The Collected Stories Read online

  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.

  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.

  Reflections of a Wild Kid

  MANDELL ASKED if 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 lik
e 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.

  “Has it been five years?” asked Liebowitz, figuring seven. “You sound wonderful, Joyce.” She said he sounded “good.” He regretted “wonderful,” but noticed no other reserve in her voice, and just as he remembered, she seemed still to love the telephone, coming at him right through the machine, much the thing, no later than this minute. When his other phone range he didn’t reach for it, thus letting her hear and understand how complete was his attention. She understood. She went on directly about some restaurant, insisting let’s eat there. He didn’t even consider not. She’d said, almost immediately, she was getting married to Mandell, a professor.

  Did Liebowitz feel jealousy? He didn’t ask professor of what or where does he teach. Perhaps he felt jealousy; but, listening to her and nodding compliments at the wall, he listened less to what she said than to how she spoke in echoes. Not of former times, but approximately these things, in approximately the same way, he felt, had been said in grand rooms, by wonderful people. Joyce brought him the authority of echoes. And she delivered herself, too, a hundred thirty-five pounds of shank and dazzle, even in her questions: “Have you seen …?” “Have you heard …?” About plays, movies, restaurants, Jacqueline Kennedy. Nothing about his wife, child, job. Was she indifferent? embarrassed? hostile? In any case, he liked her impetuosity; she poked, checked his senses. He liked her. Joyce Wolf, on the telephone. He remembered that cabbies and waiters liked her. She could make fast personal jokes with policemen and bellhops. She tipped big. A hundred nobodies knew her name, her style. Always en passant, very much here and not here at all. He liked her tremendously, he felt revived. Not reliving a memory, but right now, on the telephone, living again a moment of his former life. For the first time, as it were, that he didn’t have to live it. She has magic, he thought; art. Merely in her voice, she was an event. She called him back, through time, to herself. Despite his grip on the phone, knees under the desk, feet on the floor, he felt like a man slipping from a height, deliciously. He said he would meet her uptown in forty minutes. Did he once live this way? Liebowitz shook his head; smirked. He was a wild kid once.

  On his desk lay a manuscript that had to be edited, and a contract he had to work on. There was also an appointment with an author … but, in the toilet with electric razor and toothbrush, Liebowitz purged his face of the working day and, shortly thereafter, walked into a chic Hungarian restaurant on the Upper East Side. She arrived twenty minutes later; late; but in a black sleeveless dress. Very smart. It gave her a look that seized the day, the feeling and idea of it. She hadn’t just come to meet him; she described their moment and meaning, in a garment. She appeared. Late; but who, granted such knowledge, could complain? Liebowitz felt flattered and grateful. He took her hands. She squeezed his hands. He kissed her cheek. “Joyce.” The hair, white smile, hips — he remembered, he looked, looked. “It was good of you to call me.” He looked at her. He looked into his head. She was there, too, this minute’s Joyce Wolf, who once got them to the front of lines, to seats when the show was sold out, to tables, tables near windows, to parties. Sold out, you say? At the box office, in her name, two tickets were waiting. Then Liebowitz remembered, once, for a ballet, she had failed to do better than standing room. He hadn’t wanted to go. He certainly hadn’t wanted to stand. Neither had she. But tickets had been sold out to this ballet. Thousands wanted to go. Liebowitz remembered how she began making phone calls, scratching at the numbers till her fingernail tore. That evening, pelvises pressed to a velvet rope, they stood amid hundreds of ballet lovers jammed into a narrow aisle. The effluvia of alimentary canals hung about their heads. Blindfolded, required to guess, Liebowitz would have said they were in a delicatessen. Lights dimmed. There was a thrilling hush. Joyce whispered, “How in God’s name can anyone live outside New York?” She nudged him and pointed at a figure seated in the audience. Liebowitz looked, thrusting his head forward to show appreciation of her excitement, her talent for recognizing anyone in New York in almost total darkness. “See! See!” Liebowitz nodded greedily. His soul poured toward a glint of skull floating amid a thousand skulls. He begged, “Who? Who is it?” He wasn’t sure that he looked at the correct glint of skull, yet he felt on the verge of extraordinary illumination. Then a voice wailed into his back, “I can’t see.” Liebowitz twisted about, glanced down. A short lady, staring up at him, pleaded with her whole face. “I can’t see.” He twisted forward and said, “Move a little, Joyce. Let her up against the rope.” Joyce whispered, “This is the jungle, schmuck. Tell her to grow another head.” He was impressed. During the ballet he stood with the velvet rope in his fists, the woman’s face between his shoulder blades, and now, as he went uptown in the cab, his mouth was so dry he couldn’t smoke. After all these years, still impressed. Joyce got them tickets. She knew. She got. Him, for example — virtually a bum in those days, but nice-looking, moody, a complement to her, he supposed. Perhaps a girl with so much needed someone like him — a misery. Not that she was without misery. She worked as private secretary to an investment broker, a shrewd, ugly Russian with a hunchback and a limp. “Hey, collich girl, make me a phone call.” After work she used to meet Liebowitz, hunching, dragging a foot, and she would shout, “Hey, collich. Hey, collich girl, kiss my ass.” They’d laugh with relief and malice; but sometimes she met Liebowitz in tears. Once the Russian even hit her. “In a Longchamps, during lunch hour,” she said. “He knocked me on the floor in front of all those people eating lunch.” Liebowitz remembered her screaming at him: “Even if there had been a reason.” He stopped trying to justify the horror. It got to him. “Gratuitous
sadism!” Liebowitz raged. He’d go next morning and punch the Russian in the mouth. The next morning, in Italian sunglasses, Joyce left for the office. Alone. Five foot seven, she walked seven foot five, a Jewish girl passing for Jewish in tough financial circles. Liebowitz smoked a cigarette, punched his hand. Liebowitz remembered:

  The sunglasses — tough, tragic, fantastically clever — looked terrific. She knew what to wear, precisely the item that said it. Those sunglasses were twenty punches in the mouth. She’d wear them all day, even at the typewriter. The Russian would feel, between himself and the college girl, an immensity. He’d know what he was, compared to her in those black, estranging glasses. Liebowitz felt an intellectual pang; his reflections had gone schmuckway. Beginning again:

  Joyce made two hundred and fifty dollars a week. With insults and slaps, the Russian gave tips on the market. The year she lived with Liebowitz, Joyce made over a hundred thousand dollars. Liebowitz, then a salesman in a shoe store, made eighty dollars a week hunkering over corns. He had rotten moods, no tips on anything; he had a lapsed candidacy for the Ph.D. in philosophy and a girl with access to the pleasures of Manhattan. Her chief pleasure — moody Liebowitz. In truth, he never hated the Russian. He pitied Joyce; for a hundred thousand dollars she ate shit. The sunglasses symbolized shame. Liebowitz remembered:

  Twenty-four years old, a virgin when she met Liebowitz, who took her on their first date. “I don’t know how it happened,” she said. “Two minutes ago I had some idea of myself.” Liebowitz replied, “Normal.” She’d been surprised, overwhelmed by his intensity. She’d never met a man so hungry. Now he was cool, like a hoodlum. “Where’s your shower?” He wondered if he hadn’t been worse to her than the Russian. Hidden in the bedroom, crouched in pain, Liebowitz made big eyes and held out his hands, palms up, like a man begging for apples. He’d had certain needs. She’d been good to him — the tickets, the parties, and calling now to announce her forthcoming marriage; invite him to dinner. It was touching. Liebowitz had to piss. He remembered that, walking into the restaurant, he’d had an erection. Perhaps that explained the past; also the present, running to meet her as if today were yesterday. Then they strolled in the park. Then they went to her apartment for a drink. Life is mystery, thought Liebowitz. He wondered if he dared, after all these years, after she’d just told him she was getting married, put his hand on her knee; her thigh; under the black dress where time, surrendering to truth, ceased to be itself. The doorbell.