Tours of the Black Clock (9 page)

I work in dread of every word I write. It leaves me abysmal and burdened rather than released. When I lie down to sleep I have to put the papers away, where I can’t reach or see them. When I finish I don’t wait a minute with it, but take it right down to the offices of the magazine, so as to have it out of my life.

T
HE MAGAZINE BUYS THE
story for forty dollars. That’s the long and short of it, actually there’s a great deal of fussing and hesitating and general screwing around that goes on several weeks. First they don’t believe I’m really writing stories, because I don’t look like someone who writes stories, then they don’t believe I wrote this particular story, then they’re trying to figure out what to do with a story like this. This then is the second career which comes of standing around Jerry’s newsstand on the afternoon Jerry’s wife had a stroke; and the first career, as Doggie Hanks’ doorman, provides me the resources with which to pursue the second. The second will lead to the third, which will take me away from my country for more than thirty years. But that’s almost two years away: it’s now early 1935. I’m writing for the pulps. The stories are a cut above average and my rate goes up from forty dollars to fifty, but the secret of success is writing
lots
of stories; I don’t have the energy. Also, I don’t know anything. What do I know? I know how to destroy the manifestations of my youth in a single night. Out of it I write stories I can barely stand to hold in my hands, after which I travel for days inside my own black hour.

T.O.T.B.C.—5

I
MAKE A FATEFUL
and entirely conscious decision right at the beginning. This decision is to put across the top of my stories the name Banning Jainlight. I know that this has got to catch up with me, I can read the papers. The Philly papers have run a couple things, and Philadelphia just isn’t that far away. They’ve heard of Banning Jainlight there. Maybe I’m just not willing to be a tourist anymore. Maybe I’m not visiting anymore. The name goes where I go, bad or good. Maybe I keep it in defiance of Oral and Henry in that hut, Alice and my father thrashing on the ground beyond the licks of the flaming house, maybe I keep it to defy my mother who disappeared into the night, when she should have disappeared sixteen years before and taken me with her. Then I wouldn’t have been Banning Jainlight at all.

Sooner or later someone’s going to come. Little man, big man, whoever. I remember them already, actually. They’re still about twenty months into the future but I already remember them coming out of the night, down the street: “You know someone named Jainlight?” they say to me out of the dark. Little man. Big man. I turn and run. I hear their footsteps running after me, rounding the last corner of 1936.

But now in the spring of 1935 after I’ve been working for Doggie almost a year, I’m at the club one night early before the crowd has come in. Not much is going on, Doggie’s just strolling up the aisles and Billy’s with him, and Billy’s thinking very hard, hard enough to practically launch his head from his shoulders. When they’re close to me Billy says out of the blue, but so that Hanks will hear it, “So: Jainlight.” Just like that. First time he’s ever used my name, and I know it’s come to mean something to him.

I’m leaning in the door reading a paper. News all over the front about Germans. I don’t even look at Billy.

Billy’s eating a toothpick and talking around it. “Heard they’re looking for someone named Jainlight in the Pittsburgh area: that’s what I heard. A big redhead kid about six foot somethin’. Went on a rampage one night wiped out his whole friggin’ family.” He gazes off for a moment even though there’s nothing of interest in his line of vision except a bourbon glass on the bar that’s empty anyway. Doggie looks at him in confusion and then at me.

I look up from my paper now. “The news is fascinating these days,” I say, “take these fucking Germans for instance. I was under the impression we taught them what’s what around the time I was being born. Anyway, I can barely tear my attention away from it.”

“A big redhead kid named Banning Jainlight,” says Billy.

“Banning Jainlight is my alias,” I say, “must have been the
real
Banning Jainlight you heard about.”

Billy turns his gaze in my direction; now he appears a bit befuddled. “The real Banning Jainlight?”

Doggie’s looking at me, then at Billy. “You heard him,” he says to Billy, “the real Banning Jainlight. In parts of Pennsylvania there are probably several.”

“I know sixteen or seventeen myself,” I say.

Billy can’t believe it. He looks at Hanks and then at me and scowls; his nostrils actually begin to flare.

“Say, why don’t you take a walk,” Hanks says, putting his hand on Billy’s shoulder. Then he turns and pulls me by the arm toward the cloakroom. All the way I’m looking over my shoulder at Billy and Billy’s looking over his shoulder at me.

Leona’s been waiting in the cloakroom to ambush me, she has my coat halfway off my body before she sees the boss. She flushes and tries to sputter something ridiculous. “Give us a few minutes, OK, sugar?” Doggie says. When she scampers out he takes a long time looking at me. We’re in the dark and about all we see of each other are our eyes. For a moment I think I’m going to see fear, for a moment I actually think he’s going to be afraid of me. I guess he sees something too. “The whole family?” he finally says.

I don’t want to sound like I’m justifying anything. “I think,” I’m whispering, “I think we might more accurately say part of the family.”

“Oh,” says Doggie. In the dark I see him nodding. “Only part.” He nods.

Over and over in my hands I’m rolling a picture of the chancellor of Germany. “My mother wasn’t even my mother,” I blurt.

“OK,” he finally says, and now I definitely think he’s a little afraid. He doesn’t entirely comprehend but he’s managing his doubts into shapes he can live with. He turns around and, leaving me there, walks out, and I wait awhile in the dark of the cloakroom thinking about everything. Leona comes in and throws her arms around my neck, I shrug her off. I go out into the club, I want to find Billy and say, I’m your Banning Jainlight and always will be; but he isn’t there.

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.

T
HIS CONTINUES ABOUT SIX
months. During this time I deliver four thin books, each interrupted by a general haggling over the money. The man in the backroom at Charles and Bleecker is small and pudgy, with eyeglasses so strong they seem to disassemble his whole face; he regards me as an oaf. He acts like it’s impossible to believe I’m writing these books, and he’s always giving me messages to deliver to my “employer,” for whom he assumes I’m an errand boy of some sort. “
I’m
my employer,” I explain; he ignores it. “My employer,” I tell him one day, “says to tell you a dollar a page doesn’t cut it anymore. My employer is making three dollars a page writing for the crime magazines.”

“A dollar’s a very good rate,” the man answers, quietly and insistently.

“It won’t do,” I say. Ultimately my employer and I eliminate the middleman altogether, because it turns out my employer isn’t me after all. It’s a guy named Kronehelm, I notice because his business card gets clipped to one of my manuscripts as soon as I bring it in. This means the Charles and Bleecker man with the disassembling eyeglasses is selling the manuscripts to a private client who, for whatever quirk will explain it, has developed a partiality to
my
work in particular. I’ve got a good idea Mr. Kronehelm and I can come to an arrangement both of us prefer to the present one.

M
AKE THAT
HERR
KRONEHELM
. He lives in a flat in Gramercy Park, and that’s the listing on his box. The whole hall seems to vibrate when I go up the stairs, and when Herr Kronehelm opens the door he seems to shrink before me, cowering. He’s a middleaged man with flesh so thin and translucent it barely covers anything. The vague blue innards of his head hint at themselves like the meat in a Chinese dumpling. He’s actually not that small but he walks and acts that way and speaks that way. He’s dressed in a red bathrobe and keeps his cigarette in a holder, and it doesn’t smell like American tobacco. We go into his flat which is very spacious and well furnished and would probably be very impressive if someone cleaned it now and then or pulled the curtains back from the windows once a month. Kronehelm sits on a sofa and gestures next to him, but I settle for a chair nearby, some little European piece that creaks with the burden of me. Kronehelm winces.

We get down to business. On the telephone I’ve already identified myself as the author of
Maiden Voyage
,
Tunnel of Love
and several other notable works of contemporary literature. He’s having a hard time, I can tell, matching me with these efforts. A fog seems to fill the space between us, across which I’ve been hurling words for some months now, only to be received and transformed by Herr Kronehelm on the other side. The fog’s now quickly lifting. I have to subject myself to a discursive quiz on my oeuvre before he’s willing to believe my manuscripts and I go together. “You must be a man of some wide experience?” Herr Kronehelm asks; his accent is Austrian and heavy. “But how many years are you anyway?”

I’m tired of being asked how old I am. I dispense with my usual smart answer and just ignore the question. “Look, Herr Kronehelm,” I begin, leaning forward in the little creaking chair. I explain the situation without tipping my hand too much, I’m trying to get a fix on his situation first. He’s surprisingly open about it, allowing that he buys the work from the man at Charles and Bleecker for six dollars a page. When I hint at how little of that has been coming my direction, he isn’t especially indignant about it, but after a while he starts to see what I’m getting at. He starts to see that if I deliver the manuscripts directly to him, he can pay me three and a half dollars a page, which is better for both of us. Kronehelm weighs the pros and cons of this. It’s a good business move on the face of it but he worries that it’ll get him in trouble with the man at Charles and Bleecker as well as, I guess, whatever other characters he’s dealing with in this matter. But then another aspect of the situation occurs to him, one of great appeal.

“This way,” he says, “we can
specialize
the work, one might say.”

“What?”

“This way,” he says, “we might
customize
, so to speak.”

So to speak, one might say … he means he wants me to tailor the stories to him and his tastes. And for a moment I almost think I’m not going to laugh about it anymore, for a moment I almost think I’m going to feel the dread again. I almost feel it knowing that somehow I’ve locked into the preferences and passions of this man who, the more and more I watch him, appears as a blotch of human tissue that still hasn’t completely formed, with an unfinished cranium and a cigarette holder in his unfinished mouth. I almost think I’m going to feel it … but there’s not a chance. No chance at all. I’m just going to laugh harder. I’m going to feel better than I’ve ever felt. I’m going to feel better than the night in my mother’s hut, I’m going to feel better than the time I threw the bum out of the door of the railroad car. I’m going to have the time of my fucking life. I may not be able to write a syllable, convulsed as I’ll be with the mirth of it all. I’m going to be in fucking stitches. “Why that’s
fine
, Herr Kronehelm,” I say, “that’s jake. We’ll specialize it. We’ll customize it.”