Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

I chose the LSD episode with Mr. Wayne for my beginning. I picked it, from all possible beginnings, because it enticed me by providing the writer’s fondest desire, the elusive hook, which is necessary to attract people wanting to know why they ought to read what you write. If you don’t have a hook, what you write might as well be jotted down in invisible ink.

  It was my sister’s boyfriend at the time—I was thirteen in 1970 when we tried to give Mr. Wayne LSD—who planned to dose the famous cowboy star with Timothy Leary’s favorite stimulant. But calling what we did a plan is probably giving us too much credit. That dark desert night we lurched around from bar to bar following rumors. When the location of Mr. Wayne proved to be elusive, Meredith’s boyfriend urged us to go on searching for hours because, in his tripped-out state, he knew if we could get Mr. Wayne high on acid we could stop the Vietnam War. We carried with us that night two things: the acid and a little white rat in a fishbowl. When I thought of it, remembered it and recognized its significance eight years later, age twenty-one, I salivated. I tell you real spit came into my mouth at the chance to tell that story. That’s a sure sign to a storyteller of a rich prospect.

  I had settled on this, decided most certainly on the LSD incident, and jotted notes from my memory and seeing how I might tell of the terror and the humor of it, when one of the special collections librarians eased his bottom, imprisoned in tight corduroy bellbottoms, onto the edge of the table beside me and began speaking.

  “I’m married actually,” he confided in a whisper, “and my name is Rex Almshouse.”

  Here it came, I said to myself, another goddamn masher right as I had an idea for the beginning of my novel! I was a homely woman, but that didn’t matter to mashers.

  Oh, perfect timing, universe. It was inevitable, though unique—I had never had a librarian bother me before.

  Every time I got a good idea for a novel, a masher showed up. Why was it I could never work on a novel in public without a frightening encounter with a man? And this guy was about as lovable as a teddy bear cholla.

  “I wondered what you would think about that. Well, I have to be honest; I worried about it,” this man named Rex blurted. I glanced up from my paper where my pen had jotted the barest details of the Wayne exploit, and I have to admit I glanced up with an expression of horror and confusion as the married librarian gazed into my eyes and continued, out of the blue, with intent blue eyes, telling me more than I ever wanted to know about himself.

  “Belinda and I married ten years ago in one of those desert canyons that used to be full of nudists down near the border with Mexico.” He grimaced horribly, but who knew what that meant! Was it a hatred for Mexico? Or the awful image of himself nude now that made him grimace, and if so, on this we might be in agreement? “The wedding took place in a meadow full of wildflowers and she had other men that wished to marry her, believe me, she was the loveliest girl in the camp, by far the prettiest, but I was the most sympathetic to her need to stay on a strictly macrobiotic diet, which, by the way, would go a long way toward curing your acne and your greasy hair, but now my wife doesn’t understand me,” he complained, whispering at me in a sing-song voice, his head bobbing to an internal rhythm. “Then sometimes she understands me perfectly well,” he added with a creepy little shrug, “but she still doesn’t like me.”

  A pyramid of pencil lead dirtied the corner of the pocket of his cowboy shirt, and those eyes of his, which were so blue, grew impossibly large when he closed in on me. Cradling his own freckly elbows with his hands and rocking, he betrayed his excitement, which was a sickening sight to me, and his tongue busied itself moistening his cracked lips. He leaned his head over me, and his voice came out of lips buried in a tangle of brown beard. It was a voice full of constrained pleasure at the way I squirmed during his speech, which he hid from the other librarian, a stiff lady dressed in a sailor mini-dress, navy and white. His voice hinted of the tinge of sadness, or nostalgia, he felt for the time, then thoroughly extinguished, that existed before he had begun to tell me the facts of his marital status, when he supposed, erroneously, that I had been attracted to him. By his very voice he revealed the great desire to speak to me which overcame the blue feeling it gave him to admit to his marriage, to his adulterous interest in me, and yet he exuded happiness when explaining his circumstances in quick, nervous strokes. “I wonder what you think about that fact, about my being married. I’ve been wondering what you would think. I wondered if you were the type to judge me harshly or have a schoolgirl idea about morality and fidelity and monogamy that would make you unavailable.”

  Gadzooks! This man’s speech ranked as one of the funniest one’s I’d heard in a long time; worth putting in any novel, however I sadly would have to actually get rid of him first. Who would be foolish enough to marry Rex Almshouse, and then I recalled that almost any man can marry even if his face resembles a close-up of a wood tick. Oh, but that was rude of me to think. Who was I to think Rex was beneath me? I wearied of being the type of petulant, lofty person who scorned the stories that came to them. Maybe I should thank my lucky stars for people like Rex Almshouse. Maybe I should give myself over to them and at least hear out their stories?

  “I probably haven’t thought about those things much, monogamy, or anything, but everything is groovy, about what you’re saying. Seize the day and everything and it’s all pretty groovy, actually. I’m just here for writing, that’s all,” I explained, trying to be upbeat and cheerful and a little spacey as I found this put intense, intellectual men off-balance and might, in this case, delay his reaction long enough for me to time my exit. I felt myself slowly turning a bright scarlet. Already I eyed the library door and figuring out what I would have to sweep together in order to flee. “I got so involved in the process of remembering exactly some of the things that happened to me when I was a kid a few years ago, really funny stuff, ah, and bad stuff about a time that my older sister and my older brother and I tried to give John Wayne LSD, that I never even noticed you noticing me while I was writing. I guess you were. Noticing me, I mean. It’s just that I never noticed you. Never noticed you back.”

  And while I conveyed that, I was thinking what an outrageous thing that was to confess to in a book, that is, when a really interesting character besides myself appears in my novel, and not counting John Wayne who isn’t a character at all. What a telling thing, what an embarrassing thing, for the reader to know. Wasn’t I, a would-be writer, supposed to notice everything and tell the reader, all about my surroundings and the characters near me? How could I be so incompetent that I would let him come bursting into my story when I hadn’t noticed him in time before? Why should he even be in this thing when I had not expressly invited him? Wasn’t that taking the plastic nature of art a bit too far for the artist to be held hostage and assailed by the subject, the unobserved subject? And what about the reader? Didn’t they have rights in this matter, too? Should their reading be interrupted by just any old character who decided to worm his way in? By a masher, not an editor. Shouldn’t I be able to tell the reader all about his ways instead of telling how horrifying he was? Shouldn’t I be non-judgmental about his flaws and simply see them as interesting things that I could weave into an interesting story? If I edited him out before he had a chance to reach the paper wouldn’t I be interfering with the creative process? If I paid attention to him and observed things about him I could use him in one of my stories. I fancied myself as a sort of modern Scheherazade with a thousand and one tales. Wouldn’t one more about him be interesting? Yes, use him—that was the way a professional author had to use people who intruded into their writing.

  But I felt honestly enthralled by his wife, the hippie woman in the wildflower-strewn canyon. Belinda, he called her. She promised to be a better character than the male masher. I knew an awfully lot of them, male mashers, that is. I abounded in them. I overflowed with them. I drown in them. I found it difficult to rid myself of all the male mashers who showed up wherever and whenever I started writing. Not tha
t I was good looking or anything; witness the oily hair and pimples comment. Mashers just show up whenever a girl sits still, even if you’re kind of ugly. I’d plopped on the lawn outside the main library once for ten minutes when a freaky mesmerizer had tried to recruit me into his cult of women.

  I wondered if I could get information about Belinda out of him without irritating him; she sounded more interesting. He may have wrecked my new beginning, but I could still gain something beautiful from him.

  “I’m sorry the library is closing,” called the lady librarian then sweetly from across the room, thinking I gave her colleague a hard time about leaving. They were used to difficult people hanging around the libraries at closing time. Strange, stinky coots and such. My mother was a librarian and I knew all about that aspect of the library trade. This lady had categorized me into that group of abhorrent hangers-on. Her dark hair barely skimmed her shoulders and she had ratted it in the back and sprayed the outside with hairspray to form a mass of hair cupping the back of her head. She had intense green eyes and a thick charm bracelet on her left wrist. She liked being firm with people and using pale pink lipstick.

  “We open tomorrow at nine,” she added succinctly. “Why don’t you come back then?”

  “I will,” I said loudly back to her. “I’m going now.”

  At least someone sane shared the room. Yes, I was going, all right. I started shoving my papers about that LSD incident into the back of my notebook and piling other notebooks into a stack. This was the last time I’d work in the Special Collections Room. Tomorrow I’d have to work in the Ag library with the Future Farmers of America surrounding me. I’d had experience with an Ag student in the stacks of the main library. This one particular Ag student happened to be another in the long series of mashers and he was the type who kept searching for me no matter where I sat. I’d moved all over the stacks to avoid him and finally I’d found the small, special collections room in the western wing. Hope he wasn’t in the Ag library since he was an Ag student. Boy, what luck, another masher just when things were getting good for me. Would the Ag library have a buzzing telephone and murky light? Or chilly air conditioning? I knew there was going to be something bad about it. I knew this as certainly as the sun would rise in the east the next day and set in the west. You might say I was becoming a pessimist about the efficacy of my attempts to find a permanent writing spot and, while I was at it, a pessimist about any writing I would produce at any place, no matter how good the light and atmosphere was.

  The male librarian, Mr. Charnel House or Mr. Usher or whatever his name was, jammed his left hand against his left thigh and squeezed the table edge until the skin at the edge of his palm and his knuckles turned white and he noticed me staring down at his knuckles and he wiggled his fingers in what, I was sure, he thought a delightful, welcoming twiddle-twaddle.

  “I’m not…” I began lamely, and wondered with a great deal of fear shooting through me if I was going to be able to rid myself of this married librarian without angering him, for any man brave enough to begin his opening gambit to a young woman by casually discussing her skin conditions and describing the state of her hair as greasy was not likely to be an easy man to deal with, there being an unmistakable level of confidence which he had in his own impressions and ability to overcome the offense that he would generate on the part of the female. But the fact that he was married was so gruesome to me that frankly he could not have approached me as a headless corpse and been less desirable. And not allowing myself the least bit of sympathy for him, which was already creeping into my thoughts, that I might be feeling in case he might sense my empathy to all humans, regardless of their marital status and interpret it as an opening to him and all his baggage, including this marriage, and I supposed horribly, children, who could be my age!

  “I’m not at all interested in you,” I said plainly with an uncontrollable quaver in my voice, a rocking tremble in my hand as I stuffed my manuscript pages, pen and pencil into my notebook, knowing the instant when it came out of my mouth that to tell this human that I was not interested in him was a crazy thing for a writer to say, a destructive thing for a writer who should be interested in everyone they encounter, who ought to trust serendipity to provide the perfect plotting to the writer who was truly open to all experiences, and who ought to have sympathy for all her fellow human beings, no matter how irritatingly awful (or stinky) the individual might be, no matter how inappropriate their interest might be in the writer. A writer, I told myself, must be people-oriented and be listening to everyone surrounding them, and have enthusiasm for their triumphs and share their disappointments, even people with the absurd name of Rex Almshouse who interrupted my work and sat on the desk beside me and scared the hell out of me with his great goggling blue eyes, and who was not understood at home by his wife.

  And yet, I told myself, this man was not a useful character because who in the whole wide world wanted to understand another man whose wife didn’t understand him? But yet I told myself I ought to listen to them, any character who presented themselves, not because they contained the greatest story, the jewel, the temptation of the story to end all stories, but because I wanted to feel closer to them, to feel closer to life through hearing their agonies and triumphs.

  But I did not respond to that calling, instead I let the terror of the moment spook me out of a positive response.

  “I’m not interested in you, really. I want you to know how not interested in you I really am, really.” I ended by shaking my head in what I thought would be the most damning display of my lack of interest. Nagging the back of my head, was the thought of that Belinda story. Damn, that dame sounded interesting. I’d probably lose that story as a stray. Belinda would remain in the canyon—a lost lamb, a lost soul.

  His insolent face burned into me, gouging my consciousness with those eyes, boring into my soul with desperation and hunger. I didn’t believe he believed me, that was the crazy thing about it. He didn’t think that I could not be interested in him, as he was so interested in himself, and something about the fact that he didn’t believe me was suddenly pleasing to my author’s ego that wanted the art to be everything, to be more than me, to surpass and overwhelm me and to subtract me from the art, and I was able to enjoy the fact that he had no interest in me and never asked anything about who I was or what I was doing in the library. He assumed that my activities corresponded to his needs. I was his servant. And because I was a writer, I really was his servant.

  “I’m not interested in you,” I repeated, nonetheless, jumping to my feet and trying to project a mature voice, one which was more adamant and confident, though I suspected this would be a hopeless task, and pairing my words with an chopping hack of my left hand, as though a current of air agitated by any one of my puny arms could discourage him and serve to quickly cut off his claim. It was at that point that I realized that art was going to edit my life. Because I was making art, I would probably have to ignore a lot of men. Art possessed me, controlled me, and destroyed me as much as I destroyed it.

  If the creative process possesses you there are things in life you can’t do. Like make money. Art is a bit like God. It redirects your life, edits it, cuts it, distorts it or makes it come alive. Art prompts experience.

  “I never meant to attract you,” I added apologetically, assuming that the blame for his adulterous feelings toward me rested with me, with my unconscious actions, and feeling conscious of the effect of, a little sorry for, the abrupt nature of my chopping arm and the possibility that I might have hurt his feelings by making such a childish gesture. “I got lost in what I was doing which was writing, actually, working on my novel. Without even knowing I was lost, I suppose I was. It’s a danger when you’re thinking and writing and you have to do it in a public place. Probably that lady writer who wrote about the need for a place of her own to write in was right, you know, or at least on the right track. And the guy who put himself in a cork room. You see, I can’t work too well any more at my home in my
bedroom. My mother’s always expecting me to get up and help her hang out another load of clothes. Important work, someone has to hang out clothes, but not every day. And I’ve tried working on a stool at the counter of a pie shop on Speedway, a charming place I had always wanted to visit, but the waitress kept expecting me to buy another slice of pie or another cup of coffee and I haven’t got much money, so you see that didn’t work out and neither did a very big red vinyl booth at a bowling alley in the middle of the afternoon because bowling people are awfully friendly, and noisy, gee whiz, you wouldn’t believe it, so I was sitting in a fairly comfortable lounge chair for a long time which was located right beside the model of the battleship Arizona, which is up there on the third floor of the student union, but there was a lot of distracting foot traffic by that spot because there was a center for information about sexually transmitted diseases right in that hallway. Guess I’ve decided libraries are probably the best places for me to work for the time being, except the stacks here are rather spooky and lonely, and I really like this room, Special Collections, it’s so peaceful and out of the way and the books are really helpful and I’m about to graduate anyway. I’m sorry to say I never really noticed you until now.” I added this in a particularly merry voice, dispassionate and yet friendly, not judgmental, not discussing the issue of his marriage to Belinda in the far-away canyon, though I was really interested in her.

  This, for him, iced the cake of anger and despair.

  “Sure,” he snorted at the end of my discussion of the various failed places I had chosen to write in and my explanation for why I stayed so often in the library where he worked, “I really believe you. That’s why you keep coming here and asking about the strangest crap over and over every single goddamned afternoon until we close.”

  His face had a pinched unyielding expression of repressed fury and disbelieve, of angry contradiction, an opposition to every fact I might give him because of his overwhelming desire to see me as someone flirting with him. He discounted my heartfelt tale of writer’s woe and anguish, preferring to imagine me as a young girl anguished over him. This was the story he wanted more than the real story I was telling him. His arms were crossed on his chest and he spit out these words, but suddenly this was done with little beams of fun coming out of his eyes toward me, beams of laughing disbelieve also, of superiority, manly superiority, the worst kind of dominance over art.

  The implication that I had been secretly flirting with him, consciously or unconsciously, trying to tantalize him by requesting his assistance in what I realized must have been crazy research ideas (rodeos, scorpions, and J. Wayne) and that all the time I had been actually trying desperately to write beautiful things, remember beautiful images and times past, and really had been sweating out the difficulties of the creation of beauty in my attempt to master something profound, something intricate and rare, and put it on a page and give it to the desert southwest, to imagine that I have been attempting to attract a strange, married librarian with a past including time spent in a nudist camp when he won his nudist wife from other nudist men, and a wife that he wanted to cheat on with me blew my mind. The accusation of this married librarian, who I was beginning to think was actually dangerous to me, floored me, and astounded me with its audacity and self-love. I reeled for a moment. “This is a library,” I said at length in a strangled voice, defiant in the face of his accusation, and as the daughter of a librarian, always thinking foolishly of all librarians as intelligent, reasonable people, “and a library is where people are supposed to go, are urged to go, to look up strange crap!”

  He smirked at what was to him the utter ridiculousness of this defense. “Just see what happens next,” he whispered ominously. “Obviously, I happen to know what you’re thinking better than you do. I can read your mind.”

  “You can’t know what I’m thinking! I don’t even know what I’m thinking!”

  “See what happens,” he whispered again in a more urgent imperative.

  Could I have made him up? I thought to myself angrily. Was he inserted in the midst of my story for added suspense? As a tricky tool to hang onto the fickle reader? But they must have left long before now. Of what use was he, this desperate librarian?

  “This is the library—” I began loudly.

  The lady, closing blinds, made her way along the windows and glanced over her shoulder. She took in the sight of the two of us together. “The library is closing,” she called.

  “—I’m supposed to look up stuff!” I finished whispering at him. I began stacking my notebooks (a Big Chief tablet from Sprouse-Reitz was my favorite at the time) on the crook of my arm.

  “See what happens when you try and leave,” he whispered back.

  “Are you crazy?” I said.

  “Do you want me to reveal the surprise in the Surprise Symphony?” His blue eyes got even wider and wilder when he said this to me in a voice which I suppose he thought sexy. I had had weird stuff like this said to me frequently. I charmed these types of psychotic mashers. Both his hands were cocked at the wrists and his open palms cradled his freckly elbows.

  The truth dawned on me slowly, because, let’s face it, I’m a little dense.

  “It was you! You sent me that weird envelope! With the green plastic scorpion in it!”

  He nodded, tugging his beard impishly. “Yes, didn’t you like our little friend? I thought you’d like him. You kept asking for books about scorpions. I thought you’d like one of your very own, except plastic.”

  “I knew I should have moved my writing spot,” I replied. “The minute I saw that green scorpion slide out of the envelope I knew I needed to move my writing spot and never come back again. For some goddamned stupid reason I convinced myself that it was someone on the bus who sent that scorpion. There was someone I had seen on the bus who also accosted me on a lawn right outside here, but I should have known better than to think he had found my address, because that man already had groupies and he couldn’t have planned anything because his brain wasn’t functioning right due to him being struck by lightning a whole bunch of times. Boy, stuff like this has happened to me so many times it’s getting kind of ridiculous. I tell you, I’m sick and tired of being plagued by men like you. This is a big, big intrusion into my writing. Don’t you understand I’m only getting this thing started! I’m about to graduate and I have to get this thing started before I graduate! And finally I’m doing something I think might be good enough for someone else to read and along comes someone like you to spoil it for me. I won’t even be able to write for a couple of days after this you’ve left me so upset and everything. Can’t you even think about anyone besides yourself? This isn’t groovy.”

  “See what happens,” was his impudent, chirping response and his eyes goggled a little more with the mocking shake of his head. “See what happens.”

  I began to understand why his wife didn’t like him.

  “You’re the worst kind of character to run into,” I protested in an outburst of outrage against my bad luck, “You’re only here to ruin me, to drive me away from the best writing place, the nicest room, the best lit table with real growing ivy outside and it’s the best that I’ve yet found at this university, but you’re not going to succeed—”

  “Just try to leave,” he said, interrupting me, “Before you speak, you ought to think, at least half as carefully as you are pretending to think before you write. In a few seconds you and I are going to be the only people left here. Look! There goes the other librarian. Breezing right out the door. Then, when she’s gone, we’re in here alone.”

  The thought did not please me.

  “Good-bye, Marnie!” he called happily, waving a merry adios to his co-worker who left with a large red bag slung across her upper torso and a rolled up magazine gripped tightly in one hand. She glanced at me without really seeing me and supposed, I suppose, that I was clearing up my Big Chief tablet and I would head out the door right behind her after her colleague had gotten firm with me.

 
“Guess what?” he said turning back to me. “I have a little knife.”

  A little knife! This was the scariest masher ever! And I hadn’t had the sense to corral him into the opening chapter of my book. Wasn’t he a better hook than giving LSD to cowboy star? A better hook than the pale people who photographed themselves with the barrel cactus?

  Stuffing the last of my papers into my notebook, I stumbled around the tables wishing that I had found another library earlier for, of all the disturbances in all the places, this took the cake and it was positively the most awful interruption yet. Perhaps Monday the Ag library, a gray building that sat quietly close to the center of campus, which I blundered into once without even knowing there was an Ag library, would be a much better place to sit and write as long as no lonely, married Ag librarians decided to take a fancy to me. It was worth the chance, I decided. I must move there and remember, clearly, to never, ever return to the second floor special collections room. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to approach the library at all!

  Despite my rush toward the special collections room exit, he managed to squirt out between the tables and beat me to the door.

  “You have to stop flirting with me here,” muttered the madman.

  “I’m only writing something!” I exclaimed.

  “Hey, do you know which way I go outta here?” asked someone suddenly.

  An old guy poked his head in the door and addressed his question to me.

  I recognized him as the white-haired somebody who had been sitting at the table with me. One of the stinky guys who hung around asking the librarians odd questions. A stray character, that’s what he was. It distressed me that another character came in who I had forgotten to observe correctly. The reader didn’t get a chance to see him before he entered and didn’t even learn his name. I have to put him in because he’s the deus ex machina man.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll show you the way.”

  I sensed the disappointment of the librarian who would not forget what I was doing. He would not be dissuaded from his impression that I was quite madly in love with him. This, to him, was not the end of our story. Even as I got out the door with the elderly man and vowed, with sadness but relief, to never see that glorious room where I had thought so many good thoughts and remembered so many past things again. My writing spot!

  Damn, I thought as I trotted out, wasn’t it great, wasn’t it simply fantastic that the nutty fellow returned to rescue me and by his coming back in the nick of time like that just when I was about to be really scared by that librarian I had avoided what would have been a really frightening, disturbing scene that I would never have wanted to relive, even on paper. I was thankful for the man saving me, and wondered if he had done it deliberately and if I ought to consider him my savior, my editor, or at least the savior of my sanity, the savior of my writing at that moment. He was as welcome as shade.

  In my flight down the hall I peek behind and saw those great blue eyes studying me and he came compulsively forward a few steps and I knew that only the fact that the man was there kept him from pursuing me down the hall. Ought I tell the man what had just happened, or did he already know because there was something a little peculiar about the way he had hung around and the way he was now walking? He walked slowly so that I could catch up.

  But another little pang throbbed for the lost story of Belinda, the hippie girl I’d abandoned to the wildflower canyon near Mexico, gone by the wayside forever it seemed. Nothing would help me tell her story but an out and out dirty low-down lie. It was a shame about losing her.

  “Mashers,” said the old man shaking his head, “are the worst people in the world.”

  He observed my quizzical glance.

  “I thought he had his eye on you,” he explained. “He’s plum peculiar. I noticed he’s been throwing hisself at all the undergraduates.”

  I decided not to tell the old coot about the knife. I guess I should have reported Mr. Carnal House and everything, but stuff like that happened to me all the time. And me with my acne!

  “Thanks for coming back,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re welcome.”

  “I think I’ve lost my romanticism about man/woman stuff,” I explained, “but I’m still romantic about the world. The world is so intense, so groovy. Man, I’ve sure meet a lot of mashers recently, but now–I guess because you saved me—I’m not gonna think they are ‘the worst people in the world.’ I’m trying to be open to everyone. Mashers are just people, and, in their own groovy way they’re characters, too.”

  “Girl, wake up! That’s why you’re getting all these dang mashers after you, kiddo. A girl can’t be open to the world,” the guy claimed. “The best thing is for a woman to be very, very closed. Take it from me. You want to close up like a clam.”

  “I think you’re wrong. I’m not really a girl, I’m a writer. A writer has to be open, probably. Open to everyone. Nonjudgmental. I’m working on it. It’s strange because I just remembered something when you said that about the worst people in the world.”

  “What?”

  “I remembered that I used to think Easterners were the worst people in the world.”

  “Easterners? Who told you that?”

  “My older sister believed it. Then she forgot it and she moved back East! And my brother left. I’m gonna leave and then no one’s gonna write all the beautiful stuff about the desert that I know. I guess I have to resign myself to that fact. I had a couple of scary encounters a long time ago. It’s hard to think it out. I wanted to write about that time, but I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start with that. Start right there. It’s bound to be interesting. Start with how you got the notion that Easterners were the worst people in the world.”

  We walked together out the front door of the library.

  His form waned with wide opened eyes under a cowboy hat. I liked that old man who had gone before me down the stairs.

  But also bitter envy and anger had its grip on me. How lucky young men were to be able to do something as simple as sit at a table in a library and write without worrying about a kook sneaking up on them and beginning to harass them, for there really were not many women who would bother a single man who wrote, although there were thousands of men who would not hesitate to insert themselves into the very life of a woman who dared appear in a library and concentrate on something other than her environment. In fact you had to continuously change places due to the harassing nature of young males, I had discovered that and I wasn’t a particularly gorgeous female, and now, now, I had a married man, not young at all, possibly the father of young children, bothering me through no fault of my own. No, men did not have women approaching them, bothering them.

  I am desperately, desperately unlucky, I told myself and instead of the pride that I used to feel, the pride in my childhood home, at my place in the sun, my unique vantage point on America, I wonder how I could ever have been more plagued. How anyone could have devised a more suitable torture than to have placed me out on this barren plain and given me so few opportunities to improve myself. How had most people been so lucky to have been born in great centers of knowledge, to be surrounded by works of art, to be born as men surrounded by moving masses of people, to not be saddled by or subject to the obsessions of married librarians, who drove them out of perfectly good writing locations into other ones which would prove less desirable for a thousand reasons. And how could I be so unlucky to be surrounded all my life by the hokey stories of Arizona, the gal-darn, side-shooting, side-show nature of the place. And going further, I wondered how people had the taste and skill to rise up out of places which were even less cultured than where I was from, and was that culture anyway? Didn’t I have a lot of nerve complaining about my situation when other people had written in prisons and camps of hobos and such, probably on rickety tables in the dead of night when the clocks were ticking non-stop and I was only complaining about the endless series of false starts I had made and people who had interrupted my work, th
ough I had always been able to start again.

  A knife? Just when my writing showed promise, when I had found the best place to work, and had a good idea to begin my work, I became captive of a crazed librarian who knew my home address and had a knife. Torpedoed. That’s what I was. My writing was as doomed as a nestling on the floor of the desert in June.

  Life had a deplorable way of happening just when I needed to create my fake past life on paper. How was I supposed to work on the past life and its meaning when the current life threw characters like Rex Almshouse at me, huh? Threatening me with knifes and sending me green scorpions in the mail. Well, I’d been threatened by bad characters before. Plenty of times while writing. Writing is a frustrating and dangerous profession, like a trial in which you don’t have a lawyer and you don’t understand the proceedings or maybe a better analogy is a puzzle with a lot of crazy pieces and all of it together makes a picture that is never perfect and is always incomplete, imperfect, and transient. Nobody tells you that stuff. A dreadful compulsion dictates that I must piece together my adventure for you, green scorpions, mashers, and knives be damned.