Adios, Scheherazade

I’ve never done a book in less than eight days, and only once did I do one that fast. I know Rod did a book once in five days, and there’s a couple other people doing them that fast all the time, but I’m not one of them.

You know what sticks in my craw? Rod sticks in my craw. That bastard did seven of these books, seven of them, and I’ve done twenty-eight, and he still gets two hundred bucks every time I write a book. Why can’t I have my own pen name? How come he rates? Seven lousy books is all he ever did, he’s never done another one and he never will. And look at me.

I’m just in a bad mood today, that’s all. Sitting here day after day, not getting anything done, that would put anybody in a bad mood. Not to speak of yesterday, and I’m not going to speak of yesterday.

I’ll speak of Thursday, though. After I finished my non-work on Thursday, about twelve-thirty, I went and watched football on television, Rams versus the Lions, which the Rams won, 31-7. During the halftime Betsy and Fred came back, Fred bitchy and crying because she was overtired, Betsy bitchy and not quite crying because it’s raining out and the traffic was crappy and all, and I wanted us to keep the good feeling toward each other we’d gotten to the day before that, so when she put Fred to bed I put her to bed, and we screwed, and we had fun, and it was almost like being back in the dorm at college, the door locked, middle of the day, sneaking her in and screwing and horsing around, giggling, keeping the giggles down then because it was illegal for her to be in the dorm, keeping the giggles down now because we didn’t want to wake Fred. But it finally had to come to an end, and she went to the kitchen to get to work on Thanksgiving dinner, and I went back to the living room and watched the last quarter of the game, and then switched over to Channel 4 and watched college ball awhile, Oklahoma against Nebraska. I don’t know how that came out because about twenty after three Pete and Ann showed up. I knew Betsy didn’t want me watching football on television with guests in the house, which is a perfect way to make me hate the guests, but because I was going all out to be a good guy and have Betsy and me continue with our good relations I turned off the set and made everybody a drink, and Ann went out to the kitchen with Betsy, and Pete and I sat around the living room and shop-talked.

Pete used to do these, you know. Not this, nobody’s ever done anything like this before in the history of the world. I mean the sex books. Rod knew him through the agency, and I met him at Rod’s apartment one time shortly after we moved down from Albany, and we kind of hit it off. Dick is the only one of us who’s a native New Yorker, so the rest of us are sort of limited in our social circles to people we manage to meet now, so just about everybody I know in New York is a writer. There’s a couple make-believe writers like me, and the rest are all writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick.

Pete Falkus, his name is. He’s got a ghost, too, the way Rod has me. He’s a magazine writer now, Pete, not a fiction writer at all. I think he never wanted to write fiction in particular, he’s the kind of guy picks up the New York Times and reads it and gets seven great ideas for articles that he can sell to Ladies’ Home Journal and True and TV Guide. Back at the beginning he was selling articles to crappier magazines, I mean lower-paying magazines, and Lance was his agent, so when this sex novel market opened up Lance looked around at all his steady-producing low-money boys and got most of them to doing sex novels, including Pete.

I wish I’d been in this at the beginning. If I had, I’d be one of the guys with a ghost now.

The hell I would. Pete was in this at the beginning because he was a writer, and he’s got a ghost now because he’s writing other things for more money. And the same with Rod. I was never a writer, and never thought I was a writer, and never even wished I was a writer until I was already neck deep in this shit. And if I did all of a sudden get a ghost, like a sublet, a subghost, what would I do? To what brilliant new ends would I turn this here typewriter?

I think I’ve been answering that question for the last several days. When I don’t do sex novels I do long boring descriptions of Thanksgiving Day dinners with Pete and Ann Falkus. Except I’m not going to. All I’m going to say is that Ann Falkus confuses me, because I admire her and I don’t lust after her. I’ve been known to lust after female chimpanzees, I have never been accused of a great selectivity in my lusts, but I don’t lust after Ann Falkus.

And it isn’t that she’s a beast. She’s very plain-looking, and she doesn’t do much with makeup, but she’s always very neat, and she’s slender, and she’s got a pretty good shape. And she has nice hair, short, worn close to her head in a kind of helmet design.