that highly specialized type of writer who can’t read, and he wanted every inch ejected from his office so it could go back to smelling no worse than Secaucus.
Once, only once, I scared up some action from the help-wanteds.
A publisher was looking for a bright young man wanting to go places, good starting salary, unlimited opportunity, fast advancement. Said bright young man had to have a good plot mind and a knack for snappy dialogue. I knew I had a nimble plot mind, I’d been plotting for years to keep eating and so far wasn’t losing weight. I had proof of my knack for snappy dialogue in the number of times I’d been removed from rooms by other people who countered with their knack for it. Anyhow, I got off a letter full of unrestrained enthusiasm for myself. A man with a voice to dislocate seismographs called to invite me down for an interview.
The address was on the Lower East Side, just off Delancey Street. It turned out to be a fifth-floor loft that had to have seen better days, otherwise it would have been condemned by the building inspectors the day the roof went on. This I estimated was around the time Peter Stuyvesant was being fitted for his fourth or fifth pegleg. Possibly Peter was one of the building inspectors. The shredding wooden floor had a lot of holes that looked like knotholes but could have been pegleg perforations. The room was bare and dusty and smelled of printer’s ink. From another one to the rear came a labored chinking sound, the sort small printing presses make.
The man who greeted me had no part that was not alarmingly pendulant. All his tissues seemed to have been systematically displaced downward, as in a melt suddenly interrupted, giving the queer impression that forehead was where nose should be, nose where lips, wrists where fingertips, and so on—a landslide of a man. His outstanding feature was his nose, I mean it stood out as though it was ready to leave home and had already taken the first step, yet what I remember most is the lips, they were really in love, constantly kissing and moving apart like a fish’s.
There was something fishy about this man all around; if you looked through the window of the big aquarium at Marineland and spotted him lazing along with the carp and manta rays you’d have thought he was at home, except for the matching argyle sweater and socks. I guess he wanted something in him to match, his eyes certainly didn’t, one was dramatically blackened. Our conversation went like this:
“How’re you at dialogue, kid?”
“I use it all the time.”
“We’ll start again. How are you at dialogue?”
“I keep up my end.”
“Suppose you had to keep up both ends.”
“I’d keep them up and play them both against the middle and have one hand free to write some dialogue for you. That’s a sample.”
“That’s a sample. Tell you what to do with that sample. You go make up some more, then take that one and chew it and swallow it before the cops get their hands on it. You’ll have ptomaine for a few days but that’s better than the electric chair. You think you could tell a whole quick-moving story in dialogue, say 15, 20 lines at the most?”
“If spoken by people with 15 or 20 things to say, sure.”
“I see you’re a wiseass but I’ll tell you, we could have some use for a wiseass. We specialize in fumy stuff around here and maybe with a lot of coaching a hotshot joker like you could come up with a tickle line or two. You acquainted with the Tijuana Bibles?”
“I’ve heard a lot goes on in those border towns but not much that calls for religious reference works.”
“These bibles they don’t use, they make, and fast as they come off the presses they go over the border.”
“Oh. You’re in bibles on the manufacturing end. Well, I could be very useful to you there, I’m not familiar with the Tijuana Bibles but I’ve read a lot of others and if you want some more bibles written I’m your man. I’ve made a study of how to get in the right frame of mind to write messianic copy, you think yourself into the position of the Pied Piper, say, or a white hunter, or the soldier who walks point in a patrol, any frontrunner type, then you think a halo around your haircut and start looking upward more than sideways or over your shoulder, and pretty soon some real leadership prose starts—”
“Put the stopper in, kid, you could sprain your tonsils. I’ll explain it to you, Tijuana Bible’s a nickname for a certain type funnies, like so.”
The thing he took from his desk drawer to pass across was a comic book, in full color, on paper that upped five or six grades could have been used for Kleenex. All the characters, I saw as I leafed through, were known American ones, but their words as captured in the balloons oven their heads were all in Spanish, more, they’d all lost their clothes, every last button and string, and were heel-kickingly happy about it, judging from the shrapnel they all were generating—ripples, shimmers, shooting stars, pows, bams and exclamation points, judging further from the interpersonal antics they were engaged in with all portions of their bared anatomies. These carefree cutups didn’t have any problem relating to others, they were relating in every way the epidermis allows, variously coupling, tripleting, communing, nosing, mouthing, fingering, backbending, splitting, three-decker-sandwiching. Moon Mullins was ringmaster for a tightly interwoven daisy chain that Dagwood was working hard to unravel. (Thanatos forever trying to undo Eros’s best work, where will it end.) Mickey Mouse had had a knockdown fight with Minnie Mouse. He’d decided to cut all troublemaking females out of his life and go it on his own. Just now he was exploring the insertive possibilities in a slab of Swiss cheese while over on the far side, unknown to him, Minnie was energetically reaping the benefits of his probes. The Katzenjammer Kids were here revealing themselves as powerhouse-jammers. The object of their ramrod affections was none other than Little Orphan Annie. Aided and abetted by a slavering Daddy Warbucks, they were using that diminutive Brillo-haired lady as a human pincushion, entering her at every passageway as though to make the point, long before Sartre, about there being no exits. I took no pleasure in what was being done to that little slip of a girl though I’d always thought she was too big for her britches (now missing) and needed to be taken down a few pegs for her protofascist leanings.
“—by the carload down there,” the man was saying. “The art work’s right on the nose, sure, they draw fine, but where they fall down is with the continuity, see, the talk give and take, their dialogue writers don’t cut the mustard—”
“I’ve often wondered about that.”
“About what?”
“Why any mustard should be cut. Most mustard, if you cut it it’s back in one piece the second you take your knife out, so I don’t—”
“You’re a smartski. You’re a button buster, no doubt about it. All right, here’s where a weisenheimer like you could come in. We take over the drawings but leave the Spanishy crap out of the balloons and fill in our own lines in English. We need people to write the lines. Bright young fellows who can turn a phrase without it saying ouch. We can pay for the words pretty good because we get all this art work for free, we lift it from these thieving Mexes so we come out way ahead on the graphics end. You by any chance read Spanish, kid?”
It happened I did, and said so. I’d taken Spanish in high school and applied myself a lot more than I did later in college to engineering drafting. He handed me another comic book, this one with the Spanish balloons intact.
“Here you got a Tijuana original we’re right now in process of knocking off. Study the human situation, the dramatic setup, then read the dogass words those chumps put in and you’ll see our problem.” I studied the
