"He smells that old rat again," and shot a hole in the wall big enough for fifty rats.
On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house.
His friends said,
"Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said,
"I like it because it's ugly."
All his life was in that line.
Once I knocked on his door in the 60th Street slums of New York and he opened it wearing a derby hat, a vest with nothing underneath, and long striped sharpster pants; in his hands he had a cookpot, birdseed in the pot, and was trying to mash the seed to roll in cigarettes.
He also experimented in boiling codeine cough syrup down to a black mash – that didn't work too well.
He spent long hours with Shakespeare – the
"Immortal Bard," he called him – on his lap.
In New Orleans he had begun to spend long hours with the Mayan Codices on his lap, and, although he went on talking, the book lay open all the time.
I said once,
"What's going to happen to us when we die?" and he said,
"When you die you're just dead, that's all."
He had a set of chains in his room that he said he used with his psychoanalyst; they were experimenting with narcoanalysis and found that Old Bull had seven separate personalities, each growing worse and worse on the way down, till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains.
The top personality was an English lord, the bottom the idiot.
Halfway he was an old Negro who stood in line, waiting with everyone else, and said,
"Some's bastards, some's ain't, that's the score."
Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days m America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone.
His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.
He spent all his time talking and teaching others.
Jane sat at his feet; so did I; so did Dean; and so had Carlo Marx.
We'd all learned from him.
He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn't notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness – a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries.
He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life's work, which was the study of things them-selves.-in the streets of life and the night.
He sat in his chair; Jane brought drinks, martinis.
The shades by his chair were always drawn, day and night; it was his corner of the house.
On his lap were the Mayan Codices and an air gun which he occasionally raised to pop benzedrine tubes across the room.
I kept rushing around, putting up new ones.
We all took shots and meanwhile we talked.
Bull was curious to know the reason for this trip.
He peered at us and snuffed down his nose, thfump, like a sound in a dry tank.
"Now, Dean, I want you to sit quiet a minute and tell me what you're doing crossing the country like this."
Dean could only blush and say,
"Ah well, you know how it is."
"Sal, what are you going to the Coast for?"
"Only for a few days.
I'm coming back to school."
"What's the score with this Ed Dunkel?
What kind of character is he?"
At that moment Ed was making up to Galatea in the bedroom; it didn't take him long.
We didn't know what to tell Bull about Ed Dunkel.
Seeing that we didn't know anything about ourselves, he whipped out three sticks of tea and said to go ahead, supper'd be ready soon.
"Ain't nothing better in the world to give you an appetite.
I once ate a horrible lunchcart hamburg on tea and it seemed like the most delicious thing in the world.
I just got back from Houston last week, went to see Dale about our black-eyed peas.
I was sleeping in a motel one morning when all of a sudden I was blasted out of bed.
This damn fool had just shot his wife in the room next to mine.
Everybody stood around confused, and the guy just got in his car and drove off, left the shotgun on the floor for the sheriff.
They finally caught him in Houma, drunk as a lord.