Penelope was angry with me,
earlier this week I had ripped up
a story that I’d been working on for
a long time.
The story was about an ex-con, with a heart of gold,
he wandered around Nevada and righted a few wrongs
along the way.
The coolest thing about him was his name and the fact that
he was a little banged up.
In my head, he was kind of an older guy, a ***,
kind of greasy, you know, shifty, reckless, a guy
maybe you could relate to, and he walked with a cane.
Big deal, right?
Penelope didn’t think so; I mean she was smart enough
to know that this story wasn’t my ******* magnum-opus
or anything, but she got ****** because I flipped out, started yelling
about how I was a no good sonofabitch, couldn’t write for ****,
and should give it up and take up ******’ basket-weaving or something.
She tried to tell me that I was being a ******* and that I was a good writer;
pointing out that I’d made it into rags like “Clues”, “Dime Detective”, and that once
I’d even been published in “Web of Mystery”.
But I wouldn’t listen and I told her that she was full of ****, and a pain in the ***,
and that she could do better than a hack like me, and I told her to get the hell
away from me or I might lose my ******* mind and strangle her.
So, she did. She packed a bag, got in my car, and took off for her cousin’s house upstate.
Now, here I was, without my car, without more than maybe twenty-five bucks to my name,
and without the girl of my dreams.
I was just about to throw my typewriter out the window when the phone rang…
“Penny?”
“Nope.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, ya dumb ****!”
“Who the **** is ‘me’ and what the **** does ‘me’ want?”
“It’s Dale, ya *******!”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah!”
Dale proceeded to tell me about how he’d just been picked
up by both “Amazing Stories” and “Tales From The Crypt” for a
six month run of short fiction in each and he then tells me that
they’ve seen fit to advance him two-hundred dollars each.
“Eat ****, Dale,” I say, and hang up the phone.
About thirty minutes later there’s a knock at my door.
It’s not Penelope, unfortunately.
It’s Dale.
“I don’t wanna eat ****, Chuckie-boy.
I wanna eat a steak.”
I tell Dale to go get a **** steak and that I’m not planning on going anywhere.
He won’t take no for an answer, so the next thing I know, we’re loaded into his jalopy and heading downtown.
The first place we go is Rico’s.
Rico’s has pretty good food and they know what to do with a KC strip,
so Dale’s pretty jazzed.
“Chuck, you getting’ a steak?”
“Nah, I was thinkin’ about the club sandwich.”
While we ate, Dale told me about how he’d gone about the writing of the pilots
for his two series of short stories, about the correspondence between himself and the
editors, about sending in edits and revisions, and about finally getting his acceptance letters,
signing the contracts, and getting the checks in the mail.
I listened, sure, but mostly I let my thoughts wander to how Penelope and I had done, and been doing, much the same for the past several years.
I would mail manila envelopes back and forth to “Mystery and Suspense” and she would do her monthly allotment of sentiment scribbling for The Renaissance Greeting Card Co.
Neither of us were hacks. We got some checks in the mail, same as Dale, and more often.
What chaffed was that Dale had gotten a contract for a run of stories.
Dale had gotten what I wanted. And, I couldn’t handle it.
I had forgotten about all that I had done, all that I had achieved,
I had dismissed all of those manila envelopes, all of those little checks, I had forgotten how they’d added up, how they’d kept me alive, fed me, sheltered me, how they’d sustained me.
And in the dismissal of those envelopes and all the good they’d done me, I’d managed to dismiss the only other things that had done me any good at all. I’d dismissed myself as a writer, and I’d done the very same to Penelope.
What a fool I was.
When we’d finished, Dale paid the check and asked if I wanted to go to Auggie’s *******
and have a look.
I said that I didn’t.
I thanked him for the meal and asked if he’d mind dropping me off at home.
I told him that I had a lot of work to do on a rewrite,
and that I had a telephone call to make.
*
-JBClaywell
©P&ZPublications; 2016
