The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan Page B

over an hour to do it. He shot himself through the chest, missed his heart, then shot himself through the stomach. I heard both shots. There was an interval of about forty seconds between the shots. I thought afterwards that during the interval he was probably trying to decide if he ought to go on wanting to be dead or if he ought to try to get well.
    Then he started to holler. The whole thing was a mess, materially and spiritually, this man hollering, people running, shouting, wanting to do somethingand not knowing what to do. He hollered so loud half the town heard him.
    This is all I know about regular suicides. I haven’t seen a woman throw herself under a streetcar, so I can’t say about that. This is the only suicide I have any definite information about. The way this man hollered wouldn’t please anyone in a movie. It wouldn’t make anyone weep with joy.
    I think it comes to this: we’ve got to stop committing suicide in the movies.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

    Walking through Woolworth’s in 1927, he saw a small crowd of shoppers working swiftly with their arms over a table stacked high with phonograph records. He went over to find out what it was all about, and it was a special, new Victor and Brunswick records, five cents each, and a wide choice of titles to choose from. Well, he hadn’t heard the phonograph in months. He might wind it up again and listen to it. The phonograph was pretty much himself. He had gotten into the machine and come out of it, singing, or being a symphony, or a wild jazz composition. For months he hadn’t gone near the phonograph, and it had stood in his room, dusty and mute.
    These five-cent records reminded him that he had been silent through the phonograph for a long time, and that he might again enjoy emerging from it.
    He selected a half dozen records and took them to his room. He was certain that none of the records could be very good, but he wasn’t seeking anything good and he didn’t mind how trivial or trite the music might be. If a thing is terribly bad, anything, a man or a piece of music, it is a form of exploration to go through the thing. He knew that he could do this with the worst sort of American jazz. The melody could be idiotic, the orchestration noisy, and so on, but somewhere in the racket he would be able, by listening carefully, to hear the noblest weeping or laughter of mortality. Sometimes it would be a sudden and brief bit of counterpoint, several chords of a banjo perhaps, and occasionally it would be the sadness in the voice of some very poor vocalist singing a chorus of a very insipid song. Something largely accidental, something inevitable.
    You could not do this with the finer music. The virtues of the finer music were intentional. They were there for everybody, unmistakably.
    It was early August, I think. (I am speaking of myself.) For many months he had not listened to himself through the phonograph, and now he was taking these new records home.
    In August a young man is apt to feel unspeakably alive: in those days I was an employee of a telegraph company. I used to sit at a table all day, working a teletype machine, sending and receiving telegrams,and when the day was over I used to feel this unspeakable liveliness, but at the same time I used to feel lost. Absolutely misplaced. I seemed to feel that they had gotten me so deeply into the mechanical idea of the age that I was doomed eventually to become a fragment of a machine myself. It was a way to earn money, this sitting before the machine. I disliked it very much, but it was a way.
    He knew that he was lost in it and that they were taking out the insides of him and putting in a complicated mass of wheels and springs and hammers and levers, a piece of junk that worked precisely, doing a specific thing over and over again, precisely.
    All day I used to sit at the machine, being a great help to American industry. I used to send important telegrams to important people accurately. The things that were