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meeting existing desires rather than trying to create them, and I am meeting those desires on their only level of comprehension. I had a terrible time in the Army, almost losing my life when in Europe, I had high marks in college, I was a successful editor, I performed a unique and courageous act in giving up all of that to found my own business two years ago. You can be led to appreciate this. It is not only your breasts and eyes which engage me, not your hips and walk, the fine density of your upper arms bare to the sun, no, no, it goes far beyond those perversities and has to do with necessities of the spirit. But even if it did not, what is the difference? Do you think the account executives or copywriters who are laying you steadily on Friday and Saturday night within the context of a relationship, do you think that the aspiring writers and artists with whom you are shacked up in a meaningful situation, do you think that any of them are thinking of your
mind
when their hands encircle your breasts and, groaning, begin to take possession? Have none of that my dear; they are informed only by the basic lusts and urges which sent me into flight after you… but there is so much more to me than lusts and urges, there is a whole range and depth to my personality which you will never understand unless you give me a chance, a chance, that is to say, to explain myself to you, to connect to you on my own terms. Oh, God, give me that chance.” And I would throw myself in front of their hard little shoes for love and necessity’s sake, would have them stamp the very life out of me with their magnificent knee-length leather boots but none of that, of course, not a bit of it; after a time, I tire of the hopelessness of it and duck into a sidestreet or a store, return to the office to perform my sullen tasks.
    And if I were to speak to them, at the moment of completion I know this: that I would look up toward their faces yearning and would see spreading from eyes to cheek, brow to mouth, the most perfect expression of querulousness, and they would say to me, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of my life before I call the police.” As if they were not an incitement to riot. As if they were not glittering stone against which a man could break himself for desire, savaging the polished surfaces, looking for the smallest crevice into which he could sink his fingers, grab hold before the Fall.

XV
    In the Army, in Germany, three whores came to us on field maneuvers and took customers on in a tent a few hundred yards from the main bivouac area. We were in training for a fortnight in the field, cold and snow driving the days to flatness underneath us, and it was inconceivable that the whores could survive that German winter without protection, but somehow they did. No one knew where they came from or where they went after they had hustled a weekend’s work; it was certainly not to the tent which they broke and abandoned, but there was no town within many miles of the bivouac area and no way, seemingly, in which they could be out again in the early morning, preparing for a quick, covert fuck before reveille. Nevertheless they survived; they were part of the training maneuvers, as consequential as the rifles, the snow or the helmets, and as we were apt to do in the Army at that time, we took things for granted. If Germany provided us whores, we (or some of us) would use them; if Germany wanted its slab of reparations in this manner, we would pay them. There was very little to do with the money and the whores were reasonable; $5 American, fuck until you come, quick or slow one price, all means and methods utilized, if it were necessary. The whores were libertarians who did not understand American cunning. I was not the only man who masturbated an hour before going to their tent and who spent half the afternoon inside, staring at the tent wall in the act of fucking, trying to embarrass the mind out of all thought, canceling