Adios, Scheherazade

There. Is that happening in the real world, I mean in your real world? Pinch yourself. Is that headline at the same level of reality as the feeling when you pinched yourself? Of course not.

The Book Review. That’s where it begins to get to me. Starting right on page 2, where there’s a cartoon of a middle-aged man at a typewriter and a muse has appeared with miniskirt and boots and is about to play the lyre for him, and the man is saying, “Are you sure you have the right man, miss? My stuff is pretty square.” It’s signed Interlandi, and what did I ever do to Interlandi?

Or how about page 4, where there’s a review of a book called Writers at Work, which is a series of interviews with famous writers like Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, and the review is mostly about the characteristics of the writer in the twentieth century, and I keep trying to find myself in there. Is that me, fourth row, third from the left, it looks like I’ve got a smudge on my nose?

I keep doing phantom interviews with myself. I whisper my answers, declaiming on life and love and art and my writing methods.

But I’ve saved the best for last. Way in the back of the Book Review, page 76, there’s a review of a book of photographs of Africa called African Image. Some of the photographs are shown, and do you know what is the main central photograph taking up almost one-third of the whole page? A bunch of female spades with their tits hanging out. Right. In the Book Review of the New York Sunday Times, November 26,1967. Not 1867, and not the National Geographic.

So I guess I am in there after all. No matter what the hard news up front, no matter what the self-image we’re all pushing this week, back in the back of the Book Review there am I. All the grubby old attitudes are still alive, all the sneaky little scatological sniggering nastinesses, all the little-boy-pulling-his-wee-wee dirtiness is still inside your head and mine and the head of the New York Times, and it always will be. Because if those had been white women they would not have run the picture.

Now I know why that hooker wouldn’t take off her bra.

Why do I say that’s me back there, weeping and sniggering on those dusky boobs? Because it is out of the adolescent garbage in men’s heads that I have made my living for almost three years. The adolescent garbage in my head feeding the adolescent garbage in their heads, a real meeting of minds, a real communion, so when you come right down to it what I have been doing is closer to the definition of art than anybody in that jazz section will ever get in his entire life.

Phooey. That’s garbage, too. I have never risen above the material any more than my readers have, and if you can’t rise above the material you ain’t an artist. And it’s tough to rise above quicksand.

Only now it’s tough to get down into the quicksand. Am I going to write this Paul chapter or what am I going to do?

I’m going to wander around for fifteen pages, same as ever. Same as before Betsy left, in that way her leaving made no change at all.

You know what I’ve been thinking about? The time Betsy and I got married, the day after the day her father took me out to the gas station. I wrote about that earlier, in the part I threw away. “How do I burn this fucking place down?” Remember?

You thought that was a gag. I swear to God, it’s the absolute truth. I know I did it like a joke, making it the chapter ending and all, but that was just because fifteen pages worked out to there, I was planning on telling about the wedding then and everything. Also, I must admit I have enough respect for a punch fine to want to give it some breathing room if I can, and I know damn well “How do I burn this fucking place down?” is a grade A punch line. About the only real punch line of my life, and I suppose it’s meaningful that it was said by somebody else.

Anyway, when I finally convinced Betsy’s father that I didn’t know how to burn down his gas station, he wanted no more to do with me, and in fact he didn’t even come to the wedding. He pretended to have an ulcer attack, and Betsy believed it, but I knew the truth. He was disgusted with me, he was gaining a son who combined higher education with abysmal ignorance, and he couldn’t see the point of it.