by U
too terse. It looks nice on the page, however.
Perhaps I will try McMartin Publishers next. I have no reason to
believe I can make any headway there, but the Literary Marketplace
book says they are willing to consider photocopied submissions.
It’s such a pain trying to sell myself like this. I have no idea how to
go about it. In a way, it’s a lot like politics, though far more nebulous.
Politics in this country may be a complete fucking joke, but it has
clear rules. Literature is almost entirely a crapshoot.
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Must buckle down to more writing after this brief political sojourn.
All I really want to do at the party meeting is to vote against
Kozlowski.
That’s my goal. Mr. K. is a narcotic drug on the DemoRats, a
somnambulant ball of black tar opium. He puts us all to sleep. I don’t
see how anybody with a shred of savvy can get motivated with him in
charge.
Have an idea for a short story called "Sex Dolls." It’s pure
pornography. I’m wondering again if maybe I should try my hand at a
fuck book. But it limits your audience and therefore seems like the
wrong way to go.
Still, I could show those bastards how sick it all can really be. Put
so-called normal sex right in the open, like Edward Albee’s play An
American Dream. I love when his characters talk about "bumping
their uglies."
* * * *
July 1, 1978
It’s the first day I’ve really had off since the middle of June. I felt
exhausted when I got home last night so I drank two beers, smoked
two joints, and fell into bed for the next fourteen hours. Felt great this
morning, though. I slept like a baby, with almost no dreams at all.
Really wished there had been a woman in bed with me. We could
have had a lot of fun, baby, because I was in just the right mood.
Really had a terrific hard-on, too. I really coulda made her (whoever
she is) laugh and laugh. What I think I’ve figured out is that on a
physical plane, women like to be babied, except babied with a sexual
component.
I mean in bed. Out in the world it’s adult this and adult that but
during playtime in bed, women like it not too serious. How can it be
serious when all you are really doing is bumping your uglies?
What they like is a bit of tickle and pinch and issou a liddle
snookums kind of play time. Honestly, I will do anything a woman
wants in bed but for crying out loud she must give me a break out of
it. I mean, who likes to be nagged?
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The urge to start a new book is strong upon me. What the hell. I’m
just gonna blitz it out. The Dark City is done, as far as I am
concerned. Oh, I can revise it some more, if I so desire, but I’m not
sure I’m improving it.
Sketching out notes for Ding A Ling. No hyphens in the title.
Three words, unhyphenated. Capital A. Write what I damn well
please and screw the critics, internal or otherwise.
Yes, I know it’s childish to write as I do, but that’s just the point.
That is just the fucking point. It’s real, ain’t it?
Who of us is not a child emotionally?
I support myself with a real-life job, not a trust fund or the
parasitical behavior of having someone else support you. As for
profession, I am a scribe, recording not the lives of kings but of
peasants. You should see the massive dossiers Megan and me
compile on the welfare clients. Holy shit.
We’ve got a whole room full. Every time somebody wants a
peanut it’s another piece of paper, a form. Megan knows them, inside
and out. What a smart girl she is.
Yesterday, I told her that we know so much about the clients we
can probably predict to the minute when they’re likely to take a dump.
She kinda rolled her eyes at that.
So it goes with my days. I may wind up spending my life alone. It
may be written in the stars.
More likely in myself. Astrology I do not believe in, not one
fucking whit. Similar to Christianity or Marxism, palm reading or
voodoo, and about as believable. Hocus pocus, ergo bloviata,
abracadabra, mumbo jumbo. Shazam.
Peromeneah sacula saculorum. Amen. Mea culpa, mea culpa,
mea maxima culpa.
I don’t need anyone in my life and I am serious about my writing. I
have a day job and write every chance I get. I’m burning up with
words, attacked by them. They set me on fire. I’m trying to say new
things, incredible things other people haven’t thought of or don’t
know how to say. I wanna goeth where no man has goneth before.
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Probably get started in right around my birthday. Seek a larger,
more expressive vision. Make people laugh.
* * * *
July 2, 1978
I’ve sent four query letters out so far. Each individually wrapped
and separately typed, with photocopied sample chapters. Perhaps I
should be sending them out one at a time. I’m not exactly sure what
the etiquette is here but at the rate of one plink at a time it will take
forever to get it around.
What does it matter? I have no confidence it will be accepted but
rejection is at least a response. I can’t tell you how many times things
have disappeared into the ozone.
Not sure what to do next. Some short stories, possibly with a
notable sexual component. Maybe some crime fiction. I have been
reading a lot of it lately. A modern detective story, with a female
protagonist. Something very offbeat.
I need to create a detective. Who shall it be? I might try a 3,000 to
5,000 word short story. About 10-15 typed pages. Try to work it out
in a notebook version first.
Experiment.
* * * *
July 3, 1978
Helped Megan and her husband Mark move tonight. Mainly their
big stuff. They are now living out by Siltcoos Lake in a house that
was built in 1950.
A Walt Disney-style place. Very nice.
Low slung roofs thrown over a big, zig-zagging cedar box.
Unusual but attractive. Roomy and comfortable, with a great view
and a private deck that is ideal for sun tanning.
I really like Megan and Mark. They seem to have a good
relationship. From the outside, it appears friendly and close.
Mature and supportive. No mutually degrading dependency
discernible there.
I think Mark’s favorite expression may be "What an asshole!" A bit
volatile. He works in Eugene during the week and returns on the
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weekends. Megan says it is taking forever for him to find a job that
will utilize his master’s degree in social work.
Must admit I really envy that guy. He’s got what I consider the
perfect wife in Megan. She’s smart, bright, funny, hip, slender, and
sexy. Blond and beautiful. The kind of woman I always hoped I
could find, if somehow or other things worked out instead of always
fucking up.
What I did wrong previously is now perfectly clear: I kept a
journal. I wrote things down. I was not the bland, inarticulate, but
financially stable male so beloved
by the women of my generation. I
kept a journal to record some of my thoughts and let this other person
use it against me in precisely the same way Nixon nailed himself with
his White House tapes.
"How can you deny this... this abomination?" Ms. Ellsworth said,
more or less. "It is written down. How can you claim it’s not true
when you have put it on paper?"
She never had any shame about rooting through my stuff. When I
started reading Marie’s journal years ago I had to stop after a couple
pages because my sense of shame overwhelmed me. The thing I
remember most was deciding that Marie had developed a cool way of
keeping a journal, writing occasionally in a blue lab notebook.
Nevertheless, the irony here is that I still feel this powerful sense of
regret about the way things turned out between Polly and me. I
honestly believe in many ways that we could have (at one time) been
the ideal match for one another. I swear I could have entertained the
hell out of her. I guarantee it.
When we were together, I could make her laugh with ease. She
loved to laugh. I know we could have had a lot of fun.
Likewise I would have worked my ass off at any job I could find
and would have treated her with all the love and tenderness that I have
in me.
As far as her family was concerned, there is no doubt in my mind
that I could have charmed the socks off the whole fucking eight
person tribe.
Even her mother Prude, eventually.
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A big family? Just let me at them.
The only problem back then was that I wasn’t entirely sure about
my feelings and Polly seemed like she was in way too big of a hurry.
And for what?
Why was she in such a fucking rush? I don’t get it and never will.
She still isn’t married to that guy. She still doesn’t have the baby she
said she wanted. If she has somehow wrangled the "commitment"
from him she said she wanted from me it sure as hell ain’t evident to
the rest of us.
Eventually, I see her getting married to some incredibly dull (but
financially stable) dodo and spending her life in Dullsville. In
Dullsville with Dodo Guy. That’s where these desperately insecure
middle class chicks always end up.
Married to dull, tiresome men while their true loves, (as Kerouac
might say,) wander alone through the wilderness, all of them
passionate, romantic, brave, driven, sorrowful and lost. They stand
atop sheer cliffs in the inky midnights of the world, solitary figures
forlornly baying at the Goddess Luna.
So be it. I am moving on. I give up. For too long I have played
the complete and total fool. It didn’t work out, as is the case with
many things in life. I’ll say one last thing about her, however. Polly
Ellsworth could really push my buttons.
The woman was a natural in bed, a truly gifted sex partner. She
never once made me feel like it was a big goddamned favor she was
doing me. Not once. I don’t know whether it was me or what the deal
was, but Polly was always ready to go, always hot to do the dirty
deed.
Nine times out of ten it was initiated by her. Her slender hand
would slide across my belly, touch my cock, and start to stroke.
Goddamn, she was a good fuck.
The only inhibition Polly ever had was about me eating her pussy.
Was a bit hesitant about that. Got over it quickly enough, though,
much to my delight. Young women are so sweet and pink and clean
down there.
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Why is it they are all convinced otherwise? Where the hell do they
get that fucked up idea in their heads?
They must have their minds warped by society, I suppose. You
can’t sell anything to women unless they figure something is wrong.
Why else would they buy douches and deodorants and all that other
crap? They really fall for everything, blow themselves up at every
turn. The choices women make are often terrible.
Damn. How truly beautiful young women can be was really laid
plain that time Polly and me took a bath together.
How exquisite she was. That summer, Polly had long dark hair and
big brown eyes that gave her a perpetually questioning look. During
the time when I knew her, she was a woman who asked lots of
questions and worse, demanded answers.
We first got to know each other in that half-assed speech class we
took together. One of the assignments was to prepare and deliver a
declamation in front of the rest of the students. As I recall, that drove
about half of the students out of there before the last day to add or
drop classes came around.
But Polly and I remained. I stayed because it was convenient and
looked like an easy A. Polly stayed, as she later confessed, because I
did.
In any case, our declamation could be comic, political, social,
satiric, serious, whatever. But it had to be original, dramatic, and at
least 500 words. Memorized.
To prepare for it, the instructor started making us read bits from
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations aloud in class. Then it came time to do
our thing.
Mine took me about ten minutes to write and another twenty to
memorize. The material I used came from my memory of a speech
from Randy Thune, a Rockwell High classmate. He’d written a
speech for our sophomore rhetoric class denouncing radical left
wingers for their politics. Randy is a right winger, a disciple of
William F. Buckley.
I turned his speech into a satire, tossed in a few new jokes, and
stole Randy’s closing line:
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"Someday they will understand that the conservative is not the
enemy of the common man."
Seven years later, and I can still remember the huge fucking laughs
I got with my delivery. That was sweet.
A bunch of other people got up and did theirs. They stumbled over
words, forgot their lines, screwed up right and left.
Then Polly Ellsworth stood up in front of the class.
Instead of some typical feminine blather about the need for world
peace, Polly launched into a comedy routine about the lengths people
will go to pretend they are better than they are. She punctured human
hypocrisy with one zinger after another. She had me cracking up.
Also worth mentioning, now that I’m at it, was Polly’s body, which
at age twenty was sleek as a racing hull and decidedly ultra fetching.
I was totally entranced.
I don’t know if she was reading my mind as I sat there staring at
her, but once class was over she walked so slowly out of Deady Hall
that I had no trouble falling in alongside her.
"That was quite the declamation," I said.
Her long, dark brown hair fell across her big, dark brown eyes
before she brushed it away and returned my glance.
"Yours was better. You got more laughs than I did."
"I laughed at yours. Didn’t you hear me?"
"You and the instructor were practically the only ones."
"Well, you’re just ahead of your time. Everybody should have
been laug
hing," I said to her. "In my opinion."
"If you say so. But yours was the best."
"Thanks. I maybe spent an hour on it."
Again the hair fell across the eyes. "I wasn’t sure," Polly said, "if
you were laughing at my jokes or at me."
"Don’t be insecure, I said. "You’re too pretty for that."
She blushed.
Then I introduced myself, telling Polly my name, which she already
knew. I knew her first name, but learned her last name for the first
time.
1 19
She accepted my invitation to walk to the Memorial Union, where
we found seats in one of the second floor window boxes, watching
people walk by in the courtyard below.
This was the winter of 1971.
Soon we were talking, to my surprise and pleasure, about ourselves,
our backgrounds, our petty hopes and dreams.
"What’s your major?" I asked.
"Art and Art History."
"Pray tell," I said, "why would an artist such as yourself be in a
speech class?"
"I figured it was an easy A."
"Me too. I’m in Poly Sci."
"Pray tell," she said, mimicking me, "why would a statesman such
as yourself be in a speech class? Ooops! I think I answered my own
question."
"Yes, you’re right. I’m going into politics eventually," I said. "I’m
already pretty good at speechmaking, but I need to be even better, if
I’m going to get anywhere."
"I see."
There was a pause, while we munched muffins and drank beverages
from the commons. She had coffee with milk, while I drank apple
juice. The winter sun came through the window box briefly and Polly
looked radiant.
"I’ve seen you with a woman around campus," Polly said. "Several
times. Who might she be?"
"My ex-girlfriend. Leanne."
"You sure she’s your ex-girlfriend?" Polly said.
"As sure as I am the sun is shining."
Technically speaking, I was lying. I’d had a number of rocky
moments with Leanne and we were always on the verge of breaking
up. But as no formal split had yet taken place.
Not liking to be put on the defensive, I said:
"What the current status of you and your boyfriend?"
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Polly looked at me with an expression like I had groped her tits,