have dozed off occasionally, twenty winks, if not forty. How else could I still be functioning even at the modest level at which I am functioning? I must be sleeping without knowing it, though I can’t imagine when it occurs. Probably not in bed at night, since that’s when I am most acutely conscious of being awake. I spend a lot of time looking at television. I suppose I might be sleeping then. By evening I am terribly tired. I am happy to be tired, thinking that now at last I’ll sleep. I drag myself up the steps and climb into bed. I stretch myself out like a corpse, and
pop
go the eyelids. It’s horrible. I can almost hear the noise the lids make as they slam up against the roof of my eye sockets. At the same time I feel my body going rigid, my fingers and toes splay, the muscles in my neck bulge. I lie like that for hours, until I can’t stand it any longer, and then I get up and wander around the house, the empty, absolutely silent house, surrounded by the screams of crickets. At those times I wish I had a telephone so I could call somebody up and yell at them.
I don’t care about the Spalding Street building, as a building, any more than you do. But its loss means that another trickle of income has been staunched, and I’m that much closer to complete bankruptcy. I don’t see why you can’t get a real job, at least until I can put things here back on their feet. The money I send you would just about do it. You can be an actress next year. Why can’t you be something else this year? After all, you already know how to type. I am struggling. I have several projects, but they all need time to bear fruit. I am working on a new novel, one I have been thinking about for a while, aimed at a wider public this time. I don’t see why I can’t do it without compromising my principles.
Yes, I did have a maid. She was coming once a week, and she hardly stayed long enough to make even a small dent in the mess, which is really like a nation of its own. I had a maid not because I had money to throw away but because I am now considered a charity case. I am considered this by people who ought to know, who have to deal professionally, on a daily basis, with cases like that, like mine. I let her go because I could no longer afford the sandwiches she ate for lunch. After poking around in the mess for an hour or so, while making little complaining noises in her native tongue, she would go home or back to church or wherever they go, and I would open the refrigerator and discover she had eaten my supper. I have to drink the cheapest whiskey now, and I never have wine. I tried to get the firemen to come in and have a drink with me. Do you ever have the thought that we might get back together when all this is over?
Love,
Andy
p.s. I don’t know what I mean by “all this.”
¶
Dear Fern,
I had not expected to hear back from you so soon. It is really too bad you were able to dig up only one old issue of the magazine, and too bad it had to be that one. Your obviously tongue-in-cheek assertion that you were “horribly shocked” suggests to me that you were
in fact
a little bit shocked. You can’t say I didn’t warn you! Even so, I would not have picked an issue containing Nadine’s “Crotch Poems” as the best introduction to the sort of writing we want. Nadine is quite the exception. And it’s too bad the same issue also contains my “Meditations of an Old Pornographer.” I do hope you understand that this piece was meant as a satire of a certain type of person, a lonely, aging, and desperate “loser” (to use a really nasty expression). It is, of course, a literary fabrication, a piece of fiction, and not a description of the sort of things I personally think about while I am in the tub. I insist on this point because of your remark that I am a “funny man.” To give you a more rounded picture of what we are all about, I enclose some other back issues.
Your poetry just keeps getting better—stronger, more
pop
go the eyelids. It’s horrible. I can almost hear the noise the lids make as they slam up against the roof of my eye sockets. At the same time I feel my body going rigid, my fingers and toes splay, the muscles in my neck bulge. I lie like that for hours, until I can’t stand it any longer, and then I get up and wander around the house, the empty, absolutely silent house, surrounded by the screams of crickets. At those times I wish I had a telephone so I could call somebody up and yell at them.
I don’t care about the Spalding Street building, as a building, any more than you do. But its loss means that another trickle of income has been staunched, and I’m that much closer to complete bankruptcy. I don’t see why you can’t get a real job, at least until I can put things here back on their feet. The money I send you would just about do it. You can be an actress next year. Why can’t you be something else this year? After all, you already know how to type. I am struggling. I have several projects, but they all need time to bear fruit. I am working on a new novel, one I have been thinking about for a while, aimed at a wider public this time. I don’t see why I can’t do it without compromising my principles.
Yes, I did have a maid. She was coming once a week, and she hardly stayed long enough to make even a small dent in the mess, which is really like a nation of its own. I had a maid not because I had money to throw away but because I am now considered a charity case. I am considered this by people who ought to know, who have to deal professionally, on a daily basis, with cases like that, like mine. I let her go because I could no longer afford the sandwiches she ate for lunch. After poking around in the mess for an hour or so, while making little complaining noises in her native tongue, she would go home or back to church or wherever they go, and I would open the refrigerator and discover she had eaten my supper. I have to drink the cheapest whiskey now, and I never have wine. I tried to get the firemen to come in and have a drink with me. Do you ever have the thought that we might get back together when all this is over?
Love,
Andy
p.s. I don’t know what I mean by “all this.”
¶
Dear Fern,
I had not expected to hear back from you so soon. It is really too bad you were able to dig up only one old issue of the magazine, and too bad it had to be that one. Your obviously tongue-in-cheek assertion that you were “horribly shocked” suggests to me that you were
in fact
a little bit shocked. You can’t say I didn’t warn you! Even so, I would not have picked an issue containing Nadine’s “Crotch Poems” as the best introduction to the sort of writing we want. Nadine is quite the exception. And it’s too bad the same issue also contains my “Meditations of an Old Pornographer.” I do hope you understand that this piece was meant as a satire of a certain type of person, a lonely, aging, and desperate “loser” (to use a really nasty expression). It is, of course, a literary fabrication, a piece of fiction, and not a description of the sort of things I personally think about while I am in the tub. I insist on this point because of your remark that I am a “funny man.” To give you a more rounded picture of what we are all about, I enclose some other back issues.
Your poetry just keeps getting better—stronger, more
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