There was something really intense, he noticed. Something very wild about the way the things worked, the way the one moved over, the thing happened, seven times thirty would be your Trafalgar, sixteen thugs in a browning sauce over E-Z, super class, super mass, everything chancing itself on a throw of the moratorium--how he loved the thing, eventually, after he had spent a good month in noticing it.
The thing he loved was awesome. It had the total breadth of a great many love things. Many attunements, total, containing the stealth and meringue of a great tongue. Many things happening all at once.
He would go to the cocktail parties.
His eyes were extremely wide and his skin was sagging and there was something totally bald about his head. How could he know about Liechtenstein? How could he laugh on the phone, divulging the secret for which you could destine him to slapstick? How could you ignore his body, however hideous, when he might notice your rejection before it happened, start seeing in you the seeds of your own importance, and grant you that way a real animated humanity you might not sell for anything?
Addictive behavior? Addictive behavior is that which continues itself--the French republic, for example. The French republic is that which is ruled by the French en masse.
Was it addictive of him to go to the places he went and enjoy talking up and down the length of the very entrancing madmen who frequented such places, drink in hand, mastery underfoot? The erotic madmen, was it addictive of him to have them all to himself in the parlor? If so, whom precisely was it addicting? Not the madmen?
I, for example, was confronted with him, and I enjoyed his bug-eyes and though he was cute I found him not cute, but though I found him not cute I wanted to do him, and though I wanted to do him I couldn't and there wasn't the time and he showed me out the door and he was happy and his roommate was not. His roommate, obviously enough, had had the same life as he had and failed.
All of these things--and that he has made me think about him as if he were Warhol--wrench from me blessings or gratitude or whatever it is they get warmed by.
He himself was not warmed by me, since I left after he'd taken down my number.
If I had stayed and he had wanted me to stay, things would have taken their course and there would have been some frightfully intimate sex and I would have forgotten him sooner than I have. Instead there is only autonomy. I am lost today; I have newly discerned the matter of dating as something to do with me--I am no longer obligated to have just now found the boy-cum-old-man of my dreams, and am freed from the wallops of stiff breads and leather.
There are several things I am thankful for, and one of them is that I can still get disturbed and not fall off the edge of my sanctity. If I were to fall off the edge of just about anything to do with me, I would be speechless, and I am constantly challenging myself to be speechless, running at cliffs. When I go to the synagogue I get sudden rushes of a very great madness as well as a gradual swell. There is speech there, the basis of speech; its basis is speech.
Is it addictive behavior to know what is going on at every moment, or to tell someone's life before he has opened his book?