Free Crazy Cock by Henry Miller

feeling more and more like a pile of wet sand. The next moment he felt her lips fastened to his ear, her breath scorching. “Do it here,” she murmured as she pressed him against the banister and with a convulsive, shuddering movement lifted her dress.
    H E DIDN’T know where he was walking, only that it was somewhere uptown. He was famished and his head was still cloudy. But the frost soothed like an ice pack. There were a million lights—they dazzled and blinded him. They were little and then they grew big and swooped down on him. The colors were wild and dangerous. They rushed up on him like a flock of semaphores.
    A sheet of ice, no thicker than the band of a ring, covered the asphalt. It was a mirror broken into an ocean of light waves, a mirror in which all the colors of the rainbow flashed and danced. A theater loomed up; the lobby had vertigo. It was not a lobby but a huge illuminated funnel revolving at high speed; into this dizzy, crystal maze long queues advanced with an undulating motion, like gigantic waves flinging their plumed crests against the shore of an inlet. With each smashing assault they eddied back in a swift-rushing vortex, were reabsorbed and became another column which in turn lifted its vibrant, hissing mass and broke in swirling cubes of light. . . . At a drugstore he saw a row of telephone booths in the window. The booths were put there to make people telephone. “I want to speak to Hildred,” he said, when they had connected him with the Caravan. “She’s nothere,” came a gruff voice. Bang! The receiver clicked like an automatic. He jiggled the hook. “Hello! Hello!” There came to his ears the hum of far-off planetary orbs rolling through ethereally cushioned space. It’s no use, he said to himself, we’re traveling in different orbits. The world was simply a field of blind energy in which microcosm and macrocosm moved according to the caprice of a demented monarch.
    By the time he reached Times Square he was drunk with well-being. He felt the ebb and flow of bright, liquid blood in his veins. With trip-hammer rhythm it rose and fell, dilated his heart, bathed his vision, surged through his pulsing limbs. Bright, red, liquid blood: in a state of euphoria it made men wise, lucid, sane; diluted it produced flaccidity, neuroticism, despair, and melancholy; clotted it gave the spangled phenomena of solipsism, the terrors of epilepsy and chorea, the hierarchies of caste, the unfathomable magnitudes of dementia. In a single red corpuscle were sufficient enigmas to confound all the colleges of science. In blood were men born and in blood they died. Blood was potent, fecund, magical. Blood was an ecstasy of pain and beauty, a miracle of creative destruction, a particle of the divine essence, perhaps the essence itself. Where blood flowed life ran strong. Where there was song there was blood, and where there was worship there was blood. There was blood in the sunset, in the flowers of the field, in the eyes of maniacs and prophets, in the fire of precious gems. Everywhere where there was life and song and drunkenness and worship and triumph there was blood.
    In this state of bloody exuberance he took a stand across the street from the Caravan. It was about midnight. Groups of idlers, attracted by the bursts of revelry escaping from thepartially opened windows, clung to the railing in front of the establishment. Presently he was hanging on the railing himself. The privilege of enjoying this spectacle from the outside gave him a strange exhilaration.
    Whenever Hildred brought to light an interesting personality she would escort him to a little niche in the corner near the window. Here, with elbows planted well forward, she would sit and stare admiringly into the eyes of the one who had for the moment captivated her. If, as had happened before, she averted her gaze for an instant and allowed her glance to stray through the window, lighting with a rapt,