And the reader is poet Stephen Orlen
of our own creative writing faculty.
I hope you can come to the Student Union following
tonight's reading to meet Mr. Michaels.
We'll be in the terrace lounge, which
is the most inaccessible spot in the union on the third floor
just as far west as you can go and around the tables
and through the forest.
We had hoped to publish a creative writing newsletter
in the middle of October, but it will be rather short unless you
give us some material.
Our policy, of course, is to publish only good news, honors,
and publications, and awards.
So if you don't want to feel like you're
tooting your own horn, let one of your friends do it for you
and stick a note in our box or give us an anonymous telephone
call.
Your friends do want to know what you're doing,
they do like to hear about nice things that happen to you.
So give us a chance to publicize it.
Leonard Michaels comes to us from the University
of California Berkeley.
He's published two collections of short stories, "Going
Places" which was a National Book Award nominee
and "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could".
His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times
Book Review, Partisan Review, New Republic,
and other magazines.
He's co-editor of a book of essays,
"The State of the Language".
He's offered a Guggenheim Fellowship,
an award from the National Foundation
on Arts and Humanities and the O. Henry Prize.
Those of you who have had an opportunity to hear him
read for us an informal reading two years
ago know that you have a big treat in store, Mr Leonard
Michaels.
[CLAPPING]
Most of the material that I'll read from is very short
and it'll pretty much represent samples
from my work at all stages.
I'll end with a reading from a section of my novel
which has just been completed.
Well, I've got to just find my glasses.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, this is a story, am very sure it's
only a paragraph long.
It appeared in American Review.
It's called "Pretty Women".
"Kittredge loves pretty women, but he
is blind he can't pursue them.
So I take him to a party and describe a woman in the room.
He whispers, is she pretty?
Tell me about her neck.
Eventually, I introduce him to her
and they leave the party together.
Kittredge is always successful.
Women think he listens differently from other men.
In his blinds, they think pleasure is truth.
Blind hands know deep particulars, what
yearns in the knee and neck.
I suppose women also imagine themselves beautifully
reciprocal, embracing Kittredge with goodness
the way sunlight takes a tree.
He says, talk about her hips, he wants badly
to assimilate the pretty ones.
As I talk, his eyes slide with meanings rather
like eyes in a normal face, except quicker, something
fearful snapping at them.
Kittredge cannot see, cannot know if a woman is pretty.
I say, she has thick black hair.
When they leave together I begin to sink.
I envy the magnetic darkness of my friend.
To envy him without desiring his condition is possible."
The next is called "Imagine a Man".
"Kafka imagines a man, he has a hole in the back of his head.
The sun shines into this hole.
Anyone can look into this hole.
The man himself has denied a glimpse of it,
naturally, it is in the back of his head.
But Kafka may well be talking about the man's face,
only other people, never the man himself, see it directly.
Others even look into it as if it were a hole.
The most public, most promiscuous part
of the man's body is thus essentially
invisible to himself, how obvious.
Still, it takes a genius to say that our most visible thing,
what eats, kisses, whistles, moans, is to each of us
more private than our privates.
However, there is a moment when you see it directly as
if with the eyes of another.
It happens through a freak of circumstances
when you are surprised in a mirror.
Your face is then stunningly plain as never
else, not even when photographed or drawn.
In such credit is distorted by the mediating instruments.
Worse, it is qualified by time, instantly
and forever when photographed, your face
is younger than you are.
But surprised in the mirror, it is given to you actual, living,
now.
You fail to know who, let alone what it is.
Then gradually at the intersection
of familiarity and strangeness, it
begins looking at you with the same question
as exists in yourself looking at it,
such rare sympathy is difficult to sustain.
You retreat from it and settle again
into quotidian blindness, the blindness of your face
to itself.
But now you want to light a cigarette
or fix yourself a drink.
You want to make a phone call, to whom?
You don't know, of course you don't.
You want to phone your face, the one you've never met,
who you are."
The next is called "You".
Begins with a quote from Kafka.
"Every time I went to close the window,
I saw a grocery store on the other side of the marketplace.
This is Kafka's diaries.
I could say why it is marvelous but that
would be like saying to your lover
in a moment of a sacred intimacy,
"Aren't we having fun?"
Suddenly, the room is full of ghouls.
You empty the world, nothing remains but you, you, you, you.
I want to read a slightly longer story.
This is from my first book, it's called "Crossbones."
At the end of the summer, or the year,
or when he could do more with his talent
than play guitar in a village strip joints,
and after considering his talent for commitment and reluctance,
she found reluctance in her own heart and marriage talk
became desultory.
Specifics din, ghostly, lost in bed, and doing wrong things,
working on her.
Discovering epileptic dysrhythmia in her hips.
And he asked about it and she said, he'd hurt her someplace,
but not, she insisted, in her head.
And they fought the next morning and the next,
as if ravenous for intimacy.
And disgrace themselves, yelling, becoming intimate
with neighbors.
And the superintendent brought them
complaints which would have meant nothing
if they hadn't exhausted all desire for loud broad strokes.
But now, conscious of complaints,
they thrust along the vital horizontal with silent stiletto
words and later in the narrowed range of their imaginations
could find no adequate mode of retraction.
So wounds festered, burgeoning lurid weeds, poisoning thought
dialogue.
And the simple air of their two room apartment,
which had sinned with its view of the Jersey cliffs,
so much larger than now, seemed too
thick to breathe or to see through to one another,
but they didn't say a word about breaking it experimentally.
For whatever their doubts about one
another, their doubts about other others, and the city,
themselves adrift in it, among messy one
night stands were too frightening.
And at least they had in one another what they had.
Sara had more in bronski, gloomy brown eyes, a guitar
in his hands, as mystical and tearing as say Lorca.
Though Mirren's particular hands derived from dancing,
clapping, Hasidim.
And he had Sara Nilsson, Minnesota blonde,
long bones attic schizophrenia in the gray infinities
of her eyes, and a turn for lyric poems derived
from piratical saga masters, rare but opposites cleave
in the divisive angularities of Manhattan.
And as the dialectics of embattled individuation
became more intense, these two cleaved more tightly.
If Sara out for groceries hadn't returned
in 20 minutes Mirren punched the wall, pulverizing
the music and his knuckles, but punched,
the flung through the door shrieking stop.
And he, 20 minutes late from work
found Sara in kerchief coat and gloves, the knotted cloth
beneath her chin a little stone, proclaiming wild indifference
to what the nighttime street could hold,
since it held most for him if she were raped and murdered
in it.
After work, he ran home.
Buying a quart of milk and a pack of cigarettes,
she suffered stomach cramps.
Then a letter came from St. Cloud, Minnesota,
Sara's father was coming to visit them next week.
She sewed curtains, squinting down
into the night, plucking thread with
pricked exquisite fingertips.
He painted walls lately punched.
She bought plants for the window sills, framed and hung three
Japanese prints and painted the whole toilet
opaque flat yellow.
On his knees until sunrise, four days in a row,
he sanded and varnished floorboards
until the oak bubbled up its blackest
grain, sealant and petrified.
And Monday dawned on Sara ironing dresses
more than enough to last her father's visit
and Mirren already twice shaved, shining all his shoes
urging her to hurry.
In its mute perfection, their apartment
now had the expressive air of a well beaten slave,
simultaneously, alive and dead.
And reflected like an emanation of their nerves,
their own hectic mainly wordless harmony.
But it wouldn't have mattered if the new curtains, pictures,
and varnished floors yelled reeking spiritual shambles
because Sarah's father wasn't that kind of minister.
His sermons alluded more to Heidegger and Sartre
than Christ.
He lifted weights, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day,
drove a green Jaguar, and since the death of Sarah's mother
a year ago in a state insane asylum,
had seen species of love in all human relations.
And probably at this very moment taking the banked curves
of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, knuckles pale
on the walnut wheel, came man and machine
leaning as one toward Jersey and beyond that toward love.
The sense of all these had driven them,
wrenched them out of themselves onto their apartment
until nothing more could make it coincident with what
he would discover in it anyway.
And they had now only their own absolute physical being
still to work on.
At 9 o'clock when Mirren dashed out
to the cleaners for shirts, trousers, and jackets
then dressed in fresh clothing, while Sarah slammed and smeared
the iron down the board as if increasingly sealed
in the momentum of brute work.
And then Mirren standing behind her lighting
a cigarette was whispering as if to himself that she must hurry.
And she was turning from the board
and in the same motion hurled the iron lunging after it
with nails and teeth before it exploded against.
And Mirren instantly hideously understood
that the iron had it struck him had to burn his flesh
and break his bones, flew to meet her with a scream
and fists banging her mouth as they locked,
winding, fusing to one convulsive beast reeling
off walls, tables, and chairs with ashtrays, books, lamps,
shooting away with pieces of themselves.
And he punched out three of her teeth
and strangled her until she dissolved in his hands
and she scratched his left eye blind,
but there was hope in corneal transplantation
that he would see through it again.
And they were strapped in bandages, twisted and stiff
with pain a week after Sarah's father didn't arrive
and they helped one another walk slowly
up the steps of the municipal building
to buy a marriage license.
[CLAPPING]
Now I'll read some--
again, very, very short ones, these
are from my second collection of stories "I Would
Have Saved Them If I Could".
And it's from a section of the book called Eating out.
The first is called "Basketball Player".
I was the most dedicated basketball player,
I don't say the best.
In my mind, I was terrifically good.
In fact, I was simply the most dedicated basketball player
in the world.
I say this because I played continuously
from the time I discovered the meaning of the game
at the age of 10 until my mid-20s.
I played outdoors on cement, indoors on wood.
I played in heat, wind, and rain.
I played in chilly gymnasiums.
Walking home, I played some more.
I played during dinner, in my sleep, and movies,
and automobiles, and buses, and at stool.
I played for over a decade taking every conceivable shot
with either hand from every direction.
Masses cheered my performance.
No intermission, no food, no other human concern
you hear they cheered me on.
In living rooms, subways, movies, and schoolyards,
I heard them.
During actual basketball games I also played basketball.
I played games within games.
When I lost my virginity I eluded my opponent
and sank a running hook.
Masses saw it happen.
I lost my virginity and my girl lost hers,
the game had been won.
I pulled up my trousers, she snapped her garter belt,
I took a jump shot from the corner,
and another game was underway.
I scored in a blind drive from the foul line.
We kissed goodnight, the effect was epileptic,
masses thrashed in their seats, loud holes in their faces.
I acknowledged with an automatic nod
and hurried down the street dribbling.
A fall away jumper from the top of the key, it hung in the air.
Then, as if sucked down suddenly it zipped through the hoop.
Despite the speed and angle of my shots, I never miss.
The next is called "Pleasure".
My mother was taking me to the movies.
We were walking fast.
I didn't know what movie it would be,
neither did my mother, she couldn't read.
We were defenseless people.
I was 10 years old, my mother was 5 foot nothing.
We walked with fast little steps, hands in our pockets,
faces down.
The school week had ended, I was five days closer to the M.D.
My reward for good grades was a movie, Black Brilliant
Pleasure, encouragement to persist.
We walked in a filthy, freezing, blazing wind for half a mile,
the pleasure I'll never forget.
A girl is struck by a speeding car, a beautiful girl who
speaks first class English, but she is struck down, blinded,
broken, paralyzed.
The driver of the car is a handsome doctor,
my mother whispers, "nah" the Polish word
that stimulates free associational capes
in children.
[LAUGHTER]
Mind spring, this to that, the doctor
operates on the girl in a theater of lights, masks,
and knives.
She has no choice in this matter, blind and broken,
paralyzed.
Lucky for her, she recovers.
Her feeling of recovery is thrilling love for the doctor.
He has this feeling too, it spreads from then
to everywhere like the hot vibrant glowing moo
of a tremendous cow.
The world is feeling.
Healing is the deadly car, the broken girl and blinding
doctor, the masks, knives, and kisses.
Finally, there is a sunset.
It returns me with smeared and glistening cheeks
to the blazing wind.
I glance at my mother she whispers, "Nah".
Intelligence springs through my mind like a monkey seizing
the bars shaking them.
We walk fast with little steps, our hands in our pockets.
But my face is lifted to the wind, it shrieks M.D. my call.
The next is called "Something Evil".
I said, Xtene stands outside the door for a long time
before he knocks, did you suspect that?
Did you suspect that he stands there listening to what
we say before he knocks?
She said, did you know you're crazy?
I said, I'm not crazy.
The expression on his face when I opened the door
is giddy and squirmy as if he'd been doing something evil,
like listening outside our door before he knocked.
She said that Xtene's expression, why
do you invite him here.
Leave the door open he won't be able to listen to us.
You won't make yourself crazy imagining it.
I said, brilliant.
But he isn't due for an hour and I won't sit here
with the door open.
She said I hate to listen to you talk this way,
I won't be involved in your lunatic friendship.
She opened the door, Xtene stood there giddy and squirmy--
[LAUGHTER]
The next is called "Answers".
[LAUGHTER]
I began 200 hours of continuous reading
in the 12 hours that remained before examination.
[LAUGHTER]
Melvin Bloom, my roommate, flipped the pages
of his textbook in a sweet continuous trance,
reviewing the terms work was his pleasure.
He went to sleep early.
While he slept, I bent into the night reading,
eating Benzedrine, smoking cigarettes.
Shrieking dwarfs charged across my notes.
[LAUGHTER]
Crabs asked me questions.
Melvin flipped the page, blinked, flipped another.
He effected the same flipping and blinking with no textbook
during examinations.
For every question, answers marched down his optical nerve,
neck, arm, and out his paper where they
stopped in impeccable parade.
I'd look at my paper oily, scratched by rat like misery,
and I think of Melvin Bloom.
I would think, Oh God what is going to happen to me.
[LAUGHTER]
The next.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you.
The next is called "Eating out".
Four men were at the table next to mine.
Their collars were open, their ties loose,
their jackets hung on the wall.
One man poured dressing on the salad,
another tossed the leaves, another filled the plates
and served.
One tore bread, another poured wine, another ladled soup.
The table was small and square, the men
were cramped but efficient nonetheless.
Apparently practiced at eating the hair this way,
hunched over food, head striking to suck at spoons,
tear at forks, then pulling back invidious, invincible
mastication.
Their lower faces slid and chopped, they didn't talk once.
All their eyes, like birds on a wire, perched
on a horizontal line above the action,
swallowing muscles flickered, and jaws, and necks.
Had I touched the shoulder and asked for the time,
they would have been snarling a flash of teeth.
Next is called "What's New".
My mother said, so what's new?
I said something happened.
She said, I knew it, I had a feeling, I could tell.
Why did I ask?
Sure something happened, why couldn't I sit still,
did I have to ask?
I had a feeling.
I knew, I knew what happened?
That's the story.
[LAUGHTER]
[CLAPPING]
The next is called "The burglar".
I dialed, the burglar answered and said Xtene wasn't home.
I said tell him I called.
The burglar laughed.
I said what's funny.
The burglar said, coincidence.
When you called I was reading a passage in Xtene's diary
which is about you.
I said tell me what it says.
The burglar snorted, your request
is compromising, just hearing it is compromising.
I said I'm in the apartment below Xtene's, we can easily
meet and have a little talk about my request,
I'll bring something to drink.
Do you like marijuana?
I know where Xtene hides his marijuana.
I have money with me, also a TV set, and a Japanese camera.
It's no trouble for me to carry everything up there, one trip.
He said if I came upstairs he would kill me.
[LAUGHTER]
This is called "Right Number".
A girl lived in the apartment below.
We became friends.
I'd go there any time, early or late.
She opened the door and didn't turn on the light.
I undressed in darkness, slid in beside her, made a spoon
and she slid into my spoon.
She had no work, nothing she had to do,
no one expected her to be any place,
money came to her in the mail.
She had a [AUDIO OUT] lawyers who were in a Botticelli face.
She was tall, pale, blonde, and wavy.
I knocked, she let me in no questions.
We talked fast and moved about from bed to chairs to floor.
Sometimes I'd pinch her thigh, once she knocked the coffee
cup into my lap.
Finally, we had sexual intercourse.
We made a lot of jokes and she was on her back,
I tried to be gentle.
She thrashed in a complimentary way and moaned.
Later she said to guess how many men she'd had,
I said 10, she said 15, how does that sound?
It sounds more depraved than I feel.
After the tuck, she understood the Ottoman Empire.
She said people thought of her as manic depressive,
but it wasn't true.
She had good reasons for what she feels.
Germans are friskier than you'd imagine.
The right number is seven or eight,
it sounds like a lot yet it isn't depraved,
it's believable.
A girl shouldn't say seven or eight then describe 20.
What if I said more than 10 less than 20, how does that sound?
Six came in one weekend, they counted.
How old do you think I am?
28?
I'm only 22.
With A, it is a way of making something out of nothing,
with B, it as a form of conversation,
with C it as letting him believe something about himself,
with D it's a mistake.
I've had 17, people think I've had 50 or 100.
Do I want 50 or 100?
No.
I want 25, 25 or 30.
Do you remember what my face is like?
I think it looks sluttish.
Indians are the nicest, Blacks don't talk to you afterward.
I was raped when I was a kid then
I rode my bicycle around and around the block
and talked to myself in a loud voice.
All my life I've tried to keep things
from getting out of hand.
But I get out of hand, nothing works, nothing works.
I like you very, very much I said, let's try again.
I was gentle, she thrashed in a complimentary way and moaned.
The next day she knocked on my door
wearing a handsome gray wool and high heels,
her hair had been washed and combed into a style.
She looked neat, intelligent, and extremely beautiful.
She said she was going to a job interview
to have something to do.
We hugged for good luck and kissed.
Somehow she was on her back, we had sexual intercourse.
I wasn't gentle, she whipped in the pelvis and screamed murder,
me too.
The next is called "god".
My mother said, what's new?
I said nothing.
She said what, you can tell me.
Tell me what's new.
I said something happened.
She said, I had a feeling, I could tell.
What happened?
I said nothing happened.
She said, thank God.
[LAUGHTER]
The next is called "Ma".
I said Ma, do you know what happened?
She said Oh my God.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to read one that's slightly longer and--
[LAUGHTER]
This is very obliquely political.
In fact, probably not political at all.
[LAUGHTER]
It's art.
It's called "Trotsky's Garden".
Trotsky is writing, he will mention
his love of life and his unqualified faith
and dialectical materialism.
He will mention Natasha, the strip of green
outside his window, his invincible atheism,
and he will contemplate his death.
It is morning, Trotsky sits at his wooden desk,
he looks at letters and the blotter.
The Mexican sun burns in the green outside his window just
opened by Natasha.
Trotsky notices, Natasha and the green slide into his writing.
A man like Trotsky in the head with a pickaxe.
Trotsky sons murdered, are mentioned in the writing.
From Russia to Mexico, friends, secretaries, and bodyguards
murdered are mentioned in the writing.
In Berlin where he sent her for psychoanalysis,
his daughter killed herself.
The pen does not see so a grovel in individuals.
Trotsky will mention his faith and dialectical materialism,
his faith in meaning.
His mother suffered difficulties in reading,
she crouched over novels and said beta, alpha.
Trotsky says, if I could begin all over
I would try to avoid this or that mistake,
but the main course of my life would remain unchanged.
I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist,
a dialectical materialist.
Dialectical materialism in the heat of the day
draws a pickaxe from its raincoat, some say rusty axe,
others say ice peak.
Trotsky himself noticed nothing, it
descended from behind but he will bite the assassins hand.
He's writing that again he would avoid mistakes.
The sun, as it did yesterday and will tomorrow, is shining.
Trotsky loves the green outside his window
and flourishes it in his writing.
We shout, OK Trotsky, no time for poems, he cannot hear us.
This poem is a March of corpses, the theme is terrific,
feet are beating in his writing, the sun
is in the green in his writing.
Sedov of the aristocrat lifts her elbow for photographers,
see, a bullet made that ugly scratch, my old man
isn't nobody.
Yesterday, the machine gunned our bedroom, she means.
From revolution to Mexico, Trotsky
is pursued by his inventions.
Trotsky himself says that he put the idea of exile
into the ear of Stalin's spy, hence into the mind of Stalin.
In effect, Trotsky exiled Trotsky and machine
gunned his bedroom.
Now writing that one cannot be reborn until one is dead
and look, it sits beside him with a raincoat and pickaxe.
He makes nervous conversation, alphabetical materialism.
Suddenly, Trotsky is fighting not writing,
blood runs into his eyes.
Nevertheless, he catches the personal fact.
Who said Lenin is morally repulsive
and Stalin is a savage who hates ideas and Parvus is
a fat, fleshy bulldog head, Trotsky said these things.
Now the assassins hands is in his teeth.
With fury of intimacy, Trotsky bites.
This hand wanted to remind him of something, but what?
On the wall outside the guards carry rifles and binoculars,
they're gossiping in the sun when Trotsky screams.
They see him standing in the window bleeding and blind,
a figure of history.
What?
He screams.
The assassin is behind him, bent, sobbing like a child
as he sucks his mutilated hand.
The guards are running on the wall with their rifles
and binoculars.
Freud lights a cigar and contemplates this tableau.
He says Trotsky and I were neighbors in Vienna.
Trotsky admired Freud, he sent him his best daughter.
Now Trotsky shouts in the window,
what does it mean heat in such heat a raincoat.
Trotsky flings toward his wooden desk,
he needs only seconds to write on hot days
in Mexico beware of rain coats.
The next story I'd like to read is
one that depends very, very much on New York accent or New York
musical phrasing.
It's called "Hello Jack".
Jack phoned, I said hello Jack.
He said he was going to the hospital.
I said, all right, I'll go with you.
I asked if I should phone his wife,
they weren't living together.
He said he didn't want me to know--
I'm sorry, he said he didn't want me to know where he was.
He didn't want me to do anything.
I said you're the boss, what's wrong?
I made my voice little.
He yelled, let's not talk about it, I'm in the hospital.
I said you said you have to go to the--
[AUDIO OUT] little words, chippy, chippy, chippy.
His wife couldn't stand him, I knew plenty.
I said hello Jack and rushed to the hospital.
I had a bad foot, every step was a wolf bite.
But Jack was in the hospital, he was the boss.
Jack phoned so I said hello taxicab, he'd
do the same for me.
We were old friends from Novgorod,
nothing to think about.
Taxi, taxi, in the hospital I noticed everyone was dead,
then a nurse was walking.
I yelled rooms, rooms, rooms, she
said she personally didn't build the hospital.
I said so where's Jack?
She said he was in a room with another man.
In the hall I was running, I saw Jack.
Compared to the other man, Jack was Mr Universe.
What the Mongolians did to one grandmother,
the Germans did to the other.
They made a big blond Chinese Jew.
His wife hated him, she was from Budapest, say anything.
What's with that man I said.
I limped to a chair and took the shoe off my bad foot.
The other man was blankets up to a face
the color of chicken fat, his eyes
were sticking out like swords.
Jack said the man was recovering from pneumonia,
I didn't say anything.
If you ask me, the man finished recovering I said.
I put my shoe on Jack's bed.
Jack said, what's the matter with your foot?
Nothing, I said.
The man heard us, he said virus.
My foot was sweating.
Jack said virus is different from plain pneumonia.
I rubbed my foot, poo I said open a window.
Jack said, don't do anything it's not important.
I said how much are they paying you to stay here, stinks
is not important?
I hopped to the window in one shoe and asked the virus,
I'm opening the window.
His eyes didn't move, they looked like a sign,
be quiet, be quiet, two killers shining, pushing.
He said, virus.
I asked them again, I'm opening this window stop stinking.
He said virus.
A little snow came in, you couldn't notice like feathers,
nothing.
It melted on the radiator.
The virus didn't complain, only a maniac would complain.
The virus looked at the ceiling as
if a movie was playing there.
I looked too.
I knew there was no movie on the ceiling, but I looked.
I was right, Jack was happier with the window open.
Why not?
He was a man with a friend.
He began a speech while he was in the hospital.
He couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep, this, that.
He fell down at work in his stomach of pain,
so his union sent him to the hospital.
Talk, talk, talk, I knew plenty.
I said I'm glad you want to talk.
He said is it wrong to talk?
I said, tell me if what you have is serious
and forgive me for laughing, a friend can laugh.
He said you think it's not serious.
I said to you serious is to the world ridiculous, sure
an enemy wouldn't laugh, he doesn't care so we can care.
You have no sense of proportion I rubbed my foot.
The other man said, virus.
Jack said nobody told him not to talk,
I said maybe you would like to sing.
He began to sing yayaya.
The man said virus, me too, yayaya.
All of a sudden the virus pushes his blankets on the floor
and gets out of bed, his gown was
pinched in his behind, his legs with bones,
his face green like a tomato.
I thought he was a tomato not a virus.
He walked out of the room, we stopped singing.
I said he went to the toilet, Jack
said the toilet is behind the door over there,
he didn't go to the toilet.
I said how do you know, maybe he doesn't like that toilet.
Jack said he didn't go to the toilet.
I said he'll be back in a minute,
he went to another toilet because he didn't want
us to hear him make a tinkle.
Jack said he didn't go to any toilet.
I said all right, then he recovered, why should he
pay another penny.
He recovered, stop the clock, a motel is cheaper.
I noticed I had a headache, Jack gave me a face
like Genghis Khan, a rock with eye slits.
I could see the tomato was my fault,
I could see it in the rock.
I said I know how [AUDIO OUT] you come in with trouble
and they put you with a virus.
Look at my foot, is that sweat Jack?
It's sweat, believe me.
Jack's wife hated him, a small skinny from night school,
hair and pimples.
She used to read him from Goethe,
he couldn't understand the words, so they got married.
[LAUGHTER]
When Jack had a hard on, she would vomit,
he called her the stomach.
He used to say, I'm going home now to the stomach.
I knew plenty, I said what do you say about my foot.
He said he phoned me so I would walk on my rotten foot.
Then he grabbed my shoe and went to the window.
A guy like him makes life meaningless,
I said Jack it was a shoe, you should throw Goethe
out the window.
Maybe you're in the Mongolian mood
to throw my other shoe out the window.
I slapped it on his bed, he threw it out the window.
How about this lamp, I said, out the window.
These blankets you want to keep?
Out the window.
I said this is too big, don't even look at it, Chinese Jew,
the mattress was no trouble.
A nurse came in when I was pulling
Jack's bed toward the window.
She started hitting and scratching me,
Jack knocked her down with a punch.
We were singing yayaya, when nurses and doctors from all
over the hospital came in.
Why not?
How often do schmuck see a friendship.
I walked home without a shoe, not one shoe.
I begged myself to take a taxi, it's cold, it's snowing,
take a taxi.
But I refused, no taxi.
For proof, I yelled taxi, taxi, it stopped.
Drive into a wall, I said.
[LAUGHTER]
The driver looked at me, I made a jerk face.
He picked up a wrench, I could see he was a maniac.
I was standing without shoes and a maniac
was coming with a wrench, he could hit me on the foot.
When he pushed open the door, another taxi knocked it off.
He was I yelled, but he was hitting the other driver
with the wrench.
In the snow I ran away, you'll get pneumonia I said.
I said I hope it's a virus.
Then I saw phone booth and called Jack's wife.
She said, hello.
I recognized her voice because it was so little and quiet,
that's how she talked, like a one-year-old.
I said, hello, Jack's wife?
She said yeah, Jack's wife.
I said Jack is dead.
She said what?
Who?
I said you are no good, believe me, Eastside hospital.
She was screaming with her little voice what?
Who?
I didn't say anything, I said I'm hanging up,
you think my foot isn't killing me?
What do you care.
She screams wait, wait.
I said Jack's wife?
She screamed, yeah, Jack's wife.
I said Jack's wife from Goethe?
She screamed yeah, Jack's wife.
I said listen, let another person talk sometimes.
She stopped screaming.
Are you listening, I said?
She whispered, yes, yes.
Glunk I hung up.
That night Genghis Khan and the stomach were together,
I didn't say any.
I went home and put my foot in the toilet bowl
and flushed the water.
Who needs a hospital or a small, skinny from Budapest, not
for me.
A friend calls and I said hello Jack.
I also have a toilet bowl, it sucks my foot
and soon it feels better.
At night I knock over the garbage bag under the sink
so in the dark I listen to them eat, the rats are happy,
I'm happy.
I yell sleep, it comes like a taxi cab.
[CLAPPING]