IN THE FIFTIES
leonard Michaels
GROWING UP
In
the fifties: I learned to drive a car. I was frequently in
love. I had more friends than now.
When Kruschev 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 .Y.V.
would
bum. 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.V., 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 any–
thing 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 musi–
cians, ass bandits, nymphomaniacs, nonspecialized 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.
