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The man groaned but nobody heard. Later, the police found him. The cops who got a weekly payment happened to be at a crash course in Virginia and the substitute captain didn't want to reorganize the area. The bar was closed despite the damage to the police car and over the protest of the sergeant, who got forty dollars a month and came back from Virginia to get his take. Sam deigned to testify in court. He had received threats by phone and he wrote down every word that was said and told Lionel he was studying theater from life instead of vice versa, and Lionel looked at him and recalled how he fell asleep at the beautiful play they saw in the Village, tried to understand, but was tired and fell asleep. When they tried to stab him and missed-he didn't retract his complaint, even when a policeman who came back from the crash course tried to persuade him not to testify. After the sentence was declared, he felt relief, but also abhorrence. He looked cheerfully at Crystal Heart and at the kicked bartender. There were no marks on the bartender. Sam didn't admit to any attack. They looked at him with cold, flashing hatred, but he said: You're terrific. Everything exploded then, everything he had kept inside from the day he had left the camp was now a ring of suffocation. The play he went to see with RibaRiba opened the dam. Now he didn't know when he was dreaming and when he was daydreaming and all the time the SS men were beating him and he was shrieking, No! No! And he saw his mother naked and his father expecting him with a diamond in his rectum. Everything was woven in his mind with dark and humiliating ceremonies carried out on lighted stages.

Tape / -

Dear Lionel,

For some years now, I've been following your son. You asked me to help him, you told me to try to advise, you're a senior member of the university, you said, and I did keep my word. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand, Sam's past is a sealed chapter for me, while you refuse to tell me. When he dropped out of regular school and registered for the theater department, I was afraid, but his talent is impressive, and I thought to my self: Well, you also maintained that he should do whatever he wanted. But when day after day he wandered around cemeteries and seduced women to come with him to their houses and performed plays for them that later damaged them emotionally, I thought I should do something, but I didn't know how. What Sam could say in his defense in the case of that woman, Mrs. G., which you yourself were involved in: "She put on a striptease for me, because she thought men are aroused by black panties, and afterward because she thought I had a sexual disease-I told her about the gonorrhea I picked up-I kissed a boot and acted for her how I'd fuck its mate. And then she laughed, what's she complaining about all of a sudden?" It was hard for me to explain to him, the anger in him is incomprehensible to me. What attracts him is the human sewer, or magic. I don't understand what all that has to do with theater. In my opinion, he's playing with fire and that fire is buried inside him. He told me that on one of his visits to the cemeteries, a woman saw him, took him to her room, undid his trousers (these are his words), and when he penetrated her, he fell asleep. When he woke up, he said, she was naked and smoking a cigar. He said he turned on the radio. I'm reconstructing the details that coalesce into a picture you should be aware of. He said he combines tidbits in his mind like a man named Ebenezer did. Women in cemeteries, religious ceremonies, music he hears in jazz clubs-all that, he said, is intertwined, into one equation. And he can, he told me, recall who a disaster truly happened to. What disaster, Lionel? When he left the theater department and joined a theater that traveled throughout the state, you told me to persuade him not to go, but you know how much I tried and the result, nil! What I do know is that instead of studying theater in our department, one of the best in the United States, he worked in lighting, sets, as a stagehand, and learned to sew shrouds (his words) and to be a stage manager you claimed then that I should persuade him to work in what he really wanted to do and not in stage management of an amateur theater that traveled from one small town to another, but I didn't succeed. Look Lionel, Sam recently came back. He came back to the department and I accepted him. What you may not know is that he doesn't study but is preparing a play with three actors and has even managed to persuade me to help him. I'm writing to you because if there are complaints about my behavior, know that I tried, but he has some charm that compels you (me) to give in to him; and so it happened, Lionel, that people who studied four years in the department, successfully finished and did all their assignments, are waiting to put on their play while Sam, who didn't study in a regular way, who hit a teacher, who slept with, or in the words of one witness, raped two women directors we brought to the department, is producing a play and I, I am its sponsor. And as for the rest-

Yours…

After Sam's premiere performance, there on the stage covered with thousands of pairs of shoes while a gigantic heart pounded metallically and three actors fought some war against themselves, Rachel Blau decided to reveal to her son who Sam Lipp was and who Lionel's father was. Her husband told her: Why is that so important? I'll take care of everybody and if Sam wants theater and Lionel wants to write stories, let them. Rachel didn't argue with him. She took the subway because she didn't know how to drive and didn't want to waste money on a taxi. When she came out of the station, she fainted. People who from now on would look alike to her took her to a nearby hospital. Nuns dressed in white laid her in a narrow bed, above her hung a big crucifix and below burst the melancholy cold sound of the nuns' singing. When Lionel came, she smiled at him and thought he was all the people she had seen before. She was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital but her condition didn't improve. Lily took Lionel's hand and then touched Rachel. Rachel didn't know who they were anymore. She turned to Sam and spoke Polish. She muttered and suddenly fell silent. Her face contorted and Sam told her in Polish: Regards to Rebecca Secret Charity. Lily said: She'll recover, but everybody knew she wouldn't.

A week later, the play of the shoes closed and the reviews came in. Sam listened and was silent. Then he said: The play was no good, but I know what I want and what I want will take time, but it will be better. He came home and saw Lionel and Lily sitting with dictionaries in their hands and Lily was editing an article for Lionel for The New York Times. Sam looked at them and glanced again at a story that Lionel published in Harpers, and said: I'm a wretched creature, Lionel, a creature others die for, Ebenezer recites them, I'm not an expert in writing stories, in your articles you're wise and smart, so you succeed, but the heroes in your stories aren't wise like you, and that's not good.