Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: "Scared?" Yes, but not of drugs; it was Denny's derelict life that frightened me, and I wanted to emulate him not at all. Strange to remember, but I had preserved the faith: I thought of myself as a serious young man seriously gifted, not an opportunistic layabout, an emotional crook who had drilled Miss Langman till she geysered Guggenheims. I knew I was a bastard but forgave myself because, after all, I was a born bastard—a talented one whose sole obligation was to his talent. Despite the nightly upheavals, the brandy heartburns and wine-sour stomachs, I managed every day to turn out five or six pages of a novel; nothing must be allowed to disrupt that, and Denny was in that sense an ominous presence, a heavy passenger—I felt if I didn't free myself that, like Sinbad and the burdensome Old Man, I'd have to cart Denny piggyback the rest of his life. Yet I liked him, at least I didn't want to leave him while he was still uncontrollably narcotized.
So I told him to take the cure. But added: "Let's not make promises. Afterward, you may want to throw yourself at the foot of the cross or end up scrubbing bedpans for Dr. Schweitzer. Or maybe that's my destiny." How optimistic I was in those sheltered days! — battling tsetse flies and scraping bedpans with my tongue would be honeyed nirvana compared to the sieges I've since withstood.
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