The point is, Hannah’s a nurse, the kind of a nurse where the starch starts at the forehead and ends at the toenails. The kind of a nurse that you can tell from looking at her she thinks enjoyment is a sin. She’s consecrated her life, you know what I mean? A shriveled-up virgin at twenty-one, probably a hell of a good nurse, one of these tight-lipped efficient bitches you’d like to dip in a vat of lye.
And Hester’s just the opposite. They’ve got the same face, being twins, and it’s amazing the different things they’ve done with it. You look at Hannah, you know she’s a virgin and always will be. You look at Hester, you know right away she puts out because she loves the cock. It’s in her eyes, in a kind of loose blow-job quality in her smile, in the kind of wave she has in her hair, pretty long hair with a long wave over the right side of the forehead that she’s always pushing back with a movement of arm and head that makes her breasts move. Hannah’s breasts have never moved.
Could I talk to Hester? I don’t know, I suppose I could, I suppose she’d be sympathetic. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking what a schmuck she’d think I was. She’d say, “What the hell’s the matter, Ed? You’re all constipated, honey. Relax. Take it easy. Have a ball.”
Have a ball? How can I have a ball? I have responsibilities, I have Betsy and Fred, I have a house full of furniture and a garage full of Buick. I have a deadline I’m supposed to make.
If I don’t get this rotten book done by the thirtieth, Lance will drop me. I know he will, I am positive of it, there is no question in my mind. He told me so, and he doesn’t make idle threats. Besides, he said, “I’m sorry, Ed.” In that mellifluous voice.
I’m on page 14. This is ridiculous, it’s twenty-five minutes after four, I’ve been sitting here all afternoon typing away and I don’t have a goddam thing done. This isn’t a sex novel, this isn’t anything. This is a piece of shit.
What’s the matter with me?
Betsy’s back. I heard her drive into the garage about an hour ago. She’s out there in the kitchen now, moving around, she hears me typing in here, she thinks I’m doing the November book. What am I going to tell her?
I’ll have to come back in tonight. I mean, no matter how you look at it, this isn’t the first chapter of a dirty book. Although there is a kind of a sex scene in it, the fantasy thing with Sabina.
No. In the first place, I’d have to retype it in order to change the names, I couldn’t use everybody’s real names, and that’d be almost as much trouble as doing another whole chapter. And in the second place, even if this was my first chapter where the hell is my second chapter? You couldn’t have an entire book of crap like this. A fantasy sex scene in each chapter. Lovely.
Besides, the sex scene with Sabina isn’t done at the kind of length we need. Two or three pages of sexual description, that’s what we have to have. All the euphemisms. D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and all those alleged literary types can say cunt, but us dirty book writers have to say “the hot pulsating core of her being.”
How would you like to write shit like that all the time?
Well, I’ve got to write some shit like that, and I’ve got to do it today. No more fooling around. I have wasted an entire afternoon, I have typed fifteen pages of gibberish, that’s an end on it. Tonight I’ll come back in and start the dirty book.
1
I can’t think of a title.
I’ve been sitting here for half an hour with this sheet of paper in the typewriter, it’s going to come out all wavy, and I’ve been saying to myself, Ed, all you need is a title. Think of a title, then see which of the four basic plots that title makes you think of, then look in the Nassau County phone book on the floor beside your desk, pick a name at random out of it, make that your lead character, and start for God’s sake to write.
But I can’t think of a title.
What I’ve decided is, I’ve got writer’s block. Some of the other guys have talked about it, I’ve heard some wild stories about writer’s block hitting this one or that one, and what everybody says is, when you’ve got writer’s block the only thing you can do to break it is write something. It doesn’t matter what. Sit down at the typewriter and type out names of cheeses, a political speech, anything that comes into your head. It sort of primes the pump, and pretty soon you can go and write the thing you’re supposed to be writing, which in my case is a filthy book.
So what shall I say? My name is Edwin George Topliss, I am twenty-five years old, I was born on August 7th, 1942, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. My mother was then Mabel Swing, part of a girl quartet called the Melogals. One of the other Melogals, Laverne LaRoche, became a big star around 1946 and sank without a trace around 1950. I don’t think it had anything to do with the blacklist or anything like that, I think she just wore out her welcome. She was a recording star, and some other recording stars came along and she got shoved off into Hits of Yesteryear. My mother used to have some of Laverne LaRoche’s records, and some sheet music with her smiling face on the front. A sort of long horsy face with very big white teeth. Mouse-colored hair that blooped on top and hung down straight at the sides and blooped again at the neck. Padded shoulders that made her look as though she was wearing a crepe coffin. “My Saturday Love,” that was one of her big hits. Remember that one, gang? Da de da, de da da, my Saturday love. I always thought it stank. Particularly when my mother sang along with the record, thereby giving me a weird version of half the Melogals, one-quarter recorded and the other quarter live.
I don’t know how it worked out, exactly, I think maybe my mother wrote to Laverne LaRoche when Laverne LaRoche was on top of the heap and never got any answer. And then Laverne LaRoche wrote my mother a letter, or called her on the phone or something, along about my senior year in Albany High, which would be around 1959, and my mother either didn’t answer the letter or if it was a phone call she told Laverne LaRoche to go fuck herself or something like that. Anyway, the Melogals don’t have reunions. But my mother kept the records, and I can still remember coming into the house unexpected every once in a while, nobody home but my mother, and she’d be singing along with one of the old 78s. “You took my heart, but you wouldn’t take me, you wanted my love, but you wanted to be free.” This is when I was in high school, and later on during summer vacations from college, and every time it would happen my mother would right away clam up and play some other record and not sing along any more.
Frankly, I don’t think that much of my mother’s voice, but she assures me it used to be better. She still thinks it’s pretty good, or she thinks it’s still pretty good. You know what I mean.
Do writers have trouble like that? At fifty thousand words a book, with twenty-eight books under my belt — in more ways than one — that’s one million four hundred thousand words I’ve written. And I still get screwed up in the sentences. And that’s the basics, you know? Being a writer, I mean a fiction writer, I mean a real honest-to-God storyteller like Rod or Pete or Dick, means having so much by way of imagination and ability to invent character and incident, all these talents and abilities that are as complicated and wonderful as the working of a pinball machine, and I’m so far down the ladder I even get the sentences screwed up.