How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

A Remington 22 That Belonged to Chester Himes

BOUBA CAME BACK from the store. Except for some dehydrated potatoes and rotten onions, we had run out of provisions. Bouba fell for the Pellatt’s special: a pork shoulder at $1.09 a pound, fresh green onions at $2.39, six boxes of Campbell’s Soup at 29 cents each, dish soap (we were in dire need) for $1.87, a carton of creamy margarine (disgusting) for 59 cents and, at the regular price, a kilo of iodized salt, a 25-pound sack of Uncle Ben’s rice and three cans of spaghetti.

Bouba is making chicken and rice with peanut sauce. The smell is inspirational. I sit down at the typewriter in hopes of forcing something out of a Remington 22 that actually saw Joan Baez in the flesh. I bought the machine at a junkshop on Ontario Street that sells pedigreed typewriters. Old machines. The guy sells them to young writers. Who else but a young writer would be foolish enough to go for such an obviously commercial ploy? Who else would consider himself a writer just because he owned a machine that belonged to Chester Himes, James Baldwin or Henry Miller? This guy pitches his machines according to the kind of book you want to write. If it’s a paranoid book, he’ll sell you the schizophrenic machine that belonged to Tennessee Williams. If you’re looking for a suicide machine, there’s Mishima’s old model. For those in the family saga game, Joyce Carol Oates’s Olivetti will do the trick. Want to write a bestseller? Step right up and purchase the solid gold heap that Puzo owned. And if you’re interested in the tangled destinies of a young Southerner and his neighbors (a Jewish genius and a disturbed young Polish girl), take Bill Styron’s Corona. How can one choose among this embarrassment of riches? It’s like Ali Baba’s cave for a young writer. The junkman’s voice left me no repose, praising Salinger’s discreet machine, Gabrielle Roy’s tin one, the prudish machine of Virginia Woolf, etc. Here’s the terrorist machine that the Black Panthers used to type their communiqués — it’s a portable, of course. The choice boiled down to Hemingway’s old Underwood and the Remington 22 that belonged to Chester Himes. I took Himes.

I’VE ALWAYS HAD this old shoebox full of notebooks, with a journal I’ve kept on and off for three years, and stacks of cards where I note down sentences that come to me, sketches, bits of dialogue overheard in bars, short descriptions of chance encounters, objects and animals, thoughts on jazz, girls, hunger — that sort of thing. A kind of autobiographical grab-bag where the beginning of a novel, an unfinished journal and a missed appointment are all thrown together. What can be saved from this amorphous mass? Burning it is the only reasonable thing to do. I dry out the sink, set the box in it and prepare for immolation. (“Ta ha. It was not to distress you that we revealed the Koran.” Sura XX, 1.)

THE CHICKEN and rice is ready. I set the table. Bouba puts on a Coleman Hawkins record (Blues for Yolande) that he cut with Ben Webster.

“You writing, man?”

“I’m trying.”

“What’s it about?”

Bouba never reads what I write. He likes to talk about it, build a project, discuss a subject, but reading a manuscript — never. He abhors being presented with a fait accompli.

“I think I’m onto something big.”

“Great!” Bouba looks happy. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s a novel.”

“No kidding. A novel? A real novel?”

“Well. a short novel. Not a real novel — more like fantasies.”

“Knock it off, man. Leave that number to the disabused, used-up critics who don’t have any more juice. A novel’s a novel. Short or long. Tell me about it.”

“There’s nothing to it. It’s about a guy, a black, who lives with a friend who spends all day lying on a couch meditating, reading the Koran, listening to jazz and screwing when it comes along.”

“Does it come along?”

“I suppose it does.”

“Hey, man, I like that, I really do. I like the idea of the guy who doesn’t do fuck-all.”

“Of course you do. You’re my model.”

“Writers! You can’t trust them, they’re all bastards!”

Bouba lets loose a big jazz laugh.

“Then what happens?”

“Nothing in particular.”

Hawkins’s sax plays “Body and Soul” (1939).