Last Words

(all Postal Supervisors [should be] armed at all times)

Saturday, December 28, 1997.

Vague dreams.

Well, tried some exercises to uncover past lives. A few nibbles—a voice, a bit petulant and put-upon says:

“Well, I’ve been instructed to show you this.”

And showed me very little.

The old Senseney house at Walton and Pershing. It was Mrs. Senseney who said of me:

“Stay away from it. It is a walking corpse.”

Well, it isn’t every corpse can walk. Hers can’t.

And this walker can still talk.

(Hers can’t, and this corpse can still walk.)

Oh well, not much light. I hope—about lives past or future or present to be found in this tawdry, snobbish, cruel—

How she could toy with a climbing Jewess:

“Oh, Mrs. Senseney, I had such fun at the Wallace party.”

“You were very fortunate, weren’t you.”

The dining room was always cold and dank. The bedroom where she slept, and crept and leapt on some poor Jewess—the stink of it was pure Death. That is, it had no stink at all.

Don’t know how I have such a clear picture of this room—and a blue kimono and blue coverlet, on untidy bed.

These are gloomy glimpses. Bits of vivid and, fortunately, vanishing details. The St. Louis bourgeois ….

“Well, I had a fine dinner, enjoyed it”—(after three stiff whiskeys)—“but I can’t help feeling a twinge of conscience when I think of all the millions of people don’t have enough to eat.” (Discreet belch)

Dr. Senseney was a terrible doctor. Nearly killed me on a tonsil operation, flushed with an uneventful removal of adenoids, which I kept in alcohol in a jar next to a 6-inch centipede from under a rock in New Mexico, Valley Ranch, and my horse was named Grant. A Strawberry Roan. And the band played on. And I came near bleeding to death from his bungling hands.

“I did all I could,” says he, and that was certainly no lie.

But I come of good stock and can survive the ineptitude of a socialite puff[ed]-shirt croaker (a sort of bladder with a face on it).

Cut his throat with my Scout knife and dragged him around the block behind my Red Bug three times.

“He molested me!” I sobbed.

And that was no lie, with his story about bringing a French fairy back to his digs. It was raining and cold:

“Then I knocked him into the gutter and slammed the door.”

Yes, he sure was molesting me.

“Why if any son of mine, or any friend of mine, turned that way, I’d kill him with my own hands.”

At this point I was molested, so I couldn’t contain myself, kicked him in his nuts, and was on him with the shiv and all he could do was let out a squawk like a stricken turkey.

What all day? And so much negative Karma.

December 29?—30?, 1996

I was locked out of my apartment. The janitor with a pass key was Cabell Hardy on the 3rd floor.

(Found his letter today and immediately answered. Should have done before, but I did not register. The dream nudged me—gracias Allah.)

A little restaurant with one waitress. Somehow my gun was checked with her, and there were these two cops there (like Mexico). One had a harelip and looked like Big Al in the Beat Hotel (nostalgia hits me—the Beaux Arts Restaurant, the Balkan, Brion’s room).

It is not certain they are or are not there to arrest me.

Outside is a dock (short and in ruins), deep blue water. Fish down there.

Reading New Yorker article about Hiroshima:

“Once, like everyone else, I thought the bomb had ended the war and saved many lives.”

Include me out of your “everyone else.” The war was already won. Japan was asking for peace through Sweden. It was obvious official USA were and are such shits as boggles a sane and relatively decent mind.

You see, they wanted a “virgin” target. Enough blood on that sheet to satisfy the bloody lot of you.

“Thank God it wasn’t a dud,” said Oppenheimer.

“We are become [Death], destroyer of worlds.”

“Most perfect aiming point I’ve seen in this whole damn war,” said Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the (Ebola) Enola Gay that dropped it.

“Shadow left by a Japanese idler as he waited on the stone steps of a bank that never opened.”

“Clock stopped at 8:15 A.M.”

Gets worse and worse. The Ugly American keeps on getting uglier, until there is no uglier image what can be got.

And what is that final point? The ultimate F.U.?

Well now, of course you’re a woman—I understand these things. I am a man of the world, my little short rib.

December 30, 1996

Reading New Yorker, July 31, 1995, account of “firestorms” in Hamburg occasioned by Allied bombing. (They don’t need an Atom bomb.) Then Dresden, to break German morale. The result was history’s second major firestorm. Like I say, top people in USA and England were such shits as you can’t believe.