Folly

So there was this writing competition that I had heard about somewhere. Apparently you do a good enough job and they give you a thousand bucks. I sat there, thinking “Okay”.

It always felt a little disassociative to me, writing out of necessity and not passion. But my pockets were empty and my belly was growling and I had some pencils and some writing paper and that was it, so I figured, hell, why not, and I set about searching for ideas, finding the right words and the right constructs to fit around those ideas, and when I had some I uncapped a beer, lit a cigarette and sat down at my desk.

The problem with longhand is that the writing hurts more than the thinking. I had done plenty of thinking, sitting around and doing nothing, flicking uselessly through the channels on the television or listening to the radio when the cathode images became too much. So I had the ideas, or at least the essentials of the ideas, and all I needed to do was get them down and after three pages of cramped, sloppy handwriting my wrist was sore, my fingers ached, I lost my momentum. I had always meant to get a typewriter someday but whenever I got any money – the dole, a painful job here and there laying bricks or peeling potatoes, a poem if I was lucky – it would be gone. Rent, bills, food, drink, there was never any left for a typewriter.

Anyway, after those three pages I was spent and I leaned back in the chair, sat staring at the wall for five or ten minutes, and then I got up and walked around a little. Already I had used up all the good words, all the clever tricks that took the attention away from the mediocrity of the story itself. I wondered how the greats had done it. Bukowski, Orwell, Celine. They were born and they died and somewhere in the middle that had left behind all this paper, all these glorious images, and the hell if I knew if they got cramps and sore fingers but they rode the dragon, they fell in the fire from time to time, but they rode until they just keeled over. And here I was: three pages in and massaging my wrist because the dragon just didn’t want me.

I took a deep breath, sat back down and started in on it again. But after only two more pages I couldn’t take it anymore, and I went back through what I had already written, a spelling error here and a comma there and I pushed myself away from the desk. All I had was a jumble in my head, a jumble on the paper in front of me and a cantankerous wrist that hurt more than it should have, probably because of the cold, the unpaid gas bill.

I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t fathom how one could do it, how one could deem one’s fictive wailings precious enough to commit to paper. The sheer craziness of it all: envelopes, stamps, throwing another rejection letter in the bin and saddling up the dragon again, thinking, this time, maybe this time. The endless waiting, waiting for some input after all the output, and ninety percent of the time it’s three or four months down the track, you’ve completely forgotten about that thing you sent away, and all of a sudden there’s a letter in the mail and it’s saying “While we enjoyed your piece very much, the editors and I feel…” or it’s a yes but they can’t pay you because they’re some two-bit little journal in the middle of nowhere. So you’re left alone in your room wondering why you go on, scratching around in the laundromats for three dollars so you can get yourself a cheeseburger.

The clever ones always had something on the side. They worked the factories and steered clear of the women and ate rice and when they got home at eight in the evening they’d get in two, maybe three hours of ink on paper before they went to bed, to wake up at four and head out into the world again. There they worked their guts out and whatever they had left when they returned home, they spilled onto the page.

For me it was writing or nothing and that’s why I was stupid. I baulked at the factories and was a sucker for a pretty girl and a good rare steak. Whatever money I had left at the end of the month would go towards some lady I met at a bar, and nothing would come from that and I would be back in my room, staring at the walls.

I guess I was just lazy. I stayed away from the cafés with all those droll people who recited Camus without understanding what they were saying, or who did not speak at all because they were deep in concentration, lost in their laptops and mobile phones, shushing the waitress if ever she asked “Would you like some more coffee?” Beanies and designer jeans, decaf and Salems (but of course, they didn’t inhale), their best thoughts stolen by the ancients.

I sat down for the third time and looked at what I had in front of me. It wasn’t a bad piece, as they go, but it was sloppy and poorly trained and I didn’t have it in me to spank it and say “No more”. Just let it run its course, allowed it to deviate more and more from the path I had set out for it, six more pages and although it hurt like hell I just let it go, I didn’t care enough to make it work, I barely cared enough to make it end.

After an hour or so I stood up once more and went into the bedroom. There was a copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets on the bedside table that I had started and never finished because I couldn’t see where old Will was heading. I knew how he ended up, though: dead and with people debating over whether he even existed at all. A girl had given me the book and told me to read it, told me to come back to her when I had and when it had taught me what women wanted, and it seemed that what they wanted was ye olde English and a pile of violence.

In retrospect I know I had it all wrong, but right then I was sure I had all the answers. I knew that I wouldn’t sell out and that I would write myself right into the grave, I gave myself the classic justification: I’m writing for myself, not for anyone else. People came over and I would be blasé about it, “Oh, I wrote another thing. It’s not very good” and they’d read it and I would sit there, pretending not to care.

I went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water, drank it down and had two more. Then I sacrificed myself once more at the temple, vomited up another three pages. I ran through it a few times until I was more or less satisfied, and then I went to bed.

The next day I made the final draft of the whole thing, scratched out the address on a secondhand envelope, stuck a stamp on there and slipped it in the letterbox downstairs. Later, I found myself walking down the street, checking the change return slots on every payphone I passed. I had all the answers. The clock struck three and, somewhere, another leaf fell.