Sheldon Lord
A Strange Kind of Love
THIS IS FOR CAROLE
and it is not nearly enough
Chapter One
I got off the subway at 86th and Broadway and clawed my way through the usual mob of people, hauling myself up the stairwell to the street. The air smelled good — even the soot and sweat and all the stinks of New York were good all of a sudden.
I felt at home, and I hadn’t felt like that since I left New York.
It’s a funny thing and it’s a thing that never fails. If you start in New York you’ll never have another home, no matter how long you’re away or how many other burgs you hit. The subway was crowded and the air outside was stale and musty, but that didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.
Dan Larkin was home.
There were no brass bands. There was no ticker tape parade with Grover Whelan sitting up there next to me, nothing like that. Dan Larkin was home — and nobody in the world gave a good goddamn.
I shook my head, realizing that I’d been standing on the street corner like a lost sheep for about five minutes. The light turned and I crossed Broadway, then headed south and east again on 85th Street. Walking was easier; walking gave me something to do so I wouldn’t have to bother thinking.
But you can’t shut thoughts out. East of Broadway the neighborhood was a collection of run-down red brick tenements with kids playing stickball in the street and obscene scrawlings on the red brick walls. I started to remember. I saw how far up I had gone and how far down I had come.
I didn’t start on 85th Street, but I started on a street just like it or worse, an ugly little street in East Harlem.
I went up fast and I came down faster.
My suitcase felt heavy and I looked down at it. It was covered with scratches but it was still good leather — the only decent thing I still owned. There was a sort of poetic beauty in it, because when I bought that suitcase I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I bought it the first time I moved out of Harlem and into the Village, and I had cockeyed ideas about impressing my landlady with a decent show of luggage. The clothes I stuffed into the suitcase were pretty bad but the landlady never got much of a look at them.
Later I realized that I made a mistake — the damned landlady figured my rent on the basis of the suitcase. But in those days I was just twenty and on the way up and it was something else to laugh about. Everything was a load of laughs then.
Well, I still had the suitcase.
But the laughs were gone.
It all started in that room in Greenwich Village — the whole uphill climb and the rolling tumble back down the hill. I locked myself in that room for a twelve-hour stretch every day, seven days a week, banging the Great American Novel out on a broken-down Royal portable. By the time I finished it I had run through three reams of typewriter paper and the portable was ready for the junkman. I boxed the book and hauled it uptown to a publisher, and I came back to the Village and had a few beers in a cellar club to celebrate.
The first publisher bounced the book with a form slip. So did the second, and the third, and the fourth. The fifth publisher sent along a nice note saying that the occasional drive and brilliance couldn’t begin to compensate for the length and lack of organization and total absence of commercial appeal. Then there were more form rejections — from a total of twenty publishers.
It’s funny — I can’t remember what the deuce that book was about, but I know it must have been a dog. In those days I thought the book was the greatest thing since Hamlet and the publishers were just a bunch of illiterate jackals. I remained convinced until the twentieth rejection.
After number twenty I lugged the script home and set it down on the floor. I stared at it for almost half an hour. Then I carried it back outside and left it for the garbagemen. I never saw it again.
I walked back up the stairs determined to show everybody. If they wanted garbage I’d write them garbage. I could turn out junk as well as the next guy. I sat down and knocked out a western and mailed it off, waiting for the check to come.
The script came back by return mail with a printed form.
I tried it again, and I tried another western, and then I tore them both up and chucked them in the ashcan.
So I decided to learn. I hocked the suitcase for ten bucks and bought up every pulp magazine I could get my hands on. That was the heyday of the pulps — there were millions of them, and I had enough sense not to buyout the newsstands. I found a back-magazine store on 42nd Street that sold pornography under the counter and could afford to make next to nothing on back-magazines. I bought them by the bushel and read them as if they were classics, and when I finished I carted them back to the store and got half back on them.
Two months later I sat down and wrote a detective story. I mailed it off and a check for $17.50 came back three days later, with a request for more material. I got drunk and picked up a prostitute and spent all the money the first night.
That was the start. I reduced everything to a formula and batted out the words — one, two, three stories a day. I kept the typewriter grinding and I kept on turning out stories. A bum knee kept me out of the war, and during the war anybody who could write English could sell to the pulps. I moved out of my hole and into a three-room place in the West Village.
I kept on typing.
When the war ended the price of paper went sky-high and the pulps folded sickly. All of a sudden I didn’t have a market any more. I had to forget everything I ever learned and I had to learn a dozen new things in-between. I wasn’t the kind of guy who saved money — when it came in I spent it.
One by one the pulps dropped dead and my markets were gone. I kept having the same expenses but I didn’t have the same money any more. I picked up a quick hundred now and then with a book for the pornographers on 42nd Street, but it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t big money, and I was used to big money.
I tried the slicks, but slick writing never turned out to be my meat. There was a kind of polish and phoniness to Saturday Evening Post stories that I never did manage to catch. But I caught on to the paperback book bit and ground out three chapters and an outline. One of them picked it up for an advance of $500 and I was in business again.
I wrote everything. I wrote under a dozen different pen names, all in all, and I was writing for half-a-dozen different paperback publishers. I picked up an agent and he got me more work than I could handle. I picked up a mistress and leased a fancy layout in the East Fifties and the money went out as fast as it came in.
Everything came easy — maybe that was the trouble. From the time I figured out how to start being a writer I never wrote a thing that didn’t sell. It was just a simple formula — I saturated myself in the stuff until I was sick to my stomach, and I figured out just how the writers managed to get the effect they were looking for. And then I sat down at the typewriter and turned out more of the same old thing.
The editors ate it up every time, and so did the readers.
It was the same with women. I had my first piece when I was fifteen. Sex is something you grow up with in East Harlem. Half the girls in school were knocked up before they graduated and the other half never graduated.
I still remember the first girl. Maybe it’s because she was the first — there was a hell of a lot I don’t remember. Her name was Sally and she was two years older than I was. Her hair was the color of copper and her skin was soft and smooth all over.
She copped my cherry on a pile of leaves in the school playground one night in the late spring. Her breasts were firm as melons and her hips worked like twin triphammers and she moaned at the right time.