Adios, Scheherazade

The point is, I read the article and I thought of doing it as a sex novel, and it turned my stomach. But I was in this room here, and the typewriter was here, and the blank paper was here. I wanted to leave the room, but I didn’t want to do anything all alone, and I’m afraid to call Dick or Pete or anybody because surely the cops have talked to all of them by now and they probably all believe the story and think I’m sick and will turn me in for my own good, which I’d rather not have.

How many mystery novels have I read where the hero is unjustly accused of some crime, and instead of going to the police he goes out and solves the crime himself because it’s the only way he believes he can get himself off the hook. Well, here I am. I’ve been unjustly accused, and I haven’t turned myself in.

Of course, there are differences between me and the mystery novel hero. In the first place, I’m not a hero. In the second place, the mystery can’t be solved because nobody did it.

Well, that isn’t true either, apparently at one time or another someone has rung little Angie’s register, but I’m hardly in the position to go grill a lot of high school students and find out which one it was. And even if I did, there’s still another difference between this and a murder mystery, in that Angie hasn’t been murdered, she’s only been laid, and whereas you can only be murdered once you can be laid millions of times, so coming forward with some blushing linebacker isn’t going to help me much.

So I can’t go solve anything, because there’s nothing to solve. If I run — if I continue to run, I mean — it is running for running’s sake, nothing more.

Digression. I was talking about the article in the Times. How I read it and disgusted myself. How I sat around here with nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing to occupy my mind.

So I put paper in the typewriter. I didn’t type anything, but I did put paper in the typewriter.

After a while I did go out, leaving the paper in the typewriter, and bought myself three paperback books, and came back here with them, and tried to read. I tried all three, and none of them helped at all. I would look at the page with all the words on it, and I would think about tomorrow. What am I going to do tomorrow? How will I support myself in the tomorrows to come? Will I try to get Betsy back? Will I go to the police? Will I try to write a sex novel? Will I try to write anything? Will I write Sex Hungry?

Finally I went and took a shower, which involved walking down a very long hall wearing shoes and overcoat and carrying soap and towel. I was propositioned while drying myself afterward, and if you promise not to tell anyone I will whisper to you that I was tempted.

Not by the overwhelming sexual magnetism of the poor faggot who approached me, believe me. He was about thirty, and very short, and soft-looking in a decayed-dumpling sort of way. His approach was so sad-eyed and forlorn and defeatist and fatalistic that for the first time in days I felt like a winner myself, a doer and a decider, a giant among men.

Well, I might not be a giant among men, but I was a giant among that guy. He mumbled something pitiful about the weather, asked me if I had television in my room, and offered to let me come and watch his. Television. “While you’re drying.” In other words, no need to go back to my own room and dress first.

I hesitated, I didn’t give him an immediate get-lost-cocksucker, and though the reason for the hesitation may have had something to do with personal loneliness, or incipient loneliness, or the prospect of loneliness, I think mainly my reason was something else, and I think it had to do with belonging to something.

I understand that the theory of herd instinct in human beings, having been in for a while, is now out, and I suggest it be brought back in again at once, because something inside my breast wants me to be able to define myself by something other than my name. By occupation, perhaps. By something which states my group affiliation.

I’ve always had a group affiliation. First student. Then for a while I was one of the guys that worked at the beer distributing company. For the last two and a half years I’ve been a writer. Well, maybe not a writer, but at least a sex book writer. “I write paperback sex novels,” I would say, and however cheap and embarrassed it made me feel to say that, at the same time there was a good feeling in it, a knowledge of belonging. A feeling of identity.

Speaking of identity, I have sometimes thought my first name is actually an ironic question, and that it should be written thus: Ed, win? And my last name is the answer.

Is Topliss any sort of name? How could I have been expected to do anything with my life, bearing a name like that?