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By Root 6017 0

blind. I hadn’t the heart to try the doors, they might be jammed shut. I tried to concentrate on hatred and fury—revenge, revenge! But I couldn’t get anywhere with that. I could only see the German steward at the shop in his long white smock, like a dentist, telling me that parts would have to be imported. And I, clutching my half-bald head in both hands as if in despair, fingers interlocked, had my trembling aching legs in the air, tufts of side-hair sticking out, and the green Persian carpet flowing under me. I was heart-injured. I was desolate. The beauty of the carpet was one of my comforts. I have become deeply attached to carpets, and this one was a work of art. The green was soft and varied with great subtlety. The red was one of those surprises that seem to spring straight from the heart. Stribling, my downtown expert, told me that I could get far more than I had paid for this rug. Everything that wasn’t mass-produced was zooming in value. Stribling was an obese excellent man who kept horses but now was too heavy to ride. Few people seemed to be consummating anything good, these days. Look at me. I couldn’t be serious, becoming involved in this sort of grotesque comic Mercedes-and-Underworld thing. As I stood on my head, I knew (I would know!) that there was a sort of theoretical impulse behind this grotesqueness too, one of the powerful theories of the modern world being that for self-realization it’s necessary to embrace the deformity and absurdity of the inmost being (we know it’s there!). Be healed by the humiliating truth the Unconscious contains. I didn’t buy this theory, but that didn’t mean that I was free from it. I had a talent for absurdity, and you don’t throw away any of your talents.

I was thinking that I’d never get a penny from the insurance company on a queer claim like this. I had bought every kind of protection they offered, but somewhere in the small print they were sure to have the usual foxy clauses. Under Nixon the great corporations became drunk with immunity. The good old bourgeois virtues, even as window dressing, are gone forever.

It was from George that I had learned this upside-down position. George warned that I was neglecting my body. Several years ago he began to point out that my throat was becoming crepy, my color was poor, and I was easily winded. At a certain point in middle age you had to make a stand, he argued, before the abdominal wall gives, the thighs get weak and thin, the breasts female. There was a way to age that was physically honorable. George interpreted this for himself with peculiar zeal. Immediately after his gall-bladder operation he got out of bed and did fifty push-ups—his own naturopath. From this exertion, he got peritonitis and for two days we thought he was dying. But ailments seemed to inspire him, and he had his own cures for everything. Recently he told me, “I woke up day before yesterday and found a lump under my arm.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

“No. I tied it with dental floss. I tied it tight, tight, tight. . . .”

“What happened?”

“Yesterday when I examined it, it had swelled up to the size of an egg. Still I didn’t call the doctor. To hell with that! I took more dental floss and tied it tight, tight, even tighter. And now it’s cured, it’s gone. You want to see?”

It was when I told him of my arthritic neck that he prescribed standing on my head. Though I threw up my palms and shrieked with laughter (looking like one of Goya’s frog caricatures in the Vision Burlesca—the creature with the locks and bolts) I did as he advised. I practiced and learned the headstand, and I was cured of the neck pains. Next, when I had a stricture, I asked George for a remedy. He said, “It’s the prostate gland. You start, then you stop, then you trickle again, it burns a bit, you feel humiliated?”

“All correct.”

“Don’t worry. Now as you stand on your head, tighten your buttocks. Just suck them in as if you were trying to bring the cheeks together.”

“Why must this be done as you stand on your head? I already feel like Old Father William.”

But he was adamant and