Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“Yes. Isn’t that strange?”

Perhaps she’d been telling him a story and he nudged her and glanced significantly at the broom closet, and perhaps he worked her along subtly, as she told the story, sidling her in among brooms, mops, and cans of detergent, as she persisted in her story …

“You heard the weather report. You got up in the morning. You noticed the weather, rode a bus, and a married man with three kids made sexual advances in a broom closet.”

“The kids weren’t there.”

I put on my socks.

“You didn’t like my story, did you? That’s how it is with me. I thrash in a murk of days. But look. Have pity. Take off your socks. I’m skinny and nervous and finicky. I can’t tell you stories. I have problems with sublimity. I’m not Kafka.”

That night, in a dream, I met Kafka.

A ship had gone down. In one of its rooms, where barnacles were biting the walls, I was reading a story aloud. Sentences issuing from my mouth took the shape of eels and went sliding away among the faces in the room, like elegant metals, slithering in subtleties, which invited and despised attention. When I finished, my uncle Zev rose among the faces, shoving eels aside. He came to me and said nothing about my story, but only that his teeth had been knocked out in the concentration camp. “Write it. Sell it to the movies. Don’t be a schmuck. You could entertain people, make a million bucks. They also killed my mother.” Tony Icona was there. He said, “Starting next week, you write my menus.” With his thumbs he hooked the elastic of his bathing suit and tugged up, molding the genital bulge. The room was full of light, difficult as a headache. It poured through plankton, a glaring diffusion, appropriate to the eyes of a fish. Broken nose appeared, swimming through the palpable light, her mouth a zero. She said, “Have you been introduced to Kafka? He’s here, you know.” I followed her and was introduced. He shook my hand, then wiped his fingers on his tie.

IN THE FIFTIESI learned to drive a car. I was frequently in love. I had more friends than now.

When Khrushchev denounced Stalin my roommate shit blood, turned yellow, and lost most of his hair.

I attended the lectures of the excellent E. B. Burgum until Senator McCarthy ended his tenure. I imagined N.YU. would burn. Miserable students, drifting in the halls, looked at one another.

In less than a month, working day and night, I wrote a bad novel.

I went to school — N.Y.U., Michigan, Berkeley — much of the time.

I had witty, giddy conversation, four or five nights a week, in a homosexual bar in Ann Arbor.

I read literary reviews the way people suck candy.

Personal relationships were more important to me than anything else.

I had a fight with a powerful fat man who fell on my face and was immovable.

I had personal relationships with football players, jazz musicians, assbandits, nymphomaniacs, non-specialized degenerates, and numerous Jewish premedical students.

I had personal relationships with thirty-five rhesus monkeys in an experiment on monkey addiction to morphine. They knew me as one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.

With four other students I lived in the home of a chiropractor named Leo.

I met a man in Detroit who owned a submachine gun; he claimed to have hit Dutch Schultz. I saw a gangster movie that disproved his claim.

I knew two girls who had brains, talent, health, good looks, plenty to eat, and hanged themselves.

I heard of parties in Ann Arbor where everyone made it with everyone else, including the cat.

I knew card sharks and con men. I liked marginal types because they seemed original and aristocratic, living for an ideal or obliged to live it. Ordinary types seemed fundamentally unserious. These distinctions belong to a romantic fop. I didn’t think that way too much.

I worked for an evil vanity publisher in Manhattan.

I worked in a fish-packing plant in Massachusetts, on the line with a sincere Jewish poet from Harvard and three lesbians; one was beautiful, one grim; both loved the other, who was intelligent. I loved her, too. I dreamed of violating her purity. They talked among themselves, in creepy whispers, always about Jung. In a dark corner, away from our line, old Portuguese men slit fish into open flaps, flicking out the bones. I could see only their eyes and knives. I’d arrive early every morning to dash in and out until the stench became bearable. After work I’d go to bed and pluck fish scales out of my skin.

I was a teaching assistant in two English departments. I graded thousands of freshman themes. One began like this: “Karl Marx, for that was his name …” Another began like this: “In Jonathan Swift’s famous letter to the Pope …” I wrote edifying comments in the margins. Later I began to scribble “Awkward” beside everything, even spelling errors.

I got A’s and F’s as a graduate student. A professor of English said my attitude wasn’t professional. He said that he always read a “good book” after dinner.

A girl from Indiana said this of me on a teacher-evaluation form: “It is bad enough to go to an English class at eight in the morning, but to be instructed by a shabby man is horrible.”

I made enemies on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the Middle West. All now dead, sick, or out of luck.

I was arrested, photographed, and fingerprinted. In a soundproof room two detectives lectured me on the American way of life, and I was charged with the crime of nothing. A New York cop told me that detectives were called “defectives.”

I had an automobile accident. I did the mambo. I had urethritis and mononucleosis.

In Ann Arbor, a few years before the advent of Malcolm X, a lot of my friends were black. After Malcolm X, almost all my friends were white. They admired John F. Kennedy.

In the fifties I smoked marijuana, hash, and opium. Once I drank absinthe. Once I swallowed twenty glycerine caps of peyote. The social effects of “drugs,” unless sexual, always seemed tedious. But I liked people who inclined the drug way. Especially if they didn’t proselytize. I listened to long conversations about the phenomenological weirdness of familiar reality and the great spiritual questions this entailed — for example, “Do you think Wallace Stevens is a head?”

I witnessed an abortion.

I was godless, but I thought the fashion of intellectual religiosity more despicable. I wished that I could live in a culture rather than study life among the cultured.

I drove a Chevy Bel Air eighty-five miles per hour on a two-lane blacktop. It was nighttime. Intermittent thick white fog made the headlights feeble and diffuse. Four others in the car sat with the strict silent rectitude of catatonics. If one of them didn’t admit to being frightened, we were dead. A Cadillac, doing a hundred miles per hour, passed us and was obliterated in the fog. I slowed down.

I drank Old Fashioneds in the apartment of my friend Julian. We talked about Worringer and Spengler. We gossiped about friends. Then we left to meet our dates. There was more drinking. We all climbed trees, crawled in the street, and went to a church. Julian walked into an elm, smashed his glasses, vomited on a lawn, and returned home to memorize Anglo-Saxon grammatical forms. I ended on my knees, vomiting into a toilet bowl, repeatedly flushing the water to hide my noises. Later I phoned New York so that I could listen to the voices of my parents, their Yiddish, their English, their logics.

I knew a professor of English who wrote impassioned sonnets in honor of Henry Ford.

I played freshman varsity basketball at N.Y.U. and received a dollar an hour for practice sessions and double that for games. It was called “meal money.” I played badly, too psychological, too worried about not studying, too short. If pushed or elbowed during a practice game, I was ready to kill. The coach liked my attitude. In his day, he said, practice ended when there was blood on the boards. I ran back and forth, in urgent sneakers, through my freshman year. Near the end I came down with pleurisy, quit basketball, started smoking more.