The second robbery was notable for the loss of one item.
I had, about ten months before, started work on a first novel. Although there was one very special story I felt I had within me to tell, that was not the primary reason for beginning to write.
I started to write because at the age of thirty-seven, which I was when I began, I felt all sense of dignity slipping away from my life. When you are diving into middle age—and it happens that fast, no getting back up on the board—and you cannot get up in the morning and, at the very least, put in a day’s work at your profession, this is pitifully sad. Suffocation is what it is. I could not act unless what amounted to a committee composed of agent, producer, casting director, director, writer—and sometimes even a star or two— agreed that I was right for a part and, in effect, said: Yes, you may now be allowed to work for—what? Two days on a television show, or three weeks in an industrial, or two weeks in stock. Or half a day on a voice-over commercial.
My hand was constantly extended, in full stretch asking for work. I was beginning to feel the cramp. Even when I was working, there was the certainty that in two days or five weeks I would go begging again. I would be back in that depressing unemployment line, the one that ended at a fat Puerto Rican lady whose face tightened when she looked at my card, as if the word “actor” read “shit.”
When Kate, who was a successful fashion photographer, one of the few women in the business, got up in the morning to go off to work, I would often fix her juice and coffee as she hurriedly pulled herself together. She would peck me goodbye at the door and I would be left there in my bathrobe on the cozy end of a domestic scene. I would cringe when she would sometimes say, “Jim, you don’t have to get up, go back to sleep for a while.”
All too true, there was nothing to get up for. I could as well spend my time sleeping as sitting there awake waiting for my agent to phone with an appointment to read for a commercial, along with perhaps fifty other actors, vaguely my height, weight, and age. Often so many actors showed for one part, you knew whoever was doing the picking must be punchy from the pure swarming mass of them, all with charm stops pulled to out. It amounted to Russian roulette.
Even worse, there were many days when the phone didn’t ring.
This next part of the problem is so basic one needn’t even have heard of Dr. Freud. Lately, I was finding that the frequency and quality of erection diminished in proportion to the number of days out of work.
Bad deal. Not only for me but for Kate.
A good night’s sleep was getting hard to come by. One night I awakened at three in the morning, cold and sweaty, clutched by a prickly fear that the job I’d finished twelve days before was undoubtedly the last I’d ever get my hands on. I made a pot of coffee, took a shower, cleaned off my desk, got out a lined legal pad, and actually wrote the first nine pages of my novel by the time eight o’clock rolled around.
The relief! The joy to get up in the morning and have something to do, something I could do without awaiting results from the Central Committee.
I worked slowly if not steadily. Because I did, of course, get other acting jobs, and then there are the appointments, the auditions, the singing lessons, the readings that take up so much of an actor’s time. Pete’s death put a stop to all activities for over six weeks. I would just stare at the page and think of Pete, sometimes even write down his name. And mutter to God, then curse him, then stop talking to him altogether. But—write, no.
Now the perverse part. Kate is an extremely inquisitive girl. I would not talk about the book, let alone allow her to read my scribblings. The story was my secret, the more I kept it to myself, the stronger the compulsion to write it down. A good feeling.
One night when Kate was high and happy, she mentioned to mutual friends that I was, in fact, working on a novel. “Oh, really?” “True, Jimmy?” “How great!” “What’s it about?”
“Oh, he won’t talk about it, can’t get a word out of him,” Kate said. “But it’s good,” she added, beaming a wide smile.
The way in which she said it, the way it slipped out, together with her smugly satisfied smile, made me suspicious. “How do you know?” I asked.
She made a bad attempt at quick recovery. “I mean,” she said, “I just know it is. I know you can write.”
“You’ve been peeking!”
Immediate anger. “I have not been—peeking! I haven’t! How dare you—” But her reddened face announced she had.
We had a dandy argument, during which I accused and reaccused her of looking into the desk drawer where I kept the pages. Infuriated and still denying, she snorted: “If you’re so nervous, if you’re so untrusting, buy a safe and keep your goddamn book in there. No, I’ll buy you a safe!”
She didn’t buy a safe, I didn’t either. I did buy a small metal cabinet with a locked drawer and after that I kept the pages in there.
On November 14th, two days after I’d haltingly started back to work on the book, I came home to find my cat, Bobby Seale, in the downstairs hall of the building. I picked him up, climbed the stairs, and found the door pried off its hinges. Not only had the new television set and stereo been taken but the metal cabinet was gone.
The metal cabinet, by this time, contained nothing but my passport, a set of twelve dirty pictures Pete had given me, and two hundred and twelve pages of my novel. The only copy of the two hundred and twelve pages.
It is hard to describe my emotions. Anger? Rage? No, more like apoplexy.
Or insanity.
For the first week or ten days I harbored, sloshing around inside the mess that was me, the shaky hope/prayer that the burglar, once he’d discovered the total uselessness of the contents of the metal cabinet, might somehow return my book to me.
As the days passed it was apparent the book had been simply thrown out with someone’s trash or left lying in an alley to be rained upon and blown away.
I was victim, not of burglary, but of kidnaping. My child had been taken away and destroyed.
The fantasies I had of catching the unspeakable bastard would fill a twelve-volume set of Gothic horrors. Oh, the scenes of torture, of bloodletting, that crammed my head, awake and dreaming.
This latest misfortune hit hard. I was inconsolable and miserable to be with. Miserable to be with myself, and miserable to be with Kate.
She was not really devious; she was curious and high-spirited and she’d finally admitted reading approximately one chapter. She loved it, she said she also promised she would not attempt to read more until I made an offer. Still, I had bought the metal cabinet. The pages had merely rested in my desk drawer, undisturbed, during the first robbery. But now that she’d forced me to keep them locked up, well, naturally Kate came in for her share of the blame.
I blamed myself, too. I even blamed my cat, Bobby Seale, whom I loved, berated him for sitting idly by while the burglar made off with my book.
“Can’t you attack! Are the claws only for the furniture? Jesus, I ought to trade you in for a police dog, you rotten no-good black bastard, you!”