The Abyss of Human Illusion (7 page)

— XXXIX —

TO THE EDITOR:

S
heldon Dufoy’s letter to last week’s “Faith Base” section was in very poor taste and lacking of good sense and education in the Christian religion field. The Bible tells all Christians who are true Christians that there is no way of entering Heaven unless you are born again and accepting Jesus Christ in your heart as the only true Lord of the Universe, be it vast or otherwise, it does not matter for the Lord God is all Supreme.

There is no other god or gods, and Mohammed (or Allah), Moses, Talmud, Buddha, Zen, Hindu Deity, and others, for instance, of the Eskimos, Africans, Bushmen, Pygmies, and so on are, are all false gods that lead nowhere but to everlasting torture in the fiery flames of Hell forever in eternity, Mr. Dufoy’s secular humanistic beliefs and fashionable liberal ideas are not based on the Holy Bible, which alone, he might not be aware of, is the Word of God.

As for the translation of God’s word maybe being not accurate and so, therefore, not the true Word of God, as was spoken by Him or Jesus Christ, his son, Mr. Dufoy should know, to lighten up his ignorance, that the Almighty God or Jesus sometimes was at the side of King James and his helpers as they labored, in spirit and giving them strength in their labors. It is almost amusing to read such displays of ignorance however, but I hope that Mr. Dufoy soon asks God into his heart, for Jesus, is always standing by miraculously every single person at the same time, waiting for such an invitation, even though it may be given by a Jewish person, despite what they have done to Him over the thousands of years ever since Adam and Eve. He forgives even them and their crucifixion of Him, hard though it is for, He is the lord of forgiveness and a great Boss, no matter how small it may seem or unimportant.

This letter was found in the desk drawer of its author some few weeks after a massive stroke led to his death outside the Pinto movie theater, which establishment he had just exited. The film playing at the time was
Hot Bottoms,
starring J’Adore Vegas. The letter was tucked into an addressed, stamped, but not sealed envelope. In another drawer of the same desk there was discovered some 1,500 pages of pornographic writings by the same author, rife with solecisms, tattered grammar, bad spelling, and a syntax seemingly borrowed from a lost language.

Notable in this work of erotica—apparently a series of linked amorous adventures—is the presence of a recurring female character, a “quivering,” “shameless,” “tremballing,” “moaning,” “large-breasted,” and “full-lipsed” young woman, who, the patient reader is told, over and over again, looks exactly like Julia Roberts, and who often has “depraved” and “perverted” sex with other women, all of whom bear the name of the deceased author’s wife, Myrna.

When told of the discovery of this venereal cache, Myrna unhesitatingly averred that Satan was certainly the author of such filthy material, for her husband—and, as his wife, she could, she said, testify to this—knew absolutely nothing about sex. “I could tell you some stories,” she remarked, and then fell silent.

Satan’s evil literature was burned at a ceremony conducted by the White-Robed Ladies of the choir of the Lamb’s Blood Ministries, Inc., Church, in the parking lot, to cries of “Amen!,” “Jesus!,” and “Yes!,” wails of joy, and the loud clashing of tambourines. The purification ceremony was followed by a buffet luncheon in the church’s basement, where the pastor, Ellsworth Roy Womp, noticed how her White Robe flattered Myrna’s figure.

— XL —

H
e is driving his father’s Fleetwood sedan to the latter’s house, which is near a beach that he somewhat imprecisely recalls. He is driving because his father, while he seems to be strong and alert, is an old man who has had some minor road accidents of late, “moving violations,” as they are officially called. But when he stops to get gas, his father, without a word, gets behind the wheel and takes over the driving.

After traveling perhaps ten or twelve miles, his father turns the Cadillac off the highway into a sparsely wooded area from which a faint dirt road leads into scrub woods and dry grass. His father, without hesitation, takes this road, and suddenly accelerates, so that they are traveling at high speed. He has the idea, which comes to him calmly, that his father wants to kill both of them and he understands why, but says nothing. His father is smiling, pleased and smug and oddly youthful in manner and appearance.

The car bursts out of the woods and the dirt road suddenly becomes a well-paved one, smooth and straight. It appears to be the main street of a small, falsely picturesque seaside town, quaint shops and art galleries seemingly everywhere. Yet on their right is a carton-like building made of gray concrete slabs, some ten stories tall, and in the final stages of construction. On a sixth-story scaffolding, a construction worker is performing oral sex on what seems to be a businessman, who bites the handle of his briefcase in sexual pleasure. The building, in its fierce ugliness, is wholly out of place in the cutely fake little town. A sign near the outdoor freight elevator reads NEPTUNES BAYE ESTATES. His father ignores the building and remarks that this is a very nice town, clean and quiet and right on the water, even though the people who live here are for the most part disgusting fanatic Christians who believe that God speaks to them. At the end of the street lies a glistening stretch of what looks to be a bay edged by a strip of white sand. “Look how the clear blue water sparkles and glitters!” his father says. “Just the place for the family to kick back and
enjoy!
Work? What’s that?” He looks at his father in astonishment.

They reach the end of the street and his father makes a left, to continue driving, now parallel to the dazzling beach, which is comfortably crowded with people taking the sun or moving into the calm waters to wade or swim. “You can keep your fabled New Jersey,” his father says, looking at the beach. Among the people at the water’s edge are, surprisingly, a number of men who are fishing, casting their lines as fishermen do everywhere. He says to his father that it seems a strange place to fish, since whatever fish may possibly have been in the water hereabouts are most certainly gone, driven away by all the splashing and clamor. His father replies that these fish are used to noise and people and don’t mind a bit, they come close in to shore to eat the leftover food that the people invariably cast into the water, “actually, surf,” his father says. “Don’t be surprised, by the way, to learn that the construction worker back there is really a famous movie star.” Just then, one of the fishermen’s lines goes taut with an obvious strike, and he finds that he is very pleased.

They get out of the car and sit under some trees at the edge of the beach farthest from the water. He says that he remembers that his father landed the largest blue marlin ever caught off the Florida coast, and his father smiles and nods, delighted that his son has remembered this. He says that he told one of his students about his father’s catch and that she was very impressed. His father is looking at him with tender, impossibly tender love, and he feels, at that moment, overwhelming, crushing sadness and loss, deep and irremediable, and he begins to cry and wakes, crying.

— XLI —

A
l’s wife had left him for a casual friend, the owner of a chain of bathroom-furnishings stores in the Midwest—a man whom Al had always casually despised. He was unprepossessing in every way—short, dumpy, with thick-lensed glasses, a high, whining voice, bow legs and acne scars. His sense of humor was so perfectly blunted that it seemed as if he had been born with an “a-comedic” gene. To make his lack of graces and charm even more pronounced—at least to Al—he had, as a Jew, no sense of or interest in his putative religion, yet had become a passionate, even slightly crazed defender of Israel, as if that state’s fortunes and security had something important to do with his gray life. To listen to him “on Israel,” was, according to Al, to be trapped in a weird Jackie Mason monologue, sans timing or even that performer’s weary shtick. Al thought of his rants as “enoughness already.”

After Al and Ginny’s divorce become final, it became clear to him—or, let us say, he admitted it to himself with qualification, that she had married Norman Shin Bet for his money. That he had earlier refused to consider this seriously, as they say, may reveal the “credit” that he gave his wife’s motives; perhaps she really did love the grotesque? But no, it was the money, it had to be the money. Her—Al’s and her—two daughters were now attending private schools in Westchester, they took riding lessons and were both on a brilliantly snobbish swim team that practiced in an Olympicsize pool when they weren’t sneering at everything and pretending not to be Jewish. As for Ginny, the last time he had seen her, when she’d come to pick up the girls from his rattrap apartment on Avenue A, she was wearing a tweed coat as beautifully tailored as it was exquisitely soft and elegantly draped, and a pair of knee boots of dark-brown velvety suede. How he loathed her, how he loathed her coat and her boots and her goddamned smug, suddenly different, rich face.

His attitude became darker and more acidic as time passed. He no longer cared that he’d lost his bitch whore of a wife and his two snotty daughters, nor did he care that she’d left him for the Frog King, the fucking Jew bastard, the sweaty kike whose family, Al
knew,
had smelled of stale sweat and fish before the money rolled in. What he cared about was that
she
had got the money and he’d got
nothing!
And yet he’d been ordered to pay child support to her and Norm, miserable Norm! They must have laughed themselves sick whenever his pitiful check arrived in the mail. “The measly check is here!” he’d no doubt say, the fat little prick! “Ha ha ha! How
will
we ever spend it all? Shrimp lo mein?”

One day, Al bought three gallons of the darkest green paint that he could find in Kamenstein’s, Forest Green, although it was truly the color of hell. Over the course of two or three days, he painted his entire apartment, including the ceilings, this sepulchral green, a green so gloomy and bleak that it seemed the representation of utter despair, a suicidal color, if one can call it a color, for it was somehow blacker than black. Those friends he had left—those few who could tolerate his rantings about the goddamn Jews this and the fucking kike bastards that—made no mention of what was this anteroom of insanity. A remark here and there by Al seemed to indicate that he had stepped into that state, although he said that he had “changed” his apartment to assure himself that he was not
yet
mad; for if the rooms filled him with dread, that dread was, so he said, a sign of hope that he would one day come to terms with the hurt that had been done him: if he could stand living here, he could stand anything. He suggested that the vile darkness of his place gave him a frisson of—what?—life, perhaps. Nothing could be worse than the wretchedness that he had constructed to enclose him. He was not yet dead if he could survive this tomb.

— XLII —

H
ere is a man, placed, when he was but eight years old, into an orphanage by his father, a man overwhelmed by the necessity of raising, alone, three children, while denying, for a year and a half, the fact that his wife had gone totally insane. The boy was selected, so to say, by his father, on what can only be called a whim. And so off he went to the orphanage, while his siblings lived on with their father in the small frame house in Troy. He was more or less ignored by his family, and after a few years, forgotten.

In 1942, he was permitted to leave the orphanage, a year earlier than decreed by law, so that he could join the army, which he discovered to be very much like the orphanage. He fought through Europe with the Second Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army, was wounded three times, and was discharged early in 1945,on points. After holding a job as an assistant manager in a relative’s floor-covering business, he enrolled, for some wholly obscure reason, in a Baltimore art school, and the moment he put a brush to canvas, knew what he was meant to do with his life, his time, with everything. The paint would occult, with color and texture, his family, silently; perhaps even kill them. And so he became a painter.

His relationships with women were ephemeral and unsatisfactory. He wanted to be humiliated, embarrassed, shamed—he wanted to be dominated, but his desires were far removed from the carnal. He wished to be erased. It was, or so he must have thought, all he was good for, as hopeless as he was, as unhappy as he was, as useless as he was. In the orphanage, ignored by his father and his hateful siblings, and unremembered by his crazy mother, he had seen the routine sadisms of the institution as small deliverances. But in the army, through the years of blood and agony and horror, the severed limbs and shit and pus of ceaseless death, he had not even been
present
enough to be killed, to become another cipher. That he became a good painter, a very good painter, meant, of course, nothing, insofar as his happiness was concerned. He was a very good artist choked with misery.

He could not ask the women who passed through his life to shame and debase him, he had no words to ask these things, and, perhaps, he had no true sense of
what
he wanted. He did not avail himself of professional women who could have relieved him, for that would have been different, grossly erotic; he needed someone who cared for him, however fragile that caring might have been, to insult and demean him. He wished to be humiliated by a friend; a gentle friend.

Perhaps with the knowledge that he was sublimating his deepest desires, addressing and satisfying them in some vague and peripheral way, or perhaps not, he chose—this was long before he had a regular dealer or gallery—he chose to make a living by working as a waiter. He complained to everyone he knew about how terrible a job it was, how he loathed it, how he would get back to his studio too exhausted to paint (this was not true), how he’d rather do anything else, and so on. But he loved the work, loved being shouted at by the chefs, the head waiters, the bartenders; he loved being treated contemptuously by so many of the diners, whom he thought of as foul, slobbering pigs, their money earning them a place at the expensive trough and the absolute right to insult and harry this cheap-tuxedo-wearing slave, this lackey, this zero. When he watched them eat, his stomach would turn over with nausea, and he would be obscurely delighted that these swine had power over him.

He loved it, he wanted it. He needed it. It was precisely what he was worth, it was all he was worth. It was a wife and a mistress, troops of luscious whores, all of them waiting to carry out his depraved, self-abasing orders. To be humiliated. To be embarrassed. To be shamed and shamed again to the core of his being. To be salvaged at last and forever.