There are two kinds of P.K.'s. One is all saint, the other all devil. One look at me and you know which kind I am. Although I am the devilish type, you should be safe in my presence. So far, I haven't hurt a flea in my life, let alone a human being. To qualify that, I have hurt one human being, and that is myself. Was it my fault, or was I fated to be who I am? I wish I knew.
I am not the poet I appear to be, although I was born to be one. Instead, I am an advertiser. Not the occupation you'd expect of a devil like me. Not that advertizing can't be devilish, but that it is so banal. You'd think I'd find a more creative way to be devilish. How could a man like me, who has no business savvy, make anything out of advertizing? That must have been the first question to pass through the mind of my employer when he saw me for my job interview. But I have a gift--and I don't mean a gift of divine grace either--Sorry, Father--for selling. Just think of advertisements for a moment. Sometimes the selling image is the dapper, handsome man wearing a tailored suit and giving a straight-forward pitch for the product. But what usually catches the consciousness and, more important, the unconscious, is an image that doesn't fit in real life. Even the most rationalistic of us need a sense of fantasy somehow. So, what better way is there to sell a product as prosaic as laundry detergent or a plastic hamburger than to make it appear to be a gift from a transcendental mystic world.
The fantastical imagination is important, even vital, to the world of advertizing. That is why I was welcomed into this world, not in spite of appearing to be an agent from outer space, but precisely because of that dubious quality. Here is the discontented young man who exudes the sense that he opposes everything about America that smacks of the bourgeois capitalistic culture. Yet this alien brings otherworldly gifts to that very culture. When I appear in an ad which I have scripted myself, I become a more mystic presence than the Jolly Green Giant. A green giant or genie would sooner appear in a housewife's kitchen than a misplaced misanthropic poet. But there I am, on the cathode tube, appearing before the bourgeois nation the way I appeared in the New York advertizing office to sell myself. The executive could hardly believe his eyes. Surely I would not appear in such a place to apply for such a job. But I did. And he just knew, without knowing why he knew, that I could sell anything. And I do.
Those of you who think that advertizing is of the devil must wonder how I can live with myself. The answer is I can't. Mind you, I 'm not talking about having a conscience over selling my soul. I don't think I have a conscience really, except that I would never knowingly hurt any of God's little ones. As for advertizing, it is worth remembering that few people respond to ads that simply convey information about what is available. Most people want fantasy, not the product, and fantasy is what you have to give them or they won't buy what you're selling.
How I loved that story when I was little, but I heard little of it in church later on. The sweet old lady who taught first-grade Sunday school read it to us and told us it was important. What my father seemed to think was important was the hellfire and brimstone he preached from his pulpit. I don't want you to feel sorry for a poor long-suffering boy who was forced to listen to those sermons. The truth is, I liked them, but not in the way my father expected I would. His delivery was tremendous. Father could hold the congregation breathless in the palm of his hand as he made us feel the flames of Hell burning through every muscle of our bodies. You see, my father, too, could sell anything he wanted to, even men getting swallowed by whales, and human souls writhing in eternal torment because they didn't go to evening prayer services. He never talked about people being good. I think that's because the Bible doesn't have much in the way of good people being sweet and nice. The Bible is full of people who do the sorts of things that get them thrown into Hell. Alas, I was soon to learn that hell is not as exciting as my father made it out to be.
It is strange to me still, that we need so badly to meditate on Hell. Heaven never seems to be enough to interest anyone. Heaven is interesting long enough for a thirty-second spot that reveals the bliss of biting into the Ultimate Hot Dog, but you couldn't show people eating these hot dogs for thirty minutes and have any viewers. After the thirty-minute heaven of the Hot Dog, you have to throw some decent human beings into problems sufficiently interesting to get people's attention. When the problems are solved, it is time for the next thirty-minute slot following the thirty-second slots filled with more glimpses of heaven. I suppose the church and the small South Dakota town where I grew up were images of Heaven in their way. Everything was clean. There were no factories, although some of our people worked at those in the next town. The place was safer than anybody can imagine today. Nobody locked the doors at night. Everybody knew everybody else, and every sales clerk treated me like a friend. What could be better?
But all of that clean light was not enough. There had to be more to life. I didn't form my thoughts in just that way when I was a kid, but I knew, vaguely at least, that I needed more if life was going to be interesting. The other side of life, the hellfire, gave me a taste of that something more. If drugs had been circulating in small towns then, I would have tried them. Like any self-respecting boy, I hated poetry. Poetry was all about silly flowers in spring time. If I had been told that some poets wrote books like Seasons in Hell, that would have been different. I was not to find out about real poetry until I was already diverted to a different line of work. As it was, I was to enter that other side, the dark side, in a way that makes every drug seem innocuous in comparison.
There was an old man in the town who came to embody this other side for me. All of us were afraid of him. It wasn't a rational feeling. He never did anything that we could see that was blameworthy. He was just odd. Because he was odd, our imaginations ran wild as to what he did that could not be seen. He lived all alone in a large house on the edge of town up on a small hill. He was the last of the line of one of the town's oldest families. After his death, there would be nobody left of the clan which built the town during pioneer days. Because of his ancestry, Silas Cuthroe was deemed worthy of respect. But it was also rumored that he had sold his soul to the devil. My father said over and over again that he did not believe it was true. Silas Cuthroe attended church every Sunday and he always put a large contribution in the collection plate in front of the whole congregation. But my father never paid the old man a pastoral call.
For me, it was different. It started when I was a very small child running around during fellowship hour like a wild Indian. One day, I stopped in my tracks without knowing why. The other kids had left me far behind. I felt something cold surround me. It was a chilly April morning, but we had the heat on and it was warm in the fellowship hall. When I turned around, there was Silas Cuthroe. He had me locked in place by the look in his eyes. I was amazed that he was even at the fellowship hour. He hardly ever attended, and nobody wanted him to. But there he was with his eyes fixed on me! We each took a step or two toward each other until we were close enough to touch. He reached out his hand and I took it, and not reluctantly either. I was smelled the presence of the other side, and I did not want to pass the opportunity by.
"You're my kind of boy," said old Silas in a raspy voice I had never heard before. Perhaps few people had been privileged to hear his voice, come to think of it. "You aren't like the others." What a shock I received from those words! Up to that moment, I had always tried to be exactly like the other boys. But with those fatal words, my head swelled with the thought that I was above all of the other boys. Silas Cuthroe had said very little and this was all there was to our exchange that Sunday morning, but it left me feeling that I had been handed a secret that nobody else knew. The secret came, of course, from the other side. I was thus given the first taste of a life richer than unadulterated sugar. My taste buds for living had grown to appreciate the bitter.
We never spoke again but I saw him a few more times, though never again at church. Each time, I was running an errand for somebody, for which I was well paid. While getting from one place to another, suddenly I ran into Silas Cuthroe. He seemed to just appear out of nowhere, like a ghost, when he felt like it. He never spoke a word, and neither did I. Each time we met, he tipped his head slightly, and I did the same. Each time we greeted each other in this way, I felt that something of his spirit was entering me and that I was deeper into a secret only the two of us shared. Each time I passed the old man, my thoughts filled up with the errands I would run and the money I could make. Even before he died, I was already knocking on my neighbors' doors to convince them they needed an errand done for them when they hadn't even thought of anything.
Early in autumn, Silas Cuthroe died. I experienced no emotion over that loss to our town and the church. Father had no cause for grief on the financial end of things, for a large bequest from him guaranteed fiscal stability for the church far into the future. Father's sermon was sober and edifying for all to hear, but every eye in the church was dry. The old house passed into the hands of the state and remained in its abandoned state.
By a month or so after Silas Cuthroe's death, rumors were circulating about town that he still appeared in the streets from time to time. His ghost usually only walked from one corner to the next, nothing more than that, but there he was, or so it was said. For myself, once the rumors started, I took extra-long walks while doing errands in hopes of seeing him, but I never saw him in his ghostly form.
An empty house on the edge of a small town is automatically a haunted house in the minds of boys. Silas Cuthroe's house was no exception. Not least because the house was not cared for in Silas Cuthroe's last years and it was falling into decay as the owner's body was also decaying. There were signs in front warning off all trespassers while the state tried to find a buyer for the place, but adventurous boys are only encouraged by such deterrents.
By the next autumn, by which time the dilapidated house had stood empty for a year, it was irresistible. By this time, my friends and I had graduated from the "wild Indian" stage to something more serious. For a year we had talked about Silas Cuthroe. One of my friends was among those who claimed to have seen the ghost of Silas Cuthroe pass him on the street. Having had the experience while the old man was alive, I knew my friend was telling the truth. The shudder in his voice was all too real. I said nothing of my own true encounters with old Silas, but I made up my own stories about meeting his ghost so as to gain the respect and admiration of the other boys. The way they started to look up to me convinced me that Silas was right, I was not like the other boys.
The next step, of course, was for me to plan an expedition to the haunted house. We waited for a suitably blustery dark afternoon, which was not long in coming in October. We planted our excuses for not being home directly from school and took a devious route to the house. What a sight! Paint had peeled off the shutters and bricks were crumbling. The wind seemed to pick up in response to our daring to visit the place. We approached the house with ritual caution. We were brave and could face anything, but we had to act as if we were doing something dangerous, or we would not feel so brave. After hiding behind one scraggly bush after another, and peeking out to see if a disembodied hand appeared at a window, we made our way towards the house.
The front door was locked, of course. We probably could have broken it down, but that was so easy it would have been cheating. Instead, we inspected the windows, and picked one with a shutter flapping in the wind. One pane was already conveniently broken. We made short work of the rest with the stones at our feet. The frames stood in our way, like so many bars, but the wood was so rotten that a few more well-aimed stones broke them away so that we could climb into the house.
The first thing that hit us was the stench. We had never thought about what a house would be like when it hadn't been ventilated for a year. Mouse droppings covered the bare floor. The furniture had long since been cleared out and auctioned off. Large cracks adorned the bare walls. We advanced with cautious, fearful, steps, torn between the bravado of yelling at the ghost, and the cowardly waiting for him to appear on his own accord. As a result, we stood in silence for a long time. No sound interrupted our vigil.
When we could be patient no longer, we moved through the living room towards the hall way and the staircase. A scraping sound sent us scurrying back to the window. But before we had climbed back out, we realized it was only a mouse. Grinning sheepishly at ourselves, and putting our brave faces back on, we walked stoutly towards the stairs. As we went, our steps grew quieter and smaller. By the time we reached the hallway, we were on our tip-toes. We listened. Still no sound, not even a mouse this time.
I must have been the first to know, but I was not the first to react. A cry stuck in the throat of one of my companions. He pointed a shaky finger up the stairs at what I had already seen but couldn't believe. The sound of running feet filled the house. This time, we did not stop at the window. We piled out as fast as we could and ran until we were well back into town. Not until I was almost home did I realize I had cut my hand on the broken glass on my way through the window. I fabricated an explanation for my injury that had nothing to do with haunted houses.
My friends and I exchanged knowing looks every time we got together, but no word escaped our lips for three or four weeks. I think it was the boy who cried out and pointed up the stairs who first said something about having seen the ghost of Silas Cuthroe. I was not about to be outdone. I told the other boys that I had been back to the house several times, that I had seen the ghost each time, and that I was not afraid of the ghost. Not only that, I was buddy-buddy with the ghost. One of the effects of telling those lies was that Silas Cuthroe seemed to become more and more a part of me every time I mentioned him to my friends. I even woke up in the morning, thinking I had dreamed about visiting the house when it was still full of furniture and talking with the old man or even playing with Silas when he was a boy my age. The other effect was that the boys were in awe of me. I also think they were hoping to bring me crashing down to earth.
I thought I was safe telling those lies because I was sure none of the other boys were willing to go near that house again for twenty million dollars. Maybe twenty million dollars wouldn't have motivated them, but the chance to dare me did. One cold and cloudy and windy night in November, I went to bed with the chilling realization that I had promised the other boys to return to the haunted house at midnight. There was no escape. If I didn't show up at the appointed place, I would be a chicken for life.
Walking by the light of our flashlights along the country road, I felt buoyed up by my companions. I was also trapped by them. There was no way I could turn back without having walked into the house and back out of it. No matter what happened, I dared not run as that, too, would have given the lie to all that I had said for a month. Needless to say, it was a dark, cold night with the wind blowing hard in our faces.
The dark house looked like a monster waiting to devour me. I could hear a shutter banging against the house from some distance away. I had almost reached the point of deciding that it was worth the disgrace to run away when one of the boys said: "Say 'hi' to him for me." I couldn't resist the challenge. I desperately tried to brainwash myself into believing that this wasn't a haunted house and nobody lived there. I would walk into an empty house while my friends waited outside and then I would walk back and tell them what a nice time I had with Old Silas Cuthroe.
So fortified in my resolve, I climbed through the window through which I had fled with my friends several weeks before. One flashlight is not very much in such a big house. To my surprise, the house did not feel so strange. I almost had the feeling that I was walking into my own house. I just knew where the couch was, and where I could have sat in the rocker. I even remembered seeing a painting of a shipwreck over the mantel I found, of course, that I saw the furnishings better without the flashlight than with it. The light only showed up the cracks in the wall and the mouse droppings on the floor.
By the time I had reached the hallway and the stairs I was in a state of exhilaration. I was rehearsing the boastful account I would make to my friends once this ordeal was over. The made-up conversation flowed through my mind. I didn't even see or hear any mice. Then I saw the shadow on the steps. I could have sworn I had not seen it even a second ago. If my friends were not waiting outside I surely would have bolted once more. But I was caught by their desire to see me turn chicken. I had to see this patch of darkness through.
My courage was rewarded. I slowly moved the beam of my flashlight up the steps in the direction of the dark figure. What the light showed me was a face, but not the face of a ghost. With a wildly beating heart, I found myself looking at a portrait mounted on the wall half way up the staircase. Immediately I started to breathe more easily. I could see how I and my friends had mistaken it for a ghost. The canvas was quite dark and the shadow surrounding the face absorbed the light I was casting on it. Cautiously, I climbed the stairs to get a closer look. It was a portrait of Silas Cuthroe himself. He was younger then when I knew him but in the picture he was at least middle-aged. He had changed little in the last half of his life. He was dressed all in black and the background was dark as well, so that only the piercing face emerged out of the shadow. I stood there transfixed. Silas was staring at me with that same piercing look he gave me when we passed on the street during the last year of his life on earth. The face was so life-like, that I was not even startled when he took my hand.
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