Adios, Scheherazade

The answer I gave her was that when I wrote a book in ten days I didn’t get a chance to forget anything in it, but of course that isn’t the real truth. The real truth is, the whole world in one of my books is so narrow and thin and untenanted there’s practically nothing to remember. The characters’ names, any occupation or make of car or address that I might give them, and that’s about it. As for characterization, forget it. I don’t even usually do caricaturization, the old Dickens bit of giving a character a tag. You know? I got this in college, the idea of giving a character an odd quirk, a funny phrase or a mannerism of some kind, and then every time he comes on the scene he does his thing and you remember him and you say, “That’s characterization, by Neddy Dingo!” Like Queeg in The Caine Mutiny saying, “Kay,” all the time.

I wonder how much longer this is going to go on. The fact of the matter is, I may sound calm and rational on this page but in reality I am terrified. I mean, I have to do a dirty book, I have to write book number 29, and I have to get started on it. I have ten days.

June of this year was the first time I missed a deadline, and I haven’t made a deadline since. That was book number 24, Raving Passions, and it was three days late. June 30th was a Friday, and I didn’t get the book in till the next Monday. I brought it in and gave it to Samuel in Lance’s office and Samuel said, “What happened Friday?”

“I got a little hung up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t want to make a habit of this,” Samuel said. He’s a nasty snotty kid and I hate him. I’m sure he reads all the manuscripts we write before sending them to New Orleans, reads them all in the men’s room down the hall from the office there, jerks off ten times per book and then sends them out covered with his smear of approval. How else could he be so skinny, the little bastard? He looks nineteen, he’s a year younger than me. Which irritates me anyway, that he s in the dominant position in relation to me and I’m older than him. And heavier. And better educated. And smarter. But he s Lance’s assistant, and since Lance almost never makes personal appearances anywhere, that means it’s Samuel that I have to deal with.

If I wasn’t so goddam apologetic with him all the time. Like saying I was sorry when I brought Raving Passions in three days late, one working day late, when it was the first time I’d missed a deadline and before that I’d turned in twenty-three consecutive books on time. But I apologized, and I was all nervous and upset about it, and I get mad at Samuel and hate him and it’s all because he’s in a position of dominance and I’m in no position at all and he’s too much of a sleazy creep to refrain from rubbing my nose in it.

I mean, after all, what am I? I write, but I’m not a writer. I don’t write under my own name, I don’t even write under my own pen name. Dirk Smuff, that’s how I sign myself, and Dirk Smuff is a creation of Rod’s, it’s his pen name, he wrote the first seven books under that name, I still pay him two hundred dollars a month for the use of it.

About a year ago I went in to talk to Samuel to ask him what he thought about me doing two books a month for a while. I mean, a month has thirty days and I only use up ten per book. What I had in mind, I thought I could start a pen name of my own, do two books a month for a while until I had the new name established, and then Rod could get somebody else to take over the Dirk Smuff books and I’d go on just doing my own books. I had the name picked out, too: Dwayne Toppil, it’s a sort of a variant on my own name.

I mean, I wasn’t doing this for the two hundred bucks. That wasn’t the point at all, but naturally Samuel couldn’t see that. The point was, for God’s sake, I’m not real. I’m gray, I’m translucent, you can see daylight through me. What am I? I’m a ghost, I’m Rod Cox’s ghost, I’m Dirk Smuff’s ghost, I’m sort of a pornographic Kukla, activated by the hand of the masturbating high school boy, piping rotund obscenities into his waxy ear.

Some of the other guys, they can look ahead and see daylight, they can see a way out of this cave, but honey I’m Injun Joe and I’ve got no place to go. Like Rod. He started doing these sex books while we were still in college, but all the time he was doing other stuff, too, short stories and articles and finally other books, and now he’s got this spy series going with Silver Stripe, it’s a paperback house but he’s doing the books under his own name, Anthony Boucher in the Sunday Times reviewed one of them, the third one I think, and said it was pretty good, it showed the kind of vitality the paperback originals can come up with these days. And he gets translated into French and published by an outfit over there called Gallimard, all the books have black covers. And some other countries, too, I think Italy and Japan and at least once in Mexico.