Rod thinks he’s upset. How can I think? How can I write? How can I do this stinking chapter about this stinking babysitter with all this stuff happening around me? Birge and Johnny. Betsy. And Rod acting peeved at me, as though the whole thing was my fault. He volunteered to go out there, it wasn’t my idea, he wanted to look at the lions close up, he wanted to be Edgar Rice Burroughs swinging from a real vine. Okay, baby, go ahead, but when you land on your ass don’t get mad at me.
I wonder what happened out there. He wouldn’t tell me. He said he was driving my car in and bringing my stuff, he said Birge and Johnny had spent the night in the house and ate a couple of meals there but hadn’t busted anything up, but he wouldn’t tell me what happened between them and him.
Obviously they mean to hang around till they get me, Christmas season or no Christmas season. With Thanksgiving safely out of the way, they should be busy driving Christmas trees and hot gifts down from the wild north country, but I suppose they figure first things first and I’m a first thing.
If they want to fight so bad, why don’t they go to Vietnam? They’re hawks, of course, that goes without saying, they want to bomb everything the other side of Hawaii.
No. I am not going to describe my own attitude toward Vietnam, that’s one digression I refuse to digress to. I’m a dove in ostrich’s clothing, but I suppose that’s just as obvious as Birge and Johnny being hawks.
Why don’t I write the chapter about the goddam babysitter? It’s a simple matter, a sex scene at a drive-in movie, I’ve done it ten or fifteen times already, winding up back at her house and the arrival of Paul. Simple. I could do it with my eyes closed.
If I could do it.
Why can’t I? For God’s sake, there’s no personal involvement with that, is there? I wouldn’t make the baby-sitter anything at all like the real Angie, there’s no connection at all.
Maybe I’m just too far into the habit of going off the tracks by now. How many of these things have I done?
I can’t remember. Somewhere around ten, I think, I don’t have them with me.
If only they were sex book chapters. Do you realize, if these were only sex book chapters I’d make the deadline? I’d beat the deadline, I’d bring the goddam book in tomorrow, a day early.
Is there any way to do it? Change the names in ink, take out words like cunt and fuck—
I don’t have the first few chapters. It wouldn’t work anyway, but even if it would work I don’t have the first few chapters.
I shouldn’t have gotten rid of them.
Do you suppose I have a death wish? Do you suppose I want to fuck up, I want to do things to destroy an intolerable situation? The intolerable situation being the deadline, I suppose. Or generally writing the sex books. Or generally everything. In general.
Like people who secretly want a war, a great big war, because maybe a great big holocaust of a war will change their lives. Like the grocery clerks and assembly line workers that join the Minutemen and go practice Army crap on weekends, because they believe they would be much more successful and happy as guerrillas, and they really and truly and actively want a huge war that blows up all the cities and everything because that’s the only way they’ll ever get to live in a cave in the woods and shoot people. But they understand enough to know that most people wouldn’t be very sympathetic if they came right out and explained that what they really wanted to do with their lives was live in a cave and shoot people, so they coat the pill in red white and blue sugar and they swear up and down that what it is, they’re patriotic.
Yeah. And maybe I’m up to the same thing. “Oh oh, I have to do a sex book now,” I say, but when I sit down to the typewriter, what do I do?
Did I want Betsy to read those chapters? Did I leave them around so she’d read them and leave me?
Whoa. Hold on there, enough of that, that’s horseshit. Betsy hadn’t read a word I’d written for over a year, there was no reason at all to suppose she was going to read anything I was writing this time. So let’s cool it with the five-and-dime psychoanalysis. I may be neurotic, but I’m not crazy.
At least, I don’t think I’m crazy.
What I think I am, in fact, I think I’m regressing. Here I am rooming with Rod again, it’s college days all over again. I’m nineteen, I’m a sophomore, I never met Betsy, Rod and I are roommates, the cold weather and the campus life are fun even if I am broke, and nobody’s a writer, not even Rod. He types, but he’s not a writer.
Rod was an Army brat, his father’s a Colonel in the Air Force, he grew up all over the place. His father’s in Washington now, but when I first met Rod his folks were stationed in Germany. Their official residence was Syracuse, New York, so Rod could get into the state university at the state resident rate, so that’s what he was doing there.
He’s a lot different guy now than he was then. He used to be very silent, very self-contained. He still has the same aura of self-containment, self-control, but there’s more outgoing assurance to him now. He used to make me think of a tight spring, of something packed too tightly into a long thin box. That pressure is gone now.
I think it’s because he’s more sure of himself now, or he has more stability or something. The thing is, growing up all over the place, one air base after another, it was a new school every couple of years, a new country even, new kids around him, if he’d made any friends in the last place they were gone for good. So he was lonely, I believe, though he was never the type that would show it. He was always proud, very cool, always acted sure of himself.
I don’t know whose idea it was that we be roommates after our freshman year. Probably mine.
Why do I say probably mine? It could have been Rod’s idea, too. I always think of myself in the secondary position, I always think of the other person as dominant.
You know that’s true? I put myself at the wrong end of the pecking order with everybody I meet, and there’s no need for it. No matter how much of a clown I am, I’m not that much of a clown. I mean, if I was I wouldn’t be able to function at all.
Come to think of it, I’m not functioning very well.
Back in college, one time when I was being particularly lazy, I remember Rod said to me, “Ed, if you ever have a fit, it’ll be catatonic.” But wouldn’t that be nice? You just sit there. Somebody else feeds you. Somebody else wipes the drool from the corner of your mouth. Somebody else wipes you. Somebody else takes care of you.
No, I can’t do that. I’m just feeling glum because so many things have happened, everything’s gotten so screwed up all at once. I’m not even in my own house any more.
And I’ve done another fifteen pages of gumbo, which is enough to make anybody long for the green pasture of catatonia.
Rod will get here soon. I’ll read the Paul chapter, he’ll give me a pep talk, I’ll ask him to call Samuel tomorrow and get me a stay of execution, and then I’ll come in here and I’ll really and truly write Chapter 2. I still have all evening, I can get Chapter 2 done with no trouble at all. Granted I’m a little tired, I only had four hours’ sleep last night, but I can surely stay up long enough to write another fifteen pages.
The funny thing is, this stuff is going faster than the sex books ever went. Three hours, some of these chapters, which is really fast. Of course, I suppose that’s because I don’t have to worry about plot or continuity or sex scenes or anything like that. All I have to do is open my head and spill the brains onto the paper.
Brains?
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