Stanley Elkin - Boswell

Then a week after I had seen Sandusky I got a letter from him. It was odd to think that the only being in the world who knew my address was The Great Sandusky. I opened the envelope.

My dear Boswell,

I have been thinking over your problem. I think it’s better to face things right off then to deceive yourself for a while only to find out when it’s already too late that you’ve just been kidding yourself along. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future but I can tell you that right now and for a long time to come probably the strong man game is dead. Now I say that speaking from a background of experience which covers I don’t like to think how many years. The facts are this: 1) That Vaudeville is dead and that let’s face it it was in Vaudeville that the real muscle money was made. It isn’t only strong men of course. Acrobats, animal trainers, all that crowd I used to tour the circuits with are in the same sinking boat. 2) There are still circuses and while it’s true that circuses have absorbed a certain number of the acts there was never any real demand for a strong man in a circus. Now I know, I know you always hear the term “Circus Strong Man,” but think about that for a minute. Did you ever see a strong man put on an act in the big ring? If you’re honest with yourself you’ll have to admit you did not. His apparatus is too costly and clumsy (and anyway who could set it up unless it was another strong man). No, your “Circus Strong Man” if the term means anything at all was a guy in a side show in a tiger suit, a freak with a bald head and a phony mustache. His size came more from good German beer than it did from training. You don’t want any part of that. 3) The carnival or “carny” as it is called does still use a strong man act, but more often than not it is faked and as with the side show it is not a good life. It is not clean and the traveling is not interesting. All towns you never heard of in N. Minnesota and etc.

So all the old showcases for a strong man act are gone, Vaudeville being the main one. (Now some of my friends think that television may bring new inroads but, frankly, I cannot agree and I think they are just kidding themselves and whistling in the dark. What would be more ridiculous than a guy claiming to have force lifting weights on a little tiny television screen? Those weights would look like six- ounce balls. No, definitely not. Besides, in an act like mine was, there had to be audience contact and on television you couldn’t have that.) Now there’s one other thing to think about as you probably know yourself. I am referring to the so-called “physical fitness magazine.” Well go ahead if you want to but if I had my way they wouldn’t be allowed to sell them. That world is just inhabited by a bunch of queers and fags. How would you like to have it on your conscience that some nut is using your picture in a magazine to jerk off in front of? It’s worse than the carny and more filthy and I wouldn’t think you’d want to touch it.

Well, you must be asking yourself, what does all this mean for me? Where does all this leave me? Well frankly, and I say it right out because I don’t like to see you break your heart, it means that there’s no place for you in the strong man game! Face it now, Boswell, I tell you like a father.

However, I have been thinking that there’s one area left that I haven’t mentioned and that’s wrestling. A lot of the boys go into that and make good money and a famous name and it’s not a bad life. I know what you’re going to say, that wrestling is fixed. Well it is and it isn’t. What I mean is that there are clean wrestlers and even those that are fake have to demonstrate a mastery of the different holds and etc. And don’t think it doesn’t hurt when you get slammed around like that! Of course you know how to fall but plenty of bones are still broken. So don’t kid yourself about that! After all, they’re really wrestling. Only the winner is fixed. And what does an artist care about that, right? It’s the form of the thing. The same as in weightlifting or anything else.

Now I don’t know whether this sounds like good advice to you or not. Maybe like most young men you would prefer to beat your head against the wall than learn from an older person’s experience, but I think you’re more sensible than that and so I took the liberty after you left me of writing to an old friend of mine who actually used to manage me at one time, maybe you heard of him — Mr. Frank Alconi — about you who now handles wrestlers and promotes matches in Jersey City. He wrote back saying that he is always looking for big strong boys like yourself for the ring world and that if you are interested he will forward train fare, coach of course. His address is Frank Alconi, 9 Water Street, Jersey City in New Jersey.

Do as you please, but I think this is the best thing. Whatever happens good luck to you. I sign as I used to in the old days when it meant something.

Yours in Force,

Felix Sandusky

P.S. Where are the poses you promised? I want to see that neck.

I wrote Frank Alconi for the money, and he sent it, and I went to Jersey City and became a wrestler.

I became a wrestler, I suppose, because, resolutions or no resolutions, it is an integral part of my character to take advice from the great. A reflex action. Go with the experts, I always say. There’s no father-figure crap about it. My father is dead.

I never sent Sandusky a picture. He had to be made to understand that it was my neck and I did not intend to do any better by it than I did by myself. There would be no silk shirts around it; I would not flatter it with ties. I wrote Sandusky once thanking him for his interest because that is good sportsmanship. Otherwise, when I was in St. Louis I sent him passes to the matches and that was the end of it. If he was so in love with my neck he might want to be around when it was strangled.

Frank Alconi put me to work at once. I was already strong, of course, and Alconi said I was a natural and anybody Felix had faith in by Jesus he had faith in too. But for a long time I didn’t know what I was doing. I went wearily up and down the East Coast between Jersey City and Raleigh, North Carolina, precariously ambulatory, describing my sensations to myself in a kind of hospital shorthand — restive, critical, grave. Indeed, my memories of those first weeks are chiefly memories of liniment. My body was like some great northern forest, one part of which was always on fire. The other wrestlers kept telling me what a good sport I was and visited me at the rubbing table afterwards. Beating me up made them feel young again. They seemed to like to feel my muscles. I can remember more than once, lying on the rubbing table near unconsciousness and death in the unheated basement of a civic auditorium, looking up into the loveless smiles of ancient apes, having them stare down at me lost in wonder, and then, tracing their prehensile fingers over the bumps and hollows of my flesh, pointing with inverted pride at their own tough and lumpy bodies, which looked, from the angle at which I saw them, like great hairy mounds of red meat. Then these fellows would shrug, pull on their pin-striped businessmen’s suits, snap their Wall Street Journals smartly under their armpits, and go off with a wave to lose themselves among the traveling salesmen in the hotel lobby. In those days druggists went blind mixing special liniments to keep me alive.

When I got back to Jersey City I told Alconi I would have to have more training.

He grinned. “Tough. Felix said you was tough.” I rubbed my neck sentimentally. “Rough, huh? Trip’s been rough?” “A cob, Mr. Alconi.”

“Sure. It’s the gym does it. All the time developing yourself against instruments, against metal, when what you need’s contact with human beings. Where’s the fight in a bar bell?”