Well, that isn’t true either, apparently at one time or another someone has rung little Angie’s register, but I’m hardly in the position to go grill a lot of high school students and find out which one it was. And even if I did, there’s still another difference between this and a murder mystery, in that Angie hasn’t been murdered, she’s only been laid, and whereas you can only be murdered once you can be laid millions of times, so coming forward with some blushing linebacker isn’t going to help me much.
So I can’t go solve anything, because there’s nothing to solve. If I run — if I continue to run, I mean — it is running for running’s sake, nothing more.
Digression. I was talking about the article in the Times. How I read it and disgusted myself. How I sat around here with nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing to occupy my mind.
So I put paper in the typewriter. I didn’t type anything, but I did put paper in the typewriter.
After a while I did go out, leaving the paper in the typewriter, and bought myself three paperback books, and came back here with them, and tried to read. I tried all three, and none of them helped at all. I would look at the page with all the words on it, and I would think about tomorrow. What am I going to do tomorrow? How will I support myself in the tomorrows to come? Will I try to get Betsy back? Will I go to the police? Will I try to write a sex novel? Will I try to write anything? Will I write Sex Hungry?
Finally I went and took a shower, which involved walking down a very long hall wearing shoes and overcoat and carrying soap and towel. I was propositioned while drying myself afterward, and if you promise not to tell anyone I will whisper to you that I was tempted.
Not by the overwhelming sexual magnetism of the poor faggot who approached me, believe me. He was about thirty, and very short, and soft-looking in a decayed-dumpling sort of way. His approach was so sad-eyed and forlorn and defeatist and fatalistic that for the first time in days I felt like a winner myself, a doer and a decider, a giant among men.
Well, I might not be a giant among men, but I was a giant among that guy. He mumbled something pitiful about the weather, asked me if I had television in my room, and offered to let me come and watch his. Television. “While you’re drying.” In other words, no need to go back to my own room and dress first.
I hesitated, I didn’t give him an immediate get-lost-cocksucker, and though the reason for the hesitation may have had something to do with personal loneliness, or incipient loneliness, or the prospect of loneliness, I think mainly my reason was something else, and I think it had to do with belonging to something.
I understand that the theory of herd instinct in human beings, having been in for a while, is now out, and I suggest it be brought back in again at once, because something inside my breast wants me to be able to define myself by something other than my name. By occupation, perhaps. By something which states my group affiliation.
I’ve always had a group affiliation. First student. Then for a while I was one of the guys that worked at the beer distributing company. For the last two and a half years I’ve been a writer. Well, maybe not a writer, but at least a sex book writer. “I write paperback sex novels,” I would say, and however cheap and embarrassed it made me feel to say that, at the same time there was a good feeling in it, a knowledge of belonging. A feeling of identity.
Speaking of identity, I have sometimes thought my first name is actually an ironic question, and that it should be written thus: Ed, win? And my last name is the answer.
Is Topliss any sort of name? How could I have been expected to do anything with my life, bearing a name like that?
It was bad enough in grammar school and high school, where all the jokes based on my name had to do with stupidity and having no head and things like that, but in the last few years, since the topless waitress craze — think how insecure so many Americans must be, that they want their food brought by women with bare breasts — the jokes on my name have become very obscene and even less funny than the old ones.
I’ve thought about changing my name, I’ve thought about it a lot, and if my father hadn’t died when I was two years old maybe I would have changed it by now, but as things are it would seem too disrespectful somehow, too much of a slap in the face of my father. I understand that’s ridiculous, honest, I do realize that, but it’s the way I feel.
Sometimes I wish my stepfather had adopted me before abandoning my mother. Edwin Harsch is a pretty good name. With a name like Edwin Harsch I might be owning the waterfront by now. But he didn’t, and of course after he ran out on my mother she wasn’t at all happy with the name or the fact that she had two daughters wearing it, and even now I think I’d get some static from her if I suggested switching to that name. She herself is using her maiden name these days, Mabel Swing.
What if I called myself Edwin Swing? No, I don’t think so. The only images I get out of that name are being hanged and turning fag, neither of which I find very appealing, despite having been tempted by the dumpling in the shower this afternoon.
When I was in high school I thought for a while of just using my first and middle names, and calling myself Edwin George. Maybe I should have. Edwin George. That isn’t a bad name. It would save me a lot of mammarian humor, let me tell you.
I suppose I’ll have to change my name now, what with the cops looking for me and all. I registered here as Dirk Smuff, my sex book pen name, but Dirk Smuff isn’t a name I can see myself carrying around for very long. Besides, it does belong to Rod.
What, then? A brand new name? Something totally different, something to help me switch to a better personality, a winner personality, get rid of this loser mentality.
Brock Stewart.
Oh, shit, that doesn’t sound right. That’s as phony-sounding as Dirk Smuff.
Or Ed Topliss, really.
Maybe Ed Stewart. Edwin Stewart, that’s bland without being weak. Ed Stewart is a GI sort of name, a nice-guy sort of name, a friendly reliable sort of name, a name for a guy who’s a winner in a quiet and non-pushy kind of way. No loser mentality for Ed Stewart.
Maybe it ought to be Edgar. Edgar Stewart. A little stronger, that.
Yeah, but it’s for me. Maybe it ought to be Edsel.
Wait a second. If I’m going to travel, I can’t use a phony name. I’m going to have to use my Diners’ Club card, and that has my name on it, right there in raised blue plastic letters, with my illegible signature scrawled above, and that means I’m going to have to travel under my own name.
How much effort are the cops going to put into looking for me? Statutory rape isn’t going to make that much noise in the world. They’ll contact my friends and relatives, they’ll probably put something in the paper — I didn’t see Newsday but there wasn’t anything in today’s Times — and they’ll check my house from time to time, but that should be about all. Oh, they’ll put out a wanted circular on me, I suppose, so if I’m picked up by the police somewhere else for some other reason they’ll know not to let me go, but I really doubt they’ll be blanketing the airports and railway stations and running house-by-house searches of the world. With any luck I should be able to travel for a few days at least on my card, and what with the speed of transportation these days in a few days I can be anywhere in the world. I can go to Ulan Bator, or Mérida, or Brazzaville. I can go anywhere.
No, I can’t. I don’t have a passport.
Well, I can go anywhere in this country and Canada, and that’s territory enough for anybody to disappear in, surely. Particularly with a Diners’ Club card to keep them alive until they get settled somewhere.