Free Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Page A

I listened to Hell-Town in the hour between waking and sleep.
    â€œOh, Tim,” the voices said, “you’ve burned your candle by both ends: the balls and the brain, prick and tongue, your bunghole and your mouth. Is any tallow left in your wick? As if the wicked could tell.”
    They said, “Oh, Tim, don’t lick the thighs of whores. You come too fast tasting the old sperm whale. Give to us the dying salts. Give us back the scum of all who lost. Goodbye, sweet friend, I curse your house. I curse your house.”
    Let me speak of the little I could comprehend. Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed atlast onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed—and how could I be certain of that?—I still had to ask: Who was? It must be someone who knew my marijuana patch. That spoke directly of my wife—unless it was her hair I touched in the burrow. So I had my conclusion: I must go back to the woods and look again. As fixed in my memory, however, as the flash of light that is followed by the thunder of pain when your shoulder is pulled out of its socket, was the remembered glimpse of that dirtied blonde hair. I knew I could not go back. I was a jelly. I preferred to molder in the last suppurations of cowardice.
    Is it evident why I do not care to describe my night? Nor why each logical step cost so much? Now I understood how the laboratory rat develops psychosis in a maze. There are shocks at too many of the turnings. What if Jessica was there? Would I know then that I had done it?
    On the other hand—and I could have driven a hundred miles in the time it took me to go back to this alternative—if Pond and Pangborn had returned to Boston, or were by now even back in Santa Barbara, or back wherever their fling would chuck them—then it had to be Patty’s head. That brought on a wholly unmanageable sorrow. Sorrow, and a surge of nasty vindication—which was only choked off by the onset of a new fear. Who could have killed Patty but Mr. Black? If that was true, how safe was I?
    Do you feel a hint uncool around strange black dudes? Try such a thought in the night when you have come to the conclusion that the dude may be looking for you. Every wave that slapped on the shore, every gull that stirred, was an invader: I could hear windows raised and doors forced.
    It was degrading. I had never seen myself as a hero. My father—with the best will in the world—had taken care of that. But I had usually been able to picture myself as not wholly unmacho. I could stand up for my friends; I could close a wound and keep the festering to myself. I tried to hold my own. Yet now, each time my mind was clear enough to bring forth a new thought, panic soiled me. I was like a puppy in a strange house. I began to fear my friends.
    It had to be someone who knew where I kept my marijuana. That much was demanded by logic. In the false dawn, therefore, I realized that as I met my friends on the street in the day or two to come, I would distrust the look in every eye. I was like a man plummeting down a slippery slope who finds a little horn of ice to grasp, but so soon as he embraces it, the projection breaks loose. I saw that if I could not decide the first question, which was: Put it!—Was I the killer?—then I could not stop the slide, and madness would wait at the rim.
    As dawn came up, however, and I had to listen to the solicitations of Hell-Town—why did these voices always call most loudly between wakingand sleep, as if waking and sleep were a century apart?—I became aware at last of the chirks and cronks of the gulls, their gabble loud enough to chase the larvae of the night. But saying “larvae” now offered the minuscule pleasure that one word from Latin had come back in the midst of all this. You
larvae
, you ghosts! They taught Latin well at