chemical engineer testing new drugs for the federal Food and Drug Administration he was in a position of power. He made fairly good money, but when he ran his tests, he disqualified a lot of the drugs that the other federal chemists passed. Then he was approached by the huge drug companies and made to understand that they had jobs which paid a lot more money than he could ever make. If he were a little more flexible, he could move up in the world. Attic brushed them off. Then finally one of the drugs he had vetoed was approved over his head. A year later the drug had to be recalled and banned because of the toxic effects on patients, some of whom died. The whole thing got into the papers, and Artie was a hero for a while. He was even promoted to the highest Civil Service grade. But he was made to understand that he could never go higher. That he would never become the head of the agency because of his lack of understanding of the political necessities of the job. He didn’t care and I was proud of him.
I wanted to live an honorable life, that was my big hang up. I prided myself on being a realist, so I didn’t expect myself to be perfect. But when I did something shitty, I didn’t approve of it or kid myself, and usually I did stop doing the same kind of shitty thing again. But I was often disappointed in myself since there was such a great variety of shifty things a person can do, and so I was always caught by surprise.
Now I had to sell myself the idea of turning crook. I wanted to be honorable became I felt more comfortable telling the truth than lying. I felt more at ease innocent than guilty. I had thought it out. It was a pragmatic desire, not a romantic one. If I had felt more comfortable being a liar and a thief, I would have done so. And therefore was tolerant of those who did so behave. It was, I thought, their metier, not necessarily a moral choice. I claimed that morals had nothing to do with it. But I did not really believe that. In essence I believed in good and evil as values.
And then if truth were told, I was always in competition with other men. And therefore, I wanted to be a better man, a better person. It gave me a satisfaction not to be greedy about money when other men abased themselves for it. To disdain glory, to be honest with women, to be an innocent by choice. It gave me pleasure not to be suspicious of the motives of others and to trust them in almost anything. The truth was I never trusted myself. It was one thing to be honorable, another to be foolhardy.
In short, I would rather be cheated than to cheat someone; I would rather be deceived than be a deceiver; I gladly accepted being hustled as long as I did not become a hustler. I would rather be faked out than be a fake- out artist. And I understood that this was an armor I sheathed myself in, that it was not really admirable. The world could not hurt me if it could not make me feel guilty. If I thought well of myself, what did it matter that others thought ill of me? Of course, it didn’t always work. The armor had chinks. And I made a few slips over the years.
And yet-and yet-I felt that even this, smugly upright as it sounded, was in a funny kind of way the lowest kind of cunning. That my morality rested on a foundation of cold stone. That quite simply there was nothing in life I desired so much that it could corrupt me. The only thing I wanted to do was create a great work of art. But not the fame or money or power, or so I thought. Quite simply to benefit humanity. Ah. Once as an adolescent, beset with guilt and feelings of unworthiness, hopelessly at odds with the world, I stumbled across the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov. That book changed my life. It gave me strength. It made me see the vulnerable beauty of all people no matter how despicable they might outwardly seem. And I always remembered the day I finally gave up the book, took it back to the asylum library and then walked out into the lemony sunlight of an autumn day. I had a feeling of grace.
And so all I wished for was to write a book that would make people feel as I felt that day. It was to me the ultimate exercise of power. And the purest. And so when my first novel was published, one that I worked on for five years, one that I suffered great hardship to publish without any artistic compromise, the first review that I read called it dirty, degenerate, a book that should never have been written and once written should never have been published.
The book made very little money. It received some superlative reviews. It was agreed that I had created a genuine work of art, and indeed, I had to some extent fulfilled my ambition. Some people wrote letters to me that I might have written to Dostoevsky. I found that the consolation of these letters did not make up for the sense of rejection that commercial failure gave me.
I had another idea for a truly great novel, my
Still, it took Frank Alcore six months to break me down, and then he had to get lucky. I was intrigued by Frank because he was the complete gambler. When he bought his wife a present, it was always something he could hock in the pawnshop if he ran short of cash. And what I loved was the way he used his checking account.
On Saturdays Frank would go out to do the family shopping. All the neighborhood merchants knew him and they cashed his checks. In the butcher’s he’d buy the finest cuts of veal and beef and spend a good forty dollars. He’d give the butcher a check for a hundred and pocket the sixty bucks’ change. The same story at the grocery and the vegetable man. Even the liquor store. By noon Saturday he’d have about two hundred bucks’ change from his shopping, and he would use that to make his bets on the baseball games. He didn’t have a penny in his checking account to cover. If he lost his cash on Saturday, he’d get credit at his bookmaker’s to bet the Sunday games, doubling up. If he won, he’d rush to the bank on Monday morning to cover his checks. If he lost, he’d let the checks bounce. Then during the week he would hustle bribes for recruiting young draft dodgers into the six months’ program to cover the checks when they came around the second time.
Frank would take me to the night ball games and he’d pay for everything, including the hot dogs. He was a naturally generous guy, and when I tried to pay, he’d push my hand aside and say something like: “Honest men can’t afford to be sports.” I always had a good time with him, even at work. During lunch hour we’d play gin and I would usually beat him for a few dollars, not because I played better cards but because his mind was on his sports action.
Everybody has an excuse for his breakdown in virtue. The truth is you break down when you are prepared to break down.
I came in to work one morning when the ball outside my office was crowded with young men to be enlisted in the Army six months’ program. In fact, the whole armory was full. Au the units were busy enlisting on all eight floors. And the armory was one of those old buildings that had been built to house whole battalions to march around in. Only now half of each floor was for storerooms, classrooms and our administrative offices.
My first customer was a little old man who had brought in a young kid of about twenty-one to be enlisted. He was way down on my list.
“I’m sorry, we won’t be calling you for at least six months,” I said.
The old guy had startlingly blue eyes that radiated power and confidence. “You had better check with your superior,” he said.
At that moment I saw my boss, the Regular Army major signaling frantically to me through his glass partition. I got up and went into his office. The major had been in combat in the Korean War and WW II, with ribbons all over his chest. But he was sweating and nervous.
“Listen,” I said, “that old guy told me I should talk to you. He wants his kid ahead of everybody on the list. I told him I couldn’t do it.”
The major said angrily, “Give him anything he wants. That old guy is a congressman.”
“What about the list?” I said.
“Fuck the list,” the major said.
I went back to my desk where the congressman and his young protege were seated. I started making out the enlistment forms. I recognized the kid’s name now. He would be worth over a hundred million bucks someday. His family was one of the great success stories in American history. And here he was in my office enlisting in the six months’ program to avoid doing a full two years’ active duty.
The congressman behaved perfectly. He didn’t lord it over me, didn’t rub it in that his power made me subvert the rules. He talked quietly, friendly, hitting just the right note. You had to admire the way he handled me. He tried to make me feel I was doing him a favor and mentioned that if there was anything he could ever do for me, I should call his office. The kid kept his mouth shut except to answer my questions when I was typing out his enlistment form.
