Adios, Scheherazade

1

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

I’m supposed to write a dirty book now. It is one-thirty in the afternoon, Fred is asleep, Betsy is at the A&P, it is the 21st day of November, the year of my God! 1967, and I have ten days in which to write Opus Number 29. In E flat. Scherzo, please.

What the heck am I doing? I put the paper in the typewriter, I typed the number 1 midway down the left margin, I quadruple-spaced, I indented five, and then I was supposed to write the first sentence of this month’s dirty book. So what do I think I’m doing? I’m sitting here typing nonsense, I’m supposed to be typing sex.

I can’t think about it, that’s the problem. I sit here and I look at the paper, the typewriter keys, the desk, the Bic ballpoint pen, the yellow Ticonderoga pencil, the round red eraser with the bushy green tail, and I wind up thinking things like how many words are in Ticonderoga. Ago. Tide. Recoating.

What kind of crap is that? It’s sex time, lust time, time to get the old cottage industry in high gear. I have till three p.m., November 30th, this year, to get this book written and delivered to Lance or it’s all over, I am up the flue, down the chute, in the dustbin and out on my ear. Lance does not tell jokes, and he does not make empty threats. “I’m sorry, Edwin,” he said, and he sounded sorry.

That was on the phone. I never see Lance except on the phone, if you know what I mean. Maybe he knows he’s more effective that way, with nothing but the calm sincere persuasive voice, the voice that belongs with the name Lance. Lance Pangle. You’d think he’d have changed the last name too. Rod says he had to keep it for tax reasons or business reasons or something like that, but I say no. I say the bastard’s too egotistical to become a pen name for himself. Maurice Pangle was horrible, and because (grudgingly I admit) the rat does have brains he knew it was horrible, he knew it would be a disadvantage in business dealings. And I can see why he didn’t keep the first name; Maurice itself is horrible, and the only name on earth it goes with is Evans, and that’s taken. So he changed his first name. Lance Pangle. The front half of a cowboy hero and the back half of his horse.

The voice invokes the front half. It is a gentlemanly trombone, the softest baritone in the world. The moods it implies are gentle, quiet, civilized. He can call out the firing squad and then say, “I’m sorry, Edwin,” and really and truly sound sorry.

“I’ll get it in on time, Lance,” I promised, and I wanted to sound determined and responsible, but I have the bad feeling I sounded like somebody already on the chute.

I’m a square peg in a round hole, that’s what it is, forgive the sexual reference. I’m no more a writer than I am an astronaut. I’m no more a writer than I am a—. (Fill in the blank with your three favorite occupations.)

Rod warned me. “Nobody can do this shit forever,” he said. “You gotta remember it’s only temporary.”

How could I pay any attention? In the first place he was saying “shit,” in my mother’s living room, with my mother sitting right there. In the second place he’d come up from New York with Sabina Del Lex, and they were staying together in the same motel room out at the Howard Johnson by the Thruway exit, and all I could do was try not to look at Sabina’s thighs. And in the third place I didn’t intend to do this shit forever.

A year and a half, that’s what I said. Rod came up to Albany in January of 1965, late in January. I got his letter the first week in January, and I wrote back and said hell yes I’m interested, and he drove up in that red MG with Sabina sometime toward the end of the month.

It was the money he kept talking about, and it was the money I was most interested in. I was a college graduate (class of ’64 gang!), and I was married, and I was living at home with my mother and working for Capital City Beer Distributors. And Betsy was seven months pregnant, which is another reason I was refusing to look at Sabina’s thighs.

I’ve had a letch for Sabina Del Lex ever since Rod first brought her up to Albany and introduced her to me. Me to her. No, since before that. When I’d seen her on TV on that General Electric clock-radio commercial, she was so obviously hot to grab that clock-radio and shove it in that I quick ran off and humped Betsy. And now here she was in my house — my mother’s house — and Betsy was just a few days from the beginning of the six weeks of nothing, and was as big as a hippopotamus anyway, and I was damned if I was going to look at Sabina’s thighs.

Where was I? Money. Rod said they paid twelve hundred dollars for one of these books. “It used to be a thousand, but Lance Jewed them up.”

Betsy said, “That isn’t a phrase, is it? Isn’t it Jewed them down?”

So I looked at Sabina’s thighs. Milky white, shadowed above. Eyes too. Gray, milky whites, shadowed above. I wondered if Rod neglected her. I hoped so. I began to fantasize: One o’clock in the morning. A phone call. Sabina. “Rod just passed out in the car, you know how he drinks, I can t do anything with him. I wouldn’t bother you, Ed, but I don’t know anyone else in Albany.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll be right over.”

Betsy: “What’s the matter, Ed?” Half asleep, sitting up in bed, blinking at me.

Me: “Rod’s passed out drunk. I won’t be long.”

Over to the motel. Sabina worried, wringing her hands. Rod lying in his vomit. I carry him into the room, undress him, put him to bed. Sabina: “Ed, I really appreciate this.”

Me: “Not at all.”

Some conversation ensues, too boring to fantasize, and we next come into focus with the two of us sitting on her bed — twin beds, right? — drinking scotch out of water glasses. She is telling me how unhappy she is. She starts to cry. I put my arm around her. She cries against my shoulder. I put my hand on her thigh, it’s so cool, so smooth, so gentle, so civilized, so absolutely insane-making. I slide my hand up to white panties. She sighs against my throat. We lie back on the bed. I’ve got a hard-on a pole vaulter would envy. We get our clothing off, she’s a tigress, she moves like an exploding mainspring, I come too soon, she says, “Is that all?”

Damn it. Why do all my fantasies turn against me? My trouble is, I never manage to get them hermetically sealed. A little reality begins to creep in, like mist under a door. Like tear gas around the edges of the mask.

I was talking about money. I’m having the same trouble concentrating on money instead of Sabina that I had that day in January of 1965 in my mother’s living room in Albany, New York, a very crappy city in which I grew up, but in which I was not born.

I was born somewhere in the South Pacific, in point of fact, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. It was the high point of my life so far.

“When the price goes from a thousand,” Rod told Betsy, “to twelve hundred, the phrase is, he Jewed them up.” Rod always treats Betsy with exaggerated courtesy and overfull explanations, the sort of contempt you can’t call him on. Even if I disagreed with him, which I don’t.

Anyway, he then turned back to me. “You use my pen name,” he said, “so it’s a guaranteed sale. You get a thousand, I get the two hundred. Less commission, ten per cent commission. That makes your cut nine hundred.”

“To do a book a month,” I said. My mind was full of Sabina’s thighs and my need for money. I was too excited to make decisions.

“To do a book in ten days every month,” he said.

“I’ll never do a book in ten days.”

Well, I was wrong. I’ve done twenty-eight books, and twenty-four of them were done each in ten days. The first one took almost three months, but that’s because I was learning how, and Fred was born then, in March, and up till then I’d never even thought about being a writer.

“If you can write a grammatical letter,” Rod told me, “you can write a sex novel.”

“Rod,” I said, “you are a writer. When we were freshmen you were a writer. You came to college and you said, ‘I’m a writer.’ I’m not a writer.”

“You don’t have to be a writer to write sex novels,” he said. “I know half a dozen guys doing this, they aren’t writers, they never will be writers, they’re making ten grand a year doing it.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said. I was making seventy-one twenty-five at Capital City Beer Distributors. A week. That’s three thousand seven hundred and five dollars a year. My mother, waiting table at Limurges Restaurant, was bringing home over a hundred a week, but that was still only five thousand a year. Ten thousand, my God, ten thousand is two hundred dollars a week! That’s why I said, “That’s a lot of money.”

“That’s why I think you oughta try it,” he said.

Which is when it occurred to me that ten thousand a year is what he was offering me! What with Sabina’s thighs and my mother sitting right in the same room with her hands full of argyle socks and that red MG out front and Betsy giving everybody her furrowed brow expression of being lost forever at sea, I hadn’t done my arithmetic up till then. Nine hundred dollars a book, he’d said. A book a month, he’d said. That was ten thousand eight hundred dollars a year. That isn’t divisible into weeks, it comes out two hundred seven dollars and sixty-nine cents with.0023076923076923076923076923 etc. left over.

“Will you try it?” he said.

“What can I lose?” I said, being cool because I was so excited I was about to froth at the mouth.

He explained what I was supposed to do. There was a formula and a system. There was practically a blueprint. It was the closest thing to carpentry you can imagine. As a matter of fact, I don’t see at all why I couldn’t write up the formula and sell it to Popular Mechanics.

Here’s the way it goes. There are four sex novel stories, which we will number 1 through 4:

1 — A boy in a small town wants to see the world. He screws his local sweetheart goodbye and goes to the big city. In the big city he gets a job and meets a succession of people, mostly female, and lays them all. Typical sequences are hitching to New York and being given a ride by a bored but beautiful wife in a convertible, or getting a job in a store and meeting a nymphomaniac in the stockroom, or going to pick up a date and meeting her nymphomaniac roommate instead. At the end of all this crap the boy can do one of three things. He can go back to the small town and the local sweetheart. He can marry one of the big city girls. He can become ruthless and shaft one of the big city girls and wind up alone. It doesn’t matter which of the three, any one of them will give your sludge that redeeming social significance which will prohibit the cops from confiscating it. All resolutions are emotional — sad, happy, pointed, poignant, cynical, sentimental or whatever — so take your pick. You can’t lose.

2 — The same as 1, except with a girl. She leaves her little home town, pausing first to fuck with her little home town boy friend, and then it’s off to the big city for her. The reason she shacks up with her lesbian roommate is she was just raped by her boss. Fill in the details and a few more studs and you’ve got a book. Same jazz about the ending.

3 — La Ronde. Chapter 1 introduces George, who screws Myra. Chapter 2 switches to Myra’s viewpoint, and she makes it with Bruno. In Chapter 3 we follow Bruno as he climbs into the rack with Phyllis. And so on, and so on. The finish here is either to have the last character in bed with the first character, or the last character decides to stay with the next-to-last character and end this chain of meaningless sex. Either way will do.

4 — A bored husband and a bored wife. The chapters alternate between their viewpoints. We watch them having bored sex with each other and less bored sex with other characters. If we make one of them, husband or (more usually) wife, the heavy, we can finish with the heavy getting his (her) comeuppance and the good guy (girl) getting a better girl (guy). If we make them both merely confused and troubled but basically nice, they get back together again at the finish. Redeeming social significance either way, if you’ll notice.

Of course, there are other sex novels that can be written, but why strain? I’ve done a few with a college campus background, but they wind up essentially to be variants on numbers 1 and 2. Rod gave me these four basic outlines, and Rod is a writer and knows what he’s doing. Got his own spy series with Silver Stripe now, under his own name and everything. One of them sold to the movies.

But I’m not done with the formula for sex novels. Your book is one of the four basic stories outlined above, right? Right. It is also fifty thousand words long, and the easiest way to do it is in ten chapters, each five thousand words long, and with a sex scene in each chapter. This means that ten times in every book there are euphemistically described sexual incidents. Generally the incident is a straight fuck between a man and a woman, but sometimes it’s a near fuck with a lot of foreplay, or sixty-nine, or a lesbian interlude, or a girl masturbating. (Boys don’t masturbate in these books, they masturbate on them.) This means that up to today I have described sexual congress or orgasm or some sort of sexual act two hundred and eighty times. It may not surprise you to hear that I’ve tended to repeat myself.

I’m losing the thread again. Ten chapters, five thousand words each, one sex scene each. Once you’ve established which of your four basic plots you’re going to use, the necessity to find somebody for your viewpoint character to get into bed with every five thousand words helps enormously in working out the details of the individual book. You say to yourself, Okay, here we are in Chapter 5, which is told from Maud’s point of view, since her chapters are alternating with Adolf’s. Are there any characters established in the first four chapters with whom Maud could possibly go to bed in Chapter 5? No? Well, what if she went to a bar, see, and got sloshed, and started to tell her troubles to the bartender. Then the bar closes, and the bartender says...

So. Given the formula, and (as Rod says) the ability to write a grammatic letter, you too could write dirty books for a living.

This typewriter uses the smaller size type, elite type, and five thousand words in elite type runs fifteen pages. My manuscripts are exactly one hundred fifty pages long, my chapters exactly fifteen pages long. I do one chapter a day for ten consecutive days, and there’s another book. I was a pretty fast typist before I started doing these books, and I’m a faster typist now, and after the first few books the formula made things very easy for me, so I work an average of four hours a day when I’m doing a book, for a total of forty hours. My pay is nine hundred dollars, and that’s twenty-two dollars and fifty cents an hour.

Where are you going to make twenty-two dollars and fifty cents an hour?

I was making two dollars an hour at Capital City Beer Distributors, and I was working forty hours a week. Riding around in the truck with Jock Dench, rolling the kegs into the bars, carrying the cases of bottled beer and canned beer.

This is the life, you’ve got to admit it. Twenty days a month I don’t have to do anything at all. Ten days a month I do some typing, four hours a day. That’s a soft life.

So why am I screwing it up?

It’s what Rod said: “Nobody can do this shit forever.”

You look at the typewriter one day, and you say to yourself, I don’t want to write about people fucking. I don’t want to write about people going down on each other, I don’t want to write about people fingering themselves and each other, I don’t want to write all those deadly dull preliminary conversations (“I just arrived in New York today,” she said, laughing self-consciously), I don’t want to write pointless stories about pointless people who live in a gray limbo of baroque sex and paper-thin characterization, I don’t want to do this shit any more.

Then you’re in trouble. You do that and you’re in trouble. Do you want to know why you’re in trouble?

Because where are you going to go, clown? If you don’t write these stinking sex novels what are you going to do? You know and I know, Ed, that you cannot, you cannot, you cannot take your wife and baby and move back to Albany and live in your mother’s house again and get your old job back at Capital City Beer Distributors. And you know and I know, Ed, that you cannot do anything else either. You were an English major in college, you studied American Lit, you could have learned to be a refrigerator repairman or a heavy equipment operator but you had to go in for American Lit, you nonsurvival type you, and what are you gonna do now?

I was going to teach. I was planning to go on to graduate school and get my master’s and then teach, preferably at the college level. But the problem was money. Well, money and influence and luck and a lot of other things.

My mother is a waitress, currently at Limurges Restaurant on North Pearl Street in Albany, New York, capital of the Empire State. My father, Hubert Topliss, Army PR man, died in a jeep accident in Hawaii on April 25th, 1944. My stepfather, Ralph Harsch, disappeared toward the end of March 1946, shortly after the birth of my sisters. The family has not exactly been rolling in wealth in the last several years. So that’s one problem.

Another problem is, I picked a college without a graduate school. If I’d gone to a college that had its own graduate school I might have been able to suck around some teacher and wind up with a grant or an assistantship or some damn thing and make it into graduate school that way, but by having been dumb enough to go to a college without a graduate school I had no influence anywhere. Also my marks were not exceptional. They were good, somewhere around a B-minus average, but that isn’t good enough to have anybody put you through graduate school for free.

Actually, my having gone to Monequois College was not entirely the result of stupidity. Being part of the state university, it was almost tuition free, and there were various assistances open to indigent students, so it was possible for me to go to Monequois College, where on the other hand it would not have been possible for me to go, for instance, to Harvard.

So there I was, I graduated from college and I knocked up this girl. I married her, being as noble as I was stupid, and then I had two going on three mouths to feed, and no connections at a graduate school, and no money, and forget it. So I wound up in my home town, Albany, at my mother’s house, and working for Capital City Beer Distributors. Saving eleven or twelve cents a week toward graduate school.

And along came Rod Cox, my college roommate all but our freshman year, and he offered me ten thousand dollars a year for easy lazy work, and I said to myself, It is now January 1965. If I learn how to do these books by April, and then I do a book a month until August 1966, that will be seventeen books, which will be fifteen thousand, three hundred dollars. I can live on four thousand dollars a year, which means my expenses between now and August 1966 will run to about six thousand dollars, which will leave me a cool nine thousand clear. I can get to graduate school with nine thousand dollars, and then do a book every three or four months while I’m in graduate school plus a couple in the summer, say six books a year, that’s fifty-four hundred dollars a year, anybody can go to graduate school on fifty-four hundred dollars a year.

It sounded good. You have to admit it, it sounded good.

Well, August of 1966 came around and I didn’t have nine thousand dollars. I didn’t have nine hundred dollars. What did I have? I had a car, and a lot of furniture, and books and records and clothing and things like that. I had four new inches around my waistline. I had a rented house in Sargass, Long Island, this house in which I am now seated at this Smith-Corona typewriter. I had beer in the refrigerator and scotch in the pantry. I had three hundred seventy-five dollars in the bank.

That was August of 1966. It is now November 21st, 1967, and what do I have?

Two hundred twelve dollars in the checking account.

Where does it go? I don’t know where it goes, I swear to God I don’t know where it goes. Betsy takes money out of my wallet and goes to the A&P and that’s the end of it. I say, “Honey, what did we eat when we used to live in Albany?” She doesn’t know.

I don’t mean she’s extravagant. Hell, I’m more extravagant than she is, I walk into Korvette’s and walk out with two AR-4 speakers. But still and all, ten thousand dollars a year. Where the hell does it go?

The graduate school idea dies hard. I keep saying, “All right, the major expenses are behind us now. We have a car, we have furniture and clothing and all this other junk. Betsy is on the pill, so we won’t have that problem again. So now we can start putting some money aside. If we’re careful we can save six thousand dollars in the next year, and even on six thousand dollars I can surely get into graduate school.”

But it never happens. The money comes in, the money goes out. Baby-sitter, trips to the city, nights out, guests in for dinner. Then there’s the car. It’s a 1964 Buick and there’s always some damn thing wrong with it. Nothing big, never more than twenty or thirty or forty dollars at a time, but it’s all the time, it’s every time.

And I have nobody to talk to about it, you know? If I tried to talk to Betsy she’d either be blank with incomprehension or she’d get terrified and weepy and be sure doom was just around the corner and I was blaming her. So I can’t talk to Betsy and I never could. And the closest my mother and I ever were was back on that aircraft carrier. We never write to each other, but every once in a while one of us phones the other — phone bills, there’s another expense, all those calls to New York, to Rod and Pete and Dick, to Lance, to everybody in the world — where was I in this sentence? I’m not a writer, and even after twenty-eight books I still do that, I get myself into a run-on sentence or an involved sentence where it’s like walking into an enchanted forest. There’s no way out, the entrance is lost in the mist behind you, and there’s nothing to do but keep pushing forward into die quicksand.

Was I talking about my mother? Yes. I reread the last paragraph, not with pleasure, and I see that I was indeed talking about my mother. We see each other at Christmas and other pagan feasts, but we don’t talk to each other. What do I have to say to her? What on earth does she have to say to me? She had a youth with some vivacity in it, she had fun. Part of a girl quartet, the Melogals, off on USO tours, one thing and another. Face it, I’m a drab son. What do I do but sit here in this room and write about people fucking. And before that college. And after that?

The chute. Oblivion. I can’t even think into the future. My past was uninteresting, my present insoluble, my future unimaginable. And unimportant, I suppose.

Shit.

Anyway, what I was saying was that I have nobody to talk to. Not Betsy. Not my mother. Certainly not my sisters. Night and day, those two. Hannah is too incredibly square and righteous and a fucking prig to listen to anybody, and Hester is some sort of insane acid head out in San Francisco or somewhere. They’re twenty-one, and already Hester’s lived five times as much as I ever have or ever will.

The point is, Hannah’s a nurse, the kind of a nurse where the starch starts at the forehead and ends at the toenails. The kind of a nurse that you can tell from looking at her she thinks enjoyment is a sin. She’s consecrated her life, you know what I mean? A shriveled-up virgin at twenty-one, probably a hell of a good nurse, one of these tight-lipped efficient bitches you’d like to dip in a vat of lye.

And Hester’s just the opposite. They’ve got the same face, being twins, and it’s amazing the different things they’ve done with it. You look at Hannah, you know she’s a virgin and always will be. You look at Hester, you know right away she puts out because she loves the cock. It’s in her eyes, in a kind of loose blow-job quality in her smile, in the kind of wave she has in her hair, pretty long hair with a long wave over the right side of the forehead that she’s always pushing back with a movement of arm and head that makes her breasts move. Hannah’s breasts have never moved.

Could I talk to Hester? I don’t know, I suppose I could, I suppose she’d be sympathetic. But at the same time, I can’t help thinking what a schmuck she’d think I was. She’d say, “What the hell’s the matter, Ed? You’re all constipated, honey. Relax. Take it easy. Have a ball.”

Have a ball? How can I have a ball? I have responsibilities, I have Betsy and Fred, I have a house full of furniture and a garage full of Buick. I have a deadline I’m supposed to make.

If I don’t get this rotten book done by the thirtieth, Lance will drop me. I know he will, I am positive of it, there is no question in my mind. He told me so, and he doesn’t make idle threats. Besides, he said, “I’m sorry, Ed.” In that mellifluous voice.

I’m on page 14. This is ridiculous, it’s twenty-five minutes after four, I’ve been sitting here all afternoon typing away and I don’t have a goddam thing done. This isn’t a sex novel, this isn’t anything. This is a piece of shit.

What’s the matter with me?

Betsy’s back. I heard her drive into the garage about an hour ago. She’s out there in the kitchen now, moving around, she hears me typing in here, she thinks I’m doing the November book. What am I going to tell her?

I’ll have to come back in tonight. I mean, no matter how you look at it, this isn’t the first chapter of a dirty book. Although there is a kind of a sex scene in it, the fantasy thing with Sabina.

No. In the first place, I’d have to retype it in order to change the names, I couldn’t use everybody’s real names, and that’d be almost as much trouble as doing another whole chapter. And in the second place, even if this was my first chapter where the hell is my second chapter? You couldn’t have an entire book of crap like this. A fantasy sex scene in each chapter. Lovely.

Besides, the sex scene with Sabina isn’t done at the kind of length we need. Two or three pages of sexual description, that’s what we have to have. All the euphemisms. D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and all those alleged literary types can say cunt, but us dirty book writers have to say “the hot pulsating core of her being.”

How would you like to write shit like that all the time?

Well, I’ve got to write some shit like that, and I’ve got to do it today. No more fooling around. I have wasted an entire afternoon, I have typed fifteen pages of gibberish, that’s an end on it. Tonight I’ll come back in and start the dirty book.