Adios, Scheherazade

1

I can’t think of a title.

I’ve been sitting here for half an hour with this sheet of paper in the typewriter, it’s going to come out all wavy, and I’ve been saying to myself, Ed, all you need is a title. Think of a title, then see which of the four basic plots that title makes you think of, then look in the Nassau County phone book on the floor beside your desk, pick a name at random out of it, make that your lead character, and start for God’s sake to write.

But I can’t think of a title.

What I’ve decided is, I’ve got writer’s block. Some of the other guys have talked about it, I’ve heard some wild stories about writer’s block hitting this one or that one, and what everybody says is, when you’ve got writer’s block the only thing you can do to break it is write something. It doesn’t matter what. Sit down at the typewriter and type out names of cheeses, a political speech, anything that comes into your head. It sort of primes the pump, and pretty soon you can go and write the thing you’re supposed to be writing, which in my case is a filthy book.

So what shall I say? My name is Edwin George Topliss, I am twenty-five years old, I was born on August 7th, 1942, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. My mother was then Mabel Swing, part of a girl quartet called the Melogals. One of the other Melogals, Laverne LaRoche, became a big star around 1946 and sank without a trace around 1950. I don’t think it had anything to do with the blacklist or anything like that, I think she just wore out her welcome. She was a recording star, and some other recording stars came along and she got shoved off into Hits of Yesteryear. My mother used to have some of Laverne LaRoche’s records, and some sheet music with her smiling face on the front. A sort of long horsy face with very big white teeth. Mouse-colored hair that blooped on top and hung down straight at the sides and blooped again at the neck. Padded shoulders that made her look as though she was wearing a crepe coffin. “My Saturday Love,” that was one of her big hits. Remember that one, gang? Da de da, de da da, my Saturday love. I always thought it stank. Particularly when my mother sang along with the record, thereby giving me a weird version of half the Melogals, one-quarter recorded and the other quarter live.

I don’t know how it worked out, exactly, I think maybe my mother wrote to Laverne LaRoche when Laverne LaRoche was on top of the heap and never got any answer. And then Laverne LaRoche wrote my mother a letter, or called her on the phone or something, along about my senior year in Albany High, which would be around 1959, and my mother either didn’t answer the letter or if it was a phone call she told Laverne LaRoche to go fuck herself or something like that. Anyway, the Melogals don’t have reunions. But my mother kept the records, and I can still remember coming into the house unexpected every once in a while, nobody home but my mother, and she’d be singing along with one of the old 78s. “You took my heart, but you wouldn’t take me, you wanted my love, but you wanted to be free.” This is when I was in high school, and later on during summer vacations from college, and every time it would happen my mother would right away clam up and play some other record and not sing along any more.

Frankly, I don’t think that much of my mother’s voice, but she assures me it used to be better. She still thinks it’s pretty good, or she thinks it’s still pretty good. You know what I mean.

Do writers have trouble like that? At fifty thousand words a book, with twenty-eight books under my belt — in more ways than one — that’s one million four hundred thousand words I’ve written. And I still get screwed up in the sentences. And that’s the basics, you know? Being a writer, I mean a fiction writer, I mean a real honest-to-God storyteller like Rod or Pete or Dick, means having so much by way of imagination and ability to invent character and incident, all these talents and abilities that are as complicated and wonderful as the working of a pinball machine, and I’m so far down the ladder I even get the sentences screwed up.

These things are done once, you know. Every once in a while, if I’ve really done something horrible with grammar or a run-on sentence, I’ll take that page out of the typewriter and start again, but mostly this stuff is one draft. I mean, it’s bad enough to write it, I couldn’t possibly read it. So I go along, fifteen pages a day, ten days a book, all of it first draft, all of it pushing along as fast as I can go, whatever comes into my head next, which is almost invariably something very stock and banal and expected and ordinary and imitative of a thousand books before me, and it all pours like a runny nose onto the paper, sheet after sheet, one hundred fifty sheets of paper when I’m done. Plus an extra sheet of paper to the left of the typewriter on which I jot down important things like the characters’ names and any other facts I may have to refer to again later on in the book.

I was talking to a girl at a party once, a party at Rod’s place when he had the place on East 10th Street, and she asked me what I did, which gave me my usual trauma, and when she finally got it out of me that I write dirty books in ten days each she said, “How do you remember all of the things that are in the book? How can you go back to it the next day and still have that whole world clear in your mind?”

The answer I gave her was that when I wrote a book in ten days I didn’t get a chance to forget anything in it, but of course that isn’t the real truth. The real truth is, the whole world in one of my books is so narrow and thin and untenanted there’s practically nothing to remember. The characters’ names, any occupation or make of car or address that I might give them, and that’s about it. As for characterization, forget it. I don’t even usually do caricaturization, the old Dickens bit of giving a character a tag. You know? I got this in college, the idea of giving a character an odd quirk, a funny phrase or a mannerism of some kind, and then every time he comes on the scene he does his thing and you remember him and you say, “That’s characterization, by Neddy Dingo!” Like Queeg in The Caine Mutiny saying, “Kay,” all the time.

I wonder how much longer this is going to go on. The fact of the matter is, I may sound calm and rational on this page but in reality I am terrified. I mean, I have to do a dirty book, I have to write book number 29, and I have to get started on it. I have ten days.

June of this year was the first time I missed a deadline, and I haven’t made a deadline since. That was book number 24, Raving Passions, and it was three days late. June 30th was a Friday, and I didn’t get the book in till the next Monday. I brought it in and gave it to Samuel in Lance’s office and Samuel said, “What happened Friday?”

“I got a little hung up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t want to make a habit of this,” Samuel said. He’s a nasty snotty kid and I hate him. I’m sure he reads all the manuscripts we write before sending them to New Orleans, reads them all in the men’s room down the hall from the office there, jerks off ten times per book and then sends them out covered with his smear of approval. How else could he be so skinny, the little bastard? He looks nineteen, he’s a year younger than me. Which irritates me anyway, that he s in the dominant position in relation to me and I’m older than him. And heavier. And better educated. And smarter. But he s Lance’s assistant, and since Lance almost never makes personal appearances anywhere, that means it’s Samuel that I have to deal with.

If I wasn’t so goddam apologetic with him all the time. Like saying I was sorry when I brought Raving Passions in three days late, one working day late, when it was the first time I’d missed a deadline and before that I’d turned in twenty-three consecutive books on time. But I apologized, and I was all nervous and upset about it, and I get mad at Samuel and hate him and it’s all because he’s in a position of dominance and I’m in no position at all and he’s too much of a sleazy creep to refrain from rubbing my nose in it.

I mean, after all, what am I? I write, but I’m not a writer. I don’t write under my own name, I don’t even write under my own pen name. Dirk Smuff, that’s how I sign myself, and Dirk Smuff is a creation of Rod’s, it’s his pen name, he wrote the first seven books under that name, I still pay him two hundred dollars a month for the use of it.

About a year ago I went in to talk to Samuel to ask him what he thought about me doing two books a month for a while. I mean, a month has thirty days and I only use up ten per book. What I had in mind, I thought I could start a pen name of my own, do two books a month for a while until I had the new name established, and then Rod could get somebody else to take over the Dirk Smuff books and I’d go on just doing my own books. I had the name picked out, too: Dwayne Toppil, it’s a sort of a variant on my own name.

I mean, I wasn’t doing this for the two hundred bucks. That wasn’t the point at all, but naturally Samuel couldn’t see that. The point was, for God’s sake, I’m not real. I’m gray, I’m translucent, you can see daylight through me. What am I? I’m a ghost, I’m Rod Cox’s ghost, I’m Dirk Smuff’s ghost, I’m sort of a pornographic Kukla, activated by the hand of the masturbating high school boy, piping rotund obscenities into his waxy ear.

Some of the other guys, they can look ahead and see daylight, they can see a way out of this cave, but honey I’m Injun Joe and I’ve got no place to go. Like Rod. He started doing these sex books while we were still in college, but all the time he was doing other stuff, too, short stories and articles and finally other books, and now he’s got this spy series going with Silver Stripe, it’s a paperback house but he’s doing the books under his own name, Anthony Boucher in the Sunday Times reviewed one of them, the third one I think, and said it was pretty good, it showed the kind of vitality the paperback originals can come up with these days. And he gets translated into French and published by an outfit over there called Gallimard, all the books have black covers. And some other countries, too, I think Italy and Japan and at least once in Mexico.

And Pete Falkus. He kept doing these magazine pieces at the same time he was writing sex novels, and he had a sale in Playboy and a sale in True and a sale in Holiday, all these fact pieces, and now he’s got a ghost too and he’s doing nothing but the magazine pieces and he’s making all kinds of money. He’s got money in a mutual fund, he was telling me about it a few months ago. Saving money, investing money in a mutual fund.

Of course, Ann Falkus is no Betsy.

But that isn’t fair. It isn’t Betsy’s fault the money disappears, it isn’t anybody’s fault. As a matter of fact, if it’s anybody’s fault at all it’s mine. I’m the one bought the car, I’m the one goes out all the time and buys records, books, all this crap. We came down here from Albany in August of 1965 with three suitcases to our name, we furnished that apartment on East 18th Street out of the Salvation Army store on West 46th, and now we could fill a moving van. Every once in a while I say, “Why do I need all this stuff?” but then I look around and there isn’t one thing in the whole heap I want to throw away.

Except Betsy.

That isn’t fair. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. I don’t mean it, and it isn’t fair.

I was talking about writers. Real writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick. They knew they couldn’t do this shit forever, but they could do it as long as they had to because all the time they were working on something else, something more, something better. They knew they were headed somewhere, they were going to move up.

What a trap that is. I tried it myself, I tried to be a writer. You make your living writing novels, it doesn’t matter what kind of novels they are, you begin to think maybe you are a writer after all. So I tried some mystery stories. I read Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and I tried some stories. One sold, for a penny a word, to a magazine that isn’t around any more, called Shock Action Detective Tales. The other three nobody wanted. Samuel said, “Ed, I don’t think you’re comfortable in the short story form.” With that dead frog expression on his face. Meaning, stick to the sex books, sonny, that’s all you’re good for.

I tried articles, too. That was even worse, I never even got anything in shape to be submitted. I discovered Reinhard Heydrich, the beast of Belsen, and Samuel said, “He’s been done too much, Ed.” I didn’t know he’d been done at all.

That’s the trouble, you can’t try to sell to magazines you don’t read, because you don’t know what’s old hat to them. But the magazines I felt I could take a stab at were all too crappy for me to read.

The point is, I’m not a writer. Or have I made that point too much already? I don’t give a damn, it seems to be the only point of my life. Through a fluke of fate I have been let into a room where a fantastic feast is being presented. All around me people are moving up the line of the table, the food’s getting better and better. I wasn’t hungry before I came into this room, but smelling the smells of the food, seeing the other people eat, now I’m hungry. But the only problem is, you can’t get any of the food unless you ask for it. And I don’t speak the language, all I can do is point. And if all you can do is point, all you get is boiled potatoes. So here I stand, eating my boiled potatoes, watching the feast going on all around me, and wishing I knew the language.

Well, it’s midnight. I have a small white plastic clock on my desk, we got it with Plaid Stamps, and it says midnight, twelve o’clock. November 21st is gone, absolutely gone, and I haven’t written a word of the sex novel. Just this junk, this feeling sorry for myself.

I came in here at ten-thirty, full of ambition, determination and terror. After I finished this afternoon’s wasted effort I went out to the kitchen and got into a stupid argument with Betsy. One of our stock stupid arguments, the one about Fred.

Fred was in the kitchen, sitting at the table and eating a vanilla yogurt, and she said, “Hello, Daddy.”

I said, “Hi, Fred.”

Betsy turned around from the refrigerator and said, very cold, “Her name is Elfreda. She is a girl.”

“When you want a fight,” I said, “you jump on that, or something else, or whatever you want. When you don’t want a fight, I call her Fred and you never say a word.”

“We won’t discuss it,” she said, “in front of Elfreda.” And she turned her back on me and went back to the refrigerator, whatever she was doing there.

I didn’t need that, I really didn’t. It isn’t my fault if something went wrong at the A&P or she hates the Buick or whatever set her off, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to pay for it. So I kept it up, in front of Elfreda, and pretty soon she was crying and Betsy had those white marks on her cheekbones that meant she was enraged beyond endurance and I was ready to murder everybody in sight and make page 3 of the Daily News. That’s my big threat around here: “You want to make page 3 of the Daily News?”

The thing is, I have no respect for myself.

Maybe if I call Lance tomorrow and explain things, I’m having a little trouble, I may have to skip a month, but I’ll be back as good as ever, I just need a little time off...

Maybe he’ll say, “I’m sorry, Edwin.”

Five books in a row have been late, that’s the problem. Raving Passion, due on Friday, in on Monday. Then in July, Beachcomber Sin, two days late, due on Monday, in on Wednesday. August, Summer Sex, five days late, due on Thursday and I didn’t get it in till the following Tuesday. That was when Samuel said, “This is three times in a row, Ed.”

“Oh,” I said, with my foolish grin. “Are we keeping track?”

“Yes,” he said. “Spack called Lance yesterday afternoon, he said the shipment’s one book missing. He wanted to call Rod, he wanted to know what’s the problem.”

“Oh,” I said, with my foolish grin dying. “I’m sorry about that.”

Because Spack is the publisher, down in New Orleans, and he’s paying the twelve hundred dollars every month because he thinks these Dirk Smuff books he’s getting in are still being written by Rod Cox. Why he would think somebody with a successful spy series at Silver Stripe, getting three thousand a book, plus a thousand from France, money from Italy, Japan, Mexico, all those places, plus one of the books sold to the movies for twenty thousand dollars, why Spack would think somebody with all that would keep turning out this garbage for him every month I don’t know, but he does. And Rod has already told me, the one thing he doesn’t want is for Spack to call him on the phone sometime and start talking about the books. Because Rod doesn’t read these things, why should he?

I have no readers, you know. I mean, among people I know, friends of mine. Rod can hand me a book and say, “Here, I just got copies of this one,” and then I take it home and read it and it’s great and I call him and say, “It’s great,” and he says, “Thanks.” Who am I going to hand Escape to Lust to? Even Betsy stopped reading these things, about a year ago.

Escape to Lust was the September book and I really tried to get that one in on time. After what Samuel had said when I brought in Summer Sex. And I missed. September 30th was a Saturday, which meant the 29th was the deadline, which meant I started the book on the 19th, and I didn’t turn it in till Monday, October 2nd, three days late. I needed that extra weekend again.

This time, Samuel called me on Monday morning, a little after nine. I was still in the rack, I tend not to get up much before noon, but Betsy woke me and Samuel said, “Are you going to have the book in today, Ed?” He sounds just as snaky and nasty on the phone as he looks in person, which is his big difference with his employer, Lance.

“Sure,” I said. “I finished it last night. I’m really sorry about not—”

“Try to get it down here by eleven,” he said. “We held up the package so we could put your book in with it if you got it done over the weekend.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Samuel. You know I really tried to—”

“We have to ship it out by eleven,” he said.

So it wound up with all of us going into the city, me driving, Betsy beside me, Fred in the back. Betsy never let me forget that she had wash to do, she had things to do. But there’s nothing you can do with a car in midtown, and the car was the only way we could get in there on time, and I didn’t want the Buick towed away, so I needed somebody to sit in the car while I parked it on Madison Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets and dashed into the Solinex Building and up in the elevator to the seventeenth floor and into the door with Lance Pangle on the glass and gave Samuel the manuscript.

Then I had to stand around while Samuel gave me a lecture. “Everything is supposed to run smooth, Ed,” he said. “Spack doesn’t buy from anybody else, we supply him exclusively. Do you know he puts out sixteen books a month?”

Yes, I already knew that. Spack puts out sixteen books a month and pays twelve hundred a book, of which Pangle gets ten per cent as the agent. That makes Pangle better than twenty-three thousand dollars a year. Plus all the other writers he has, other stuff he has, Rod and Pete and Dick and some science fiction writers and all sorts of people. Anyway, out of the sausage machine of which I am a part, twenty-three thousand a year for Lance Pangle.

Is Lance Pangle going to risk twenty-three thousand a year because Ed Topliss has hang-ups? Would you? Would I?

Anyway, I had to stand around while Samuel read me the riot act. “There are any number of young writers coming along, Ed,” he said. “If you feel you’d rather stop doing these books, we’ll be happy to find a replacement.”

Stop doing the books? And do what instead?

I gave him all sorts of assurances, and his expression never changed. The oak door on the other side of the office remained closed, but I could sense Lance beyond it, a fat spider, and I felt like a fly in the outer reaches of the web, safe as long as I kept buzzing, dead as soon as I stopped to rest.

I was up there ten minutes, and when I came down the Buick wasn’t there. I stood around in a panic, not knowing what to do, and then I saw it turn the corner and come down toward me, Betsy behind the wheel, and even through the windshield I could see she was in one of her cold rages.

It turned out a cop had come along and told her she couldn’t stand there, so she had to circle the block, and she got into a traffic jam on Park, and her nerves were frayed to the breaking point. The only trouble was, so were mine, so the third or fourth time she said, “Did you have to stay up there that long?” I started to shout and get angry and incoherent, and then Fred started to cry in the back seat and I turned on her, and then we drove out the Long Island Expressway in silence and nobody said a word around the house for two days.

And after that I was nine days late with the October book, Passion’s Prisoner. I just couldn’t think about that book, I couldn’t plot it, I couldn’t do anything with it. I finally opened up old books of mine and copied out sex scenes word for word, but the stuff between the sex scenes I couldn’t copy and that was absolutely impossible. I was calling Samuel every day, in more and more of a panic, promising I’d get it done tonight, tonight, tonight, and when I finally did bring it in he didn’t say a word at all. He looked as cold-faced as Betsy, all he did was say, “Thanks,” when I handed him the manuscript. I stood around a few seconds, waiting for him to say something, to give me the word again, but he didn’t say a thing. That’s when I really got scared, that’s the first time I thought it might really happen, they might drop me and get somebody else to do the books. Anybody else. Granted that nobody is indispensable, I am more so, if you follow me. I’m one of the least indispensable people on earth. They don’t even have to find a writer to replace me, they can replace me with some other semi-educated fairly literate buffoon just like me.

That was November 9th, which was a Thursday, and the next day Lance called me. That was when he gave me the ultimatum: miss one more deadline and bye-bye. And said, “I’m sorry, Edwin.” In that bishop’s voice.

Maybe that’s one of my problems now, having been so late with the October book. I didn’t finish that till November 8th, and that’s less than two weeks ago. I’m not ready to do another book.

Well, I better do another book, ready or not. This jazz I’m doing here isn’t going to pay the rent or make Samuel happy or keep Lance from chopping off my head.

I started to talk about Dwayne Toppil, my attempt at a pen name. In order to give myself a feeling of substantiality, of being somebody. I went in and talked to Samuel about it, and he said, “Ed, I don’t think you’re ready.”

“Ready?” I said. “I’m doing a book a month now, I’ve done them for a year and a half, I do them in ten days. So I take another ten days, I do one of my own.”

But he shook his head. “What you’ve turned out so far,” he said, “it’s the Dirk Smuff name that sold them. They’re acceptable sex novels, there’s nothing wrong with them, but they don’t have any flair, they don’t show anything special. Spack does sixteen books a month, and we’ve got people for all sixteen slots. And we don’t deal with anybody but Spack, because most of those other guys are shoestring outfits, you can’t get your money out of them, it’s one problem after another. So we don’t have a slot for a second book a month from you, we’d have to dump somebody else. And frankly, Ed, you aren’t that good that we’d want to drop somebody to sell two books for you every month.”

I felt stupid, but I said, “Would you mind if I tried to sell a book to somebody else on my own?”

“Go right ahead,” he said.

“That’s what I’ll do, then,” I said.

But of course I didn’t. In the first place, one book a month was about all the vicarious sex I could stand. I’d think, Now’s the time to start the second book, but I wouldn’t do it. And in the second place, I was chicken to try peddling sex books on my own. I know there’s half a dozen publishers right here in New York that put these things out, but how do I go about selling to them? I’ve never submitted any writing of any kind to any publisher. All I’ve done is the sex books and the mystery stories and they all went through Lance. Or through Samuel, actually.

Besides, if somebody as sharp and bastardly as Lance doesn’t want to try to do business with those people, what sort of luck would I have with them?

Anyway, I never did it.

It’s after one o’clock in the morning, and I’ve done practically a whole chapter again, and this still isn’t a sex book or anything else. This chapter doesn’t even have a fantasy sex scene in it.

Betsy isn’t talking to me. Not that we talk even when we’re talking to each other, but now we aren’t even saying words. Which is just as well, in fact I’m better off that way. I won’t have to lie about the thirty pages I’ve done today.

We ate dinner in silence, and then I read the paper. The Times. I didn’t read it this morning because I was going to come in here and do the first chapter of the book, so after dinner I took it into the living room and started to read it while Betsy did the dishes. Then she came in and turned on Red Skelton, which she doesn’t really like but she knows I can’t stand Skelton and when she’s mad at me she keeps doing little things to needle me and make me uncomfortable. So I came in here and read the paper in here. England just devalued the pound last Sunday, so the paper was full of that, but the thing that caught my eye was a strange item on page 20 about a circus clown that was murdered. He was beaten to death in his hotel room last October, and the guy that did it was just sentenced to life in prison. It said there was a prostitute in the room with the clown and she opened the door for the killer, who beat the clown to death when he wouldn’t give him any money. The clown worked for Ring-ling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

I also did the puzzle, and read the book review, which was of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, by Harold Cruse. The review said it was a tough book. Grove Press had a half-page ad pushing four books, one called Numbers by the guy who wrote City of Night, and a first novel called Sheeper, and something called Freewheelin’ Frank about the Hell’s Angels and a book of short stories by LeRoi Jones.

If Rod had never come up to Albany I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t want to be a writer, I wouldn’t even think about it. I wouldn’t have made twenty-five thousand dollars in the last two and a half years, and I wouldn’t need nine hundred dollars to keep tottering forward one more month.

That’s the ridiculous thing, of course. You can’t want something until you know what it is. When I made two hundred a month I lived on two hundred a month. When I hadn’t ever written anything I didn’t want to ever write anything.

I’m Caliban. I’m Frankenstein’s monster. I’ve been shown how nice human life is, and I’ve been allowed to be almost human, and I’m hanging in here neither fish nor fowl, merely a poor foul fish with no place to swim.

Betsy’s in bed and asleep. I have no letch for her at all right now. Maybe once or twice a month I get a generalized letch, a real need to get my rocks off, and the other times we do it it’s simply to maintain appearances. I think that’s probably the way it is with her, too.

Tomorrow I’ve got to start the book. I’ve got all this stuff off my chest, now I can get to the book. And if I could do ten thousand words of this crap today I can damn well do ten thousand words of useful crap tomorrow and get caught up.

Maybe I can do something with that clown story. Clown, whore, killer. Only he wouldn’t get killed.

What do I know about circuses? Nothing.

I could call it Circus Lust. Carny Lmt. Passion Under the Big Top.

Sure.