Adios, Scheherazade

This typewriter uses the smaller size type, elite type, and five thousand words in elite type runs fifteen pages. My manuscripts are exactly one hundred fifty pages long, my chapters exactly fifteen pages long. I do one chapter a day for ten consecutive days, and there’s another book. I was a pretty fast typist before I started doing these books, and I’m a faster typist now, and after the first few books the formula made things very easy for me, so I work an average of four hours a day when I’m doing a book, for a total of forty hours. My pay is nine hundred dollars, and that’s twenty-two dollars and fifty cents an hour.

Where are you going to make twenty-two dollars and fifty cents an hour?

I was making two dollars an hour at Capital City Beer Distributors, and I was working forty hours a week. Riding around in the truck with Jock Dench, rolling the kegs into the bars, carrying the cases of bottled beer and canned beer.

This is the life, you’ve got to admit it. Twenty days a month I don’t have to do anything at all. Ten days a month I do some typing, four hours a day. That’s a soft life.

So why am I screwing it up?

It’s what Rod said: “Nobody can do this shit forever.”

You look at the typewriter one day, and you say to yourself, I don’t want to write about people fucking. I don’t want to write about people going down on each other, I don’t want to write about people fingering themselves and each other, I don’t want to write all those deadly dull preliminary conversations (“I just arrived in New York today,” she said, laughing self-consciously), I don’t want to write pointless stories about pointless people who live in a gray limbo of baroque sex and paper-thin characterization, I don’t want to do this shit any more.

Then you’re in trouble. You do that and you’re in trouble. Do you want to know why you’re in trouble?

Because where are you going to go, clown? If you don’t write these stinking sex novels what are you going to do? You know and I know, Ed, that you cannot, you cannot, you cannot take your wife and baby and move back to Albany and live in your mother’s house again and get your old job back at Capital City Beer Distributors. And you know and I know, Ed, that you cannot do anything else either. You were an English major in college, you studied American Lit, you could have learned to be a refrigerator repairman or a heavy equipment operator but you had to go in for American Lit, you nonsurvival type you, and what are you gonna do now?

I was going to teach. I was planning to go on to graduate school and get my master’s and then teach, preferably at the college level. But the problem was money. Well, money and influence and luck and a lot of other things.

My mother is a waitress, currently at Limurges Restaurant on North Pearl Street in Albany, New York, capital of the Empire State. My father, Hubert Topliss, Army PR man, died in a jeep accident in Hawaii on April 25th, 1944. My stepfather, Ralph Harsch, disappeared toward the end of March 1946, shortly after the birth of my sisters. The family has not exactly been rolling in wealth in the last several years. So that’s one problem.

Another problem is, I picked a college without a graduate school. If I’d gone to a college that had its own graduate school I might have been able to suck around some teacher and wind up with a grant or an assistantship or some damn thing and make it into graduate school that way, but by having been dumb enough to go to a college without a graduate school I had no influence anywhere. Also my marks were not exceptional. They were good, somewhere around a B-minus average, but that isn’t good enough to have anybody put you through graduate school for free.

Actually, my having gone to Monequois College was not entirely the result of stupidity. Being part of the state university, it was almost tuition free, and there were various assistances open to indigent students, so it was possible for me to go to Monequois College, where on the other hand it would not have been possible for me to go, for instance, to Harvard.

So there I was, I graduated from college and I knocked up this girl. I married her, being as noble as I was stupid, and then I had two going on three mouths to feed, and no connections at a graduate school, and no money, and forget it. So I wound up in my home town, Albany, at my mother’s house, and working for Capital City Beer Distributors. Saving eleven or twelve cents a week toward graduate school.