Is Lance Pangle going to risk twenty-three thousand a year because Ed Topliss has hang-ups? Would you? Would I?
Anyway, I had to stand around while Samuel read me the riot act. “There are any number of young writers coming along, Ed,” he said. “If you feel you’d rather stop doing these books, we’ll be happy to find a replacement.”
Stop doing the books? And do what instead?
I gave him all sorts of assurances, and his expression never changed. The oak door on the other side of the office remained closed, but I could sense Lance beyond it, a fat spider, and I felt like a fly in the outer reaches of the web, safe as long as I kept buzzing, dead as soon as I stopped to rest.
I was up there ten minutes, and when I came down the Buick wasn’t there. I stood around in a panic, not knowing what to do, and then I saw it turn the corner and come down toward me, Betsy behind the wheel, and even through the windshield I could see she was in one of her cold rages.
It turned out a cop had come along and told her she couldn’t stand there, so she had to circle the block, and she got into a traffic jam on Park, and her nerves were frayed to the breaking point. The only trouble was, so were mine, so the third or fourth time she said, “Did you have to stay up there that long?” I started to shout and get angry and incoherent, and then Fred started to cry in the back seat and I turned on her, and then we drove out the Long Island Expressway in silence and nobody said a word around the house for two days.
And after that I was nine days late with the October book, Passion’s Prisoner. I just couldn’t think about that book, I couldn’t plot it, I couldn’t do anything with it. I finally opened up old books of mine and copied out sex scenes word for word, but the stuff between the sex scenes I couldn’t copy and that was absolutely impossible. I was calling Samuel every day, in more and more of a panic, promising I’d get it done tonight, tonight, tonight, and when I finally did bring it in he didn’t say a word at all. He looked as cold-faced as Betsy, all he did was say, “Thanks,” when I handed him the manuscript. I stood around a few seconds, waiting for him to say something, to give me the word again, but he didn’t say a thing. That’s when I really got scared, that’s the first time I thought it might really happen, they might drop me and get somebody else to do the books. Anybody else. Granted that nobody is indispensable, I am more so, if you follow me. I’m one of the least indispensable people on earth. They don’t even have to find a writer to replace me, they can replace me with some other semi-educated fairly literate buffoon just like me.
That was November 9th, which was a Thursday, and the next day Lance called me. That was when he gave me the ultimatum: miss one more deadline and bye-bye. And said, “I’m sorry, Edwin.” In that bishop’s voice.
Maybe that’s one of my problems now, having been so late with the October book. I didn’t finish that till November 8th, and that’s less than two weeks ago. I’m not ready to do another book.
Well, I better do another book, ready or not. This jazz I’m doing here isn’t going to pay the rent or make Samuel happy or keep Lance from chopping off my head.
I started to talk about Dwayne Toppil, my attempt at a pen name. In order to give myself a feeling of substantiality, of being somebody. I went in and talked to Samuel about it, and he said, “Ed, I don’t think you’re ready.”
“Ready?” I said. “I’m doing a book a month now, I’ve done them for a year and a half, I do them in ten days. So I take another ten days, I do one of my own.”
But he shook his head. “What you’ve turned out so far,” he said, “it’s the Dirk Smuff name that sold them. They’re acceptable sex novels, there’s nothing wrong with them, but they don’t have any flair, they don’t show anything special. Spack does sixteen books a month, and we’ve got people for all sixteen slots. And we don’t deal with anybody but Spack, because most of those other guys are shoestring outfits, you can’t get your money out of them, it’s one problem after another. So we don’t have a slot for a second book a month from you, we’d have to dump somebody else. And frankly, Ed, you aren’t that good that we’d want to drop somebody to sell two books for you every month.”
I felt stupid, but I said, “Would you mind if I tried to sell a book to somebody else on my own?”
“Go right ahead,” he said.
“That’s what I’ll do, then,” I said.
But of course I didn’t. In the first place, one book a month was about all the vicarious sex I could stand. I’d think, Now’s the time to start the second book, but I wouldn’t do it. And in the second place, I was chicken to try peddling sex books on my own. I know there’s half a dozen publishers right here in New York that put these things out, but how do I go about selling to them? I’ve never submitted any writing of any kind to any publisher. All I’ve done is the sex books and the mystery stories and they all went through Lance. Or through Samuel, actually.
Besides, if somebody as sharp and bastardly as Lance doesn’t want to try to do business with those people, what sort of luck would I have with them?
Anyway, I never did it.
It’s after one o’clock in the morning, and I’ve done practically a whole chapter again, and this still isn’t a sex book or anything else. This chapter doesn’t even have a fantasy sex scene in it.
Betsy isn’t talking to me. Not that we talk even when we’re talking to each other, but now we aren’t even saying words. Which is just as well, in fact I’m better off that way. I won’t have to lie about the thirty pages I’ve done today.
We ate dinner in silence, and then I read the paper. The Times. I didn’t read it this morning because I was going to come in here and do the first chapter of the book, so after dinner I took it into the living room and started to read it while Betsy did the dishes. Then she came in and turned on Red Skelton, which she doesn’t really like but she knows I can’t stand Skelton and when she’s mad at me she keeps doing little things to needle me and make me uncomfortable. So I came in here and read the paper in here. England just devalued the pound last Sunday, so the paper was full of that, but the thing that caught my eye was a strange item on page 20 about a circus clown that was murdered. He was beaten to death in his hotel room last October, and the guy that did it was just sentenced to life in prison. It said there was a prostitute in the room with the clown and she opened the door for the killer, who beat the clown to death when he wouldn’t give him any money. The clown worked for Ring-ling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
I also did the puzzle, and read the book review, which was of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, by Harold Cruse. The review said it was a tough book. Grove Press had a half-page ad pushing four books, one called Numbers by the guy who wrote City of Night, and a first novel called Sheeper, and something called Freewheelin’ Frank about the Hell’s Angels and a book of short stories by LeRoi Jones.
If Rod had never come up to Albany I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t want to be a writer, I wouldn’t even think about it. I wouldn’t have made twenty-five thousand dollars in the last two and a half years, and I wouldn’t need nine hundred dollars to keep tottering forward one more month.
That’s the ridiculous thing, of course. You can’t want something until you know what it is. When I made two hundred a month I lived on two hundred a month. When I hadn’t ever written anything I didn’t want to ever write anything.