Step by Step

If i remember correctly...

I’ve been a professional writer for fifty years, and, with the exception of four instructional books for writers, virtually everything I’ve written has been fiction. (I did turn out several pseudonymous works of purported nonfiction, ostensibly psychological case studies, but they were entirely fabricated, fiction in sheep’s clothing.)

So this is a departure for me. In the pages that follow, everything I’ve written is as it happened. I realize that this no longer seems to be a requirement in memoirs, that some memoirists apparently feel free to let their imaginations improve on reality, but when I want to use my imagination I sit down and write a novel. A memoir, it seems to me, should confine itself to what the author remembers.

Clearly, this doesn’t matter to everyone. When I expressed contempt for one such imaginative memoirist, a contempt shared by Oprah Winfrey, my daughter Amy couldn’t understand why I was getting so exercised. “Maybe he made some of it up,” she said, “but I have to say I found it very entertaining.”

Right. And that Hitler? Say what you want about him, but the guy was one hell of a dancer.

So I’ve stayed with what I remember, and have avoided doing anything to improve it. My father couldn’t tell a story without exaggerating, aiming to make a better story of it. That always bothered me, and I’ve always erred in the other direction, hewing to the line of the literal truth.

As best I can.

Memory, you see, is an artful Ananias. I’ve become deeply suspicious of those cases in which a suppressed memory, recovered decades after the fact with the aid of a brilliant hypnotherapist, has resulted in an indictment for child molestation. Even conscious memories, I’ve found, are overly cooperative witnesses, quick to tell you what you want to hear. How much trust can one place in those wrestled from the unconscious? (And isn’t it remarkable how the same therapists keep on dredging such memories from one client after another?)

Sometimes my memory’s a liar. Sometimes it’s merely asleep at the switch. I’m not inclined to trust it unequivocally, and yet I have to if I’m going to write about early times. Whom else can I consult?

I tell the story, for example, of a walk I took in 1949 with two friends, Jerry Carp and Rett Goldberg. At least I’m pretty sure those were my two companions. That’s how I remember the incident.

I can’t ask Rett. He’s gone, dead of cancer for more than a decade now. I could ask Jerry, we’re still friends, but would he remember? And if he did, why should his recollection be any more reliable than my own?

And does it really matter who accompanied me on that walk downtown?

Here’s an example of dueling memories. In 1960, I was one of half a dozen people who established a weekly poker game for small stakes. Most of us were writers, honing our skills and earning a marginal living writing paperback trash. And one of us came up with the idea of combining the two activities, to our mutual profit.

Suppose, say, half a dozen poker-playing writers assembled at someone’s home. Five would play cards, while the sixth went off to another room and wrote a chapter of a novel. When he was done, he’d return to the game and another player would go write a chapter.

And so on.

Twice around the circuit would give us twelve chapters, and that’s all we needed. By dawn, if all went well, we’d have a book. We’d present that book to our agent, Henry Morrison, a poker player himself, and he’d peddle it to our publisher, and we’d divvy up the proceeds. It would be the first poker game in history where everybody would come out ahead.

What could possibly go wrong?

Six of us assembled at Mel Fox’s house — Mel, Don Westlake, Dave Foley, Hal Dresner, Byrne Fone, and myself. Somebody shuffled the cards, somebody dealt them out. And one of us went upstairs and sat down at the typewriter.

I don’t remember who went first, but I do know that Hal, Don, Dave, and I were the first four, and each of us wrote our chapters with all deliberate speed and put them out of our mind upon returning to the game. Then it was Byrne Fone’s turn, and he had a request; he was not that sanguine about his ability to stay awake all night, and not much of a cardplayer anyway, so how would it be if he wrote both of his chapters at one stretch — and then went home?

We all agreed that would be fine, and he went upstairs and got to work. And it didn’t take very long at all before he came downstairs, with not one but two chapters completed in record time. We wished him the joy of the evening — though it was probably morning by then, if you want to be technical about it — and he headed home while Mel, our host, climbed the stairs to take his turn.

And time stopped.

It was hours later when Mel finally staggered downstairs and the rest of us discovered the problem. Byrne, concerned that he’d fall asleep at the poker table or the typewriter, had tried to stack the deck by ingesting a handful of amphetamine. That almost certainly had a good deal to do with the pace at which he knocked off his assignment, but it also scrambled his brain beyond recognition, and the two chapters he’d produced were gibberish. Grammatically correct gibberish, perfectly typed gibberish, even highly literate gibberish — but the story got lost completely, and nothing on the page made a particle of sense.

That was only half the problem, and if Hal or Don or Dave or I had been scheduled to follow Byrne, all would have been well; the four of us were old hands in the world of soft-core porn, and would have quickly concluded that Byrne’s chapters would be fine for lining the parakeet’s cage but for nothing else, and would have tossed them and picked up where he’d started.

But Mel was the group’s neophyte, and it never occurred to him to question the work of a veteran like Byrne. So what he tried to do was write the next chapter, and do so in a way that would make logical sense, and all of that was plainly impossible. Which is why it took him hours, and why he ultimately came downstairs looking as though he’d sustained a massive concussion.

That was pretty much the end of that. Dawn had broken, and so had our spirits. We cashed in our chips and went home.

Years passed. Several of them, during which time Dave Foley came down with leukemia and died at a lamentably early age. And at some point we disinterred the partial manuscript, which we’d taken to referring to as Lust Fuck; we shit-canned Byrne’s chapters and Mel’s heroic attempt at their sequel, and Don and Hal and I took turns adding chapters to what was left until we had, if not a book, at least a book-length manuscript. We gave it to Henry, who sold it to our regular publisher, Bill Hamling, and every cent of the proceeds — $1000? $1200? — went to Sandy Foley, Dave’s widow. It was our understanding that Scott Meredith, Henry’s employer, didn’t even take a commission on this particular sale, and that, I have to tell you, is the single most implausible element in the whole affair.

All these years later, I recall nothing whatsoever about the plot or characters of Lust Fuck. The book must have been published, but I never saw a copy, and never learned what title it bore or under whose pen name it appeared. Were I to read it now — and I must say I hope that never happens — I doubt it would ring the faintest of bells.

While the book as a collection of ill-chosen words has essentially vanished without a trace, it lives on in legend. As an experiment in literary collaboration, Lust Fuck was an abject failure. But its anecdotal value was more than adequate compensation for all concerned. I don’t know how many times I told the tale over the years, and so did Don, and so did Hal.

But none of us got anywhere near as much mileage out of the story as another fellow. He, like Henry, worked as an agent for Scott Meredith. He too was a frequent player at our weekly poker sessions. And, although none of us knew it at the time, he was supplementing his agent’s salary by writing pseudonymous books for Hamling. (He may have kept this last fact a secret to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.)

I won’t embarrass him by telling you his name. He’s a fine fellow, an able literary agent, and on balance certainly one of the world’s good guys.

And, I have to say, a superb raconteur. He tells the story of Lust Fuck in great detail and with great enthusiasm. In his version, he was one of our number at Mel Fox’s house in Queens, an avid participant at the poker table downstairs, an able hack upstairs at the typewriter.

But, see, he wasn’t there. He couldn’t have been, for Christ’s sake. We didn’t even know at the time that the sonofabitch was a writer.

Did he simply figure it made a better story if he put himself into it? Or, as one theory about OJ holds, had he told the story his way so many times that he came to believe it himself? I don’t know and I don’t care. I know he wasn’t there. He may or may not know he wasn’t there. At this stage — indeed, at any stage — what earthly difference does it make?

Ah, well.

I’ve had to make a particular effort to avoid overusing such phrases as If I remember correctly and To the best of my recollection and As I recall. The reader can take them to be an unvoiced preamble to every incident I recount.

So: Everything that follows is the truth, as far as I can tell.

There’s one other thing I ought to tell you, although you’d probably figure it out for yourself in short order.

This book is self-indulgent.

It seems to me that comes with the territory. How could a memoir be other than an exercise in self-indulgence? One writes it sustained by the assumption that a record of one’s own experiences and observations will be of interest to other people. This assumption often proves to be unwarranted, which may explain why such a high percentage of memoirs are self-published, or not published at all.

For my part, I found that the only way I could manage to write this book was to let it be every bit as self-indulgent as it wanted to be. It is, to be sure, a record of my experiences as a walker; if the book itself were a walker, it would be an ambler and a rambler, not terribly intent on racing to the finish line, and inclined to turn off on any path that looks inviting.

Remembering, I’ve discovered, is curious work. The memory is a house in which there are many mansions; enter into one of them, and a hidden door can spring open, luring you into a portion of the past you haven’t visited in years. But there it is, and you slip inside, and another door opens...