“Come on,” Eddie said. “You can’t always be an uxurious hermit. Make a night out of it. There’ll be some great booze, good talk and some nice-looking broads. And you might make some valuable contacts. It’s harder for a critic to knock the shit out of you if he knows you personally. And your stuff may read better to some publisher if he’s met you at a party and he thinks you’re a nice guy.” Eddie knew that I had no publisher for my new book. The publisher of my first book never wanted to see me again because it had sold only two thousand copies and never got a paperback.
So I went to the party and met Osano. He never let on that he remembered that interview, and neither did I. But a week later I got a letter from him asking me if I would come in to see him and have lunch about a job he had to offer me.
Chapter 23
I took the job with Osano for many different reasons. The job was interesting and prestigious. Since Osano had been appointed the editor of the most influential literary supplement in the country a few years ago, he had trouble with people working for him and so I would be his assistant. The money was good, and the work wouldn’t interfere with my novel. And then I was too happy at home; I was becoming too much of a bourgeois hermit. I was happy, but my life was dull. I craved some excitement, some danger. I had vague fleeting memories of my running away to Vegas and how I had actually relished the loneliness and despair I felt then. Is that so crazy, to remember unhappiness with such delight and to despise happiness you hold in your hand?
But most of all, I took the job because of Osano himself. He was, of course, the most famous writer in America. Praised for his string of successful novels, notorious for his scrapes with the law and his revolutionary attitude toward society. Infamous for his scandalous sexual misbehavior. He fought against everybody and everything. And yet at the party where Eddie Lancer had taken me to meet him he charmed and fascinated everyone. And the people at the party were the cream of the literary world and no slouches at being charming and difficult in their own right.
And I have to admit Osano charmed me. At the party he got into a furious argument with one of the most powerful literary critics in America, who was also a close friend and supporter of his work. But the critic had dared voice the opinion that nonfiction writers were creating art and that some critics were artists. Osano swarmed all over him. “You bloodsucking cocksucker,” he shouted, drink balanced in one hand, his other hand poised as if ready to throw a punch. “You have the fucking nerve to make a living off real writers and then say you’re the artist? You don’t even know what art is. An artist creates out of nothing but himself, do you understand that, you fucking asshole? He’s like a fucking spider, the cobwebs are packed away in his body. And you pricks just come along and blow them away with your fucking housewife brooms after he spins them out. You’re good with a broom, you fucking jerkoff, that’s all you are.” His friend was stunned because he had just praised Osano’s nonfiction books and said they were art.
And Osano walked away to a group of women who were waiting to lionize him. There were a couple of feminists in the group, and he wasn’t with them two minutes before his group again became the center of attention. One of the women was shouting at him furiously as he listened to her with amused contempt, his sneaky green eyes glowing like a cat’s. Then he was off.
“You women want equality and you don’t even understand power plays,” he said. “Your hole card is your cunt, and you show it to your opponents face up. You give it away. And without your cunts you have no power at all. Men can live without affection but not without sex. Women have to have affection and can do without sex.” At this last statement the women swarmed over him with furious protests.
But he stood them off. “Women are complaining about marriage when they are getting the best bargain they will ever get in their lives. Marriage is like those bonds you buy. There is inflation and there is devaluation. The value keeps going down and down for men. You know why? Women become less and less valuable as they grow older. And then we’re stuck with them like an old car. Women don’t age as well as men. Can you imagine a fifty-year-old broad being able to con a twenty-year-old kid into bed? And very few women have the economic power to buy youth as men do.”
One woman shouted, “I have a twenty-year-old lover.” She was a good-looking woman of about forty.
Osano grinned at her wickedly. “I congratulate you,” he said. “But what about when you’re fifty? With the young girls giving it away so easily you’ll have to catch them coming out of grammar school and promise them a ten-speed bike. And do you think your young lovers fall in love with you as young women do with men? You haven’t got that old Freudian father image working for you as we do. And I must repeat, a man at forty looks more attractive than he does at twenty. At fifty he can still be very attractive. It’s biological.”
“Bullshit,” the attractive forty-year-old woman said. “Young girls make fools out of you old guys and you believe their bullshit. You’re not any more attractive, you just have more power. And you have all the laws on your side. When we change that, we’ll change everything.”
“Sure,” Osano said. “You’ll get laws passed so that men will have to get operations to make themselves look uglier when they get older. In the name of fair play and equal rights. You may even get our balls cut off legally. That doesn’t change the truth now.” He paused and said, “You know the worst line of poetry? Browning. ‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be…‘“
I just hung around and listened. What Osano was saying struck me as mostly bullshit. For one thing we had different ideas about writing. I hated literary talk, though I read all the critics and bought all the critical reviews.
What the hell was being an artist? It was not sensitivity. It was not intelligence. It was not anguish. Not ecstasy. That was all bullshit.
The truth was that you were like a safe cracker fiddling with the dial and listening to the tumblers click into place. And after a couple of years the door might swing open and you could start typing. And the hell of it was that what was in the safe was most times not all that valuable.
It was just fucking hard work and a pain in the ass in the bargain. You couldn’t sleep at night. You lost all your confidence with people and the outside world. You became a coward, a malingerer in everyday living. You ducked the responsibilities of your emotional life, but after all, it was the only thing you could do. And maybe that was why I was even proud of all the junk I wrote for pulp magazines and book reviews. It was a skill I had, finally a craft. I wasn’t just a lousy fucking artist.
Osano never understood that. He had always striven to be an artist and turned out some art and near art. Just as years later he never understood the Hollywood thing, that the movie business was young, like a baby not yet toilet-trained, so you couldn’t blame it for shitting all over everybody.
One of the women said, “Osano, you have such a great track record with women. What’s the secret of your success?”
Everybody laughed, including Osano. I admired him even more, a guy with five ex-wives who could afford to laugh.
Osano said, “I tell them it has to be a hundred percent my way and no percent their way before they move in with me. They understand their position and they accept. I always tell them that when they are no longer satisfied with the arrangement to just move out. No arguments, no explanations, no negotiations, just leave. And I can’t understand it. They say yes when they move in, and then they break the rules. They try to get it ten percent their way. And when they don’t get it, they start a fight.”