Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Page A

vertical tower that I had tried to climb on a drunken night almost twenty years ago, and I came so near to the summit as to reach theoverhang of the parapet not thirty feet below. I had gone up the vertical, taking handholds and footholds where I found them in the granite blocks, enough at least for my fingertips and my toes. It was a climb to awaken me in the middle of many a night for years after, since in more than one place I had to lift myself by the strength of my arms alone, and in the worst places I ran into ledges wide as two fingers for my toes, but nothing for my hands—I could only mount palms flat against the wall—it is incredible, but I was drunk enough to keep going until I came to the overhang.
    Now, I have talked to rock climbers since, and one or two have even looked at the monument with me, and when asked if they could manage the overhang, said, “A piece of cake,” and meant it. One even explained the technique he would use, although I hardly understood. I was no rock climber myself. That night was the only hour in my life when I lived on a wall near to two hundred feet from the ground, but it came to so poor an end that I never had the moxie to try again.
    For I locked myself up, as they say, in the overhang. It seems I should have trusted the holds I had, and leaned out backward until I got a hand on the parapet—it was only a small overhang!—but I could not figure how to surmount it, and so I pressed instead against an arch just beneath, my back on one supporting column, the soles of my feet on the other, and there I remained, mybody stuffed in the small arch just under the parapet until my strength began to go, and after a while I knew I would fall. Let me say I thought it was not possible, given the position I was in, to descend, and I was right. It is easier, I was told later, to go up a wall than to go down if you do not have a rope. There I perched, then there I clung, while all the collected valor of the spirits I had drunk began to wane. Then I was sober, and so frightened that I began to shout, and soon, I suppose, to scream, and to cut such recollection to its shortest, I was rescued by the Volunteer Fire Department in the middle of the night by a huge fisherman in a bosun’s swing (no less a person than Barrels himself) who was let down on a rope from the balcony above (having gone up the stairway within the tower) and he was able to grasp me finally while they hauled both of us up, but by then I was like a cat trapped for six days in a tree—I had smelled my death—and they say I fought him off, even tried to bite him when he came near. I suspect it is true, for in the morning I had a huge knot on the side of my head where he gave me one bang against the rock to chasten some of that lividity.
    Well, I was also ready to take the bus that morning, and packed my suitcase and was going to leave Provincetown forever when some friends came by and treated me like a figure of valor. It seemed I was not looked upon as a fool. So I stayed, and came to realize why Provincetown might be the place for me, since no one everthought I had done anything crazy or even particularly bizarre. We all had extraordinary stuff to get out of us, that was all. Do it the way you could.
    Still, I kept that bag beneath my bed for all of the winter months I stayed that year, and I do not think there was an hour when I was not ready to decamp—one jeer at the wrong time would have been enough. It was, after all, the first time in my life I had to recognize I was not automatically sane.
    Of course, I had some idea of what could be at the core of it. Years later, reading Jones’s biography of Freud, I came across a reference Freud made to what was “doubtless, an unruly attack of latent homosexual panic in myself,” and had to set the book down, for just so suddenly was I overcome with thinking of the night I tried to scale the monument. Now my tattoo throbbed. Was