Adios, Scheherazade

I want you to know — this is the reason for this letter — that regardless of anything I may have written in the stuff you’ve already read, and also regardless of anything I may have said to you yesterday morning when you threw me out, I do not blame you for any part of my current mess. I blame no one but myself, actually, but if I did hanker to blame other people you would not be among them. “Nobody can write this shit forever,” you said, which was fair warning, and if I didn’t listen, for this reason or that reason, it was nobody’s fault but my own.

Down at the far end of this room there’s a woman who looks like the kind of battle-ax that always used to want to put Little Annie Rooney in an orphanage — not Little Orphan Annie, Little Annie Rooney — and she’s glaring at me skeptically. She’s going to start walking this way very soon.

All right, I’m leaving.

My mistake was ever leaving college.

     Sis boom bah, buddy,

     Ed

Dear Authorities,

If I do send this letter, I have no idea where I should address it. Maybe the Nassau County District Attorney’s office.

Well, wherever it’s addressed, these words are meant more generally. It is to all authorities everywhere to whom I am now writing. Sorry about that sentence there, but my mind is a little flaky at the moment.

If you get this letter, it will be because I have decided to take my chances on running, and if I have decided to take my chances on running it is not because I am guilty, and it is not because I am afraid I would not get justice in your courts, it is because my life is very complicated at the moment and I just don’t have the time to spend going through your rituals. Being arrested and standing trial and all that stuff, it’s the same as when I got married. I shouldn’t have hung around for that, what I should have done was faded slowly into the shadows until it all blew over. Well, I didn’t that time, and I lived to regret it. As a matter of fact, I would say that it is a direct result of my not running away that time that has me in my present situation now.

But even if I do run away, I am still sufficiently bound by respect for authority and respect for ceremony and ritual to want to try to appease you all in some way, and that’s the reason for this letter. In this letter I will attempt to explain what really did happen, and make you understand why I don’t believe I have the time to spare for your concerns right now.

In the first place, I am innocent of the charge. If I was guilty of the charge, it would be a different matter. Then I should certainly stick around and stand trial and take my punishment, go through all the tribal rites, sit and stand and kneel, shuffle out with the congregation, the whole bit. But I am not guilty, absolutely and totally not guilty, and therefore I feel no need for the expiation of ceremony, and therefore you may be getting this letter and I may be on my way to parts unknown.

That’s one of the things that makes the current situation different from when I got married. That time I was guilty, and I hung around and took my punishment, did all the right things, made the appropriate ceremonial gestures and all. I want you to notice that, to see that I do take my punishment when I’m guilty. That I’m not sticking around now is already a pretty strong indication that I’m innocent.

All right. Here’s what happened. For the last two and a half years I’ve been writing paperback sex novels under the name Dirk Smuff. These are the books with titles like Sex Sorority and Warped Passion, to name two of my own, that are sold on 42nd Street. You probably have the chapters I left at the YMCA, so you know the kind of thing I’m talking about.

I realize it doesn’t look good for me to have been writing that kind of book for the last two and a half years, but I assure you my own life has been a lot tamer than that of the characters in my books. In fact, I have never once been unfaithful to my wife, and that means with anybody, and that means especially with my baby-sitter, Angie.

You see, the fact of the matter is I was having a lot of trouble writing the book for November. My mind was very worried, because if I missed one more deadline I’d be out of a job, and in the course of writing a lot of other meaningless stuff I wrote what I did about the baby-sitter. But there wasn’t a word of truth in it.

But the result is, now my entire life has been shattered, and I have to try to pick up the pieces and decide what to do next. Do I want my wife back? Do I want to go on writing, either the dirty books or something else? What do I want to do with myself?