“I mean to talk seriously to you and I will,” he said. “What do you intend to do with your life?”
“I’d like to lift elephants, Uncle Myles. Tear phone books.”
“A strong man,” my uncle snorted. “In a circus. A side show, not even a circus. Strength is humiliating to a man, do you know that?”
“Is it?”
“Physical strength is humiliating to a man,” my uncle shouted. “Listen, do you know what distinguishes human beings from animals? Love? Law? Reason? The ability to walk upright? None of those things. None of them. Any lioness loves its cub. Every herd has rules. A fox has cunning. A horse can rear. No. Only one thing distinguishes men from beasts: respectability. I’m not talking about self-respect. That’s just ego. A cat has that. Respectability is grander. Do you know what it is? Do you? Respectability is the decision of the private man that the powers of this world are right. The decision of the private man to be one with those powers. Decency is nothing more than the condition that what he considers valuable, you consider valuable, I consider valuable.
“There is a universal assumption, James, that man has intrinsic worth. He has. If he has worth then his products have worth. If his products have worth then they should be conserved. If they should be conserved then it is a privilege to have as many of those products as one can. I’ll go further. It is the duty of the private man to have those products. He must get all he can. Not to do so is waste. Waste is sin. If waste is sin, hoarding is virtue. Put money in your purse, Boswell. Put things on your shelves, in your closets, your banks, your vaults. How much closet space is there in a circus trailer?”
“This is ridiculous.”
“No. Conserve. Conserve. Man is basically a collector.”
“A squirrel can do that.”
“That’s the squirrel’s decency then, that it can save. Conserve. Collect. Accumulate. Receive. Get. Take.”
“Have you?”
“Well, I’ve failed,” he said. “But I’ve tried. It’s not a sin to be poor, Boswell — no one says that. It’s only a sin to accept one’s poverty. Where are you going?”
“I have to make a call.”
“To one of your freaks?”
“Sure.”
“Not from my phone. I forbid it.”
“All right. I’ll go downstairs.”
I went into my bedroom and flung clothes on my body. I started out. “A strong man,” my uncle laughed, coming after me. “Is that what you want? To be gaped at? A respectable man doesn’t call attention to himself. His life is quiet, sedate.”
Kiss mine, Uncle Myles, I thought. He almost had me, the little bastard. He could make me ashamed of my size, all right, any time he wanted. But at the last moment I remembered his size. I remembered, of all things, my Uncle Myles’ erection and the weird spontaneity of everybody’s life. Why fight it? We’re all of us strong men. We taste like big game, I bet. We’re gamy. We taste like tiger and ape and zebra.
“So long, Uncle Myles,” I called back to him. “You throw a very sedate convulsion, do you know that? Clean that wound, Uncle Myles. Close up that skin. Put on a Band-Aid. Johnson and Johnson is a very old house.”
“Where are you going? James, where are you going?”
“To the freak show. That’s where.”
I knew I would not be back until I had seen it.
So I was out in the street. I was twenty years old and out in the winter street, and what I had were the clothes on my back and the back itself and a key to the gymnasium. That’s savings, right? That’s conservation and collection and accumulation. That’s getting, isn’t it? I had cornered the market. Boswelfare!
There are getters and there are spenders, Uncle Myles, I thought, and we both know what I am.
I thought of Penner, the man who was my friend, or who would have been my friend if I had had a friend. (Uncle Myles once told me that I didn’t make friends. He was right.) I would call Penner. It seemed very important. I went into a drug store and squeezed into a booth. I looked his name up in the book. Only just then something went wrong. The collection was temporarily embarrassed. I had no dime in the accumulation.
It is virtually impossible for a healthy but despondent two-hundred-thirty-pound twenty-year-old, with nothing but the clothes on his back and the key in his pocket and friendless and oldly orphaned and newly de-uncled and no dime to make a phone call and no visible prospects, to die in a phone booth. Something happens. It’s a life principle. Wheels turn. Conditions ripen. It isn’t much, you think? Lover, it is all I have. Don’t forget it and you will be happy and you will go far.
I went outside. The movies were letting out. Right in front of me people were coming out of the theater and heading for their cars. I ducked down a side street and looked for a car with no snow on it. When I spotted one I went around to the trunk and, stooping, lifted it by its frame. I moved carefully sideways toward the curb and settled the rear of the car into as fluffy a snow bank as you ever saw. Then I stepped into a doorway to wait.
In five minutes there they were — some fat-throated, deep-voiced guy and his juicy wife. I swear I could see the wild sports coat beneath his overcoat, his wife’s blond hair under the babushka. They had just seen David Niven and she was telling him what a cute picture it was. They were laughing and he opened the car for her and then went around to the driver’s side. He got in and started the motor. It was a beautiful thing to hear. It purred like a dream and David Niven was a good actor and Detroit made swell cars and in a few minutes the heater would be blowing out hot air like a blast furnace and when he got home he was going to thump Blondie. Only — only the bottom fell out of his world. The rear wheels were spinning nine hundred miles an hour. The car was a slush- maker, an ice machine. He got out to see what was wrong, then came around behind the car and moved his fedora professionally back on his brow.
“What is it? Let’s go, I’m cold,” his wife said.
“Yeah, well, I’m in a damned snowdrift.”
“Well, get out of it. I don’t want to freeze to death out here.”
“I’ll have to rock it.”
He got back into the car and heaved it forward an inch and backwards an inch. The car settled down into the snow until spring. He gave it more gas and stalled the motor. He tried it in first, in second, in high, in reverse. In neutral. He got out of the car again.
“Will you have to call the motor club?”
“Shut up.”
“Maybe if you rocked it some more,” she said.
“It needs traction. It’s got no damned traction.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “It’s so cold.”
“It needs more traction.” He stooped down and patted some snow into the ruts.
“You’ll get a heart attack,” his wife said.
“Get behind the wheel and put it in first. I’ll push.”
“Call the motor club already.”
“Just put it in first, will you!”
“It’s so cold,” she said. She lowered her voice. “It’s not a safe neighborhood.”
They tried it once his way and then she came out of the car. “You’ll get a heart attack and freeze to death in the street,” she said. “Let me push.”
“Get back in the car,” he shouted. “Get back in the god-damned car.”
It was time. I came out of the doorway and walked past them. The man looked at me and his wife whispered something to him. “Maybe if two people push,” he said loudly.