So here I stand. There was no place to put the typewriter except on top of the dresser, so that’s where it is. And I’m standing here typing this stuff, shifting from foot to foot, standing here. Typing. I don’t believe it myself.
Tomorrow the sex book is due, but Rod has probably already phoned Samuel and told him not to expect it, old Ed isn’t available any more. We need a new ghost, a slot is free, send out the call.
Ghost wanted!
Ten thousand a year, very easy work. Just a little typing every month. But remember, nobody can do this shit forever.
How could I hear him when he said that? Betsy was big as a house, I was broke, and Sabina Del Lex had these smooth white thighs, smooth white thighs.
I ought to be altered, that’s what I ought to be. A good case of the mumps, that would cure what ails me.
I feel like the world is this big rattletrap wagon with everybody crammed on every which way, and I didn’t like my position, I was down too low, everybody was stepping on me, so I tried to get higher, or at least more comfortable, and in thrashing around all I’ve succeeded in doing is knocking myself off the wagon.
I have friends on that wagon. How can they go on without me? They have to notice I’m gone, they have to know something’s happened to me. Don’t they care? Doesn’t anybody care? Am I the only one in the world, in the whole wide world, who cares about me?
Well, Ed, who do you care about? Besides yourself, that is.
Hester.
Fred.
Maybe Betsy. Maybe.
Then that’s who cares about you, Ed. Hester. And Fred. And maybe Betsy. Maybe.
That’s fine. That’s wonderful. I’m lying here in the roadway, I’m lying here in the dirt, and there goes the wagon, bouncing and rattling along, over the next rise and gone.
I can’t even hear it any more.
Listen. Listen how quiet. Nothing but the click-click of this typewriter.
But now I get up, now I get up and brush off my behind and pick up my hat and put it on my head and adjust my great big polka-dot bow tie and touch my big red round nose to be sure it hasn’t fallen off or gotten dented, and I take out a huge red handkerchief and blow my nose in it and then use it to wipe the dust off my size twenty-eight shoes and then use it to wipe the lenses of my spectacles and then poke it through the spectacles to show they don’t have lenses after all, and then put it back in my hip pocket, and I bow my head and smell the white and yellow foot-wide daisy in my lapel and it squirts water in my face and I jump back in surprise and take the huge red handkerchief out of my pocket again and wipe my face with it and then go through wringing motions with it and water dribbles onto the ground and then I put it away in my hip pocket again, and then I start looking through the deep wide pockets of my baggy check trousers with the wide yellow suspenders, and I begin to find strange things in the pockets, like a puppy and a ham sandwich and a mousetrap that snaps shut on my fingers and a gun that when I pull the trigger a flag pops out that says FUCK! and an American flag and a potted plant with a flower that when I smell it squirts water in my face, and I throw everything away and take out the huge red handkerchief again and wipe my face with it again and go through wringing motions with it again and this time feathers flutter out which I do not react to and then I put the huge red handkerchief away again and look around and I am all alone.
Even the puppy’s gone.
Nothing is happening.
Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody complained to the desk about the typing, and they made me stop? But no such luck.
I’ll tell you what got me started again. After I checked in here I went out and had lunch, tasteless terrible food in which the only thing even vaguely recognizable was the french fries, which kept sliding off my fingers. I also went to a newsstand and bought the Times, hoping to see titties, and in a way I did, and I’ve been evading mentioning it, probably because I feel a moral ambivalence toward the whole matter, and I’m afraid if I start to talk about it I’ll get smug and holier-than-Times, which I really wouldn’t be able to stand from a semi-pornographer like me.
All right, the Times. Are you ready? Main headline first page, second section: “For Lonely G.I. Wives, More Than Wind Is Chill.” Story: A housing area maintained somewhere in Kansas by the Army for the families of men assigned overseas. It’s like a little town, like a suburban development, and there’s nothing there but women and little kids.
Of course the Times had to in a very sober and straight-faced and we-aren’t-being-at-all-dirty-minded-about-this way talk about the “problem” of some of the wives bringing men home. It’s not much of a problem, they decided, and that was at least partly because the wives themselves exert what some Army social worker called “social control,” because any man in this housing area has got to be a stranger and cause comment and the word will get back to the Army. In other words, most of the women’s attitude is, if they aren’t going to get any, nobody’s going to get any.
The social worker also said some of the wives tended to “hit the bottle,” which I suppose in the cage they’re living in is the best way to survive.
Anyway, I read this article, which was a long one, with pictures of some of the wives, and you just know my mind was turning it into a sex novel before I was well past the headline. I was reading the piece, and while one part of my mind was busy working out plot details another part of my mind was thinking, I can go ahead and peddle a book under a pen name of my own now, I can do this book — Sex Hungry, that’s the title — and try one of the other outfits, one of the companies that Lance won’t deal with, a New York company where I can actually go to their office and deal with them direct and avoid getting myself screwed, and then I got to the part where the Times mentioned the “problem” and the social worker talked about “social control,” and all at once I was ashamed of myself. I mean, really ashamed of myself.
Because those are people. Those women are individual human beings, with husbands, with children, with lives of their own. Personalities and problems of their own. Dignity of their own. How cheap and shabby to take the bad situation they’re in now and turn it into glib lies for some retarded geek to masturbate over.
And that’s what I’ve been doing, isn’t it? Maybe not as directly as this, something taken straight out of the paper, but indirectly it’s just as bad. Every one of my books has been a shallow lie about serious pains, and I could write them because I lived my own life the same way.
Whoa, I’m going off the deep end again. I always overkill, particularly when the target is me.
The point is, I read the article and I thought of doing it as a sex novel, and it turned my stomach. But I was in this room here, and the typewriter was here, and the blank paper was here. I wanted to leave the room, but I didn’t want to do anything all alone, and I’m afraid to call Dick or Pete or anybody because surely the cops have talked to all of them by now and they probably all believe the story and think I’m sick and will turn me in for my own good, which I’d rather not have.
How many mystery novels have I read where the hero is unjustly accused of some crime, and instead of going to the police he goes out and solves the crime himself because it’s the only way he believes he can get himself off the hook. Well, here I am. I’ve been unjustly accused, and I haven’t turned myself in.
Of course, there are differences between me and the mystery novel hero. In the first place, I’m not a hero. In the second place, the mystery can’t be solved because nobody did it.