Fools die

Chapter 12

It was nearly two weeks later that my agent arranged an appointment for me with the editor in chief of Everyday Magazines. This was a group of publications that drowned the American public with information, pseudoinformation, sex and pseudosex, culture and hard-hat philosophy. Movie mags, adventure mags for blue-collar workers, a sports monthly, fishing and hunting, comics. Their “class” leader, top-of-the-line magazine was slanted to swinging bachelors with a taste for literature and avant-garde cinema.

A real smorgasbord. Everyday gobbled up free-lance writers because they had to publish a half million words a month. My agent told me that the editor in chief knew my brother, Artie, and that Artie had called him to prepare the way.

At Everyday Magazines all the people seemed to be out of place. Nobody seemed to belong. And yet they put out profitable magazines. Funny, but in the federal government we all seemed to fit, everybody was happy and yet we all did a lousy job.

The chief editor, Eddie Lancer, had gone to school with my brother at the University of Missouri, and it was my brother who first mentioned the job to my agent. Of course, Lancer knew I was completely unqualified after the first two minutes of the interview. So did I. Hell, I didn’t even know what the backyard of a magazine was. But with Lancer this was a plus. He didn’t give a shit about experience. What Lancer was looking for was guys touched with schizophrenia. And later he told me that I had qualified highly on that score.

Eddie Lancer was a novelist too; he had published a hell of a hook that I loved just a year ago. He knew about my novel and said he liked it and that carried a lot of weight in getting the job. On his bulletin board was a big newspaper headline ripped out of the morning Times: ATOM BOMB WAR SEEN BAD FOR WALL STREET.

He saw me staring at the clipping and said, “Do you think you could write a short fiction piece about a guy worrying about that?”

“Sure,” I said. And I did. I wrote a story about a young executive worrying about his stocks going down after the atom bombs fall. I didn’t make the mistake of poking fun at the guy or being moral. I wrote it straight. If you accepted the basic premise, you accepted the guy. If you didn’t accept the basic premise, it was a very funny satire.

Lancer was pleased with it. “You’re made to order for our magazine,” he said. “The whole idea is to have it both ways. The dummies like it and the smart guys like it. Perfect.” He paused for a moment. “You’re a lot different from your brother, Artie.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “So are you.”

Lancer grinned at me. “We were best friends in college. He’s the most honest guy I ever met. You know when he asked me to interview you, I was surprised. It was the first time I ever knew him to ask a favor.”

“He does that only for me,” I said.

“Straightest guy I ever knew in my life,” Lancer said.

“It will be the death of him,” I said. And we laughed.

Lancer and I knew we were both survivors. Which meant we were not straight, that we were hustlers to some degree. Our excuse was that we had books to write. And so we had to survive. Everybody had his own particular and valid excuse.

– -

Much to my surprise (but not to Lancer’s) I turned out to be a hell of a magazine writer. I could write the pulp adventure and war stories. I could write the soft-porn love stories for the top-of-the-line magazine. I could write a flashy, snotty film review and a sober, snotty book review. Or turn the other way and write an enthusiastic review that would make people want to go out and see or read for themselves what was so good. I never signed my real name to any of this stuff. But I wasn’t ashamed of it. I knew it was schlock, but still I loved it. I loved it because all my life I had never had a skill to be proud of. I had been a lousy soldier, a losing gambler. I had no hobby, no mechanical skills. I couldn’t fix a car, I couldn’t grow a plant. I was a lousy typist, and not a really first-rate bribe taker government clerk. Sure, I was an artist, but that’s nothing to brag about. That’s just a religion or a hobby. But now I really had a skill, I was an expert schlock writer, and loved it. Especially since for the first time in my life I was making a good living. Legitimately.

The money from the stories averaged four hundred dollars a month and with my regular Army Reserve job brought me to about two hundred bucks a week. And as if work sparked more energy, I found myself starting my second novel Eddie Lancer was on a new book too, and we spent most of our working time together talking about our novels rather than articles for the magazine.

We finally became such good friends that after six months of free-lance work he offered me a magazine editor slot. But I didn’t want to give up the two to three grand a month in graft that I was still making on my Army Reserve job. The bribe-taking scam had been going on for nearly two years without any kind of hitch. I now had the same attitude as Frank. I didn’t think anything would ever happen. Also, the truth was that I liked the excitement and the intrigue of being a thief.

My life settled down into a happy groove. My writing was going well, and every Sunday I took Vallie and the kids for rides out in Long Island, where family houses were springing up like weeds, and inspected models. We had already picked out our house. Four bedrooms, two baths and only a ten percent down payment on the twenty-six-thousand-dollar price with a twelve-month wait. In fact, now was the time to ask Eddie Lancer for a small favor.

“I’ve always loved Las Vegas,” I told Eddie. “I'd like to do a piece on it.”

“Sure, anytime,” he said. “Just make sure you get something in it on hookers.” And he arranged for the expenses. Then we talked about the color illustration for the story. We always did this together because it was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of laughs. As usual Eddie finally came up with the effective idea. A gorgeous girl in scanty costume in a wild pelvic dance. And out of her navel rolled red dice showing the lucky eleven. The cover line would read “Get Lucky with Las Vegas Girls.”

One assignment had to come first. It was a plum. I was going to interview the most famous writer in America, Osano.

Eddie Lancer gave me the assignment for his flagship magazine, Everyday Life, the class magazine of the chain. After that one I could do the Las Vegas piece and trip.

Eddie Lancer thought Osano was the greatest writer in America but was too awed to do the interview himself. I was the only one on the staff not impressed. I didn’t think Osano was all that good. Also, I distrusted any writer who was an extrovert. And Osano had appeared on TV a hundred times, been the judge at the Cannes Film Festival, got arrested for leading protest marchers no matter what they were protesting against. And gave blurbs for every new novel written by one of his friends.

Also, he had come up the easy way. His first novel, published when he was twenty-five, made him world-famous. He had wealthy parents, a law degree from Yale. He had never known what it was to struggle for his art. Most of all, I had sent him my first published novel, hoping for a blurb, and he never acknowledged receiving it.

When I went to interview Osano, his stock as a writer was just slipping with editors. He could still command a hefty advance for a book, he still had critics buffaloed. But most of his books were nonfiction. He had not been able to finish a fiction book in the last ten years.

He was working on his masterpiece, a long novel that would be the greatest thing since War and Peace. All the critics agreed about that. So did Osano. One publishing house advanced him over a hundred grand and was still whistling for its money and the book ten years later. Meanwhile, he wrote nonfiction books on hot subjects that some critics claimed were better than most novels. He turned them out in a couple of months and picked up a fat check. But each one sold less. He had worn his public out. So finally he accepted an offer to be editor in chief of the most influential Sunday book review section in the country.

The editor before Osano had been in the job twenty years. A guy with great credentials. All kinds of degrees, the best colleges, an intellectual, wealthy family. Class. And a left-handed swinger all his life. Which was OK except that as he aged, he got more outrageous. One sunny, horny afternoon he was caught going down on the office boy behind a ceiling-high stack of books that he had built as a screen in his office. If the office boy had been a famous English author, maybe nothing would have happened. And if the books he used to build that wall had been reviewed, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But the books used to build that wall never got out to his staff of readers or to the free-lance reviewers. So he was retired as editor emeritus.

With Osano, the management knew it was home free. Osano was right-handed all the way. He loved women, all sizes and shapes, any age. The smell of cunt turned him on like a junkie. He fucked broads as devotedly as a heroin addict taking a fix. If Osano didn’t get his piece of ass that day or at least a blow job, he’d get frantic. But he wasn’t an exhibitionist. He’d always lock his office door. Sometimes a bookish teenybopper. Other times a society broad who thought he was the greatest living American writer. Or a starving female novelist who needed some books to review to keep body and soul and ego together. He was shameless in using his leverage as editor, his fame as a world-renowned novelist and what proved to be the busiest bee in his bonnet, a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. He said it was the Nobel Prize that got the really intellectual ladies. And for the last three years he had mounted a furious campaign for the Nobel with the help of all his literary friends, he could show these ladies articles in classy quarterlies touting him for the prize.

Oddly enough Osano had no ego about his own physical charms-his personal magnetism. He dressed well, spent good money on clothes, yet it was trim he was not physically attractive. His face was all lopsided bone, and his eyes were a pale, sneaky green. But he discounted his vibrant aliveness that was magnetic to all people. Indeed, a great deal of his fame rested not on his literary achievement but on his personality, which included a quick, brilliant intelligence that was attractive to men as well as women.

But the women went crazy for him; bright college girls, well-read society matrons, Women’s Lib fighters who cursed him out and then tried to get him in the sack so they could have it on him, so they said, the, way men used to have it on women in Victorian days. One of his tricks was to address himself to women in his books.

I never liked his work, and I didn’t expect to like him. The work is the man. Except that it proved not to be true. After all, there are some compassionate doctors, curious teachers, honest lawyers, idealistic politicians, virtuous women, sane actors, wise writers. And so Osano, despite his fishwife style, the spite in his work, was in reality a great guy to hang out with and not too much of a pain in the ass to listen to, even when he talked about his writing.

Anyway, he had quite an empire as editor of the book review. Two secretaries. Twenty staff readers. And a great outdoors of free-lance critics from top-name authors to starving poets, unsuccessful novelists, college professors and jet-set intellectuals. He used them all and hated them all. And he ran the review like a lunatic.

Page one of the Sunday review is something an author kills for. Osano knew that. He got the first page automatically when he published a book, in all the book reviews in the country. But he hated most fiction writers, he was jealous of them. Or he would have a grudge against the publisher of the book. So he would get a biography of Napoleon or Catherine the Great written by a heavyweight college professor and put it on page one. Book and review usually were both equally unreadable, but Osano was happy. He had infuriated everybody.

The first time I ever saw Osano he lived up to all the literary party stories, all the gossip, all the public images he had ever created. He played the role of the great writer for me with a natural gusto. And he had the props to suit the legend.

I went out to the Hamptons, where Osano took a summer house, and found him ensconced (his word) like an old sultan. At fifty years of age, he had six kids from four different marriages and at that time had not gotten his fifth, sixth and terminal seventh notch. He had on long blue tennis pants and blue tennis jacket specially tailored to hide his bulging beer gut. His face was already craggily impressive, as befitted the next winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite his wicked green eyes, he could be naturally sweet. Today he was sweet. Since he was head of the most powerful Sunday literary review, everybody kissed his ass with the utmost devotion every time he published. He didn’t know I was out to kill him, because I was an unsuccessful writer with one flop novel published and the second coming hard. Sure, he’d written one big almost great novel. But the rest of his work was bullshit, and if Everyday Life let me, I’d show the world what this guy was really made of.

I wrote the article all right, and I caught him dead to rights. But Eddie Lancer turned it down. They wanted Osano to do a big political story, and they didn’t want him to get mad. So it was a day wasted. Except that it really wasn’t. Because two years later Osano called me up and offered me a job working for him as assistant on a new big literary review. Osano remembered me, had read the story the magazine killed, and he liked my guts, or so he said. He said it was because I was a good writer and I liked the same things about his work that he liked.

That first day we sat in his garden and watched his kids play tennis. I have to say right now he really loved his kids and he was perfect with them. Maybe because he was so much a child himself. Anyway, I got him talking about women and Women’s Lib and sex. And he threw in love with it. He was pretty funny. And though in his writings he was the great all-time left-winger, he could be pretty Texas chauvinistic. Talking about love, he said that once he fell in love with a girl he always stopped being jealous of his wife. Then he put on his big writer-statesman look and said, “No man is allowed to be jealous of more than one woman at a time– unless he’s Puerto Rican.” He felt he was allowed to make jokes about Puerto Ricans because his radical credentials were impeccable.

The housekeeper came out to yell at the children fighting for a game on the tennis court. She was a pretty bossy housekeeper and pretty snotty with the kids, as if she were their mother. She also was a handsome woman for her age, which was about Osano’s. For a moment I wondered. Especially when she gave us both a contemptuous look before she went back into the house.

I got him talking about women, which was easy. He took the cynic’s stance, which is always a great stance to take when you’re not crazy about some particular lady. He was very authoritative, as befitted a writer who had had more gossip written about him than any novelist since Hemingway.

“Listen, kid,” he said, “love is like the little red toy wagon you get for Christmas or your sixth birthday. It makes you deliriously happy and you just can’t leave it alone. But sooner or later the wheels come off. Then you leave it in a corner and forget it. Falling in love is great. Being in love is a disaster.”

Asking quietly and with the respect he thought due, I said, “What about women, do you think they feel the same way since they claim to think as men think?”

He flashed me a quick look of those surprisingly green eyes. He was on to my act. But it was OK. That was one of the great things about Osano even then. So he went on.

“Women’s Lib thinks we have power and control over their lives. In its way that’s as stupid as a guy’s thinking women are purer sexually than men. Women will fuck anybody, anytime, anyplace, except that they’re afraid of talk. Women’s Lib bullshits about the fraction of a percent of men who have power. Those guys are not men. They’re not even human. That’s whose place women have to take. They don’t know you have to kill to get there.”

I interrupted. “You’re one of those men.”

Osano nodded. “Yeah. And metaphorically I had to kill. What women will get is what men have. Which is shit, ulcers and heart attacks. Plus a lot of shitty jobs men hate to do. But I’m all for equality. I’ll kill those cunts then. Listen, I’m paying alimony to four healthy broads who can earn their own living. All because they are not equal.”

“Your affairs with women are almost as famous as your books,” I said. “How do you handle women?”

Osano grinned at me. “You’re not interested in how I write books.”

I said smooth as shit, “Your books speak for themselves.”

He gave me another long, thoughtful look, then went on.

“Never treat a woman too good. Women stick with drunks, gamblers, whoremasters and even beater-uppers. They can’t stand a sweet, good guy. Do you know why? They get bored. They don’t want to be happy. It’s boring.”

“Do you believe in being faithful?” I asked.

“Sure I do. Listen, being in love means making another person the central thing in your life. When that no longer exists, it’s not love anymore. It’s something else. Maybe something better, more practical. Love is basically an unfair, unstable, paranoid relationship. Men are worse than women at it. A woman can screw a hundred times, not feel like it once and he holds it against her. But it’s true that the first step downhill is when she doesn’t want to fuck when you do. Listen, there’s no excuse. Never mind the headaches. No shit. Once a broad starts turning you down in bed it’s all over. Start looking for your backer-upper. Never take an excuse.”

I asked him about orgasmic women who could have ten orgasms to a man’s one. He waved it aside.

“Women don’t come like men,” he said. “For them it’s a little phitt. Not like a guy’s. Guys really blow their brains with their nuts. Freud was close, but he missed it. Men really fuck. Women don’t.”

Well, he didn’t really believe that all the way, but I knew what he was saying. His style was exaggeration.

I switched him on to helicopters. He had this theory that in twenty years the auto would be obsolete, that everybody would have his own chopper. All it needed were some technical improvements. As when auto power steering and brakes enabled every woman to drive and put railroads out of business. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s obvious.” What was also obvious was that on this particular morning he was wound up on women. So he switched back.

“The young guys today are on the right track. They say to their broads, sure you can fuck anybody you want, I’ll still love you. They are so full of shit. Listen, any guy who knows a broad will fuck strangers thinks of her as a geek.”

I was offended by the comparison and astonished. The great Osano, whose writings women were particularly crazy about. The most brilliant mind in American letters. The most open mind. Either I was missing his point or he was full of shit. I saw his housekeeper slapping some of the little kids around. I said, “You sure give your housekeeper a lot of authority.”

Now he was so sharp that he caught everything without even trying. He knew exactly how I felt about what he’d been saying. Maybe that’s why he told me the truth, the whole story about his housekeeper. Just to needle me.

“She was my first wife,” he said. “She’s the mother of my three oldest kids.”

He laughed when he saw the look on my face. “No, I don’t screw her. And we get along fine. I pay her a damn good salary but no alimony. She’s the one wife I don’t pay alimony.”

He obviously wanted me to ask why not. I did.

“Because when I wrote my first book and got rich, it went to her head. She was jealous of me being famous and getting a lot of attention. She wanted attention. So some young guy, one of the admirers of my work, gave her the business, and she fell for it. She was five years older than him, but she was always a sexy broad. She really fell in love, I’ll give her that. What she didn’t realize was that he was fucking her just to put the great novelist Osano down. So she asked for a divorce and half the money my book made. That was OK with me. She wanted the kids, but I didn’t want my kids around that creep she was in love with. So I told her when she married the guy, she’d get the kids. Well, he fucked her brains out for two years and blew all her dough. She forgot about her kids. She was a young broad again. Sure, she came to see them a lot, but she was busy traveling all over the world on my dough and chewing the young guy’s cock to shreds. When the money runs out, he takes off. She comes back and wants the kids. But by now she has no case. She deserted them for two years. She puts on a big scene how she can’t live without them. So I gave her a job as a housekeeper.”

I said coolly, “That’s maybe the worst thing I ever heard of.”

The startling green eyes flashed for a moment. But then he smiled and said musingly, “I guess it looks that way. But put yourself in my place. I love having my kids around me. How come the father never gets the kids? What kind of bullshit is that? Do you know men never recover from that bullshit? The wife gets tired of being married, so men lose their kids. And men stand still for it because they got their balls chopped off. Well, I didn’t stand still for it. I kept the kids and got married again right away. And when that wife started pulling bullshit, I got rid of her too.”

I said quietly, “How about her children? How do they feel about their mother being a housekeeper?”

The green eyes flashed again. “Oh, shit. I don’t put her down. She’s only my housekeeper between wives; otherwise she’s more like a free-lance governess. She has her own house. I’m her landlord. Listen, I thought of giving her more dough, of buying her a house and making her independent. But she’s a dizzy cunt like all of them. She’d become obnoxsous again. She’d go down the drain. Which is OK, but she’d make more trouble for me and I’ve got books to write. So I control her with money. She has a damn good living from me. And she knows if she gets out of line, she’s out on her ass and scratching to make a living. It works out.”

“Could it be you’re antiwoman?” I said, smiling.

He laughed. “You say that to a guy who’s been married four times, he doesn’t even have to deny it. But OK. I’m really anti-Women’s Lib in one sense. Because right now most women are just full of shit. Maybe it’s not their fault. Listen, any broad who doesn’t want to fuck two days in a row, get rid of her. Unless she has to go to the hospital in an ambulance. Even if she has forty stitches in her cunt. I don’t care whether she enjoys it or not. Sometimes I don’t enjoy it and I do it and I have to get a hard-on. That’s your job if you love somebody, you gotta fuck their brains out. Jesus, I don’t know why I keep getting married. I swore I wouldn’t do it anymore, but I always get conned. I always believe it’s not getting married that makes them unhappy. They are so full of shit.”

“With the proper conditioning don’t you think women can become equal?”

Osano shook his head. “They forget they age worse than men. A guy at fifty can get a lot of young broads. A broad of fifty finds it rough. Sure, when they get political power, they’ll pass a law so that men of forty or fifty get operated on to look older and equal things out. That’s how democracy works. That’s full of shit too. Listen, women have it good. They shouldn’t complain.

“In the old days they didn’t know they had union rights. They couldn’t be fired no matter how lousy a job they did. Lousy in bed. Lousy in the kitchen. And who ever had fun with his wife after a couple of years? And if he did, she was a cunt. And now they want to be equal. Let me at ‘em. I’ll give them equality. I know what I’m talking about; I've been married four times. And it cost me every penny I made.”

Osano really hated women that day. A month later I picked up the morning paper and read that he’d married for the fifth time. An actress in a little theater group. She was half his age. So much for the common sense of America ’s foremost man of letters. I never dreamed that I would be working for him someday and be with him until he died, miraculously a bachelor but still in love with a woman, with women.

I caught it that day through all the bullshit. He was crazy about women. That was his weakness, and he hated it.