Adios, Scheherazade

And Pete Falkus. He kept doing these magazine pieces at the same time he was writing sex novels, and he had a sale in Playboy and a sale in True and a sale in Holiday, all these fact pieces, and now he’s got a ghost too and he’s doing nothing but the magazine pieces and he’s making all kinds of money. He’s got money in a mutual fund, he was telling me about it a few months ago. Saving money, investing money in a mutual fund.

Of course, Ann Falkus is no Betsy.

But that isn’t fair. It isn’t Betsy’s fault the money disappears, it isn’t anybody’s fault. As a matter of fact, if it’s anybody’s fault at all it’s mine. I’m the one bought the car, I’m the one goes out all the time and buys records, books, all this crap. We came down here from Albany in August of 1965 with three suitcases to our name, we furnished that apartment on East 18th Street out of the Salvation Army store on West 46th, and now we could fill a moving van. Every once in a while I say, “Why do I need all this stuff?” but then I look around and there isn’t one thing in the whole heap I want to throw away.

Except Betsy.

That isn’t fair. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. I don’t mean it, and it isn’t fair.

I was talking about writers. Real writers, like Rod and Pete and Dick. They knew they couldn’t do this shit forever, but they could do it as long as they had to because all the time they were working on something else, something more, something better. They knew they were headed somewhere, they were going to move up.

What a trap that is. I tried it myself, I tried to be a writer. You make your living writing novels, it doesn’t matter what kind of novels they are, you begin to think maybe you are a writer after all. So I tried some mystery stories. I read Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and I tried some stories. One sold, for a penny a word, to a magazine that isn’t around any more, called Shock Action Detective Tales. The other three nobody wanted. Samuel said, “Ed, I don’t think you’re comfortable in the short story form.” With that dead frog expression on his face. Meaning, stick to the sex books, sonny, that’s all you’re good for.

I tried articles, too. That was even worse, I never even got anything in shape to be submitted. I discovered Reinhard Heydrich, the beast of Belsen, and Samuel said, “He’s been done too much, Ed.” I didn’t know he’d been done at all.

That’s the trouble, you can’t try to sell to magazines you don’t read, because you don’t know what’s old hat to them. But the magazines I felt I could take a stab at were all too crappy for me to read.

The point is, I’m not a writer. Or have I made that point too much already? I don’t give a damn, it seems to be the only point of my life. Through a fluke of fate I have been let into a room where a fantastic feast is being presented. All around me people are moving up the line of the table, the food’s getting better and better. I wasn’t hungry before I came into this room, but smelling the smells of the food, seeing the other people eat, now I’m hungry. But the only problem is, you can’t get any of the food unless you ask for it. And I don’t speak the language, all I can do is point. And if all you can do is point, all you get is boiled potatoes. So here I stand, eating my boiled potatoes, watching the feast going on all around me, and wishing I knew the language.

Well, it’s midnight. I have a small white plastic clock on my desk, we got it with Plaid Stamps, and it says midnight, twelve o’clock. November 21st is gone, absolutely gone, and I haven’t written a word of the sex novel. Just this junk, this feeling sorry for myself.

I came in here at ten-thirty, full of ambition, determination and terror. After I finished this afternoon’s wasted effort I went out to the kitchen and got into a stupid argument with Betsy. One of our stock stupid arguments, the one about Fred.

Fred was in the kitchen, sitting at the table and eating a vanilla yogurt, and she said, “Hello, Daddy.”

I said, “Hi, Fred.”

Betsy turned around from the refrigerator and said, very cold, “Her name is Elfreda. She is a girl.”

“When you want a fight,” I said, “you jump on that, or something else, or whatever you want. When you don’t want a fight, I call her Fred and you never say a word.”

“We won’t discuss it,” she said, “in front of Elfreda.” And she turned her back on me and went back to the refrigerator, whatever she was doing there.