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PARTISAN REVIEW
and gets into my suit. "You look even more like a gorilla," I say,
when he stands to model himself in my clothes .
"And even in my terrible dressing gown," he says, "you look like
a happy, healthy, carefree impostor."
Bolotka's story.
"I was nineteen years old, I was a student at the university. I
wanted like my father to be a lawyer. But after one year I decide I
must quit and enroll at the School of Fine Arts. Of course I have first
to go for an interview. This is 1950. Probably I would have to go to
fifty interviews, but I only got to number one. I went in and they
took out my 'record.'
It
was a foot thick. I said to them, 'How can it
be a foot thick, I haven't lived yet. I have had no life- how can you
have all this information?' But they don't explain. I sat there and
they look it over and they say I cannot quit. The workers' money is
being spent on my education . The workers have invested a year in
my future as a lawyer. The workers have not made this investment
so I can change my mind and decide to become a fine artist. They
tell me that I cannot matriculate at the School of Fine Arts, or any–
where ever again, and so I said okay and went home. I didn't care
that much. It wasn't so bad. I didn't have to become a lawyer, I had
some girlfriends, I had my prick, I had books, and to talk to and to
keep me company, I had my childhood friend Blecha. Only they had
him to talk with too. Blecha was planning then to be a famous poet
and a famous novelist and a famous playwright. One night he got
drunk and he admitted to me that he was spying on me. They knew
he was an old friend and they knew that he wrote, and they knew he
came to see me, so they hired him to spy on me and to write a report
once a week. But he was a terrible writer. He is still a terrible writer.
They told him that when they read his reports they could make no
sense of them. They told him everything he wrote about me is un–
believable. So I said, 'Blecha, don't be depressed, let me see the
reports-probably they are not as bad as they say. What do they
know?' But they
were
terrible. He missed the point of everything I
said, he got everything backwards about when I went where , and the
writing was a disgrace. Blecha was afraid they were going to fire
him- he was afraid they might even suspect him of playing some
kind of trick, out of loyalty to me. And if that went into
his
record,
he would be damaged for the rest of his life . Besides, all the time he
should be spending on his poems and his stories and his plays , he
was spending listening to me . He was getting nothing accomplished
for himself. He was full of sadness for himself over this. He had
