The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [177]
Only it never lasts.
I can't tell you why, he says one night to a friend. It's just every time I start an affair, I know how it's going to end. The end of everything is in the beginnings for me. It's going through the motions. If you saw my analyst. . .
The hell with that. If I'm afraid of having my dick cut off or something like that I don't care to know it. That's not a cure, it's a humiliation, it's a deus ex machina. I find out what's wrong and bango I'm happy and go back to Chicago and spawn children and terrorize ten thousand people in whatever factory my father decides to give me. Listen, if you're cured, everything you've gone through, everything you've learned is pointless.
And if you don't go you're just going to get sicker.
Only I don't feel sick. I just feel blank. . . superior, I don't give a damn, I'm just waiting around.
Perhaps. He doesn't know the answer himself, hardly cares. For months there is very little in his head beyond the surface reactions, the amusement and the boredom.
When the war in Europe starts, he decides to get into the Canadian Air Force but his night vision is not quite good enough. He has been thinking in terms of leaving New York, and he finds he cannot bear to remain in it. There are nights when he goes off by himself, and wanders through Brooklyn or the Bronx, taking buses or elevated trains to the end of the route, exploring along the quiet streets. More often he walks through the slums at night, savoring the particular melancholy of watching an old woman sitting on her concrete stoop, her dull eyes reflecting on the sixty, seventy years of houses like this and streets like this, the flat sad echo of children's voices rebounding from the unyielding asphalt.
It swells into movement again, and through a friend he gets a job as an organizer for a union in an upstate city. There is a month of organizer's school, and then a winter of working in a factory, signing men up. And again the break. For after the majority is achieved and the union recognized, the leaders make a decision not to strike.
Hearn, you don't understand, you can't afford to give a condemnation, you're just a dilettante in labor, and things that seem simple to you aren't.
Well, what's the use of building up the union if we're not going to strike? This way it's just dues out of the pay envelopes.
Listen, I know this outfit we're up against. If we strike they'll drop their recognition, fire the lot of us, and pull in a bunch of scabs, this's a mill town, don't forget.
And we'll throw them right up against the NLRB.
Sure, and after eight months there'll be a decision in our favor, and what the hell are the men going to do in the meantime?
Then why have started the union, and given the men all that bullshit? Because of higher politics?
You don't know enough about it to judge. The CIO would have been in here next year, Starkley's outfit, Red all the way through. You've got to build fences, you're being a kid about it, you want everything simple, do this and get that, well, I'll tell you it won't work that way, you got to build a fence around those boys.
The editorship is out, and this too, and the others, he realizes. A dilettante skipping around sewers. Everything is crapped up, everything is phony, everything curdles when you touch it. It has not been the experience itself. There was the other thing, unfocused, the yearning for what?
On an impulse he goes back to Chicago for a few weeks with his parents.
Now, Bob, there's no use kidding around, you been out working and know what the goddam score is, you might as well come in with me, what with these war contracts with Europe, and the armies we're building I can use you, I'm getting so goddam big I don't even know all the damn factories I got a finger in, and it's gonna be getting bigger and bigger. I tell you it's different from the way it used to be when I was a kid, everything's tied up now, you know, it sorta gets out of