A Bad Man by Stanley Elkin

stay still.
    Content but embarrassed.
    His father was famous now, and they seemed to live under the special dispensation of their neighbors. “I would make them eat the Jew,” he would confide defiantly.
    Like anyone famous, however, they lived like captives. (He didn’t really mean “they” surprisingly, he was untouched—a captive’s captive.) It must have been a task even for his father to have always to come up to the mark of his madness. Once he bored them he was through. It was what had happened in Vermont, in Maine, elsewhere. Once he repeated himself—not the pattern; the pattern was immune, classic—it would be over. “There’s a fortune in eccentricity, a fortune. I’m alive ,” his father said in honest wonder, weird pride. “It’s no joke, it costs to live. Consumers, we’re consumers. Hence our mortality. I consume, therefore I am.” He would smile. “ I hate them ,” he’d say. “They don’t buy enough. Read Shylock. What a wisdom! That was some Diaspora they had there in Venice.”
    It was not hate, but something darker. Contempt. But not for him. For him there were, even at thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, pinches, hugs, squeezes. They slept together in the same bed (“It cuts coal costs. It develops the heart”). Awakened in the declining night with a rough kiss (“Come, chicken, cluck cluck cluck. If you cannot tell me, hold me”). Whispers, declarations, manifestoes in the just unhearing ear. Bedtime stories: “Your mother was a gentile and one of my best customers. I laid her in my first wagon by pots and by pans and you were born and she died. You think I hate you, you think so? You think I hate you, you took away my shicksa and a good customer? Nah, nah, treasure, I love you. She would have slowed down the Diaspora. We had a truck, and she couldn’t read the road maps. Wake up, I’ll tell you the meaning of life. Can you hear me? Are you listening? This is rich.” (At first he was terrified, but gradually he accommodated to madness, so that madness made no difference and words were like melodies, all speech as meaningless as tunes. He lied, even today. He said what he wanted, whatever occurred to him. Talk is cheap, talk is cheap.) “Get what there is and turn it over quick. Dump and dump, mark down and close out. Have specials, my dear. The thing in life is to sell, but if no one will buy, listen, listen, give it away! Flee the minion. Be naked. Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock. Be in a position to lose nothing by it when the bombs fall. But what oh what shall be done with the unsalable thing?”
    Madness made no difference. It was like living by the railroad tracks. After a while you didn’t hear the trains. His father’s status there, a harmless, astonishing madman, provided him with a curious immunity. As the boy became indifferent to his father, so the town became indifferent to the boy, each making an accommodation to what did not matter. It was not, however, that madness made sense to him. It was just that since he’d grown up with madness, nothing made sense. (His father might even be right about things; he was probably right). He had been raised by wolves, he saw; a growl was a high enough rhetoric. But he could not be made himself. Perhaps he did not have the energy for obsession. He had lived so close to another’s passion, his own would have been redundant. “You have a locked heart,” his father told him. Perhaps, perhaps he did. But now if he failed to abandon him (“When do you go?” his father sometimes asked. “When do you embark, entrain, enbus? When do you have the shoes resoled for the long voyage out? And what’s to be done with the unsalable thing?”), it was not a sudden reloving, and it was no longer fear. The seas had long since been scraped of their dragons; no turtle death lay waiting for him. The Diaspora had been disposed of, and the