“What business are you in?”
“Publishing.”
“What type?”
“Books,” he said warily. “What makes you ask?”
“No reason.”
“Because I haven’t got anything for a person without experience.”
“Oh, I’ve got experience,” I said. “I’ve got more experience than you would believe, even if it won’t do me any good. I’ve done more things in the past nine or ten months—”
“I can imagine. When I was your age—” He shook his head. “What did I give you, a buck? Why don’t you hang on to it and I’ll buy you that hamburger you were drooling over and we’ll talk.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we can do each other some good.”
So Mr. Burger worked up a contract for my book and gave me money for living expenses and bought me a typewriter and got me a beautiful blond secretary.
Not really.
What he did, really, was listen to me, talk about where I’d been and what I’d done, and nod every now and then, and smoke a lot of cigarettes, and wonder why I wouldn’t smoke one but kept saving them for later. And he told me, when I was all done, that I had a hell of a story to tell and that it was the kind of story he’d like to bring to the attention of the reading public.
“You be sure you put all the sex in,” he said. “What you have to do is hook the reader’s attention and rivet his eyes to the page right from the start, and then you make him laugh and cry by tugging at his heartstrings, but if you want to sell books, you’d better make sure you write something that’ll give the son of a bitch a hard-on.”
And he said he would take a chance on me.
“I’m a gambling man,” he said. “I’m willing to take a risk. Now I’ll tell you what I’ll do. It won’t take you long to write this all up, but you’ll need something to live on in the meantime. You got a typewriter?” I didn’t. “Well, you got to have a typewriter and money to live on. I figure you ought to be able to get a decent typewriter for twenty dollars. And living expenses — suppose I give you fifty bucks total, and you’ll see how it goes.”
I finally found a typewriter for thirty-five dollars. Not a very good typewriter, but since I can’t type with more than two fingers, I suppose a good typewriter would be wasted on me. That left me with fifteen dollars, plus the dollar for changing the flat tire, plus the few dollars I had set aside.
Now Mr. Burger is supposed to read this, if he remembers who I am. And if he likes it he can publish it, and then I’ll get some money, I guess. I don’t know exactly how it works but I must get something. I’ve been killing myself writing all this, though I suppose it doesn’t show when you read it. I don’t suppose it’s very good, either. And I probably put in either too much sex or not enough, and I don’t even know which. And I’m sure I told you too many things you didn’t want to know and skipped things you would have wanted to hear more about, but I never did this before.
And that’s the whole point, actually, now that I think about it. The first time is the hardest. There are probably other morals, too, but as sure as I like epilogues, I hate it when the author steps in at the end of the book and tells you what it was all about. Either you find it out for yourself or it’s not worth knowing about. So I’ll just say goodbye and thanks for reading this, and I’m sorry it wasn’t better than it was.