Crazy Cock by Henry Miller

iron sink where the dirty dishes accumulated. The only source of heat was an open fireplace which was out of order. No one had thought to inquire about a gas range or to observe whether there were clothes closets, etc. Despite the drawbacks, Hildred and Vanya declared it to be a jolly place. It was the sort of den that appealed to their bohemian natures.
    As soon as they had received permission they commenced redecorating the rooms. The green walls were converted to pitchblende, the ceiling ripened into a violet shudder, the electric bulbs were tinted a Venetian pink and etched with obscene designs. Then came the frescoes. Vanya began with her own room first. It was a little cell separated from the lavatory by a barred window. Directly above her cot a toilet box was suspended. The faint, gurgling tinkle of the drains soothed her nerves.
    While she worked the two Danish sisters who owned the house looked on with prurient eyes. They would bring down liverwurst sandwiches and beer, and when they got better acquainted, they finally produced long black cigars which they smoked leisurely and with deep contentment. Vanya was not long in acquiring the habit. Hildred was the only one to demur; she said the cigars were vile. They probably were.
    One day Vanya plucked up courage to ask the sisters to pose for her. They were flattered at first, but when it dawned on them that they were to pose in the nude, they reneged. After a little persuasion, however, they consented—not in the altogether, but in chemise and hose. And so, day after day, they stood shivering with cigars in their mouths, their bodies composed in the suggestive order of a bacchanal. Just as a Chinese artist will faithfully reproduce a broken plate, so Vanya reproduced these hungry madonnas—she verified every wrinkle, every crease, every wart.
    The walls of the ménage soon began to heave, to scream and dance. Vanya’s inventiveness was inexhaustible. At the far end, adjacent to the outhouse, a circus of toppling skyscrapers opened the legend; in the open spaces, on velvet greenswards, the weary megalopolitans could be seen pursuing their degenerate practices. From this Sodom it was but a jump to the Gomorrah of Paris—Paris with its kiosks and urinals, its quays and bridges, its fizzing boulevards and zinc bars. Looking at a narrow panel beneath the word “Montparnasse,” one had the sensation of standing inside a
urinoir
plastered with municipal proclamations. A tableau of figures, one below the other, presented vividly to the imagination the dire effects of venereal infection. To make the circuit of the rooms was to receive a painful crosscut of our civilization:there was the machine, the ghetto, the palatial lobbies of the money-grubbers, the speakeasy, the funny paper, the dance halls, the insane asylums—all fused into a maelstrom of color and rhythm. And, as if this were not enough, a special area was given over to the
fantastique
. Here Vanya permitted herself the liberty of painting her unconscious. Here flowers grew with stupendous human organs; here monsters rose up out of the deep, their jaws dripping with slime, and united shamelessly; from the facades of cathedrals huge teats, bursting with milk, swelled out; children instructed the aged, their belts slung with Korans and Talmuds; words unprintable floated in a sky drunk with blood through which zeppelins sailed upside down, piloted by such queer fellows as Pythagoras and Walther von der Vogelweide; sea cows mooched along side by side with amberjacks, and painted sunsets with their tails.
    Tony Bring looked on incredulously, applauded, or put in a suggestion now and then, marveling all the while at the fecundity of this genius with the dirty fingernails.
    Alone, he fell into his usual vegetal ruminations, or wandered moodily from one room to another, surveying the walls absentmindedly. When Hildred returned (she was still at the Caravan) he would sit before her like a frozen