Tours of the Black Clock

42

I DON’T STAY AT THE Top Dog much longer. I leave for several reasons, not because of Billy, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, but Leona’s becoming a nuisance, she’s always around, and a couple of times when I wind up spending some time with other girls, a waitress in a luncheonette over on Seventh Avenue and another of the girls at the club, it causes problems. Doggie doesn’t like it either. But the main reason I leave is that this third career comes along. The editor at the magazine tells me about it rather confidentially one afternoon. He says it involves writing books and when I say I can’t come up with a whole book, he says he thinks I might actually be pretty good at these kinds of books, given the stuff they have to cut out of my stories. A whole book of that kind of thing, that’s what they want, he tells me. I’m still a little thickheaded about what he’s driving at. “Books,” he says, “they don’t put out on the shelves, books you have to ask for and they pull them out from under the counter.” Now I know what he’s driving at but I still can’t quite see it, and then he tells me the pay starts at a dollar a page and is guaranteed to go up if they like what I’m doing.

Who “they” are remains a little ambiguous at first. At the outset they’re nameless dealers dealing for other dealers dealing for … who knows. Some of the stuff is sold to anyone who walks in and asks for it and some of it is commissioned by private collectors. I figure I know even less about this particular area than I do gangsters. But I come to learn that the less I know the better. I just sit at the typewriter laughing my head off. That’s when I know I have something going.

I guess that’s why I do it. To write something I don’t dread. I set myself a schedule, every morning squeezing another cup out of the coffee grounds that have been sitting on the bookshelf the last month and then knocking out three pages about whatever or whoever was in my head all night, reducing every nightmare and misunderstood impulse to something I can laugh at. Three pages every morning of someone fucking Molly or Amanda, this morning it’s a gangster who’s having her and tomorrow it’s a Prussian sergeant, the morning after tomorrow a cannibal chieftain. Next week it’s a man from Mars and the week after that it’s somebody dead. After lunch I labor on whatever I happen to be doing for the pulps, and then I have to take my mood out into the city and walk it off, have dinner, stand outside the dancehalls and jazz clubs listening to what’s inside. Sometimes I’ll see Leona on her night off, other times it might be someone else. The sheer heft of me either attracts them or sends them running for cover. It weeds out the squeamish. If nothing happens with someone it doesn’t matter, I go back to my room and write a couple more pages, at this rate it takes a month to finish a book and then I set off to deliver it to a man in a backroom at Charles and Bleecker in the West Village.