428
ALAN
FRIEDMAN
sharp features, his freckles, his skinny boy's body. I wanted
his
mind and body for my own. I raged and desired him uncondition–
ally. And certainly no little girl's wishes were ver answered so
unconditionally.
"You never know what's underneath," my father said to
quiet
me. It's the very earliest memory I have of him. He had taken me
to the matinee at a local theater one Saturday-a kind of vaudeville
performance for children. On stage a troupe of dancing animab
snarled back at the trainer' whip, and the audience of children
was unea y. "You never know," my father said, his hand on the back
of my neck, soothingly. I was three and a half. When the biggest
animal of all came down off the stage- a lion, I suppose, though
to me he was only Animal- and began to climb through the theater
over the empty rows up front, the children panicked. From where I
sat toward the side, he seemed to be climbing over the audience,
his paws on their heads. Still, I kept quiet. He came fourfootedly
up the center aisle and paused, the audience shrieking and backing
away. To calm them, he sat back on his haunches and proceeded
to
slit his throat, from his furry chin down--out came a man's head:
I screamed- down to his groin: a man's body: I screamed louder.
What terrified me then, and always has,
is
not the beast
in
man, but the man in the beast. Look at the person nearest you
this
moment and you'll see what I mean. The emergence of man from
animal is always half complete: I see him standing there, cheap actor,
one leg out of the fur forever. Our history only repeats the first man's
history. When he stepped out completely and shook the dead golden
rag on the floor, I went wild. I screamed hysterically for
alm~
ten minutes, my father trying to stop me in the lobby with loud,
reasonable arguments. And let me mention that later on, one of the
most soul-terrifying moments I\-e e\-er had (the resultant short poem,
"Boy, You Theban Beast," is one of my most celebrated) came to me
when I looked at my brother, then grown old, and saw that in fact
he was not a beast.
My brother, five years more interested than I was in "what's
underneath," took me under the bed one day when I was four and
be
was nine to find out_ "Let's swap," he said. "You look, I look."
I had no particular objection, but he added, "Give and take, that's
the way the world works." In the midst of a very thorough explora.
