Chip Harrison Scores Again

Fourteen

i had to write the last chapter twice. The first time I did it, I put in a six-page scene that never happened. It was the first night after I left Bordentown, when I stayed in the motel with cardboard walls. The way I wrote it the first time, there was this long scene where I listened to a couple through the wall, and the guy finished before the girl was satisfied, and he just left her there, and she was storming around the room throwing things and crying. So then I went next door and brought her back to my own room and took her to bed, and afterward she was sleeping and I heard the same thing happen again in the room next door, except this time the guy was drunk and passed out before he could do anything. Whereupon the heroic Chip Harrison went next door and found the second girl, and she was also ready to walk up the wall and across the ceiling, and good old Chipperoo brought her back, too, and balled her in the bed while the first girl was still sleeping, and then the first girl woke up, and the three of us had this wild orgy with everybody doing everything to everybody else all at once.

I filled up six pages with that crap. It was a pretty good scene, actually, and I think it would have been pretty erotic.

But I thought about it and tore it all up and did it over the way it really happened.

So I wrote that scene, and it didn’t bother me while I was writing it. In fact while I was typing it all out I could actually believe it really happened. Sometimes it’s a little frightening the way your imagination will take a lie and make it almost true.

Then why did I tear it up? I could say it was because I didn’t want to put any lies in this book, but that’s not it because there are already a couple of lies in it that I’m leaving in. Just small lies, but that doesn’t make them true. The real reason, I think, is that putting in a scene like that would just make a lie out of everything that happened in Bordentown and lot of what went on afterward. Because that scene I wrote could never have happened. If the beginning of it happened, and if a guy did leave a girl there all unsatisfied, I never would have gone next door. Not the way I felt. If anything I would have just left the motel and gotten back in the car and kept on driving. And if I tried to do anything with a girl just then, if somehow I really did make an effort, I’m sure I couldn’t have managed to accomplish it.

I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, but for a while there I guess I left my balls in Bordentown.