He drank a little too much sometimes and worried about lung cancer because he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. He cheated moderately on his income tax. He coveted one of his neighbors’ wives. He read all the current paperback bestsellers, dissected them in his mind, and then reassembled them into similar plots for his own novels. When new acquaintances asked him what he did for a living he said, “I’m a writer,” and seldom failed to feel a small glow of pride.
That was the way it was for fifteen years, right up until the morning of his fortieth birthday.
Hackman woke up on that morning, looked at Grace lying beside him, and realized she had put on at least forty pounds during their marriage. He listened to himself wheeze as he lighted his first cigarette of the day. He got dressed and walked downstairs to his office, where he read the half page of manuscript still in his typewriter (an occult pirate novel, the latest craze). He went outside and stood on the lawn and looked at his house. Then he sat down on the porch steps and looked at himself.
I’m not just a writer of hack stories, he thought sadly, I’m a liver of a hack life.
Fifteen years of cohabiting with trite fictional characters in hackneyed fictional situations. Fifteen years of cohabiting with an unimaginative wife in a trite suburb in a hackneyed lifestyle in a conventional world. Hackman the hack, doing the same things over and over again; Hackman the hack, grinding out books and days one by one. No uniqueness in any of it, from the typewriter to the bedroom to the Adirondacks.
No originality.
He sat there for a long while, thinking about this. No originality. Funny. It was like waking up to the fact that, after forty years, you’ve never tasted pineapple, that pineapple was missing from your life. All of a sudden you craved pineapple; you wanted it more than you’d ever wanted anything before. Pineapple or originality — it was the same principle.
Grace came out eventually and asked him what he was doing. “Thinking that I crave originality,” he said, and she said, “Will you settle for eggs and bacon?” Trite dialogue, Hackman thought. Hackneyed humor. He told her he didn’t want any breakfast and went into his office.
Originality. Well, even a hack ought to be able to create something fresh and imaginative if he applied himself; even a hack learned a few tricks in fifteen years. How about a short story? Good. He had never written a short story; he would be working in new territory already. Now how about a plot?
He sat at his typewriter. He paced the office. He lay down on the couch. He sat at the typewriter again. Finally the germ of an idea came to him and he nurtured it until it began to develop. Then he began to type.
It took him all day to write the story, which was about five thousand words long. That was his average wordage per day on a novel, but on a novel he never revised so much as a comma. After supper he went back into the office and made pen-and-ink corrections until eleven o’clock. Then he went to bed, declined Grace’s reluctant offer of “a birthday present,” and dreamed about the story until 6:00 A.M. At which time he got up, retyped the pages, made some more revisions in ink, and retyped the story a third time before he was satisfied. He mailed it that night to his agent.
Three days later the agent called about a new book contract. Hackman asked him, “Did you have a chance to read the short story I sent you?”
“I read it, all right. And sent it straight back to you.”
“Sent it back? What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s old hat,” the agent said. “The idea’s been done to death.”
Hackman went out into the back yard and lay down in the hammock. All right, so maybe he was doomed to hackdom as a writer; maybe he just wasn’t capable of writing anything original. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do something original, did it? He had a quick mind, a good grasp of what was going on in the world. He ought to be able to come up with at least one original idea, maybe even an idea that would not only satisfy his craving for originality but change his life, get him out of the stale rut he was in.
He closed his eyes.
He concentrated.
He thought about jogging backward from Long Island to Miami Beach and then applying for an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Imitative. He thought about marching naked through Times Square at high noon, waving a standard paperback contract and using a bullhorn to protest man’s literary inhumanity to man.
Trite.
He thought about adopting a red-white-and-blue disguise and robbing a bank in each one of the original thirteen states.
Derivative.
He thought about changing his name to Holmes, finding a partner named Watson, and opening a private inquiry agency that specialized in solving the unsolved and insoluble.
Parrotry.
He thought about doing other things legal and illegal, clever and foolish, dangerous and harmless.
Unoriginal. Unoriginal. Unoriginal.
That day passed and several more just like it. Hackman became obsessed with originality — so much so that he found himself unable to write, the first serious block he had had as a professional. It was maddening, but every time he thought of a sentence and started to type it out, something would click in his mind and make him analyze it as original or banal. The verdict was always banal.
He thought about buying a small printing press, manufacturing bogus German Deutsche marks in his basement, and then flying to Munich and passing them at the Oktoberfest.
Counterfeit.
Hackman took to drinking a good deal more than his usual allotment of alcohol in the evenings. His consumption of cigarettes rose to four packs a day and climbing. His originality quotient remained at zero.
He thought about having a treasure map tattooed on his chest, claiming to be the sole survivor of a gang of armored car thieves, and conning all sorts of greedy people out of their life savings.
Trite.
The passing days turned into passing weeks. Hackman still wasn’t able to write; he wasn’t able to do much of anything except vainly overwork his brain cells. He knew he couldn’t function again as a writer or a human being until he did something, anything original.
He thought about building a distillery in his garage and becoming Long Island’s largest manufacturer and distributor of bootleg whiskey.
Hackneyed.
Grace had begun a daily and voluble series of complaints. Why was he moping around, drinking and smoking so much? Why didn’t he go into his office and write his latest piece of trash? What were they going to do for money if he didn’t fulfill his contracts? How would they pay the mortgage and the rest of their bills? What was the matter with him, anyway? Was he going through some kind of midlife crisis or what?
Hackman thought about strangling her, burying her body under the acacia tree in the back yard — committing the perfect crime. Stale. Bewhiskered.
Another week disappeared. Hackman was six weeks overdue now on an occult pirate novel and two weeks overdue on a male-action novel; his publishers were upset, his agent was upset; where the hell were the manuscripts? Hackman said he was just polishing up the first one. “Sure you are,” the agent said over the phone. “Well, you’d better have it with you when you come in on Friday. I mean that, Charlie. You’d better deliver.”
Hackman thought about kidnapping the star of Broadway’s top musical extravaganza and holding her for a ransom of $1,000,000 plus a role in her next production.