Boswell by Stanley Elkin Read Free Book Online

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