A Diet of Treacle

cigarette remain between his fingers, his eyes on the column of smoke rising perhaps two or three inches into the air before the wind blew it away. When the cigarette burned all the way down he let it drop from his fingers to the asphalt where it continued to burn. It went out before it could burn to the end.

He lit another cigarette.

Immobility.

The Good Humor Man passed, his wagon full of ice cream. Maybe an ice cream would taste good, Joe mused.

Then again maybe it wouldn’t.

Go to hell, Good Humor Man.

Very few things matter and nothing matters very much. Where had Joe heard that? It didn’t sound like a quote, and yet it had a very familiar ring. Where had he seen it?

It didn’t matter, he decided. Of course it didn’t matter. That was the whole point of it, anyway. Immobility.

It was a very beat condition, this immobility, and he found himself wondering why nobody had bothered to describe it in a novel. The beat writers were uniformly lousy, but one of them nevertheless should have managed to get hipped on the notion of transferring that marvelous state of nothingness to paper. Or was the condition unique with Joe? The human condition, the beat condition, the stony stonelike condition.

Immobility.

It wasn’t the same as sitting with nothing to do, Joe pondered. There were any number of things he could do, any number of people he could hunt up. He could find a woman or find a friend or run up to Times Square and see a movie or get a hotdog at Grant’s or sit over coffee at Bickford’s or make the coffee-house scene at The Palermo or one of the other spots. Or he could buzz up to the library and bury himself in a book or head back to his place and read something or write something or smoke the stick in his pocket.

There were many things to do. A veritable myriad of possibilities.

None of which attracted him.

Back to immobility, he told himself. Let’s analyze this. Let’s take it apart and see what’s running around inside. Let’s figure out how it’s put together. Let’s peel off the outer wrapper and dig inside it once and for all and figure out why in the hell we are sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park with a cigarette burning to hell and gone between our tobacco-stained fingers with nothing to do and no place to go and the world whirling around and making absolutely no sense at all. Let’s nail it to the floor and throw darts at it. Let’s jump up and down on it and pick the meat off its bones.

Let’s do something, for Christ’s sake.

Your name had been Joe Milani, then as now, and you had been taking courses at NYU and living in a ratty room on West 12th Street. You had had a landlady whose false teeth had been so perfect they had resembled false teeth, and the room had always been neat as a pin because the landlady habitually cleaned it up and hung up your clothes after you had thrown them on the floor, and had swept up your cigarettes when you had stamped them out on the linoleum. And you had been taking a bevy of courses, exams coming up in a week—not finals, just midterms, and you had been smart enough so the exams had looked to be a breeze.

You had come home from school one day. You had sat down in front of the table, the room’s excuse for a desk, and you had propped up a book. You had been taking a course in the development of the early English novel and the book in front of you had been Humphrey Clinker by one Tobias Smollett. You had had to get the book read so you had flipped it open to page one and had started reading.

That had been at three-thirty.

At four o’clock you had gotten to page forty-five because you could read like a bat out of hell, except not like a blind bat out of hell because blind bats obviously couldn’t read. Did they have braille books for blind bats, Joe wondered momentarily. It was worth thinking about, but forget it for now. You’re contemplating immobility, remember?

So at four o’clock you had been on page forty-five and you had kept on reading.

At five o’clock you had been on page forty-five.

At six-thirty you had been on page forty-five.

You hadn’t taken your eyes off that page. You hadn’t moved from that hard wooden chair.

But you had still been on page forty-five. Seven more butts had littered the linoleum and your beard had grown perceptibly longer than when you had started, but that’s all that had happened.

You had still been on page forty-five.

Three days later you had still been on page forty-five. You had eaten eight or nine meals, had gone to The Palermo once or twice, had talked very briefly with the landlady when she had entered to make the bed. But you hadn’t managed to read any more or do anything except smoke a number of packs of cigarettes and drop three days out of your life. You hadn’t gone to classes or read anything else, and never in your life would you progress further than page forty-five in Humphrey Clinker.

By one Tobias Smollett.

Joe dropped the cigarette, squashed it with his foot, lit another and closed his eyes when the end-smoke from the cigarette hit them and burned them a little. Then he opened his eyes, dragged on the cigarette, blew out smoke and let his eyelids drop shut again.

Now why had page forty-five stopped him so cold?

All right. To begin with, Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett had been a grade-A bore. The whole course, from Pamela to Mansfield Park, had been a grade-A bore. The whole bit at NYU, from the required geology course he hadn’t wanted to take to the advanced English courses he had looked forward to with a great deal of pleasure-all had added up to a grade-A bore.

So he had been bored then as now. Was that any reason to spend half his life on page forty-five?

It wasn’t.

And if he were bored, didn’t it figure he should do something to stop being bored?

It did.

Then what the hell?

Immobility, you damned fool.

Joe dropped the cigarette before he was finished with it. The cigarette fell from its perch between his fingers and dropped to the pavement. It rolled several feet into the middle of the walk and a passer-by stepped on it without noticing it.

He had dropped the cigarette because he had just come upon a great eternal truth, and the shock of discovery had been too much for him.

Immobility was the opposite of something!

The opposite of mobility, obviously. But as Joe looked at immobility from that unique point of view, some things began to make sense.

Sitting on a bench like an oyster on the floor of the Atlantic was the same at the root as running around and turning on and banging good old Fran and drinking too much and raising all kinds of quiet hell.

The same thing in reverse.

The reaction.

The other side of the coin, the other face of the Roman gatekeeper, the opposite.

Ah!

Because, Joe thought, when you did move you moved at the speed of light. You could do everything at once, go every place and know everybody and read a book in an hour and do all your work at school with both eyes shut and race around madly and dig everything. When you were immobile, nothing appealed; when you were—well, call it mobile for the time being—when you were mobile you could dig everything because everything was dynamically real and vivid and alive and breathing and gasping with things that mattered.

Ergo: the running and the joy-jumping and all was the same as the sitting and walking and lying down.

Ergo: immobility was not a phenomenon but a result of whatever made him the person he was, the Joe Milani who lived on Saint Marks Place and sat on benches in Washington Square.

Which raised another inevitably interesting question.

Why?