Adios, Scheherazade

So what shall I say? My name is Edwin George Topliss, I am twenty-five years old, I was born on August 7th, 1942, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller.

My mother was then Mabel Swing, part of a girl quartet called the Melogals. One of the other Melogals, Laverne LaRoche, became a big star around 1946 and sank without a trace around 1950. I don’t think it had anything to do with the blacklist or anything like that, I think she just wore out her welcome. She was a recording star, and some other recording stars came along and she got shoved off into Hits of Yesteryear. My mother used to have some of Laverne LaRoche’s records, and some sheet music with her smiling face on the front. A sort of long horsy face with very big white teeth. Mouse-colored hair that blooped on top and hung down straight at the sides and blooped again at the neck. Padded shoulders that made her look as though she was wearing a crepe coffin. “My Saturday Love,” that was one of her big hits. Remember that one, gang? Da de da, de da da, my Saturday love. I always thought it stank. Particularly when my mother sang along with the record, thereby giving me a weird version of half the Melogals, one-quarter recorded and the other quarter live.

I don’t know how it worked out, exactly, I think maybe my mother wrote to Laverne LaRoche when Laverne LaRoche was on top of the heap and never got any answer. And then Laverne LaRoche wrote my mother a letter, or called her on the phone or something, along about my senior year in Albany High, which would be around 1959, and my mother either didn’t answer the letter or if it was a phone call she told Laverne LaRoche to go fuck herself or something like that. Anyway, the Melogals don’t have reunions. But my mother kept the records, and I can still remember coming into the house unexpected every once in a while, nobody home but my mother, and she’d be singing along with one of the old 78s. “You took my heart, but you wouldn’t take me, you wanted my love, but you wanted to be free.” This is when I was in high school, and later on during summer vacations from college, and every time it would happen my mother would right away clam up and play some other record and not sing along any more.

Frankly, I don’t think that much of my mother’s voice, but she assures me it used to be better. She still thinks it’s pretty good, or she thinks it’s still pretty good. You know what I mean.

Do writers have trouble like that? At fifty thousand words a book, with twenty-eight books under my belt — in more ways than one — that’s one million four hundred thousand words I’ve written. And I still get screwed up in the sentences. And that’s the basics, you know? Being a writer, I mean a fiction writer, I mean a real honest-to-God storyteller like Rod or Pete or Dick, means having so much by way of imagination and ability to invent character and incident, all these talents and abilities that are as complicated and wonderful as the working of a pinball machine, and I’m so far down the ladder I even get the sentences screwed up.

These things are done once, you know. Every once in a while, if I’ve really done something horrible with grammar or a run-on sentence, I’ll take that page out of the typewriter and start again, but mostly this stuff is one draft. I mean, it’s bad enough to write it, I couldn’t possibly read it. So I go along, fifteen pages a day, ten days a book, all of it first draft, all of it pushing along as fast as I can go, whatever comes into my head next, which is almost invariably something very stock and banal and expected and ordinary and imitative of a thousand books before me, and it all pours like a runny nose onto the paper, sheet after sheet, one hundred fifty sheets of paper when I’m done. Plus an extra sheet of paper to the left of the typewriter on which I jot down important things like the characters’ names and any other facts I may have to refer to again later on in the book.

I was talking to a girl at a party once, a party at Rod’s place when he had the place on East 10th Street, and she asked me what I did, which gave me my usual trauma, and when she finally got it out of me that I write dirty books in ten days each she said, “How do you remember all of the things that are in the book? How can you go back to it the next day and still have that whole world clear in your mind?”