Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Page B

that
unruly attack
with me still?
    Yes, was it not true that every place renowned for its colony of homosexuals invariably had such a monument? I thought of the men and boys who cruised the obelisk in Central Park, and the invitations with phallic measurements listed next to many a telephone number inscribed on the partitions of the public toilets at the foot of Washington Monument. What in me had I been attempting to extirpate on that lunatic climb?
In Our Wild—Studies among the Sane
by Timothy Madden.
    There was one other man in town who couldcall himself my mate for he, too, had attempted to go up the Provincetown Monument. Like me, he had failed to solve the overhang and been rescued by the volunteer firemen, although this time (there are limits to symmetry) Barrels was not on the rescue rope.
    His attempt took place only four years ago, but such are the number of freak-outs and flare-outs who bob in the churn of the great washing machine that is Provincetown in summer that no one remembers anything. My father’s legend has been walking along with his life, but here, by the time Hank Nissen made his attempt, all had forgotten mine—too many people pass through!—and sometimes I think Nissen was the only one who remembered that I had also tried.
    I regretted, however, that our exploits were privately wed, for I could not bear the guy. Will it help to explain that his nickname was Spider? Spider Nissen. Henry Nissen a.k.a. Hank Nissen, a.k.a. Spider Nissen, and the last clung to him like a bad smell. He had a touch of the hyena for that matter—the same we-eat-tainted-meattogether intimacy that burns out of a hyena’s eyes behind the bars of his cage. So Spider Nissen would look at me and give a giggle as if we had both had a girl together, and each took turns sitting on her head.
    He bothered me prodigiously. I do not know if it was our mingled glory and shame on the monument wall, but I could not see him in the street without having my mood altered forthe day. I knew as much physical uneasiness around him as if he kept a knife in his pocket to use below your ribs, and indeed he did keep a knife. For that matter, he was the type to knowingly sell you pot ravaged with paraquat because he needed the bread to score for coke. A bad man, yet through the winter, winter after winter, one of my twenty friends in town. In winter we paid a toll not unlike living in Alaska—a friend was someone to pass an hour with against the Great Ice-Man of the North. In the silence of our winter, dull acquaintances, drunks, wretches and bores could be elevated to a species thought of as friend. Much as I disliked Spider, we were near, we had shared an hour no one else could comprehend even if our hour was sixteen years apart.
    Besides, he was a writer. In winter we needed each other if only to be critical of our contemporaries together. One night we would look for the faults in McGuane, next came DeLillo. Robert Stone and Harry Crews were saved for special occasions. Our rage against the talent of those who were our age and successful made the marrow of many an evening, even if I suspected he didn’t value my writing. I knew I didn’t like his. My lips were sealed, however. He was my dirty, treacherous, raunchy neighbor-friend. Besides, one had to admire half his mind. He was trying to launch a series of novels about a private detective who never left his room, a paraplegic in a wheelchair who managed tosolve all crime set before him through his computer. He would tap into giant networks, put knots in the CIA’s internal communications, mess with the Russians, but Spider’s man also took care of intimate deeds by peering into private computers. He’d locate the murderers through their shopping lists. Spider’s protagonist was a true spider. Once I told him, “We’ve evolved from invertebrates to vertebrates. You’ll take us on to the cerebrates.” Saying that, I saw heads with