Page 119

By Jack Joseph Smith

How many times have you been in the newspapers? Plenty, you clown. How does it feel to be famous? It must facinate you to look at your bloody face every evening. Your right, it does. Where do you go from here? I don't know. The pounding has been strong, and I don't think I am ready to stop the force. It is still behind me pushing, and I can't feel a bit of it passing through. I guess I have to experience more, before I will be able to see my life in front of me. The wasteland is endless now, and the weeds are still as stone under ceaseless wind. What were you fighting about at college? Pornographic pictures. Pornographic pictures? He was laughing again. I flushed some guys' pornographic pictures down the toilet. Michael the Ark Angel. At the time, it was the fastest way I could see toward cannonization. So he came after you? He was a big Irish dummy. He just couldn't handle it. It was the last straw. The week before I had told everybody that I was a Jew. You see they were picking on this Jewish kid. Go on. Well Daniel, they hung the star of David on a fig leaf outside the kids window and sang, don't let the sun shine nelly. What could I do? The kid was dying. So at the point of the pornographic pictures, the Irishmen also learned that you were really a Catholic and had renounced your faith.

Original Scan

Page 119

AI Interpretation

GPT

Pressed about fame and newspaper notoriety, the speaker remembers being thrown out of college after fights over pornographic pictures and anti-Jewish harassment, including pretending to be Jewish in solidarity with a kid being tormented.

The violence here comes wrapped in absurd details, especially the toilet-flushed pictures, but the anger is not only theatrical. Underneath the boasting is a real disgust with cruelty and a habit of turning moral protest into physical confrontation.

Claude

The expulsions turn into a comic-heroic litany. The college fight was over 'Pornographic pictures' he 'flushed... down the toilet. Michael the Ark Angel,' a stunt that for him was 'the fastest way I could see toward cannonization.' It followed his declaring himself a Jew to defend a boy the others taunted - they 'hung the star of David on a fig leaf outside the kids window and sang... What could I do? The kid was dying.' Daniel plays straight man ('How does it feel to be famous?'), and Michael, 'Plenty' in the newspapers, frames his serial martyrdom as instinctive defense of whoever is being crushed, even at the cost of being seen as 'too Catholic.'