PART TWO

It Must Be This

(1)

After having been asked numerous times by some of the people I work with at the factory, I finally agreed one night to accompany them back to the trailer park where one of them lives for a party after work.  There must have been about a dozen of us there all told.  Some of us sat in one or another of the frayed, sagging chairs that had been crammed into the trailer's tiny living room; others bunched themselves up on an old, tattered couch or sat about on the floor.  Cans of beer were distributed, a couple of joints got passed around, then everyone settled down to the business of smoking endless numbers of cigarettes while shouting meaningless party talk at each other over the blare of the stereo, which had been turned up full blast.

I found it rather difficult to enjoy myself.  I felt too much aware – as I am similarly aware every time I go into work – of how ill-suited I really am to the company of these people.  Unlike me, they do not feel themselves to exist outside the social order into which they have been born:  they know who they are and what they are, and where they belong.  They're a friendly group, and happy enough, being no more and no less disgruntled with their lot in life than they have been taught by life to be.  They are, in other words, as content as any group of people of similar background, intelligence, and sensibilities ever is.  I did not understand them.  I did not know how to be one of them.  I have never known how to be one with the crowd.

During the course of the evening one of the men of our group had a long fit of coughing, which left him looking exhausted and sounding hoarse.  He stared down at the joint he was holding, shook his head ruefully at it and said, "I guess that'll be enough of that!"  So saying, he passed the joint on.  Then he took a cigarette out of the pack he kept in his shirt pocket, lit that – and immediately started sputtering and hacking again.  This made everyone laugh.  "Better now?" somebody asked, and they all laughed some more.  The fellow with the cigarette, his face reddened from coughing, laughed right along with them.  The capacity to laugh at one's foibles is a feature much appreciated by these people and, despite the shadows under his eyes, the paleness of his skin and the yellow stains on his teeth, this man had a self-effacing sweetness about him which made him quite popular with the other members of his group.  Someone asked after his health.  He has a chronic lung condition and has been strictly forbidden to smoke; the doctors have warned him that if he does not quit his lungs will continue to deteriorate and may eventually become seriously damaged.  He told us then the riddling little joke he'd told his doctor, and which I repeat here now, more or less in his own words:

"Why worry about it?" he said with a shrug.  "Like I said to the doctor, the only thing you need to worry about when you get up in the morning is what you're going to do with your day.  And if you're too sick to do anything, well then, you don't have to worry about that.  If you're sick, the only thing you have to worry about is whether you're going to get better or die.  And if you die, you don't have to worry about that either.  Then the only thing you have to worry about is whether you're going to go to heaven or hell.  And if you go to hell, well, the only thing you'll have to worry about then is what you're going to do with all your friends once you get there!"

This joke was greeted with cheers all around:  everyone understood just what he meant.  After all, for these people the story represented more than just a joke; it formulated a major tenet of their lives.  "Anyhow," the fellow concluded, taking another long, ruminative drag on his cigarette, "I already know I'm going to hell.  So I guess I figure . . . why worry?"  This comment was greeted with yet more cheers and laughter and the fellow looked dazedly about him, a happy grin on his face.  The response given his remarks was meant, after all, to be friendly, and he took it as such.  I however did not.  I thought I sensed a callous quality to it.  For there suddenly swept through me the conviction that this man really meant it:  he really did believe in hell – the old Biblical hell of tormenting fires and eternal damnation.  Not only that, but he believed he was already condemned to go there, and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.  "This is a cold, cold world," he seemed to be saying, "and we all know it.  Weakness can neither be helped nor, in the end, tolerated.  But I am weak.  We are all weak.  And there's nothing we can do about it.  So . . . why worry?"

I found myself staring in wonder at this good-natured, and essentially good, young man.  He felt my gaze and glanced over at me, a fleeting, semi-embarrassed smile parting his lips.  I grinned back at him – felt my grin go wrong somehow – then averted my eyes.  But there passed through me suddenly a feeling of intense physical desire for him, a feeling which continued to possess me for the rest of the evening.  Through the impetus of pity, my lust had been aroused; and though he did not know it, I would gladly have gone to hell with him that night.  Had I been willing to surrender myself up to my lust, purely and wholly, I may even have convinced him to allow me to do so.  But to rescue him from that hell he would not have allowed.  That would have required of him the sacrifice of his cavalier attitude towards life, death, and morality; and however feeble its protection, this was the only defense he had against the surety of his damnation.  Had I gone to hell with him that night, I would have had to stay there.  And this, for better or worse, I was not willing to do.

LOVE POEM FOR SOME YOU