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By Root 6168 0

paper that he was dead, to say, as I sipped my whisky, what I occasionally did say at such moments —death is good for some people. I remembered then the wisecrack I had made to Humboldt as we walked to the Princeton Dinkey connecting with the Junction. People die and the stinging things I said about them come winging back to attach themselves to me. What about this apathy? Paul of Tarsus woke up on the road to Damascus but Sewell of Princeton would sleep even deeper there. Such was my wicked meaning. I confess I am sorry now that I had said such a thing. I should add, about that interview, that it was a mistake to let Demmie Vonghel send me down dressed in charcoal gray, in a button-down collar, a knitted maroon necktie, and maroon cordovan shoes, an instant Prince-tonian.

Anyway, it was not long after I read Sewell’s obituary in the Chicago Daily News, leaning on the kitchen counter at 4 p.m. with a glass of whisky and a snack of pickled herring, that Humboldt, who had been dead for five or six years, re-entered my life. He came from left field. I shan’t be too exact about the time of this. I was then becoming careless about time, a symptom of my increasing absorption in larger questions.

four

And now the present. A different side of life—entirely con-temporary.

It was in Chicago, and not very long ago by the calendar, that I left the house one morning in December to see Murra, my accountant, and when I got downstairs I found that my Mercedes-Benz had been attacked in the night. I don’t mean that it had been banged and scraped by a reckless or drunken driver who ran away without leaving a note under my wipers. I mean that my car had been pounded all over, I assume with baseball bats. This elite machine, no longer new but worth eighteen thousand dollars three years ago, had been mauled with a ferocity difficult to grasp—to grasp, I mean, even in an esthetic sense, for these Mercedes coupes are beautiful, the silver-gray ones in particular. My dear friend George Swiebel had even said once, with a certain bitter admiration, “Murder Jews and make machines, that’s what those Germans really know how to do.”

The attack on this car was hard on me also in a sociological sense, for I always said that I knew my Chicago and I was convinced that hoodlums, too, respected lovely automobiles. Recently a car was sunk in the Washington Park lagoon and a man was found in the trunk who had tried to batter his way out with tire-tools. Evidently he was the victim of robbers who decided to drown him—get rid of the witness. But I recall thinking that his car was only a Chevrolet. They would never have clone such a thing to a Mercedes 280-SL. I said to my friend Renata that / might be knifed or stomped on an Illinois Central platform but that this car of mine would never be hurt.

So on this morning I was wiped out as an urban psychologist. I recognized that it hadn’t been psychology but only swagger, or perhaps protective magic. I knew that what you needed in a big American city was a deep no-affect belt, a critical mass of indifference. Theories also were very useful in the building of such a protective mass. The idea, anyway, was to ward off trouble. But now the moronic inferno had caught up with me. My elegant car, my shimmering silver motor tureen which I had had no business to buy—a person like me, hardly stable enough to drive this treasure—was mutilated. Everything! The delicate roof with its sliding panel, the fenders, hood, trunk, doors, locks, lights, the smart radiator emblem had been beaten and clubbed. The shatterproof windows had held up, but they looked spat on all over. The windshield was covered with white fracture-blooms. It had suffered a kind of crystalline internal hemorrhage. Appalled, I nearly broke down, I felt like swooning.

Someone had done to my car as rats, I had heard, did when they raced through warehouses by the thousands and tore open sacks of flour for the hell of it. I felt a similar rip at my heart. The machine belonged to a time when my income was in excess of a hundred thousand dollars. Such an