PFK1 (18 page)

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