It’s a well known fact, my friends, that God may grab us by the throat but doesn’t choke us, so as a result of that solitude I decided to do something with my life. When you come off hard drugs the first thing you notice is that the days are very long, they’re full of unbearably slow hours and minutes and you think the Earth has stopped turning and you’re already dead because a nervous calm has invaded your brain, but I’d said to myself, no, go back, and I’d found the Big Enchilada and His son Walter, and devoted myself to filling those capsules of time with evangelical resistance, but now it was different: I had to use my head, but not only the outer part, the one you use for wearing a hat or for head butting someone in a fight, but the other part, and I said to myself, the time has come to explore what’s inside that sphere you have on your shoulders, and that, my dear friends, is how I started reading, beginning with books about Jesus Christ, my boss, my immediate superior, picture books for children first, because my mind was still undeveloped, but then I moved on to a study of the Gospels and another of Mary and the apostles, and I realized I was becoming engrossed, and when night came it was great to know that I could immerse myself in those reams of paper, and greater still to confirm that the next day I remembered everything, or almost everything, and so time passed and I continued working hard and reading everything I could, while Walter continued with his bodybuilding and his muscles grew ever more perfect, a sculpture in marble, my friends, and as I was becoming less of an idiot than I’d been before I said to Walter one day that we ought to make a library, which he immediately approved, so I brought up from the cellar the boxes of books that had belonged to old Ebenezer, who being a faggot had been sensitive to literature, and let me tell you this, my brothers and sisters, I didn’t have to go back to the library at Kennington school anymore, which was where I used to borrow books from, because now I had all these books to start on, and it was all top quality material, pure dynamite, as the drug dealers say.
In all that ocean of words, I discovered poetry, and set out with enthusiasm to learn its meaning and enjoy the rhymed phrases, something that before then, to tell the truth, had always seemed to me a bit faggoty, and note this, my friends, it was through poetry that I started seriously giving a meaning to my life, in spite of the fact that, obviously, the question of the hairy orifice through which I had come into the world was still a mystery, let me make that clear, but at least I already felt a brotherhood of meaning and solitude through those rhymed words, and that was something I saw in William Carlos Williams or Whitman or Milton, the last of these on a religious theme, which was especially beautiful.
In those words I saw the same stream of light that had blinded me that first day. The same voice coming from on high, but in another format, and sometimes, I confess, a rhyme made me cry because of its perfection, the cleanness and purity it concealed; ever since then, beautiful things have moved me and made me want to cry, beauty touches me deeply, takes my breath away, as if I hadn’t expected anything of the world but trash and gruesomeness; the beautiful turns mystical and allows us to regain our belief in appearances, in the possibility of goodness and tranquility, in other words, peace. Beauty, in those days, was synonymous with peace, that space where the spirit, or at least mine, grows wings, launches itself into the air, and sees everything from a long way up. And so I felt grateful to those blocks of printed paper, that black ink, those numbered pages. It was the great revelation of my life after the Eye of the Big Enchilada, and I really mean that, my friends.