Adios, Scheherazade

That’s a digression. I was talking about my day, and how I was offered a group membership but reluctantly turned it down, and now that I think of it I suppose coming to the Y instead of going to a hotel was a symbolic gesture of the same sort, an indication of my desire to belong to a group or association of some kind. Also it demonstrates how seldom I think about the potential of my Diners’ Club card, because of course I could have stayed anywhere at all on Diners’ Club, any hotel in the city, I wasn’t locked into using my cash in hand, and in fact using cash for shelter wasn’t particularly smart, now that I think of it. Since if I take off I will be a fugitive from injustice, there’s no point my paying the Diners’ Club, and in fact I won’t even be getting a bill from them.

That’s weird. Do you realize I’ve been sitting around seriously contemplating being a man on the run? Freight cars. Panting dashes through the woods. All-night diners and coat collars turned up against the chill. Unshaven cheeks. “Who sent you?” “Max.” Half-empty labelless bottles passing from hand to hand. “Cheez it, the cops!” Running down alleys. Cars with running boards. Cheap hotel rooms with an electric sign outside that goes on-off/on-off/on-off. “Halt, in the name of the law!” Bang! Bang!

You’re dead.

Except that isn’t how it would be. How it would be would be Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inn, turnpikes and thru-ways—

To where?

I can’t stay here forever, that’s for sure. Another couple of days like, this and I’ll be sixty-nining with the dumpling just to pretend I’m somebody else.

I was talking about my day, God damn it. God damn my day. I was talking about it, and I keep digressing. I feel as though I’m becoming more and more fragmented, I can’t keep a coherent train of thought for anything. It’s like I’m on a centrifuge, and as things get spun away from me I have a harder and harder time keeping hold of what’s left. My wife and kid have spun away, my livelihood and career and occupation have spun away, my friends have spun away, my house has spun away, I’m down to a typewriter and some paper (some of it soiled) and some spare clothing and a Buick and about forty dollars and a Diners’ Club card, and maybe my mind, except my mind seems incapable recently of keeping hold of any thread.

Like now, for instance. I was talking about my day.

Actually, I don’t have anything to say about my day.

It was just that the paper was in the typewriter, and I finally had to do something to keep myself from writing Sex Hungry. Does that sound stupid? I don’t care, it’s true. It’s as though I’m in one of those addiction movies, and I can’t take the cure cold turkey, I have to taper off. I do fifteen pages of What Is It? as methadone to keep me from the heroin of Sex Hungry.

Except I don’t have anything to write about. When I started this, nine days ago, I was full of things to say, absolutely full, the things I had to say kept crowding out the book I was supposed to write. So now I’ve given up entirely the book I was supposed to write, and I no longer have anything to say.

I keep thinking of Rod. I probably ought to call him and warn him, but frankly it would be too embarrassing.

What am I talking about, you wonder? What have I switched to now? Remember last night while I was stuck in Rod’s office I began to feel the call of nature, it was bowel-moving time? Well, I didn’t crap out the window, though I did consider it, and if I’d known Birge and Johnny were down there I might have done it. But I didn’t, and to be perfectly honest about it the reason I didn’t was mostly because I was afraid of falling backwards out the window, and also because I prefer if possible to avoid the more obviously ludicrous postures for myself, among which I would count squatting on somebody else’s windowsill four stories above West 9th Street in Greenwich Village with my bare ass sticking out into the cold November air. So I didn’t crap out the window.

If Rod opens the bottom left hand file drawer of his desk, he’s going to get a surprise.

Well, it was empty, and I didn’t want to stink the place up, so I had to leave it somewhere where I could cover it up somehow, and as the pressure in my bowels mounted I wandered around and around the room in increasing panic, and finally in desperation I began to open drawers, and that one was empty. So I filled it.

Well, I didn’t fill it, but I did make a deposit.

Why would he look in an empty drawer anyway? There’s no smell, the drawer being closed cut that off completely, and there’s no other reason for him to look in there that I can see, so I’m probably safe.

I really don’t want to call him and tell him I shit in his desk drawer.

I don’t even want to talk about it, not even here. It shows how desperate I am for material to fill fifteen pages that I even brought the subject up at all. Forget I mentioned it.

5

Dear Hester,