Last Words

Who lives will see

To look Death in the eye

With no Kamikaze lie

Wrap no flag around me

Who lives will see.

Man can be alone with Death

Will receive a second breath.

Café Lipp—hiking thru tall grass. I had forgotten my gun and [holster]. I was with someone indistinct—rummaging thru drawers, found only the .25. A deep wood drawer, completely empty.

“A Nothing Man” at the 1962 Writers Conference in Edinburgh. Put me on the literary map, thanks in part to Mary McCarthy, my spiritual sister—more than that—

What a job [she did] on the worst of the male sex: “The Young Man”—

A hospital for minor surgery. Hears screams in the night.

“The cancer patient at last!”

And he sang out lustily:

“Cast a cold eye on life, a cold eye on death—Horseman, pass by!”

No wonder for no apparent medical reason the surgeon could ascertain the young man’s heart just stopped in mid-surgery.

I think for no reason to continue his lusty singing and to debase the human image by a hundred cuts. So horrible beyond realization—a shattered, falsified picture of a non-being. What force could so deform a man? Sucking screams off cancer patients, not even.

To nurse: “I heard screams last night, was that the cancer case?”

Nurse: “You’ll never hear a sound from Mr. Miller, must have been in maternity.”

“Oh.”

The young man deflates like a pale green balloon.

“Oh, oh, oh.”

“Well, it’s time for your pre-operative medication.”

Young man in a sudden panic.

“I, uh, well …”

Darkness creeps up from the front of his bed.

“I am the Captain of my soul,” he mutters, as the stretcher slides down the hall, into an elevator—to the O.R.

In Tangier, my typewriter in hock to buy Eukodol, a chemical derivative of codeine, many times stronger. Dihydro-oxy-codeine—finally outlawed, owing to side effect of euphoria, hits like a speedball, Kid.

Guess I used all of it up in Tangier—but it’s still out there in Quevedo, Ecuador, on a dusty back shelf, covered with mildew on a South Sea island—

“Shoot it in the main line, Kid. Hits like a speedball.”

Maybe up in some Swede town under the Northern Lights—Christmas story.

“Any more of that?”

“Well yes—a consignment of twenty boxes—twenty in each box. Let you have it all for, well, say $100 U.S. dollars.”

“Done.”

Can we, the males, live without the other half? Female?

And O.H. must always talk. O.H. is talk, was the original invasion—was “word,” of course, so cut word out in slow withdrawal.

It’s going to hurt and hurt bad.

Saturday November 30, 1996.

I said: “L. Ron Hubbard needs a knife in his gizzard.”

And I demonstrate with an assassin knife from Alamut how one strikes upward under the left rib cage to the heart. And I threw another knife into what looked like tinfoil.

Unpleasant feel of no meaning to me. Just floating by.

So to go on from here.

What is the “whatever comes?”

As Federn used to say in his study, [middle]-European apartment—rather like Schlumberger’s in Paris—

Steak and bread and salad—red wine—talking to Allen Ginsberg about some English [person], says:

“A blues singer, a blues shouter. Everybody going to see my black bottom. He really gives out.”

What, exactly?

Perhaps somewhere out there—Quevedo, Ecuador, uno de puro, Peru … on the back shelf a dusty box of ampules, Eukodol, 15 mg per ampule.

“Shoot it in the main line, Kid, hits like a speedball.”

Who. When where? Why?

Short stories?