ALAN LELCHUK
60S
my youth. How could I have been so stupid? So totally stupid?
As
I went
about closing up the place, securing the downstairs doors and windows, and
turning off the lights, I felt down and out, depressingly out, having let every–
one down. Not only Mosey, but Bernie and Mom too: most of all, myself.
Another strange thing: I felt a curious sensation of having betrayed my
special friends down there, my books. For I suddenly realized that all those
silent dusty novels had become my chums in these months, and now, they
were like so many witnesses to my cruddy behavior!
It
was the creepiest of
feelings, you see, as though I were on trial, and here were my jurors–
Hergesheimer and Hewlett, Archibazoff and Zweig, Hilton and Hobson, all
of them, high and low! (And what about Mr. Barrett?) Oh, it stung me, hu–
miliated me!
For five or ten minutes I reeled among my used fiction, not quite in
control of myself, stopping at Balax, Belloc, Bellow, Burton and asking for
what?
And when I went upstairs, to that huge high-ceilinged hall of nonfiction,
it struck me as a prison, a dark and vaulted chamber to hold me forever.
Should I take off there and then and say goodbye quickly? Leave a brief
note of simple resignation? Haunted by full houses and red flushes, pursued
by Southern drawls and flare skirts, taunted by Spats and the porno film, I
moved from lightchain to lightchain, padlock
to
padlock, door to door: I
vowed never again to set foot in Jackson's den, where I had lost my money,
my honor, and my special feeling ofcomradeship in the basement.
Finally I managed to shut the front door, lock up the outside and pull
down the black iron shutter, and turn away, off, to the streets. In the dark–
ened evening, strangers passed (scornful, sarcastic looks?), the wind tossed,
and the curving lampposts resembled city gallows. Dumbly I prowled about
in the emptying streets, seeking... refuge, penance, understanding? From
myself, for myself. Shaking with self-torment, I wondered if I were any
longer real, or maybe only a figment of my own excessive reading? I mean,
I was burning with a new intensity of some sort. After an hour or more of
meandering aimlessly in streets that I normally would not have entered at
night, having been accosted by a man selling a packet here, a woman there, I
made my way back, and down into the subway, and soon was being hurtled
underground from Manhattan to Brooklyn, memories of dark pleasure flick–
ering alongside aHlictions ofdereliction.
(
....
)
To my surprise, maybe dismay, no one seemed to know a thing or
sense anything different about me the next day, or the next week at
Schulte's. (In fact it was only I who noticed that I had left Americana un–
locked the night before.) While I, feeling a guilty traitor, went about my rou-
