After he finished the book in his mind, he did his best to forget it. But of course it would not go away. The book was now called Night Cop, and his cop was named Jack Tesser, aka Jack the Bastard. A real person to Stan now, one Stan wished would go away. All the energy, all the feeling he had put into the book, was now backing up on him, making him crazy to get out of the joint. He woke every morning with nothing to do. Physical exercise could not cut it, even though he was up to six hours of grunting a day. No matter what he turned his mind to, it wouldn’t work. Desperately he tried to think about nothing, but there was no escape left in him.
The joint eventually ironed him flat. He stopped the daily craze and settled into waiting out the beef. The one thing he did not do was daydream about the future, about when he’d be freed. He knew too many stories about guys who sat in the joint year after year, dreaming over the same jailhouse fantasies, until they were finally let go and blew out of the joint at 180 miles per hour into the nearest brick wall. Not for Stan. Getting out would have to take care of itself. He tried as well not to think about the past, because of course the past was over. Those he’d known on the street were no different people. The sole thing he kept near his heart was the way he’d been treated in Portland. Those were good memories, so long as he didn’t expect be able to recapture any of that. He especially cherished Jaime Monel’s trust. She’d known he was a thief, and yet trusted Stan to care for Kira, to be alone with her. Stan had never told Jaime how much that meant to him. He remembered Kira’s large dark eyes and the way she’d stare at him, mouth open. She was so beautiful, her skin so pure. Stan searched himself many times to see if he had in him the seeds of a child molester, for even a speck of erotic allure in what he felt for Kira, and found none. He’d loved to pick her up, so light in his arms, and carry her around. He remembered carrying her down the slope to Latourette’s pier on Lake Oswego, how confident and strong he’d felt, protecting this child. She’d be eight years old now. She wouldn’t remember him. That would be all right, he’d still love to see her. He was glad now he had no children of his own. Judging from how he felt about Kira, imagine how he’d feel locked up in the joint with a kid of his own running around with no father to protect her. He could cry just thinking of it. It didn’t bother him to cry every once in a while. It let off the feelings.
Finally they let him out. They asked him where he was going to reside and he pointed vaguely south, so they assigned him a parole officer in San Francisco. They gave him a sweater, pants, shirt, shoes and socks, all jailhouse goods, and forty dollars. They put him on a bus for San Rafael with the other men being released. He sat by himself.
Stan’s parole officer got him a job working for a non-union painting contractor. Stan had a suspicion that this wasn’t entirely legal and that Morello was getting a kickback, but it was a good job, and the days he worked he spent rollering paint and drinking wine with the other guys, and on the days they didn’t work he stayed in his room and tried to calm down. Getting out of the joint was very emotional for him. He found he’d lost a lot of common skills, such as being able to walk into a restaurant or a store without his face getting so red and congested he felt it would explode. Or getting on a bus. Or talking to a stranger. Very difficult. Feelings going crazy. For Stan it was just another beef to sit out.
Finally he bought a typewriter and brought it home to Capp Street. He was sure he’d forgotten his book by now, but there might still be other things he could write. The notion of writing a Gold Medal Original was still a good one, and the twenty-five hundred dollars would come in handy. Stan’s room was on the second floor. He set up his typewriter and opened his ream of cheap bond paper. He remembered teaching himself to type in Portland, years ago. He wondered if it would be like riding a bicycle, and it was. Clackety-clack, he knew where all the letters were. No sooner had he started typing a few sentences just for exercise than the guy from downstairs came thundering up the stairs and beat on his door. “Hey, you can’t type in here!” Stan slid back his wooden kitchen chair and went to the door. He opened it and saw the angry face of his downstairs neighbor. A tall thin man with clenched fists and a red face.
“Fuck you,” Stan said quietly, and shut the door. He sat back down and started typing again. He heard nothing more from his neighbor. His new used typewriter, a Royal Standard, was a good one. Stan like the feel of the keys. Then something stirred, down below his stomach somewhere. Anticipation of something dreadful or wonderful about to happen. He took the paper out of the machine and fed in another sheet. He typed night cop, centered at the top. Double space. Chapter One. He searched his mind for the key word to the first chapter. He typed “Ceremony,” double-spaced, indented, and began to write.
An hour later he’d written the first chapter. He felt light, but not particularly tired, until he tried to stand up and walk down the hall to the bathroom, when his legs buckled slightly. He pissed, his mind empty, then came back to his room to read what he’d written. He wondered what the hell it would be. As he read it over the hairs on the back of his neck rose. Spooky. The first chapter read beautifully. It was as he remembered it.
The trick would be to make the rest of the chapters come out the same way. He wondered what part of his ritual was necessary, and what parts were not. Did it always have to be this time of day? Would he need his neighbor to come up and bitch at him? He didn’t know. But every day when he wasn’t called to paint, he wrote, and in a few weeks the book was done, on paper, only waiting for him to get up the guts to send it in. He read it over twice, making hand corrections as neatly as possible. Was he living in a dream? No, it seemed to him a good, fast-paced action yarn. The only possible problem being that it didn’t have a hero, only an anti-hero. That was okay, the pulps did that sometimes. He would just have to take his chances.
He waited three more weeks before sending it in, just enough time to really learn to hate painting houses. He thought about sending it to Robert P. Mills, the agent who’d helped him, but no. He’d call Mills if and when his book was accepted. Fat chance. But he sent it anyway, and heard back with amazing speed, three weeks. He’d expected to wait at least a month, maybe more. But here was a letter from Knox Burger, editor of the Gold Medal Original series, saying they’d accepted his novel, they had a few changes they wanted to discuss, and please call. There was also a check for thirty-two hundred dollars and a four-page contract. With his neck hairs up he went down to the corner bar and made a toll call to New York.
“That’s the best fucking manuscript I’ve read in years!” Burger yelled at him over the phone. “Why don’t you come to New York? We could use a man like you on the staff.”
“Uh, okay,” Stan said.