I’m too rattled to work, that’s what it is. After Birge and Johnny—
That’s who was at the door last night. I finished my fifteen pages of what-is-it and left the office and walked down the hall and into the living room, turning on lights as I went, and through the picture window in the living room I saw the truck in the driveway.
And they saw the lights go on, because all at once they switched from bell ringing to door pounding. Any second, I knew, it would occur to one of them — probably Johnny — to try the knob, and then they would find out the door wasn’t locked, and then they would come in and turn me into a veal cutlet. With tomato sauce.
So I ran. Through the kitchen and out the back door and across the back yard and across the back yard behind mine, and around that house, and out to the street there. I turned right and ran three blocks, and then I walked a block, and then I ran another block, and then I decided it was ridiculous to be chased out of my own house like that, and besides they were probably gone, so I turned around and walked back, and when I was a block away I could see the truck parked in front. So they were still there. Waiting in the house for me to come back.
I couldn’t do it. They might not actually kill me, I might survive an encounter with Birge and Johnny, but they would definitely put me into the hospital for a while.
I almost went on back just for that reason. It might solve everything. If I was in the hospital, I couldn’t be expected to meet any deadlines anywhere. And if Birge and Johnny beat me up badly enough to put me in the hospital, it might make Betsy feel sorry enough for me to come down and see me and then I could tell her die truth about the baby-sitter business.
But I just couldn’t do it. The idea of walking back there deliberately to get my bones broken and my teeth knocked out and my eyes blackened and my skin bruised just wouldn’t do. No matter how pro-survival it might be from an intellectual standpoint, from an instinctive standpoint the idea was anti-survival and that was that. We know by now what happens with me when mind says do one thing and instinct says do another.
So I turned around again and left there. I walked five blocks to the all-night grocer and called a cab there and took it to the railroad station and called Rod from the station to ask him if I could stay at his place tonight and he said yes. There wasn’t a train till four in the morning, and I kept expecting Birge and Johnny to show up any second, but they never did, and by six I was here at Rod’s place, drinking scotch and telling him my sad story, and only once or twice did he let it show that he thought anything was funny.
Rod has a new place now, on 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. It’s a five-room apartment in a prewar building, fourth floor, windows facing the street. He has a living room, very large, a small galley kitchen, a small dining room, and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the one I’m in right now, is set up as an office, with a sofa bed so it can be converted into a guest room. It has a nice view of 9th Street, a huge desk, and all in all is a better office than I have out at the house, but frankly I’d rather be at the house.
Rod is there now. I told him my time problem, how I was failing to make the deadline, so he offered to take the train out to the house, see if Birge and Johnny were still hanging around, and try to get a few essentials for me. Like a toothbrush and some clean underwear and my usable first chapter and the Buick. It sounds like a real friendly thing he’s doing, going out there like that, and I’m sure it is, but also I believe he’s intrigued by the thought of Birge and Johnny, a couple of real-life heavies, people who beat up people — they’ve done it before, beaten people up and put them in the hospital, I’m not scared for no reason at all — people who buy stolen goods and transport them to New York in truckloads of Christmas trees, people on the fringe of the law, tough nasty mean men, the kind of men he writes about in his spy series with Silver Stripe. I think he wants to see them for himself and compare the real version with the version he makes up.
I don’t mean to take anything away from the gesture, it is a friendly thing he’s doing, putting me up, going out to the Island for me, but I still think this other thing is part of it.
I’m just very cynical today, that’s all. If I sound like I’m putting Rod down, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. I’ll try not to.
Anyway, I got about four hours’ sleep in here, getting up a little before noon, and Rod and I went over to a place on 6th Avenue and had breakfast, and then he went up to Penn Station to take the train out to the Island, and I came back here and started to work. Did one page about Beth and went all to hell with myself.
How can I show this garbage to Rod?
Can I stop it? Can I pull this sheet of paper out and start page 17 again? I’d love to, I’d love to try it, but I know it won’t work, I know I can’t stop till I’ve got it all said.
Got what all said? For the love of God, what am I saying here? Nothing, not a damn thing. How I’ve filled all these pages I don’t know, because there’s nothing inside me to be said, nothing to be brought out, nothing there at all. I m an empty attic, squirrels live in me.
It’s funny, but I’ve always been fascinated by books without content. Like the phone book, for instance. How big and fat, and there isn’t a damn thing in it. You know what I mean. No thought in it, nothing happening.
The Sears Roebuck catalog, there’s another. Huge book, fat, monstrous, full of things, full of everything, full of nothing.
Like, take a look at this bookcase here, on the left side of this desk. It’s full of stuff like that, it’s got a ton of the stuff. Manhattan phone book. Manhattan classified yellow pages phone book. Sears Roebuck catalog. Roget’s Thesaurus. Official Guide New York World’s Fair 1964–1965. Dictionary. Five-language dictionary giving words in English, French, Italian, German and Russian. The Complete Street Guide to New York. Washington, D.C., classified yellow pages phone book. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and Mencken’s Dictionary of Quotations, all of which are bits and snippets from real books, like cutting fingers off dead men and throwing them in a box and when the box is full you shut the lid and put a hat on it and call it George Spelvin and claim it’s a man.
Rod uses all this stuff, of course. What he writes isn’t books, it’s carnivals. He writes well-lit night entertainments, constructed out of muslin and paint and Roget’s Thesaurus and the five-language dictionary and the Sears Roebuck catalog. He writes black-light rides where the tableaux are spies shooting each other with rifles from the Sears Roebuck catalog in front of addresses from the Manhattan and Washington yellow pages. And the amazing thing is, because God damn him and God damn me twice, my friend and mentor whom I envy so badly I could bite my tongue off in vexation is a writer, a writer writer writer, and because that’s what he is the books are good, they’re fun, they have more life than he puts into them, the sum is greater than the parts.
It’s like those two-color reproduction systems where they only use like yellow and blue, but the eye sees red and green and all sorts of stuff. They aren’t there, but they are.
That’s what a book has to have! A book has to have something more in it than what was put there, or what’s the use of it? All these things, big and fat, using up the space, they don’t have a thing in them but what was put there. But Rod’s books, this spy series with Silver Stripe, they’re good books, he constructs them the way you’d construct a sideshow booth at a carnival, all pine boards and nails and jerrybuilt, tacked together in a hurry, and when he’s done there’s magic takes place, the pumpkin he wrote becomes a coach and you can ride off on that coach into a world nobody ever made, including Rod.