And along came Rod Cox, my college roommate all but our freshman year, and he offered me ten thousand dollars a year for easy lazy work, and I said to myself, It is now January 1965. If I learn how to do these books by April, and then I do a book a month until August 1966, that will be seventeen books, which will be fifteen thousand, three hundred dollars. I can live on four thousand dollars a year, which means my expenses between now and August 1966 will run to about six thousand dollars, which will leave me a cool nine thousand clear. I can get to graduate school with nine thousand dollars, and then do a book every three or four months while I’m in graduate school plus a couple in the summer, say six books a year, that’s fifty-four hundred dollars a year,
It sounded good. You have to admit it, it sounded good.
Well, August of 1966 came around and I didn’t have nine thousand dollars. I didn’t have nine
That was August of 1966. It is now November 21st, 1967, and what do I have?
Two hundred twelve dollars in the checking account.
Where does it go? I don’t know where it goes, I swear to God I don’t know where it goes. Betsy takes money out of my wallet and goes to the A&P and that’s the end of it. I say, “Honey, what did we eat when we used to live in Albany?” She doesn’t know.
I don’t mean she’s extravagant. Hell, I’m more extravagant than she is, I walk into Korvette’s and walk out with two AR-4 speakers. But still and all, ten thousand dollars a year. Where the hell does it go?
The graduate school idea dies hard. I keep saying, “All right, the major expenses are behind us now. We have a car, we have furniture and clothing and all this other junk. Betsy is on the pill, so we won’t have
But it never happens. The money comes in, the money goes out. Baby-sitter, trips to the city, nights out, guests in for dinner. Then there’s the car. It’s a 1964 Buick and there’s always some damn thing wrong with it. Nothing big, never more than twenty or thirty or forty dollars at a time, but it’s all the time, it’s every time.
And I have nobody to talk to about it, you know? If I tried to talk to Betsy she’d either be blank with incomprehension or she’d get terrified and weepy and be sure doom was just around the corner and I was blaming her. So I can’t talk to Betsy and I never could. And the closest my mother and I ever were was back on that aircraft carrier. We never write to each other, but every once in a while one of us phones the other — phone bills, there’s another expense, all those calls to New York, to Rod and Pete and Dick, to Lance, to everybody in the world — where was I in this sentence? I’m not a writer, and even after twenty-eight books I still do that, I get myself into a run-on sentence or an involved sentence where it’s like walking into an enchanted forest. There’s no way out, the entrance is lost in the mist behind you, and there’s nothing to do but keep pushing forward into die quicksand.
Was I talking about my mother? Yes. I reread the last paragraph, not with pleasure, and I see that I was indeed talking about my mother. We see each other at Christmas and other pagan feasts, but we don’t talk to each other. What do I have to say to her? What on earth does she have to say to me? She had a youth with some vivacity in it, she had fun. Part of a girl quartet, the Melogals, off on USO tours, one thing and another. Face it, I’m a drab son. What do I do but sit here in this room and write about people fucking. And before that college. And after that?
The chute. Oblivion. I can’t even
Shit.
Anyway, what I was saying was that I have nobody to talk to. Not Betsy. Not my mother. Certainly not my sisters. Night and day, those two. Hannah is too incredibly square and righteous and a fucking prig to listen to anybody, and Hester is some sort of insane acid head out in San Francisco or somewhere. They’re twenty-one, and already Hester’s lived five times as much as I ever have or ever will.