I had never met a tattoo artist until I was introduced by a German film director to Mr. Spider Webb[1]. When I told him that I thought he was weird, he said to me,

  “If I seem weird to you, then I’m really worried.”

  But now that I know that he is a real artist, I’ve revised my opinion of him. I think that he uses the backs of his friends as a sort of sketchpad, where he works out the designs of his real pictures. His tattoos are mainly abstract but resemble certain forms of plant life. This I know because his victims are forever stripping proudly in public to display his handiwork.

  I don’t know how far Mr. Spider Webb goes, but I have read a fascinating book by a writer called Mr. Samuel Steward, who, under the nom de plume Phil Sparrow, earned his living as a tattooist. In this capacity he is said to have tattooed the penis of a policeman, during which process the officer - off-duty one assumes - ejaculated.

  One can only assume, given the outcome, that pain had become his true pleasure and he was a bona fide masochist. Nevertheless, it’s a little difficult to understand what purpose such a tattoo would serve, since the picture or message could only be fully seen or read when the gentleman’s penis was in ‘full bloom’. Not exactly the time you would want to enter an art gallery and be seen. Well, not for most people, anyway. The policeman may have thought differently.

  2. Children

  Children are an awful thing. Living in America, one cannot help but notice how much American men like their children however. It’s altogether different to how children are perceived and treated in England.

  Here, men talk to their children, play with their children and carry their children. They even kiss them, which is unheard of in England. My father never dreamt of kissing anybody, let alone me. And he would never have carried any of us. If ever we went somewhere, he always walked ahead of my mother by a good few yards. We all followed along behind. It was as if he was detached from the whole process of family life. But in America there is a strange bond between the son and the father, especially if there is only one son within the brood.

  In England, married women never have a minute to spare. You call on certain people at their house and they come to the door holding one child by the hand and with another child held to their bosom. And when you are with them, they call out into other rooms: “What are you doing in there? Margery, you sound very quiet.” They worry endlessly about all of their children and what they are doing. If they are not in the room with them, why are they not in the room? If they are in the room with them, will they keep quiet?

  I would hate to live like that, but most women do and have chosen to do it. They got married so that someone would pay their rent. I think that is genuinely the only reason why working-class women get married. Then they have about four children and have to look after them all of their lives. When the youngest is seven or eight, they can be left alone in the house for only a moment, because even then they may set the house on fire.

  I don’t know why, but there are endless reports on television of a woman who has been arrested because she left her children alone. She had to do it! She can’t go out to the shops with all her children, because they run about and take things off the shelves, and then she’s accused of stealing. She can’t control a whole gang of children, so in these instances she decides to leave them at home. And then, of course, they throw themselves out of the window, or they set fire to the place. No one knows why. But there is no way to win, so the moral here is don’t have children.

  Clearly, I have never had children. I have neither married nor ever had sex with a woman. So, I was never likely to have children. And at least partially because of this, I have never contemplated a life with children. But I know I would have hated it. Ultimately, had I fathered children I believe I would have behaved badly and I would have hit them. I don’t think there would have been an alternative. You just can’t talk to children and, of course, talking is my favorite pastime. It’s the only thing that I’m good at.

  If I had been a woman, I would have tried not to have children. I don’t know whether as a woman you can have an operation the same way you can when you’re a man. I believe you can only have a hysterectomy, which I would have hesitated to do. Here in America a doctor might even refuse to perform the operation on religious or moral grounds. I once heard about a doctor who refused to give a man a vasectomy. The doctor refused saying, “I won’t do it. Why should I let him indulge himself?” His issue seemed to be that afterwards, sex would go from being chiefly about procreation to solely about titillation. It was a kind of puritanism that the doctor was following. But it makes no sense. Even for married couples, sex is only about procreation once, twice or maybe three times in a lifetime. It’s far too expensive a pastime to maintain after that.

  Gay men have, of course, mastered the art of sex for titillation’s sake. They have so many oats to sow it’s surprising they have time for anything else. Lesbians are different. So, even if the whole world became gay, there would still be children being born because of all the turkey-baster babies that lesbians have.

  I don’t understand why lesbians want children. The trap must look so enticing to them though. Initially, you get to dress your children in pretty clothes. Then they learn to say Mama and Dada and parents coo and crow. But then they grow up to be taller than you and they start to have ideas about the world and themselves with which you disagree. And at that point all you can say is, “It didn't say any of this on the box. Why can’t I get my money back? Why can’t I throw them away?”

  I think, at the appropriate age, and in the right set of circumstances, parents should be able to legally sacrifice their children and be done with the whole thing.

  If you insist on raising children all the way to adulthood, I think the most important thing is to raise a child to be free. Children should be nurtured to have their own opinions. Not to come to you the whole time asking, “What shall I do? What should I say.” No. When you ask them, “What would you like to do?” They should be able to tell you. If they say, “I don’t know,” then they’re in trouble.

  Build them into decisive people, for their own good. Try not to suffocate them with art, literature or music. That is a mistake because life is there and they have to trudge through it. And if you can prevent them from bullying other people, or being bullied by other people, that too would be a good thing.

  A woman I knew once said, “It is as much of a sin to allow yourself to be exploited as it is to exploit others”, and that I hadn’t thought of. But it’s no good saying to children, “Well stand up for yourself”, because what if you can’t stand up for yourself? I couldn’t stand up for myself and I didn’t, and the wider world knew I couldn’t, but I survived by simply appealing for help and understanding.

  That’s something that worries me about people. Some people have no capacity to appeal to others for help. They want to be independent and they bolster this view by saying, “You had better learn how to do it because no one’s going to show you.” But people will show you how to do it, and in return you’ve only got to be grateful for their help. It worries me that the philosophy of the helpless is something that has to be gone into. To me, it is self-evident, though of course I have been helpless my whole life.

  The pursuit of parenthood is something I’ve never understood and yet it is near-universal. My father lived in debt and, though I didn’t know that at the time, I think I may have been influenced by it. He didn’t want to give anything away. He must have been a very bad lawyer, because lawyers mostly succeed. He’d been a lawyer all his life, but when he died he had given my mother four children and nothing more. He left her no money. It was a terrible thing. I disliked him for various reasons, chiefly because he disliked me, but I realize now that he was a contemptible character.

  When my parents lived in Carshalton, before I and the brother next to me were born, they had a son and a daughter and no money. What the hell did they think they were doing having two more children? And, as I have said before, I think I was a mistake; and I think my brother, who was only fifteen months older than me, was also a mistake. How could you make the same mistake twice? My parents were sophisticated people, so they must have known about contraception. I never questioned it while either of them were alive - I wouldn’t have dared - but they must have known what they were doing and I can’t understand it.

  Women seem to go mad if they can’t have children. And I can’t think why because it’s so uncomfortable bearing and then giving birth to a child. I knew a woman once who said she had never had children, and then one day she did have one. I said, “What was it like?” And she said, “Oh, Quentin. The humiliation!” That was as I imagined. You lie there with your legs apart and you grunt and you groan, and everyone stands around. It must be humiliating beyond anything. But most women don’t seem to mind and I can’t understand it. And then when you’ve done it, you’ve got a child and you’re enchained forever. A woman can never leave the house. She can’t go to the movies for seventeen years!

  A pet would be far less expensive, but people don’t have children as pets. They have children as representatives. When you say to a woman, “How nice your children are.” She says, “Thank you,” as though they were an attribute to her. As though you had just praised her. And so many parents regard children as part of themselves. That is where the trouble begins because, of course, in the end most children hate their parents, which must be the worst feeling in the world. The ultimate betrayal.

  These days, infertility is a huge concern for many would-be parents. And people are so desperate to have children that they will go through almost any ordeal in order to have them. They go to doctors, who tell them they must lie in a certain position when conceiving, they must take this, eat that, and not do this and not do that. And even if they follow all of these convoluted instructions, there’s still no guarantee that the woman will get pregnant.

  I feel like women bear most of the burden when it comes to fertility treatment. Men do not like going to doctors and finding out whether they are sterile or not. Women don’t mind as much. For heterosexual men, the ability to father offspring seems to be inextricably intertwined with their own sense of masculinity. Yet very few women are sterile, so it is quite often the husband’s fault that they cannot conceive.

  Soon, however, physical conception may be a thing of the past if the scientists behind cloning get their way. I can’t see the point myself, but that’s because I believe we have more than enough children as it is. We don’t want more of the same. And I can’t see the point of cloning myself or anyone else for that matter. The whole point of developing a personal style is to be the only one. I don’t need or want copycats.

  If they offered me enough money though, I would do it. If you offered me enough money, I would do practically anything because money is the only thing I’ve ever really loved. It’s my principal weakness. Money never lets you down the way an estranged friend can. You don’t have to pander to money in order to win its favor. And money is for hoarding. Even as a child, I tried to save the money given to me. People would say, just after they had given me some money for my birthday or for Christmas, “What are you going to spend it on?” And I would reply, “Nothing. I’ll just keep it.”

  But I digress. Returning to procreation, it’s important to note that we have already passed the population explosion that Aldous Huxley[2] thought would be the end of us. So, for the fate of humanity and its future, I think something has to be done so that we don’t continue to increase at an alarming rate. Because the more people there are, the more food we need to produce. We are still coping for now, but I’m sure the current situation will come violently to an end. Overpopulation will soon mean people living with their feet permanently in the sea, because we shan’t have the land for them to sit on or stand on.

  I presume then, we shall learn not to have children. Either because we abort them or because we sensibly decide not to have them. Currently, children are of such abundance that grandmothers have to look after their grandchildren, which is very bad for them because they have already done the parenting thing and they should be free of it. But this is because modern-day mothers are simply overwhelmed. Yet it is very bad for a child to be looked after by someone who is at the end of her tether because she is seventy and children are running amok around her house.

  More sterility, that’s what we need. I think men will have to be made barren in some way, voluntarily presumably because otherwise there would be a revolution.

  In China, you are forbidden to have more than one child. So, of course, they are always murdering their girls because they don’t want them. They are no good. They don’t earn a living. But it would be better if we had fewer murders and more prevention of unwanted children being born in the first place.

  As such, I do think we have to get over this ridiculous objection to abortion that some people have. An aborted child is none the wiser. No one alive has memories from the womb. It’s a mercy killing in the truest sense of the word. Why would you want to bring a child into a world heading towards oblivion?

  My personal objection towards children comes from the way they cramp their mother’s or father’s (or my) style. My second objection is that children turn into teenagers. Then you’re really in trouble. Teenagers have always had the same problem: how to conform and rebel at the same time. They’ve solved that of course by conforming with one another and rebelling against their parents.

  Teenagers think their parents are confining them in order to annoy them, and to some extent they are. But to an extent their parents’ concern is genuine. They worry that their teenage child will stay out and get drunk and, not knowing what they’re doing, become pregnant or get someone pregnant. Or they will get into a car when drunk, or with someone drunk, and a disaster may take place.

  Parents only want to save your life so that you will grow up into a human being. They recognize the danger because they’ve lived long enough to see it happen either to themselves or others. Teenagers and children don’t recognize this and aren’t capable of understanding the potential consequences of their actions. Children think they are invincible. Parents know that they are not.

  Some children are lucky and are born with genuinely doting parents. That means they really love you. It’s unconditional, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in the sense that they truly love you, but a curse because you’re never going to get anyone to dote on you again like your parents do. Future relationships in such lives will never quite measure up.

  Good parents want their children to be happy but, of course, they measure happiness in terms of their own values and aspirations. And there is frequently a miscommunication between children and their parents because parents seldom speak. Parents want children to just sit there, to be around, and that is very tiresome for young people. So, if I could design a perfect system, I would create one in which we didn’t have parents. Everyone would be happier that way since they would have no one to disappoint.

  3. SHOPPERS

  The real difference between the sexes is that men shop and women go shopping. Women don’t love money with the pure spiritual flame that men do. They want to convert it into objects, jewelry, furs, clothing and accessories. Men love money for its own sake. They finger checkbooks, credit cards and bank boxes as though they were fetishes. Men’s prayers are not based in words but in numerals.

  Until recently, money had a bad name in England. A British stage actress was once asked if the 1890s were really as naughty as they are now perceived to have been. She replied, “A peculiar morality prevailed at this time. We were once called into the office of Mr. Edwardes[3] and told that the reputation of his theatre rested on our slender shoulders. We were allowed to accept presents of flowers and candy, jewelry and furs, yachts, houses and islands, but never money.”

  I remember, when I was young, my sister sweeping into the room where my mother and I were sitting and stating that, “The people next door have no money to speak of.” Doubtless she was repeating something she had heard my mother say. Nevertheless, my mother replied, “But money is never to speak of.” This may have been out of self-defense however, because we didn’t have any either.

  When people visit my room here in New York, on Third Street, they look around aghast and say, “Do you have to live here?”

  I used to say, “Yes.” But that’s not the whole answer.

  If I knew that I would die in the next two years, I could live anywhere, but I don’t. To my dismay, I seem indestructible and so must conserve my wealth. This is why I continue to live on Third Street in as humble surroundings as I do.

  Why do I not advise everyone to live as I do, to renounce shopping, to buy nothing? For one thing, I don’t think they would do it. But for another, all sorts of unpleasant phrases would be flung at me, particularly by shopkeepers and economists. They would accuse me of fostering a sluggish economy.

  I am no economist. I don’t know why money only keeps its value by being spread around, but apparently it does. Another reason why I would never advocate others stopping shopping is that I am frequently the recipient of other people’s cast-offs and hand-me-downs. It would be against my own interest to advise them not to go out and shop at all.

  I want to understand the retail trade. I feel vaguely that I should spend my money, but it is very difficult. The lifetime habit of thrift that I have is so hard to break. In order to spend more freely I think I would have to work. And I don’t like work. It ages you terribly. So, before I do anything, before I even lift a finger, I have formed the habit of asking myself, “Could I possibly get out of this?” And if I possibly can, I do.

  When I saw the excellent documentary film called Paris is Burning, about the poor people of Harlem, I was surprised to discover that when they were questioned by Ms. Livingston[4], who made the film, as to what they wanted in life, it transpired they wanted luxury more than that they wanted happiness.