JUDAS ISCARIOT, THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK, AND THE SUICIDES OF MONROE AND HEMINGWAY
November 22, 1988. The Vegas Club, a strip club in Dallas, Texas. Two writers, Norman Mailer and Barry Nathaniel Malzberg, are bivouacking there after fighting through the picket lines at the movie theatre to see The Last Temptation of Christ and Harvey Keitel’s flame-haired Judas Iscariot. On this of all days, it seems appropriate. Previously, Malzberg has caused scandals with the almost simultaneous publication of his dystopian novels, the suicidal Guernica Night, where “the final trip” is offered to all reaching the age of twenty-one, and The Destruction of the Temple, revisiting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Later, Mailer will almost simultaneously publish his Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man and Oswald’s Tale. Unconsciously, in the blacks of his unconscious, Mailer thinks of a novel that he will call The Gospel According to the Son. Dead presidents, classical composers, and religious figures were the meat of science fiction writers, appearing as automata and simulacra in the novels of 1960s and 1970s radicals. Bourbon is flowing. Cigarette smoke fills the lounge as “All Along the Watchtower” plays on the jukebox.
“Here is to Abraham, father of all of us lost Brooklyn Jews.”
“Yes, a toast to Abraham Zapruder.”
“Abraham Zapruder, who came from the Soviet Union to Brooklyn, and then here to Dallas with his 8mm camera, to accidentally film the assassination of our greatest president, Jack Kennedy, on this day twenty-five years ago.”
“And while Abraham Zapruder was settling in Dallas, after New York, Lee Harvey Oswald was unconsciously, inexorably, following him. I believe that in ’42, Oswald was in foster care in New York before enlisting with the marines and defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959. Like the prodigal son, Oswald returned to Dallas in 1962 and found himself a job at the Book Depository.”
“He was a marine who married a girl named Marina.”
“He beat the shit out of her, too.”
“Did you know that the Judas of Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan, his father was named Abraham, and he died of a heart attack on Jack Kennedy’s birthday, five years after the assassination?”
“Kennedy was wearing a back brace that afternoon, so that when the first shot struck him and passed through his throat, he could not fall.”
“This is the bar where Jacob Rubenstein met Candy Barr. Jack Ruby liked to carry a gun in a holster, a Colt .38, and Candy Barr’s stripper shtick was a cowgirl gig, with holsters, boots, six-shooters, and platinum blonde hair like Marilyn.”
“Monroe commits suicide three months after singing at Jack’s birthday party; some say she had a secret abortion right after. Dead, she’s apparently full of pills, but there was no running water in her room, and no glass. One year later Jack is killed, twenty-five years ago today.”
“When Ruby shot Oswald, he was supposed to be jacked up on Preludin. Ruby thought he was injected with cancer cells in custody, and he died of a pulmonary embolism and was riddled with cancer.”
“JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby all laid out in Parkland Hospital.”
“Behold the narrow gurney of the world!”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“Pernod!”
1998. PROVINCETOWN to Armageddon. Before letting it fall, Norman Mailer pinched the shining nickel coin between his thumb and forefinger, leaning over into the black funnel where the full panoply of his ghosts spun roaring like motorcyclists upon the wall of death. He wondered: How close can one get without jeopardy to the soul, sucking the teat, hammering in the nails? Why should I write this? Where is the audacity in the known course? Is there a sting of vigor in sparring with the crude styles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the southpaw John, one piece of fiction taking on another for the provenance of the skull? Or is it all death? The novelist, like a pugilist winning on points as the rain thrashes his windowpanes in Provincetown, raising the penitent belt over his head, asks if the writer is cheapened by repetition where the painter is not. I am not afraid; what is one more portrait of Christ? The coin kept falling and made no splash. The well was truly without end. He felt a quiet fizzing in his kidneys and a momentary souring of his breath. He thought of tall buildings in Brooklyn Heights, Washington, D.C., filthy machine gun mountains in the Philippines, the Texas School Book Depository, and the glass mountain of his reputation, of Lucifer haunting the high peaks, Lucifer the bright star of the artist and the egomaniac. Mailer thought of his Judas: Jack Henry Abbott stabbing a waiter in the heart in the East Village, secretly suspecting and willing that Abbott would one day hang himself inside a prison that moaned like a whale. The contracted belly of the universe, a song of infinite pain, stalled in Mailer’s mind as he thought of how he might fail and write Jesus into heaven. Mailer poured a measure of orange juice from a cardboard carton into his glass of red wine. He was exhausted. After working at his words, writing about Judas, he fell asleep and dreamed of his idol, Ernest Hemingway. He felt himself switching skin.
Contemplating the moon-blue barrels of his shotgun, the old man recalled the fiestas of violence that his flesh had known. He saw bulls shift like black tornadoes, marlins opening the white waters of the capes, and virile shrapnel spread upon the hills of Europe like wasted youth. He had become an aficionado of death. He could hear the spooks closing in, the FBI rattling at his doors, the CIA tapping his telephone. The world was conducting a séance in his head. The metal of the gun tasted like old money.
