Adios, Scheherazade

Rod has a new place now, on 9th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. It’s a five-room apartment in a prewar building, fourth floor, windows facing the street. He has a living room, very large, a small galley kitchen, a small dining room, and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms, the one I’m in right now, is set up as an office, with a sofa bed so it can be converted into a guest room. It has a nice view of 9th Street, a huge desk, and all in all is a better office than I have out at the house, but frankly I’d rather be at the house.

Rod is there now. I told him my time problem, how I was failing to make the deadline, so he offered to take the train out to the house, see if Birge and Johnny were still hanging around, and try to get a few essentials for me. Like a toothbrush and some clean underwear and my usable first chapter and the Buick. It sounds like a real friendly thing he’s doing, going out there like that, and I’m sure it is, but also I believe he’s intrigued by the thought of Birge and Johnny, a couple of real-life heavies, people who beat up people — they’ve done it before, beaten people up and put them in the hospital, I’m not scared for no reason at all — people who buy stolen goods and transport them to New York in truckloads of Christmas trees, people on the fringe of the law, tough nasty mean men, the kind of men he writes about in his spy series with Silver Stripe. I think he wants to see them for himself and compare the real version with the version he makes up.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the gesture, it is a friendly thing he’s doing, putting me up, going out to the Island for me, but I still think this other thing is part of it.

I’m just very cynical today, that’s all. If I sound like I’m putting Rod down, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to. I’ll try not to.

Anyway, I got about four hours’ sleep in here, getting up a little before noon, and Rod and I went over to a place on 6th Avenue and had breakfast, and then he went up to Penn Station to take the train out to the Island, and I came back here and started to work. Did one page about Beth and went all to hell with myself.

How can I show this garbage to Rod?

Can I stop it? Can I pull this sheet of paper out and start page 17 again? I’d love to, I’d love to try it, but I know it won’t work, I know I can’t stop till I’ve got it all said.

Got what all said? For the love of God, what am I saying here? Nothing, not a damn thing. How I’ve filled all these pages I don’t know, because there’s nothing inside me to be said, nothing to be brought out, nothing there at all. I m an empty attic, squirrels live in me.

It’s funny, but I’ve always been fascinated by books without content. Like the phone book, for instance. How big and fat, and there isn’t a damn thing in it. You know what I mean. No thought in it, nothing happening.

The Sears Roebuck catalog, there’s another. Huge book, fat, monstrous, full of things, full of everything, full of nothing.

Like, take a look at this bookcase here, on the left side of this desk. It’s full of stuff like that, it’s got a ton of the stuff. Manhattan phone book. Manhattan classified yellow pages phone book. Sears Roebuck catalog. Roget’s Thesaurus. Official Guide New York World’s Fair 1964–1965. Dictionary. Five-language dictionary giving words in English, French, Italian, German and Russian. The Complete Street Guide to New York. Washington, D.C., classified yellow pages phone book. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and Mencken’s Dictionary of Quotations, all of which are bits and snippets from real books, like cutting fingers off dead men and throwing them in a box and when the box is full you shut the lid and put a hat on it and call it George Spelvin and claim it’s a man.

Rod uses all this stuff, of course. What he writes isn’t books, it’s carnivals. He writes well-lit night entertainments, constructed out of muslin and paint and Roget’s Thesaurus and the five-language dictionary and the Sears Roebuck catalog. He writes black-light rides where the tableaux are spies shooting each other with rifles from the Sears Roebuck catalog in front of addresses from the Manhattan and Washington yellow pages. And the amazing thing is, because God damn him and God damn me twice, my friend and mentor whom I envy so badly I could bite my tongue off in vexation is a writer, a writer writer writer, and because that’s what he is the books are good, they’re fun, they have more life than he puts into them, the sum is greater than the parts.

It’s like those two-color reproduction systems where they only use like yellow and blue, but the eye sees red and green and all sorts of stuff. They aren’t there, but they are.