eating the heart out of him. To fight was easy, but to fight for food and rent was like fighting an army of ghosts. All you could do was to retreat, and while you retreated you watched your own brothers getting popped off, one after the other, silently, mysteriously, in the fog, in the dark, and not a thing to do about it. He was so damned confused, so perplexed, so hopelessly muddled and beaten, that he put his head in his arms and wept on my desk. And while he’s sobbing like that suddenly the telephone rings and it’s the vice-president’s office – never the vice-president himself, but always
his office –
and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don’t say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody’s going to pay for it – and anyway I want to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president’s office in the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask –
and why?
And before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don’t like it and can’t take it – and if you don’t like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass – and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I’ll get the sack before the day’s over. But nothing of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don’t do anything hasty, we’ll look into it, etc. I guess they’re still looking into it because Griswold went on working just asalways – in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that’s what happens to a guy when he’s just a hero in his sleep. Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It’s all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I had walked in – without as much as a by your leave, sir!
Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law – and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an
his office –
and they want this man Griswold fired immediately and I say Yes Sir! and I hang up. I don’t say anything to Griswold about it but I walk home with him and I have dinner with him and his wife and kids. And when I leave him I say to myself that if I have to fire that guy somebody’s going to pay for it – and anyway I want to know first where the order comes from and why. And hot and sullen I go right up to the vice-president’s office in the morning and I ask to see the vice-president himself and did you give the order I ask –
and why?
And before he has a chance to deny it, or to explain his reason for it, I give him a little war stuff straight from the shoulder and where he don’t like it and can’t take it – and if you don’t like it, Mr. Will Twilldilliger, you can take the job, my job and his job and you can shove them up your ass – and like that I walk out on him. I go back to the slaughterhouse and I go about my work as usual. I expect, of course, that I’ll get the sack before the day’s over. But nothing of the kind. No, to my amazement I get a telephone call from the general manager saying to take it easy, to just calm down a bit, yes, just go easy, don’t do anything hasty, we’ll look into it, etc. I guess they’re still looking into it because Griswold went on working just asalways – in fact, they even promoted him to a clerkship, which was a dirty deal, too, because as a clerk he earned less money than as a messenger, but it saved his pride and it also took a little more of the spunk out of him too, no doubt. But that’s what happens to a guy when he’s just a hero in his sleep. Unless the nightmare is strong enough to wake you up you go right on retreating, and either you end up on a bench or you end up as vice-president. It’s all one and the same, a bloody fucking mess, a farce, a fiasco from start to finish. I know it as I was in it, because I woke up. And when I woke up I walked out on it. I walked out by the same door that I had walked in – without as much as a by your leave, sir!
Things take place instantaneously, but there’s a long process to be gone through first. What you get when something happens is only the explosion, and the second before that the spark. But everything happens according to law – and with the full consent and collaboration of the whole cosmos. Before I could get up and explode the bomb had to be properly prepared, properly primed. After putting things in order for the bastards up above I had to be taken down from my high horse, had to be kicked around like a football, had to be stepped on, squelched, humiliated, fettered, manacled, made impotent as a jellyfish. All my life I have never wanted for friends, but at this particular period they seemed to spring up around me like mushrooms. I never had a moment to myself. If I went home of a night, hoping to take a rest, somebody would be there waiting to see me. Sometimes a gang of them would be there and it didn’t seem to make much difference whether I came or not. Each set of friends I made despised the other set. Stanley, for example, despised the whole lot. Ulric too was rather scornful of the others. He had just come back from Europe after an absence of several years. We hadn’t seen much of each other since boyhood and then one day, quite by accident, we met on the street. That day was an
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