Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

I took classes in comparative anatomy and chemistry. I took classes in Old English, Middle English, and modern literature. I took classes and classes.

I fired a twelve-gauge shotgun down the hallway of a railroad flat into a couch pillow.

My roommate bought the shotgun because of his gambling debts. He expected murderous thugs to come for him. I’d wake in the middle of the night listening for a knock, a cough, a footstep, wondering how to identify myself as not him when they broke through our door.

My roommate was an expensively dressed kid from a Chicago suburb. Though very intelligent, he suffered in school. He suffered with girls though he was handsome and witty. He suffered with boys though he was heterosexual. He slept on three mattresses and used a sun lamp all winter. He bathed, oiled, and perfumed his body daily. He wanted soft, sweet joys in every part, but when some whore asked if he’d like to be beaten with a garrison belt he said yes. He suffered with food, eating from morning to night, loading his pockets with fried pumpkin seeds when he left for class, smearing caviar paste on his filet mignons, eating himself into a monumental face of eating because he was eating. Then he killed himself.

A lot of young, gifted people I knew in the fifties killed themselves. Only a few of them continue walking around.

I wrote literary essays in the turgid, tumescent manner of darkest Blackmur.

I used to think that someday I would write a fictional version of my stupid life in the fifties.

I was a waiter in a Catskill hotel. The captain of the waiters ordered us to dance with the female guests who appeared in the casino without escorts and, as much as possible, fuck them. A professional tummler walked the grounds. Wherever he saw a group of people merely chatting, he thrust in quickly and created a tumult.

I heard the Budapest String Quartet, Dylan Thomas, Lester Young and Billie Holiday together, and I saw Pearl Primus dance, in a Village nightclub, in a space two yards square, accompanied by an African drummer about seventy years old. His hands moved in spasms of mathematical complexity at invisible speed. People left their tables to press close to Primus and see the expression in her face, the sweat, the muscles, the way her naked feet seized and released the floor.

Eventually I had friends in New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Berkeley, and Los Angeles.

I did the cha-cha, wearing a tux, at a New Year’s party in Hollywood, and sat at a table with Steve McQueen. He’d become famous in a TV series about a cowboy with a rifle. He said he didn’t know which he liked best, acting or driving a racing car. I thought he was a silly person and then realized he thought I was. I met a few other famous people who said something. One night, in a yellow Porsche, I circled Manhattan with Jack Kerouac. He recited passages, perfectly remembered from his book reviews, to the sky. His manner was ironical, sweet, and depressing.

I had a friend named Chicky who drove his chopped, blocked, stripped, dual-exhaust Ford convertible, while vomiting out the fly window, into a telephone pole. He survived, lit a match to see if the engine was all right, and it blew up in his face. I saw him in the hospital. Through his bandages he said that ever since high school he’d been trying to kill himself. Because his girlfriend wasn’t good-looking enough. He was crying and laughing while he pleaded with me to believe that he really had been trying to kill himself because his girlfriend wasn’t good-looking enough. I told him that I was going out with a certain girl and he told me that he had fucked her once but it didn’t matter because I could take her away and live somewhere else. He was a Sicilian kid with a face like Caravaggio’s angels of debauch. He’d been educated by priests and nuns. When his hair grew back and his face healed, his mind healed. He broke up with his girlfriend. He wasn’t nearly as narcissistic as other men I knew in the fifties.

I knew one who, before picking up his dates, ironed his dollar bills and powdered his testicles. And another who referred to women as “cockless wonders” and used only their family names — for example, “I’m going to meet Goldberg, the cockless wonder.” Many women thought he was extremely attractive and became his sexual slaves. Men didn’t like him.

I had a friend who was dragged down a courthouse stairway, in San Francisco, by her hair. She’d wanted to attend the House Un-American hearings. The next morning I crossed the Bay Bridge to join my first protest demonstration. I felt frightened and embarrassed. I was bitter about what had happened to her and the others she’d been with. I expected to see thirty or forty people like me, carrying hysterical placards around the courthouse until the cops bludgeoned us into the pavement. About two thousand people were there. I marched beside a little kid who had a bag of marbles to throw under the hoofs of the horse cops. His mother kept saying, “Not yet, not yet.” We marched all day. That was the end of the fifties.

MANDELL ASKEDif she had ever been celebrated.

“Celebrated?”

“I mean your body, has your body ever been celebrated?” Then, as if to refine the question: “I mean, like, has your body, like, been celebrated?”

“My body has never been celebrated.”

She laughed politely. A laugh qualified by her sense of Liebowitz in the bedroom. She was polite to both of them and good to neither. Certainly not to Liebowitz, who, after all, wanted Mandell out of the apartment. Did she care what he wanted? He was her past, a whimsical recrudescence, trapped in her bedroom. He’d waited in there for an hour. He could wait another hour. As far as she knew, he had cigarettes. But, in that hour, as he smoked his cigarettes, his bladder had begun to feel like a cantaloupe. He strained to lift the window. The more he strained, the more he felt his cantaloupe.

“I mean really celebrated,” said Mandell, as if she’d answered nothing.

Perhaps, somehow, she urged Mandell to go on. Perhaps she wanted Liebowitz to hear Mandell’s witty questions, his lovemaking. Liebowitz didn’t care what she wanted. His last cigarette had been smoked. He wanted to piss. He drew the point of a nail file down the sides of the window, trailing a thin peel, a tiny scream in the paint. Again he strained to lift the window. It wouldn’t budge. At that moment he noticed wall-to-wall carpeting. Why did he notice? Because he couldn’t piss on it. Amazing, he thought, how we perceive the world. Stand on a mountain and you think it’s remarkable that you can’t jump off.

“My body,” said Mandell, “has been celebrated.”

Had that been his object all along? Liebowitz wondered why Mandell hadn’t been more direct, ripping off his shirt, flashing nipples in her face: “Let’s celebrate.” She was going to marry a feeb. But that wasn’t Liebowitz’s business. He had to piss. He had no other business.

“I mean, you know, like my body, like, has been celebrated,” said Mandell, again refining his idea. Despite his pain, it was impossible for Liebowitz not to listen — the sniveling syntax, the whining diction — he tasted every phrase. In that hour, as increasingly he had to piss, he came to know Mandell, through the wall, palpably to know him. Some smell, some look, even something about the way he combed his hair, reached Liebowitz through the wall. Bad blood, thought Liebowitz.

He remembered Nietzsche’s autobiographical remark: “I once sensed the proximity of a herd of cows … merely because milder and more philanthropic thoughts came back to me.” How true. Thoughts can be affected by invisible animals. Liebowitz had never even seen Mandell. As for Joyce, a shoe lying on its side, in the middle of her carpet — scuffed, bent, softened by the stride of her uncelebrated body — suffused the bedroom with her presence, the walking foot, strong well-shaped ankle, peasant hips rocking with motive power, elegant neck, fleshy boneless Semitic face. A warm receptive face until she spoke. Then she had personality. That made her seem taller, slightly forbidding, even robust. She was robust — heavy bones, big head, dense yellow-brown hair — and her voice, a flying bird of personality. Years had passed. Seeing the hair again and Joyce still fallow beneath it saddened Liebowitz. But here was Mandell. She had time.