In those days, you could write anything you wanted. None of it had been said. Now, the great novels have all been written: half of them hidden, choked with dust, in the crooked shelves of coffee shops. The other half, scrawled and forgotten, left in fragments on cocktail napkins and the backs of directions and baby announcements. Sexus, Plexus and Nexus were each this type of book, before Henry Miller put them back together again with Scotch tape and semen. Part Lazarus, part the professor in Back to the Future, he resurrected himself, knowing full well the Universe could collapse.

When I first read Henry Miller, it might as well have been in Sanskrit. Forty-five pages into Tropic of Cancer, and I tossed it aside. The second time, I didn’t get any farther. It was the third time that I realized: here was something unlike any other book, written by someone unlike anyone else I’d ever read. “Only the killers seem to be extracting from life some satisfactory measure of what they’re putting into it.” That was the doorway.

I certainly wasn’t getting any satisfactory measure. I’m not now; I may well not ever! But at least I know I’m not. At least I can weep like a grieving mother and when I’m done, dance like a madman and know for sure there’s nothing more to life.

Here was writing as raw and as honest as it could possibly be. I could smell the cum and the stink of shit and know there was nothing left; he’d rather fall a thousand feet to his death than take the interminable stairs