Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

“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.

THIS 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.

MAKE 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?”