Don DeLillo - Underworld

I believed in the stern logic of correction. I did my study assignments every night and pounded the floor and pounded the boards in the old gym, good riddance to bad beginnings, blood beginnings, and I was ready for this, hammering hard surfaces on some country road in the julepy haze of a midsummer day, feeling the dead soul slowly drain out of me, the sedimentary stuff of who I was, gone in the dancing air of insects and pollen.

The hills took on color in the fall and they had about as much meaning in your life as a poem on a calendar, four lines about rolling hills in Ronald Colman English.

At Staatsburg I heard many stories about doojee, which was one of the ninety-nine names of heroin, but I didn't tell them my own weak-kneed story, about how I was scared of needles and drugs.

At Staatsburg they had a psychologist who wanted me to talk about the shooting. She thought it was the way to my salvation. I told her,

No, man, forget it, let's talk about the weather. I gave her nothing she could use on my behalf.

I didn't want sweetheart treatment. I was here to do time, one and a half to three, and all I wanted from the system was method and regularity. When the kitchen caught fire I was disappointed. I took it personally. I didn't understand how a well-trained staff could allow this to happen. When three kids went out the gate in the rear of a bakery truck, fifteen-year-olds, junior Alley Boys as the Alhambras were sometimes called, I thought it was a tremendous, what, a dereliction, a collapse, bunched in the back of a Silvercup truck-I was shocked at the level of neglect.

In the gym that day we played half-court with our customary combat skills, hacking the shooter, wheeling off the boards with elbows jutting, but the intensity wasn't there and the game stopped cold a couple of times so the players could talk about the escape. They cracked jokes and bent over laughing but I thought the joke was on us. We weren't worth much if the system designed to contain us kept breaking down.

All that winter I shoveled snow and read books. The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in deep snow-this was how I began to build an individual.

But before the snows came and the ground hardened they put in the golf course. Miniature golf, novelty golf. They unloaded the equipment in a field near the mess hall on a sweet and clear November day. Plywood castles and ramps. Enough junk for nine holes. Little waterwheels and bridges and whatnot. I watched it all take shape with an odd kind of disbelief. I felt tricked and betrayed. I was here on a serious charge, a homicide by whatever name, destruction of life under whatever bureaucratic label, and this was where I belonged, confined upstate, but the people who put me here were trifling with my mind.

The club was in West Hollywood, called the Troubadour, and the man walked onto the stage and unscrewed the mike from the stand and waved it over the crowd, blessing them, and maybe they felt they needed a benediction, tonight of all nights, because the President had addressed the nation about six hours earlier, four o'clock Pacific time, on a matter of the highest national urgency.

The man looked into the audience, stroking his chin, body set in a hipster slouch, and he wore a charcoal suit, continental cut, with natural shoulders and half lapels, and a dark slim knit tie, and that New York Levantine look-yes, this was the infamous sick comic, Lenny Bruce, and they waited for him to tell them how they felt.

Because the Russians had put missiles into Cuba. And President Kennedy's grim speech still formed a kind of auditory wall running through the room. Nuclear strike capability. Full retaliatory response. Such resonant and carefully crafted terms. This was an audience accustomed to a different level of dread. Out-of-work actors and musicians, screenwriters doing draft number ninety-two, there were agents with eczema, wholesome blond beach-body hookers with their vicious slithering pimps. And Lenny's wearing a little smirk, eyeing this group like he sees right to the tacky nougat center of their collective soul. Always a few literate junkies. Maybe a couple of beehived tourists who'd wandered in by mistake with their siding salesmen husbands. And there has to be one name actor with a dose of clap and another who's been reduced to doing soaps. And they all needed Lenny to help them make the transition to the total global thing that's going on out there with SAC bombers rumbling over the tarmac and Polaris subs putting to sea, like dive dive dive , it's dialogue from every submarine movie ever made and it's all factually happening but at the same time they find it remarkably unreal-Titans and Atlases being readied for firing.

Lenny studies them a while, letting the moment draw meaning and portent. It's not at all obvious what he's going to say until he says it, with a thrust to his lower lip and an executive timbre in his voice.

"Good evening, my fellow citizens."

And once he says it, the remark is retroactively inevitable because this was the President's opening line of course and it gets a medium laugh but Lenny kills the bit before it begins. He's not about to do a Kennedy imitation.

He leaned back to distance himself further from the line. Smoke rose from the crowd, hanging in the beam of the baby spot, and he shifted into his own voice with its bent vowels and high nasal shadings.

"I dig it on one level. Being on the brink. It's a rush, man. You can talk all you want about living on the edge. Yeah I know, you smoke some grass on Saturday night. Making the scene. Plus you accidentally drove through Watts one night and can't stop talking about it. Made your shorthairs stand on end. Negroes in porkpie hats. No, yes, this thing here, let me tell you what the edge is. The true edge is not where you choose to live but where they situate you against your will. This event is infinitely deeper and more electrifying than anything you might elect to do with your own life. You know what this is? This is twenty-six guys from Harvard deciding our fate."

He swiveled toward the wings and pointed at some shadow presence as a laugh bubble broke over the massed heads.

"Dig it. These are the guys from the eating clubs and the secret societies. They have fraternity handshakes so complicated it takes three full minutes to do all the moves. One missed digit you're fucked for life. Resign from the country club, forget about the stock options and the executive retreat, watch your wife disappear in a haze of secret drinking. You have to be hip to stay connected. These guys wear boxer shorts with geometric designs that contain the escape routes they've been assigned when the missiles start flying."

Lenny was a handsome guy with dark hair and hooded eyes and he resembled a poolshark who'd graduated to deeper and sleazier schemes. His brows were set at a cosmopolitan arch that seemed to function as an open challenge to his hustler aspect-if you're dumb enough to believe my scam, that's your problem, shmucko.

And he said, "Picture it," and snapped his fingers, releasing the genie from the bottle. "Twenty-six guys in Clark Kent suits getting ready to enter a luxury bunker that's located about half a mile under the White House and the faggot decorator's doing a last-minute checklist. Let's see, peach walls, stunning. Found the chandelier in a little abbey outside Paris. None of that Statler Hilton dreck in my bomb shelter."

And even those in the audience who were familiar with Lenny's habitual scat, the vocal apparatus with its endless shifts and modulations and assumed identities, the release of underground words and tensions-they felt a small medicinal jolt at the pitch of the decorator's voice.