ve got to go out and get the loot. It doesn’t matter how you get it. You can hock everything but your shoes, and you can hock those, too, the gorilla doesn’t care. He hears those fellows out in the kitchen banging their dishes, and he knows they’re mixing up his lunch, and he’s so goddamn hungry that his stomach is aching. If you’ve got nothing to hock, he doesn’t care about that either, because this gorilla, you understand, he doesn’t think like everyday human beings do. He’s not a person, you know, he’s just a jungle beast, so he doesn’t know about hocking things, and he doesn’t care, so long as he eats. So if you’ve got nothing to hock, you steal. If you have a gorilla, I can guarantee that you will steal. You will steal, and you will mug, and you will roll, and you will mingle with the scum of the earth, you will do anything to feed that gorilla because he is the boss, and not you.
He is giving the orders. And he only wants to eat.
I wish I had known all about gorillas a long time ago. I wish I had known because then I wouldn’t ever have wanted one for a pet. Of course, gorillas have little brothers, and the little brothers could be called monkeys, and maybe that’s what you had in mind, kid, the little monkeys called reefers. They are cute as hell, kid, I’ll admit that. These little reefer monkeys are just so adorable you could squeeze them to death. And they don’t hurt you, do they? No, not much. So go ahead. Have one.
And kid, you are meeting the gorilla family. Kid, you are having a grand-scale introduction. You are on the way to mainlining it. Kid, you are getting hooked, kid, because you are not chicken and because you are not afraid of cute little monkeys. And once you’re hooked, your worries are over. You’re just not a person any more.
When you’re hooked, you’re dead.
It takes a lot of guts to make yourself dead, kid, more guts than you think, more guts than you were thinking of when you grabbed that cute little bammie. When you are dead, there is nothing but heroin. There’s a big H written across the sky, and that’s all there is. H, and it doesn’t stand for heroin, it stands for Hell.
There’s nothing brave about being in Hell. There’s nothing brave about it at all. And you won’t think you’re being brave, you won’t think anything, you will only think of H. And all the advantages of being alive will simply disappear because there’s nothing to your death but H. You will eat it, and drink it, and sleep it, and think it. And nothing else. You will not want a girl, or a car, or clothes, or movies, or beaches, or talk, or music, or anything but H. That is it. You will slowly and surely and without doubt sink into the gutter with your gorilla on your back.
There is shit in the gutter, my friend.
And the man who feeds your gorilla will drag you face first through the shit, and if you like the taste of human excrement, then being dead is for you. Being dead is wanting, wanting, wanting.
You will wake up wanting heroin and go to bed wanting it, if you go to bed. You will always and ever want it, and there will be no other thought in your mind but heroin. There will be a single purpose to your life, and your every waking minute is devoted to that purpose, and that doesn’t leave time for anything else, not even thinking about anything else, it does not leave time for anything but H, there aren’t enough hours in a day, you are married to H, you are married to death, you are married to the fat bastards who are eating steaks in fancy restaurants on the nickels and dimes and pennies you scraped up for them, the loot you dug up to feed your gorilla.
You are a sucker, my friend.
So come on. Get brave!
He lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He needed something.
No, he thought, I don’t!
I’m through being a sucker, I’m through with it all, but, Jesus, I need something. He rose abruptly and went to the record player. The hell with Buddy-boy, he thought. The hell with him and his goddamn orders, I’m playing these records, and if he doesn’t like it, he can stuff it. He put the Kenton album on the turntable and then turned the volume up full. The music slammed into the apartment and he felt suddenly better. He listened to the moody brass of “Concerto to End All Concertos,” and he found himself moving his lips with the horns, tonguing with them, going through the motions. I can think better now, he thought. I can think better with all this sound around me, you have to have music around you, music makes a nice high wall, and you can add to the wall when you’re blowing. A big fat wall, especially when it’s loud, and Christ it is loud this morning, blast away, Stan!