Frank didn’t give up. “You got no risk,” he said. “Those lists can be faked. There’s no master sheet. You don’t have to take money from the kids or make deals. I’ll do all that. You just enlist them when I say OK. Then the cash goes from my hand to yours.”
Well, if he was giving me a hundred, he had to be getting two hundred. And he had about fifteen slots of his own to enlist, and at the rate of two hundred each that was three grand a month. What I didn’t realize was that he couldn’t use the fifteen slots for himself. The commanding officers of his units had people to be taken care of. Political bosses, congressmen, United States senators sent kids in to beat the draft. They were taking the bread out of Frank’s mouth and he was properly pissed off. He could sell only five slots a month. But still, a grand a month tax-free? Still, I said no.
There are all kinds of excuses you can make for finally going crooked. I had a certain image of myself. That I was honorable and would never tell a lie or deceive my fellowman. That I would never do anything underhanded for the sake of money. I thought I was like my brother, Artie. But Artie was down-to-the-bone honest. There was no way for him ever to go crooked. He used to tell me stories about the pressures brought on him on his job. As a chemical engineer testing new drugs for the federal Food and Drug Administration he was in a position of power. He made fairly good money, but when he ran his tests, he disqualified a lot of the drugs that the other federal chemists passed. Then he was approached by the huge drug companies and made to understand that they had jobs which paid a lot more money than he could ever make. If he were a little more flexible, he could move up in the world. Attic brushed them off. Then finally one of the drugs he had vetoed was approved over his head. A year later the drug had to be recalled and banned because of the toxic effects on patients, some of whom died. The whole thing got into the papers, and Artie was a hero for a while. He was even promoted to the highest Civil Service grade. But he was made to understand that he could never go higher. That he would never become the head of the agency because of his lack of understanding of the political necessities of the job. He didn’t care and I was proud of him.
I wanted to live an honorable life, that was my big hang up. I prided myself on being a realist, so I didn’t expect myself to be perfect. But when I did something shitty, I didn’t approve of it or kid myself, and usually I did stop doing the same kind of shitty thing again. But I was often disappointed in myself since there was such a great variety of shifty things a person can do, and so I was always caught by surprise.
Now I had to sell myself the idea of turning crook. I wanted to be honorable became I felt more comfortable telling the truth than lying. I felt more at ease innocent than guilty. I had thought it out. It was a pragmatic desire, not a romantic one. If I had felt more comfortable being a liar and a thief, I would have done so. And therefore was tolerant of those who did so behave. It was, I thought, their metier, not necessarily a moral choice. I claimed that morals had nothing to do with it. But I did not really believe that. In essence I believed in good and evil as values.
And then if truth were told, I was always in competition with other men. And therefore, I wanted to be a better man, a better person. It gave me a satisfaction not to be greedy about money when other men abased themselves for it. To disdain glory, to be honest with women, to be an innocent by choice. It gave me pleasure not to be suspicious of the motives of others and to trust them in almost anything. The truth was I never trusted myself. It was one thing to be honorable, another to be foolhardy.
In short, I would rather be cheated than to cheat someone; I would rather be deceived than be a deceiver; I gladly accepted being hustled as long as I did not become a hustler. I would rather be faked out than be a fake-out artist. And I understood that this was an armor I sheathed myself in, that it was not really admirable. The world could not hurt me if it could not make me feel guilty. If I thought well of myself, what did it matter that others thought ill of me? Of course, it didn’t always work. The armor had chinks. And I made a few slips over the years.
And yet-and yet-I felt that even this, smugly upright as it sounded, was in a funny kind of way the lowest kind of cunning. That my morality rested on a foundation of cold stone. That quite simply there was nothing in life I desired so much that it could corrupt me. The only thing I wanted to do was create a great work of art. But not the fame or money or power, or so I thought. Quite simply to benefit humanity. Ah. Once as an adolescent, beset with guilt and feelings of unworthiness, hopelessly at odds with the world, I stumbled across the Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov. That book changed my life. It gave me strength. It made me see the vulnerable beauty of all people no matter how despicable they might outwardly seem. And I always remembered the day I finally gave up the book, took it back to the asylum library and then walked out into the lemony sunlight of an autumn day. I had a feeling of grace.
And so all I wished for was to write a book that would make people feel as I felt that day. It was to me the ultimate exercise of power. And the purest. And so when my first novel was published, one that I worked on for five years, one that I suffered great hardship to publish without any artistic compromise, the first review that I read called it dirty, degenerate, a book that should never have been written and once written should never have been published.
The book made very little money. It received some superlative reviews. It was agreed that I had created a genuine work of art, and indeed, I had to some extent fulfilled my ambition. Some people wrote letters to me that I might have written to Dostoevsky. I found that the consolation of these letters did not make up for the sense of rejection that commercial failure gave me.
I had another idea for a truly great novel, my Crime and Punishment novel. My publisher would not give me an advance. No publisher would. I stopped writing. Debts piled up. My family lived in poverty. My children had nothing that other children had. My wife, my responsibility, was deprived of all material joys of society, etc., etc. I had gone to Vegas. And so I couldn’t write. Now it became clear. To become the artist and good man I yearned to be, I had to take bribes for a little while. You can sell yourself anything.
Still, it took Frank Alcore six months to break me down, and then he had to get lucky. I was intrigued by Frank because he was the complete gambler. When he bought his wife a present, it was always something he could hock in the pawnshop if he ran short of cash. And what I loved was the way he used his checking account.
On Saturdays Frank would go out to do the family shopping. All the neighborhood merchants knew him and they cashed his checks. In the butcher’s he’d buy the finest cuts of veal and beef and spend a good forty dollars. He’d give the butcher a check for a hundred and pocket the sixty bucks’ change. The same story at the grocery and the vegetable man. Even the liquor store. By noon Saturday he’d have about two hundred bucks’ change from his shopping, and he would use that to make his bets on the baseball games. He didn’t have a penny in his checking account to cover. If he lost his cash on Saturday, he’d get credit at his bookmaker’s to bet the Sunday games, doubling up. If he won, he’d rush to the bank on Monday morning to cover his checks. If he lost, he’d let the checks bounce. Then during the week he would hustle bribes for recruiting young draft dodgers into the six months’ program to cover the checks when they came around the second time.