‘I ordered red wine. White wine taken with meat can cause serious gastric disturbances.’
‘Look Mister I wrote the order down.’
The Professor’s eyes light up inside and he bares his bloody canines. He slides out of his seat in a sinuous purposeful manner and seizes the waiter by the lapels.
‘Bring me red wine you hairy-assed rock ape or I drink it from your throat.’
The waiter twists free and runs for his life. The Professor sits down and writes an important formula on a napkin.
Let’s keep it together, Professor.
An Epitaph*
A victim is acted upon rather than acting. He is injured, ill, incarcerated, starving, or dead — that is, affected by other people or by circumstances or both. Some people are in the category of born victim; they may be bom into hopeless poverty or with congential deformities. Others have the status of victim thrust upon them by seemingly random circumstances — accidents, earthquakes, fires, floods, epidemics. Some achieve the condition of victim; they are accident or misfortune prone.
The hard-core victim is one who achieves his condition. The Egyptian hieroglyph of a man splitting his own head is applicable here. Take Hemingway for example; a toilet fell on his head in Paris, he shot his own foot trying to kill a gaffed fish, he was injured in a series of plane and car crashes. Indeed, the list of such achievers is a long one, with artists, writers and performers prominently featured: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Lowry, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Janis Joplin, James Dean, Isadora Duncan, and Jack and Bobby Kennedy. The chronic victim is in some cases seemingly endowed with negative telekinetic powers. (One man has been hit by lightning 11 times!) They are bad luck for themselves and anyone in their vicinity. Just walk down the street with one of these Jonahs and something bad will happen.
So, you may ask, isn’t a victim datebook unlucky right there? On the contrary, I think such a book can enable us to profit by the errors and misfortunes of our predecessors, and avoid some deadly snare. We are able to see what they could not, and take evasive action in time.
This is the principle of minimax: assume that the worst may happen and act accordingly; remember that lightning always strikes twice in the same place. This is a basic law known to all successful gamblers. Winning and losing come in streaks; in fact all incidents seem to arrange themselves in sequences as if one accident magnetically attracts similar occurences. Keep your eyes open and you will see this law in operation. If you just miss one train you are that much more likely to just miss another; see one man walking down the street talking to himself and you will probably see another; encounter one rude clerk or waiter and you will encounter another who will use exactly the same words. Look through a newspaper: two people on the same day drowned in bathtubs; similar fires and accidents ... (didn’t I already read that story?) or a run of fatalities all the same age. Thursday, May 18, 1979: killed in a plane crash ... single engine plane piloted by Kevin Brown, 22 .. . Man found burned to death was Clyde N. Olsen, 22 ... Casper man, 22, dies in traffic accident. . . Man, 22, found guilty in beating death. . .
Suppose this is a day a victim died — not just any victim but one with whom you especially identify. Be careful. This is a dangerous day for you. Remember, those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it. The more you know about that victim and his or her death the better. What was the cause of death? What day of the week? What else happened on that day? Last words? I know from a book, The Death of Jesse James, that he died on Monday, April 3, 1882 and the temperature was 46 degrees. He was shot while he had taken his guns off to clean a picture.
‘That picture’s awful dusty,’ were his last words.
Well, if you identify with Jesse James, don’t let your mother-in-law talk you up a ladder to dust off a picture on April 3. Watch your driving on the day James Dean was wiped out — and leave your scarf at home on Isadora Duncan’s last day.
When Malcolm X arrived at the auditorium on the day he was shot his step lacked its usual vigor, as if he were dead already. Brothers, that’s a day to stay home. Bobby Kennedy had a mysterious fainting fit on stage two days before he was killed. A week before Dallas some woman got within two feet of JFK and took his picture.
‘She might have assassinated the President,’ an official stated flatly.
This victim datebook will call your attention to things like that. If I were a politician in danger of assassination and someone got within two feet of me I’d fire every bodyguard in my entourage and borrow some guns from de Gaulle. Nobody ever got within two feet of Le General. And I’d stay the hell out of Dallas on November 22.
Hemingway should have known better than to be flying in a light plane in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. The brain damage he suffered in that crash prompted his suicide a few years later. He put a 12-gauge shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.
‘White white white as far as the eye can see ahead a blinding flash of white the snows of Kilimanjaro!’
The victim datebook may save you a lot of trouble that way; it may even save your life. Consider the possibility of failure or misfortune and you have already been to the course of both. Suppose you are going to a crucial meeting. First consider everything that can go wrong. Then consider how the meeting would be successful. Confronting the possibility of failure keys in success. (Performers will tell you that the worse the stage fright the better the performance.)
The victim datebook can also serve as a rich source of conversational gambits.
‘Happy birthday, Mr Brown... rather amusing coincidence ... 2 years ago to the day a man named Brown dropped dead in this restaurant right where you’re sitting now ... In the midst of life what?’
Everyone is a victim in the end. Perhaps the publishers of the Datebook should sell future space like cemetery plots. Reserve your date now.
Footnote
* Written as a Foreword to The Victim’s Datebook.
My Experiences with Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone
Box
I built my first orgone accumulator on a farm near Pharr, Texas in the spring of 1949. I was living in the Rio Grande valley with my friend Kells Elvins, reading Wilhelm Reich, and we decided to build an accumulator out in Kells’ orange grove. In a few days we had put up a wooden box about eight feet high and lined it with galvanized iron. Inside was an old icebox which you could get inside and pull on top so that another box of sheet steel descended over you. In this way the effect was presumably heightened by an accumulator inside an accumulator. Kell’s wetbacks watched dubiously from a distance, muttering something in Spanish about ‘Brajerias’ — witchcraft.
Kerouac described my orgone box in On the Road — a pretty good trick, as he never set foot on the South Texas farm. He had me taking a shot of morphine and going out to ‘moon over his navel’. The fact is that I was not using junk at that time, and even if I had been I certainly would not have done so in an orgone accumulator. Kerouac even went so far as to write that ‘Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood he used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse.’ Like so much of Jack’s writing, this makes a good story but is actually pure fiction. When he visited me I was living in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, in a little house laid out like a railroad flat and raised up on the marshy lot by concrete blocks. In Algiers I had practically no front yard at all, and was far too busy with a habit to build an accumulator.
Neal Cassady did visit me at the South Texas farm, but never used the orgone box. Since Kerouac presumably got the story of my first accumulator from Cassady, whose tendency to exaggerate rivalled Jack’s, it’s a wonder they didn’t have me throwing orgies in the accumulator for the amusement of the wetbacks. But the orgone box does have a definite sexual effect; I also made a little one from any army-style gas-can covered with burlap and cotton wool and wrapped around with gunny sack, and it was a potent sexual tool. The orgones would stream
out of the nozzle of the gas can. One day I got into the big accumulator and held the little one over my joint and came right off. That used to be one of Cocteau’s party tricks — take off all his clothes, lie down, and come off, no hands.
Wilhelm Reich was, so far as I know, the first investigator to apply the scientific method to sexual phenomena and actually measure the electrical charge of an orgasm and correlate these measurements with the subjective experience of pleasure or displeasure. There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929. For these experiments he was expelled from Norway, the traditional Scandinavian tolerance seemingly unable to assimilate such experiments. Perhaps any basic experiments into the human condition are dangerous to the tissue of false pride and misconception with which the human animal compulsively covers his nakedness.
Reich advocated the use of orgone therapy both as a preventive and as the best treatment for active cancer. He considered that cancer occurs when the electrical charge at the surface of the cells falls to a suffocation point. To offset this condition and tone up the cells, he developed orgone therapy. This therapy was rejected out of hand without trial by the medical establishment. Reich’s books were burned, his machines destroyed, and he died in prison.
Reich’s therapy is harmless and need not conflict with any other form of therapy. It could in fact be administered during the time it takes to get biopsies and arrange for an operation. It could also be used in hopeless cases and most importantly in precancerous conditions. By removing even the possibility of this form of treatment, the Federal authorities have taken a heavy responsibility on themselves, especially in view of the fact that independent researchers like Mr CD. Cone are now corroborating some of Reich’s findings.
Who is the FDA to deprive cancer patients of any treatment that could be efficacious? I am sure that most cancer patients would be glad to try any form of treatment that did not interfere with orthodox methods. The decision should rest, certainly, with the individual cancer patient and not with the FDA or the DAR. It has occurred to this investigator that orgone energy might be concentrated and directed in an effort to disperse the miasma of idiotic prurience and anxiety that blocks any scientific investigation of sexual phenomena.
When I took, some years ago, a loft in lower SoHo my friend David Prentice was building some furniture for me. We decided to make an orgone accumulator and assemble it in the loft He built a plywood box big enough to put a chair inside, with a layer of cork and a galvanized steel lining. On the outside he draped half a dozen ratty old rabbit-fur coats, to beef up the orgone charge. The rabbit coats give the box a surrealist look, very organic, like a fur-lined bathtub. I spent fifteen to twenty minutes a day in the box meditating, with the comfortable feeling that I was at least cutting down the odds of contracting cancer. It had occurred to me that the effect could be greatly enhanced by using magnetized iron and building the accumulator in a pyramid shape. If pyramids can prevent meat from decaying, they might do as much for you.
How You Stop Smoking
(A Book Review of the million-seller, How to Stop Smoking. Herbert Brean, Pocket Books 1975; 1st publ. 1959). In the form of a television ad.
It is interesting that tobacco, the most available and widely used of all drugs, should turn out to have the most conclusive mortality statistics. Such statistics on cannabis would undoubtedly be used to justify and continue existing laws, but no one so far has proposed to outlaw the manufacture, sale, and possession of tobacco.
The statistics on tobacco use and lung cancer, though widely publicized, seem to have little effect on smokers, even those of middle age or older who are quite aware of the immediate risk of lung cancer. They know they ought to stop, but they don’t know how to stop. This book — (holds book up to camera) — tells you how. The writer offers a money-back guarantee: ‘If you don’t give up smoking after reading this book and trying its proven methods, you get your money back.’
I bought this book. I followed the instructions. I stopped smoking — after fifteen years, two packs a day. Previous to reading Brean’s book I had never got beyond a few muddled attempts to ration myself down to one pack a day and never doing it, and was deeply convinced that it was hopeless to try. What magic words in this book enabled me, and many others who have read this book, to stop smoking?
The first step is to be sure you want to stop. Yes, think of everything you like about smoking. If you still want to stop, read on and you will. If you don’t want to stop, turn on another program.
Start thinking about it. Think of it coolly and calmly, without fear or hopelessness. Many others have done it — you can too. Consider the whole idea objectively. Don’t try to make even a tentative resolution. Think about it — that’s all. You can’t change it? It’s like the weather? Take a long cool look at that tobacco weather, and see whether you like it. Look at yourself looking forward to the next cigarette — you get your little treat after you come back from the supermarket, hustled from one cigarette to another from morning till night, don’t own your own hands, always crawling into your pocket and sneaking out another, you don’t even remember smoking another and another until you see the pile of butts in the ashtray, first pack almost gone at three in the afternoon ... mouth raw, he goes into momentary panic when he finds only three Senior Service left ... thank God — he finds an untouched pack in a drawer. Cancer sighs with relief from young oat cells need the tar and cyanide and nicotine to live and breathe.
Now just seeing all this without any reaction, from a point of zero cigarettes (you are thinking about stopping), you have already stopped; by reaching the point where you can look at it, a point in future time when you will stop smoking. You want to stop, and you are convinced that you can’t — without even making the attempt, without even considering the attempt? You doubt you could even sit in ‘Non-Smoking’ on a three-hour air trip, and you beat John Wayne to the draw when the no-smoking sign clicks off.
And think about those cancer statistics. Don’t scare yourself, just think about them. Already doctors are talking about an epidemic. Idea for a science fiction novel here: The steady increase in cancer becomes a tidal wave. Accelerated cancer reduces the smoker to a tumor in a few weeks. Tobacco turns out to be a long-range weapon of the Venusians to exterminate the natives. The breed could land by killing or weakening cancer antibodies — they are going to hatch out of the tumors. Don’t scare yourself, just look: You are looking right at cancer. Plop of diseased lung into a bloody trough . ..
A (cigarette brand) is great after major surgery,’ said Doctor Caspar Higgin, after removing a lung from his twin brother.
So you’ve thought about it. Now make a list of everything you don’t like about smoking and carry it around with you. By thinking about it you already have a list. Now pick your time and stop. No cutting down, no rationing: Stop. Do not permit yourself one single exception.
The first day you don’t take it seriously — you might start again tomorrow — but somehow you don’t. By the third day you know you have actually stopped, and that you prefer the way you are now to the way you were when you smoked. Now you can see the dreary sordid slavery of tobacco. Why, one respected matron who tried to stop rushed out of her house at midnight in her pajamas, quite mad for cigarettes, cribbing in gutters and ash cans ... And Oscar Wilde often encountered a young friend on the floor as they both searched the trash for usable butts.
Observing what happens when you stop smoking will tell you a lot about what the actual function of smoking is. For one thing, people light up to cover pain, worry, embarrassment. Remember the advertisements for Murad cigarettes?
‘Embarrassing moments. . .’ (Her husband returns unexpectedly, etc.)
‘Be nonchalant: light a Murad.’
And when the doctor tells you you got oat cell cancer in both lungs, be nonchalant, light a Murad — you might as well.
I see the old smoking Burroughs dim jerky far away
in a 1920’s comedy where it’s always two in the morning and languid aristocrats yawn out smoke rings. It was put down in the ads as glamorous, a badge of manhood and sophistication. I see it now as a dirty, ruinous, slobbish habit. Smokers of the world, look in the mirror. These are unsightly tricks’ — Doctor Strangelove slaps his creeping hand away from his pocket.
No-smoking Rallies could be organized . . .
‘Oh I just know I had to stop . ..’
‘It came to me real sudden, “I don’t have to do that” . . .’
‘I know, I know, I know . . .’
They wallow in congratulatory heaps until attacked by the displaced tobacco workers. But they can run so much faster ... they scatter laughing gaily. Tobacco posters rot and peel and flap in the wind. Radiant pop stars strip off tobacco plants. The tobacco industry is rained. Oh, there were a few people who smoked five cigarettes a day — they can grow their own for all the money to be made off them and some cranky old pipe-smokers. It catches on like mad: a whole film is made in which nobody smokes. Soon it is as bad form to flash a cigarette package as a mink stole.
‘In their insensate fury they could turn on other products,’ a former president of Tobacco Amalgamated warned bluntly. Yes indeed — on a lot of old products. When you stop smoking, all habits are called into question. You begin to take a long cool look at everything you think and do. How much of your thinking and doing is predicated on a conviction that you can’t change? You have just proven to yourself that you can. So why stop with cigarettes? You can give up anything or anybody.