Adios, Scheherazade

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.

1

Roscoe Bardle was tired. He sat at the dressing table removing his makeup, seeing beneath the cheery red and white clown face his own lined and tired face gradually emerging. Around him was a hum of activity as the other clowns changed out of their costumes and faces into the drab appearance of the everyday world, but Roscoe felt as though he sat in a cocoon of silence. Like a glass bell placed around him, keeping out all the noise, all the life, all the camaraderie, but at the same time permitting him to see what he was missing.

Why was he so tired? He knew the reason: Margo.

They should never have married, that was the whole thing in a nutshell. A clown and a bareback rider, the combination was too foolish even to consider. Margo didn’t need a clown, she needed a lion tamer.