I'm emmigrating to America
By the time this last installment of my life story is published, I shall have returned to the United States. Either the musical based on my autobiography will have been produced or the project will have been abandoned. In either case, when all the public speaking and the public living are over, when the being interviewed on television and the being photographed for the papers are done, I shall make the first important decision that I have made in a long time. I shall timorously approach the immigration authorities of the United States to ask their permission to spend the rest of my life in New York.
If I am allowed to stay in America, if I can scrape together sufficient money to subsist indefinitely in the fizzy air of Manhattan, I must remember that I shall no longer be the recipient of the special attention the island has so far always bestoyed upon me. I shall by then have become at least an honorary member of its divine race of denizons. It will then be my turn to dispense unfailing generosity - if not in money, then in some other currency.
Unfortunately I am living my later years with their time factor reversed. I ought to have crossed the Atlantic in early middle age and should now be coming home to die but thirty years ago my poverty and my general ineffectuality prevented me from attempting a journey so daring. Now in the winter of my life, I have been carried across the ocean as though on a plate. This astonishing piece of good fortune I must not waste.
Perhaps the wisest course of action for me to adopt will be to lie down on the White House steps and, when the occupant opens the door, to start whimpering those lines engraved round the plinth of the Statue of Liberty; 'Bring me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .'
If ever there was a huddled mass . . .
Here ends 'How To Become A Virgin'
If I am allowed to stay in America, if I can scrape together sufficient money to subsist indefinitely in the fizzy air of Manhattan, I must remember that I shall no longer be the recipient of the special attention the island has so far always bestoyed upon me. I shall by then have become at least an honorary member of its divine race of denizons. It will then be my turn to dispense unfailing generosity - if not in money, then in some other currency.
Unfortunately I am living my later years with their time factor reversed. I ought to have crossed the Atlantic in early middle age and should now be coming home to die but thirty years ago my poverty and my general ineffectuality prevented me from attempting a journey so daring. Now in the winter of my life, I have been carried across the ocean as though on a plate. This astonishing piece of good fortune I must not waste.
Perhaps the wisest course of action for me to adopt will be to lie down on the White House steps and, when the occupant opens the door, to start whimpering those lines engraved round the plinth of the Statue of Liberty; 'Bring me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .'
If ever there was a huddled mass . . .
Here ends 'How To Become A Virgin'