Thirty

by Lawrence Block

  Girls prettier than I am have jobs like that, and for what? Self-esteem?

  September 1

  Still no break in the heat.

  I keep thinking, when I’m with one man or another, that here’s one I’ll want to write about in my diary. A couple of times I find myself sitting down determined to write about one of them and then I change my mind and don’t write anything at all, I close the book and go out or go upstairs and talk with Liz or something.

  Evidently I don’t want to write about them.

  I guess what it amounts to is they cease to have anything going for them, any aura, that has sufficient impact upon me to leave me with something I have to get rid of by getting it all down in pen and ink. I mean getting it down in black and white. Pen and ink is what I use to get it down in black and white. (Except that the pen and ink are sort of a stable entry, this being a ball-point pen, so that when you’re out of ink you’re out of pen. And the ink is more blue than black. Technology kills clichés.)

  Today is the day I’m officially delinquent in my rent down in the Village, which is nothing to worry about since I moved out of there two weeks ago. I wonder what happens now. Is the sculptor hung for the dough because it was a sublet? Well, if he’s in Bolivia or wherever the hell he went to, I don’t see how they can bug him for it. Let them worry.

  You know what I miss most about the place? That there were a few dozen cheap restaurants close by that you could go to without worrying how you were dressed. Little Chinese and Italian and Spanish places you could go to in slacks. Here it’s either plastic coffee shops (home of the dollar eighty-five hamburger!) or class restaurants where you have to be dressed and you wind up spending ten dollars, and you feel awkward going there alone anyway.

  All in all, though, I like it better here.

  September 4

  I had a nice high last night. I had a John during the afternoon, an advertising man who decided that he would rather bitch than screw. Mainly about his wife and his ingrate kids and life on Long Island, the whole suburban trap. By the time he got around to balling I was very depressed.

  Why, I wonder. I guess there were just too many echoes, it was as if he was Howard talking to me, or even a male version of me talking to me. I don’t know. He brought me down very badly and I didn’t see anyone else that afternoon and didn’t go to the bars that evening.

  Around ten the phone rang. It was Liz asking me to come on up if I had nothing better to do. What I had plenty of was nothing better to do, and I went.

  She gets this sensational grass from one of her steady Johns. He’s something in advertising or public relations and he’s also a constant pot-smoker, and he’ll come over now and then and get high with her and leave her a couple of ounces of grass because he buys in quantity and has it to spare, and then she’ll fuck him for free. Tit for tat, you might say.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ll get high.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look like you could stand it.”

  “I could. I’m so low.”

  “Anything special?”

  “I don’t know. Looking in mirrors. I don’t know. I had a trick that was a real bringdown.”

  “Something he made you do?”

  “Something he said.”

  “I know the type.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t bad mouth me. It was, oh, he got me thinking. I don’t want to talk about it, it’ll just get me deeper into it.”

  “So we’ll get high and cure all that.”

  “The last time I got high all I got was low.” The last two times, actually. I had bad-tripped, thought I was dying, having a heart attack, everything. Very scary. “The mood I’m in, who knows where it’ll go?”

  “I will guarantee a good trip.”

  “How?”

  “Simple. First we smoke, then we take us some ups. Nothing easier.”

  “I thought speed and grass were a bad combination.”

  “Then so are carrots and peas. Believe me, Jan, would I do you a bad turn?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Because we love each other like sisters, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And even more.”

  “Right.”

  “And believe me, I am very anxious to ball you. I am very anxious to do something related to sex that doesn’t have a man or a dollar involved in it. Let’s smoke.”

  “Sure.”

  “Gimme a cigarette.”

  I told her she only likes to smoke with me because I have the cigarettes. I gave her one and she dumped all the tobacco out and replaced it with grass. We smoked it in deep desperate drags. I started to feel it almost instantly and knew it was going to be good.

  We got giggly high and laughed about everything. Liz got us each a small handful of pep pills and we washed them down with wine. They were Dexamyls, with the Dexedrine balanced by a tranquilizer so you don’t get too paranoid or jittery. I swallowed them and drank a little wine and smoked a tobacco cigarette and sat there waiting for the ups to hit. They hit like little bombs going off in the forehead. Kapow! Kapow!

  We just couldn’t stop making love. We haven’t been doing it much lately. Most of the time neither of us seems to have any real desire. A librarian doesn’t want to spend the night with a good book. Mailmen don’t go hiking on the weekends.

  But a good orgy once in a while is nice. And oh, it was nice last night. We were behind all that grass and we had the speed to focus everything, and there was nobody around but the two of us, nobody taking advantage, nobody to be taken advantage of, no money changing hands, no worries, none of that shit. Just the two of us in bed making lazy girl sex.

  She has this vibrator she uses on Johns. It fits on the back of your hand and vibrates. (So what else would a vibrator do, dimwit?) We took turns giving each other massages. I used the vibrator on her breasts and behind and she came like constantly and then did the same to me. It’s a fantastic thing. You can’t help responding, it’s an involuntary reaction whether you want it or not. Really fantastic.

  All squirmy and loving together.

  I love eating her. I love it sinfully much. Her thighs around my head and my hands holding onto her ass and my mouth just gobbling away. Like an infant at the breast. And her mouth on me at the same time, circulating sex back and forth, back and forth.

  I get this image in my head of the Yin and Yang symbol, each half feeding into the other. Yin and Yang and Sixty-nine.

  Now it’s the next afternoon and I still haven’t gotten to sleep. We were at each other all night and with all that speed we couldn’t get to sleep at all. I think it should wear off sometime tonight. In a minute I’ll go out and earn my daily bread. A guy called, he’s coming over at four-thirty, the usual quarter trick, but I ought to be able to turn a couple before then and one or two after he goes. Get the money home before the pills wear off and it’s time to crash.

  September 6

  I know it’s just a reaction to the speed. At least I have the intelligence to know that much. But what good does it do me to know it?

  I wish I were dead.

  Was dead. Were dead. Who the hell cares?

  I just drag myself around. All I can think of is what a fucking mess I’ve made of my life. What a complete mess.

  Jason Silverblatt called. I couldn’t talk with him. I simply couldn’t bring myself to talk with him. I can manage a trick because that’s automatic, but I couldn’t talk to my lawyer. I told him to call back sometime.

  I wonder if he’ll waste his time with me. Lawyers must be used to dealing with crazy people. They must have this sort of thing all the time.

  Something Liz said. I should get a good settlement from Howard because I gave him the best years of my life. What a worn-out expression!

  But it’s probably true. The best years of my life. The best years of my life are over now.

  What’s left?

  September 9

  I’m a little better.
<
br />   Silverblatt says we can get alimony of around ten thousand dollars a year or we can get a full cash settlement of somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars. That seems much too high to me. Why should Howard have to pay me that kind of money? It would be different if I had his children. But I don’t. And I’m fully capable of supporting myself. In fact I think I can probably earn more than he does.

  I didn’t know what to say. Silverblatt also said he thought we should settle as soon as possible, and should go for the cash, because if Howard happened to smarten up and find out what I am doing for a living and spend a little money on detectives he could probably divorce me right off the bat and not pay me a cent.

  I suppose I’ll tell him to take the money. But I don’t even know what I’ll do with it.

  September 12

  Liz says a John of hers is perfect if I come into a lot of cash. He’s a broker and he does fantastically for her, and another John took some of her cash and put it into an apartment house in Borough Park that she never sees but gets money from four times a year.

  September 23

  Went shopping, bought clothes I’ll probably never wear. Why bother?

  Oh, it’s something to do. I didn’t feel like a movie.

  Wow, what a glamorous life.

  October 2

  Saw David on the street today. I don’t think he saw me, or if he did he didn’t recognize me, which is possible. I have changed since I knew him.

  I really thought he and Arnold were dead. That Eric had killed them. I couldn’t ever figure out a reason why that might have happened, but I believed it.

  I wonder why they disappeared.

  I almost went up and said something. Like hello, for example. But I don’t know, I didn’t really have anything to say to him. What was there to say? There was a time when I really would have wanted to spend more time with those two, but they weren’t around then, and now—

  I have to feed Herringbone.

  Herringbone is my kitten. I’ve had him for a week and I’m doing everything possible to spoil him. It’s amazing how intelligent cats are. When I brought Herringbone home he was six weeks old and small enough to fit in an evening bag, but he knew instantly that he was supposed to pee and crap in the litter pan. And he never makes a mistake.

  Herringbone doesn’t have any balls. If a cat has balls when he grows up he runs around pissing on everything and it stinks. The faggot at Precious Felines explained all this at great length. He was a good deal more cultured about it, let me add.

  I wonder if he knew I was a whore?

  Of course I don’t wear a sign. Nor does he wear a sign announcing that he’s a faggot.

  Anyway, you have to castrate cats to make them behave. Same as men, I guess.

  Why did I write that?

  Oh, stop looking for hidden meanings, Giddings. Haven’t you figured out yet that the more you learn about yourself the less you like yourself?

  This is boring. I’ll go feed Herringbone. He loves me and I love him.

  Everybody needs somebody, right?

  October 12

  You’ve come a long way, baby

  To get where you got to today.

  You’ve got your own cigarette now baby.

  You’ve come a long, long way.

  I heard that on the radio today, not for the first time, and suddenly I can’t get it out of my head. I thought I would drag the book out and write it down in case it’s trying to tell me something. If so, I can’t get the message.

  It’s Columbus Day.

  January 5

  Yes, you’ve come a long long way, all right.

  All the way to the end.

  When I found this and opened it and started to read I didn’t remember exactly when I had given up writing in it. There was no sudden decision to stop making entries.

  It was more like an unanswered letter. At first you just put off answering it, and then you try to avoid thinking about it and file it in out-of-the-way places because you’re embarrassed and angry at yourself for not having answered it yet, and in the long run it never does get answered. I don’t know what it was in particular that made me stop writing in this diary after the Columbus Day entry.

  Actually there’s nothing surprising about it. What’s surprising is that I kept the diary going as long as I did. Talking to myself through this book.

  Much good it did me.

  I can hardly recognize the woman who wrote those early entries. She expressed herself differently, she saw the world and herself differently.

  She was so afraid of growing up.

  Or growing old.

  Or something.

  Thirty. Magic number. Well, today’s the day, and I don’t feel any different. And if the mirror thinks I look any different than a day ago, well, it keeps the secret nicely.

  Thirty.

  What an odd document this is, what a record of what a fractured life. Howie has his divorce now and I have my money in the bank. In the bank? In the hands of experts who will turn money into more money.

  Wonderful.

  But what’s the money for?

  I know why girls have pimps. To keep themselves broke. Because if they aren’t broke they won’t go out and hustle, and if they don’t go out and hustle they take too-long looks in their mirrors, and they see too much, and they have nothing to do but brood about it.

  I guess I don’t like being thirty.

  I guess I don’t like being me, at any age.

  Oh Jesus fucking Christ, why was this book there today, why did I have to pick it up and read it? Howard and Edgar and the kid with the snow shovel and Eric and Susan and David and Arnold and everyone else, the ones I wrote about and the ones I didn’t, the ones I remember and the ones I’ve forgotten. And that last entry, You’ve come a long, long way. I really needed that shit today.

  It’s all downhill from here. It has to be, where the hell else can it go? What do I look forward to now? Grandchildren? A trailer camp in Florida?

  Not bloody likely.

  Be a good time to end it. Get off the stage while they’re still applauding.

  Why not?

  No guts.

  Guts? It doesn’t take guts. First you dope yourself up a little with a couple of Dilaudids and then you have a few drinks of wine and then you swallow the sleeping pills. Once you’re drunk enough to be brave there’s nothing much to it, and you don’t hate yourself in the morning because there’s nobody around to hate.

  But who’d take care of Herringbone? And it wouldn’t be fair to involve him in a suicide pact. He should have some choice in the matter.

  I don’t think I’ll do it. The hell, I’ll wait until next year.

  A New Afterword by the Author

  Jill Emerson was born in 1964, in Tonawanda, New York, where she wrote a sensitive novel of a young woman’s emerging sexual identity as a lesbian. Midwood Tower published it as Warm and Willing. Later that year I moved to Racine, Wisconsin, and wouldn’t you know it? Jill came along with me, and in due course Midwood published Enough of Sorrow. Same theme, different characters, and a dandy epigraph in the form of a poem by Mary Carolyn Davies. Another of Ms. Davies’ poems is quoted in one of my Bernie Rhodenbarr books, and all of this leads me to the suspicion that Jill Emerson and I are the only persons left who could even recognize the woman’s name.

  Then Jill went into retirement.

  It wasn’t hard for her to disappear. No one but an editor or two at Midwood ever knew she existed, and they had no idea she was me. I agented those two books myself, submitting them over the transom, and some day I’ll have to publish the letters Ms. Emerson and her publishers exchanged. I haven’t held on to much of my correspondence, but those were keepers.

  A few years later I was living on twenty-two rolling acres in West Central New Jersey, a mile from the Delaware River. There was a new frankness to be found in mainstream American fiction, and a number of prominent writers were using words and describing actions that were well beyond the
pale of the old Nightstand Books /Midwood/ Beacon Books days. Berkley Books, a paperback arm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, decided that what the literary world could use was a line of candid erotic novels, and my agent, Henry Morrison, figured this would be right up my alley.

  He peddled me to them as one Lawrence Josephson. I don’t know how Henry picked that name but suspect he wanted to guard against the possibility of referring to me as Larry by mistake. (It is a propensity of the nonwriter, incidentally, when forced to devise an alias, to choose a first name or variant thereof as a surname. Williams, Andrews, Thomas, Davidson—that sort of thing. Don’t ask me why.) I don’t know who Mr. Josephson was supposed to be, but unspecified circumstances in his life required that he employ a pen name and I told Henry I’d use the name Jill Emerson. That was OK with him, and OK with Berkley, and the first book I wrote for them was this one, which I called Thirty.

  Around this time I was having a problem with fiction.

  I wasn’t having a trouble writing it, and I wasn’t even having trouble selling it—although I sometimes had difficulty living on what I earned from it. No, the problem I was having was a little different.

  I was having trouble believing in it.

  I mean, here’s this novel, any novel, and what am I to make of it? Who’s telling us this story? If it’s in the third person, whether single- or multiple-viewpoint, where did these words come from? What are they doing on the page?

  And even if it’s the most natural sort of presentation, with a first-person narrator recounting his story to me, where’d he come from and why is he nattering in my ear? And in fact it’s not his voice in my ear, it’s his words on the page, and how did they get there?

  Yes, I know. It’s a convention. In the Soviet Union, a worker explained the system thus: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In the novel, there’s a comparable mutual pretense in effect.