Adios, Scheherazade

Well, there are several ways. One of the several ways is to say everything twice, like I’m doing now. What I’m doing now is saying everything twice, which is one of the ways we get fifteen pages out of practically no action at all, plus flashback.

And this is another.

One-sentence paragraphs.

One-phrase paragraphs.

They fill up the page.

They fill it up something beautiful.

I know a guy.

This guy writes sex books.

Every sex book he writes is full of sex scenes like the following.

“Deeper!” she cried.

“Deeper!”

“Deeper!”

He thrust.

And again.

And again.

All of which gets you to the bottom of the page in jigtime.

It fills up the page and requires no effort.

Also, if you are writing a paragraph and you see that that paragraph is going to come to an end way over at the right end of the line, you add a few more words, it doesn’t matter what words, just enough to make the paragraph round the corner.

And get you another line.

These are all trade secrets now, so pay attention. This is better than answering one of those ads in the crappy magazines that says EARN BIG MONEY WRITING.

I think I’ll start the Infamous Writers School. How to write soft-core pornography for no fun and little profit.

Make big money. Graduates of our system earn ten grand a year and have a tendency to feel they are becoming invisible.

Another way to get fifteen pages out of a paucity of plot is the interior monologue, also known as Good Christ He’s Thinking Again. Characters in sex novels think all the time. They stand around with their fingers in their noses and think for pages on end. Sometimes they think about what to do next, and sometimes they think about what they’ve just done, and sometimes they think about something somebody else has done, and sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what they’re thinking about.

When I woke up Friday and Betsy was gone and Elfreda was gone, I didn’t know what anybody was thinking about. That’s the way it happened in real life, you know. I wasn’t coming home from anywhere on the train. Pete and I got soused Thanksgiving, last Thursday, after dinner we really tied one on, the two of us. Betsy was understanding and Ann was disapproving. Ann disappointed me, I figured she’d be understanding too, but she wasn’t. But Betsy was. She said I’d been working very hard, I heard her tell Ann that, and that I needed a break of some kind, a breather. And that Pete probably did, too. To which Ann remained disapproving, but neither Pete nor I gave a shit.

It was long after midnight when they left, Ann driving, and Betsy poured me into the rack, which I very vaguely remember. She’d been feeling very lovey since the fight was over and we made up, so she began trying to arouse me, kissing me and playing with Oscar and so on, but I was too totally out of it and I gradually drifted off to sleep with the light and half a hard-on.

Oscar is a private joke. Apparently I’m telling everything now, I’m boiling the whole thing out, so what the hell. Oscar is a private joke from early on in our relationship. I said one time that I was there to give her the award for being the best lay on the North American continent, which at the time I believed, and of course the award was an Oscar, so from then on we called my cock Oscar, which I grant you is foolish but it’s the little foolish pleasantries like that that make life worth living, and all the serious horseshit is what makes life not worth living.

Yeah, we had a name for her witsy bitsy private part, too, but I can’t mention it as it is the name of a well-known real-life motion picture star. You get the idea, we’re giving the Oscar to...

Yeah, well, so much for that.

I go to sleep Thursday night with Betsy’s hand wrapped around Oscar and I wake up Friday morning and she’s gone. Friday noon. And she’s gone.

I wandered around the house for a long time before I realized something was wrong. In the first place, I had a hangover, a really beautiful hangover, with the kind of headache I think of as cold stone. There are different kinds of headaches in this world, you know. There are brown wax headaches, which usually accompany clogged sinuses or a stuffy nose. There are thin wire headaches which come from eyestrain. There are green cotton headaches when you’re constipated. And there are cold stone headaches when your brain is loose inside your skull and grating against the bone. Those are the worst, and that’s what I had Friday morning, which is one reason I didn’t think much about Betsy’s absence, except to feel sorry for myself that I had to make my own instant coffee and pour my own orange juice, which was all the breakfast I could even think about.