Cowardly of me, I know, but I couldn’t face telling you all this. Nor could I help doing it. Thanks for some mostly good years.
With some (but not enough) love,
Fran
P.S. — I closed our checking account.
I went around the corner to the bank, and she was right. The checking account was gone. I sat down with a vice-president and we figured out how many checks were outstanding and cashed my final Whitestone check and put in enough money so none of the checks would bounce. I wound up with a couple of hundred dollars. There were still all those bills upstairs, and I still owed you $850, Lisa, the very $850 which I am not sending with this letter. The bank officer asked me if I wanted to open a new account; I decided to keep the money in cash. Not that I would be keeping it very long.
Then I came back here and finished the drink, and then I read Fran’s letter a few more times.
Friday, June 12th. It should have been the thirteenth. I had just lost my job and my wife and most of my money. I had retained my ex-wife and the privilege of defusing my virility-anxiety by paying her four times as much each month as I would receive in unemployment compensation. The only person I really felt like talking to about all of this was on his way to Monterrey with Fran. (And why, I wonder, did the silly cunt insist on furnishing me with their itinerary? Could I look forward to a parade of postcards? Having wonderful time. X marks our room. Wish you were here.)
I called Jennifer, who lives on East Seventh Street and weaves rugs and tapestries. We have an undemanding sort of relationship, Jennie and I. I drop over there once or twice a week and we smoke a little grass and listen to a little music and fuck a little. I told her I was at loose ends, which was as true a statement as any I have ever uttered, and that I thought I might go over and see her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m kind of uptight. I just got my period yesterday and I had this hassle with the super and I’m in a shitty mood. If you just wanted to talk a little and watch me weave—”
Jennifer is twenty-two, with a supple body and pale skin and long mahogany hair and trusting acidhead eyes. All of this makes her a yummy fuck but a verbal nothing. Going over to her place just for conversation is like going to a Chinese restaurant just for dessert. This is all right on grass — ten-minute silences aren’t bothersome then — but I felt not at all like getting high. I wanted to close the doors of perception, not open them.
And what’s deadlier than watching someone weave?
“Maybe some other time would be better,” I said.
“Actually, we could ball. Not balling during your period is just a hangup, you know. You probably wouldn’t want to go down on me, but—”
“It’s not that,” I said, truthlessly. “I’m uptight myself. I think the vibrations would be bad.”
Jennie is one of those young female persons who will accept any explanation that has the word vibrations in it. She agreed that we would make it another time, and I picked up the phone again and tried to think of somebody to call. Or someplace to go. Or something to do. And managed to think of none of these things.
I came very close to calling you, Lisa, as a matter of fact. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn’t want to hear your voice. I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds. I had some things to tell you, but I didn’t want you talking back to me while I tried to get it all out.
So I decided to write a poem, and set the typewriter upon the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into it, and spent a long time looking at it. Which made it as close as I had come to writing a poem in about a year and a half.
And then I thought, well, I can’t send Lisa a check, and I’d better tell her as much before her father sends his bloodhounds after me. Does the old bastard still raise bloodhounds? I’m sure he does.
So I started to write you a letter, and I seem to have gotten carried away. Ridiculous, isn’t it? All of this just to tell you that there’s no check in the envelope, when you found that out before you read a word.
Christ, Lisa, I’ve written twenty goddamn pages of this. I can’t believe it. This stupid letter is the first thing I’ve written in a year and a half. It is already longer than either of the two attempts I made at writing novels, and probably more cogent than either in the bargain.
All those months at Ronald Rabbit’s, with a desk and a chair and a typewriter and nothing but solitude, and I never wrote a fucking word. And here I am beating this typewriter to a pulp, the words just rolling straight from my brain through my fingers and onto the page. Pages. Page after page after page.
Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. We did have some good times, damnit. We truly did. And I think it’s nice we haven’t let the fact that we sort of hate each other keep us from loving each other a little.
Ah, Lisa. Here’s your letter, and I’m sorry there’s no check to go with it, but there isn’t, and God knows when there will be. You don’t have to answer this letter. You don’t even have to keep it. I have a carbon. I just never did get out of the habit of keeping carbons of things, and when I first put the sheet of paper in the typewriter I hoped it would turn out to be a poem. But maybe this is better. The world has enough poems, and maybe it needs more prose.
Anyway, I’ve solved a problem. When I started this I didn’t know what to do, and now I do. I’m going to tuck this into an envelope and go downstairs and mail it, and then I’m going over to the Kettle to get drunk.
You may be hearing more from me, Lisa.
With love (but without $850),
2
74 Bleecker St.
New York 10012
June 15
Mr. Stephen Joel Adel
c/o American Express
Monterrey, Mexico
Dear Steve:
Let me tell you in front, old pal, that I think you’re a total rat bastard and an unprincipled son of a bitch who ought to be tied up and horsewhipped.
Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, I thought I’d write and tell you and Fran how I’ve spent the past couple of days. As she may have told you, Fran was considerate enough to leave a note, and it seems only civil of me to respond to it. I originally thought of writing to Fran instead of to you, since it was Fran and not you who left the note for me. But I rolled this sheet of paper into the typewriter and stared at it and, instead of typing “Dear Fran,” I typed what you see above. This sort of thing has been happening lately. I started to write a poem Friday afternoon, and what came out was a letter to Lisa. You remember Lisa.
Why didn’t you ever take Lisa to Mexico, you son of a bitch? Christ, I would have paid your plane fare.
Anyway, the point is that I’ve decided not to fight my typewriter. Whatever it wants to do is fine by me. I spent a year and a half deep in writer’s block, and now that I think about it I can’t avoid the suspicion that it happened because I would sit down at the typewriter with certain preconceptions that kept getting in the way. I would decide to write a certain poem, and that poem just wouldn’t happen on the page, and as a result I didn’t write anything for a long time, until I decided to shortcut the whole operation by not sitting down at the fucking typewriter in the first place.