200
LEONARD MICHAELS
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
I were pushed or el–
bowed 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 pleu–
risy, quit basketball, and 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. He 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 mat–
tresses and used a sunlamp all winter. He bathed, oiled, and per–
fumed his body daily. He wanted soft, sweet, sensuous 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. Recently he killed himself.
A shocking number of young, gifted people, whom I knew in
the fifties, killed themselves and 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
