He saw me staring at the clipping and said, “Do you think you could write a short fiction piece about a guy worrying about that?”
“Sure,” I said. And I did. I wrote a story about a young executive worrying about his stocks going down after the atom bombs fall. I didn’t make the mistake of poking fun at the guy or being moral. I wrote it straight. If you accepted the basic premise, you accepted the guy. If you didn’t accept the basic premise, it was a very funny satire.
Lancer was pleased with it. “You’re made to order for our magazine,” he said. “The whole idea is to have it both ways. The dummies like it and the smart guys like it. Perfect.” He paused for a moment. “You’re a lot different from your brother, Artie.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “So are you.”
Lancer grinned at me. “We were best friends in college. He’s the most honest guy I ever met. You know when he asked me to interview you, I was surprised. It was the first time I ever knew him to ask a favor.”
“He does that only for me,” I said.
“Straightest guy I ever knew in my life,” Lancer said.
“It will be the death of him,” I said. And we laughed.
Lancer and I knew we were both survivors. Which meant we were not straight, that we were hustlers to some degree. Our excuse was that we had books to write. And so we had to survive. Everybody had his own particular and valid excuse.
– -
Much to my surprise (but not to Lancer’s) I turned out to be a hell of a magazine writer. I could write the pulp adventure and war stories. I could write the soft-porn love stories for the top-of-the-line magazine. I could write a flashy, snotty film review and a sober, snotty book review. Or turn the other way and write an enthusiastic review that would make people want to go out and see or read for themselves what was so good. I never signed my real name to any of this stuff. But I wasn’t ashamed of it. I knew it was schlock, but still I loved it. I loved it because all my life I had never had a skill to be proud of. I had been a lousy soldier, a losing gambler. I had no hobby, no mechanical skills. I couldn’t fix a car, I couldn’t grow a plant. I was a lousy typist, and not a really first-rate bribe taker government clerk. Sure, I was an artist, but that’s nothing to brag about. That’s just a religion or a hobby. But now I really had a skill, I was an expert schlock writer, and loved it. Especially since for the first time in my life I was making a good living. Legitimately.
The money from the stories averaged four hundred dollars a month and with my regular Army Reserve job brought me to about two hundred bucks a week. And as if work sparked more energy, I found myself starting my second novel Eddie Lancer was on a new book too, and we spent most of our working time together talking about our novels rather than articles for the magazine.
We finally became such good friends that after six months of free-lance work he offered me a magazine editor slot. But I didn’t want to give up the two to three grand a month in graft that I was still making on my Army Reserve job. The bribe-taking scam had been going on for nearly two years without any kind of hitch. I now had the same attitude as Frank. I didn’t think anything would ever happen. Also, the truth was that I liked the excitement and the intrigue of being a thief.
My life settled down into a happy groove. My writing was going well, and every Sunday I took Vallie and the kids for rides out in Long Island, where family houses were springing up like weeds, and inspected models. We had already picked out our house. Four bedrooms, two baths and only a ten percent down payment on the twenty-six-thousand-dollar price with a twelve-month wait. In fact, now was the time to ask Eddie Lancer for a small favor.
“I’ve always loved Las Vegas,” I told Eddie. “I'd like to do a piece on it.”
“Sure, anytime,” he said. “Just make sure you get something in it on hookers.” And he arranged for the expenses. Then we talked about the color illustration for the story. We always did this together because it was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of laughs. As usual Eddie finally came up with the effective idea. A gorgeous girl in scanty costume in a wild pelvic dance. And out of her navel rolled red dice showing the lucky eleven. The cover line would read “Get Lucky with Las Vegas Girls.”
One assignment had to come first. It was a plum. I was going to interview the most famous writer in America, Osano.
Eddie Lancer gave me the assignment for his flagship magazine, Everyday Life, the class magazine of the chain. After that one I could do the Las Vegas piece and trip.
Eddie Lancer thought Osano was the greatest writer in America but was too awed to do the interview himself. I was the only one on the staff not impressed. I didn’t think Osano was all that good. Also, I distrusted any writer who was an extrovert. And Osano had appeared on TV a hundred times, been the judge at the Cannes Film Festival, got arrested for leading protest marchers no matter what they were protesting against. And gave blurbs for every new novel written by one of his friends.
Also, he had come up the easy way. His first novel, published when he was twenty-five, made him world-famous. He had wealthy parents, a law degree from Yale. He had never known what it was to struggle for his art. Most of all, I had sent him my first published novel, hoping for a blurb, and he never acknowledged receiving it.
When I went to interview Osano, his stock as a writer was just slipping with editors. He could still command a hefty advance for a book, he still had critics buffaloed. But most of his books were nonfiction. He had not been able to finish a fiction book in the last ten years.
He was working on his masterpiece, a long novel that would be the greatest thing since War and Peace. All the critics agreed about that. So did Osano. One publishing house advanced him over a hundred grand and was still whistling for its money and the book ten years later. Meanwhile, he wrote nonfiction books on hot subjects that some critics claimed were better than most novels. He turned them out in a couple of months and picked up a fat check. But each one sold less. He had worn his public out. So finally he accepted an offer to be editor in chief of the most influential Sunday book review section in the country.
The editor before Osano had been in the job twenty years. A guy with great credentials. All kinds of degrees, the best colleges, an intellectual, wealthy family. Class. And a left-handed swinger all his life. Which was OK except that as he aged, he got more outrageous. One sunny, horny afternoon he was caught going down on the office boy behind a ceiling-high stack of books that he had built as a screen in his office. If the office boy had been a famous English author, maybe nothing would have happened. And if the books he used to build that wall had been reviewed, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But the books used to build that wall never got out to his staff of readers or to the free-lance reviewers. So he was retired as editor emeritus.
With Osano, the management knew it was home free. Osano was right-handed all the way. He loved women, all sizes and shapes, any age. The smell of cunt turned him on like a junkie. He fucked broads as devotedly as a heroin addict taking a fix. If Osano didn’t get his piece of ass that day or at least a blow job, he’d get frantic. But he wasn’t an exhibitionist. He’d always lock his office door. Sometimes a bookish teenybopper. Other times a society broad who thought he was the greatest living American writer. Or a starving female novelist who needed some books to review to keep body and soul and ego together. He was shameless in using his leverage as editor, his fame as a world-renowned novelist and what proved to be the busiest bee in his bonnet, a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. He said it was the Nobel Prize that got the really intellectual ladies. And for the last three years he had mounted a furious campaign for the Nobel with the help of all his literary friends, he could show these ladies articles in classy quarterlies touting him for the prize.