21 Gay Street

My heart throbbed when I looked at him. How could I have done such a horrible thing? I didn’t understand myself. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My mother’s advice sounded in my ears and I realized how wrong I had been not to listen to her. I had been wrong, and now I would pay the price . . .

He put down the magazine and sighed. He ought to get paid three cents a word just for reading this tripe, he decided. Much more of this and he would go out of his mind. The stuff wasn’t written, that was for sure. Nobody on earth could write such drivel. The editors obtained it by placing a hidden microphone in the washroom of a girl’s reformatory.

It was Monday night. He was in his own apartment, dutifully plowing through the stack of confession magazines that Joyce had brought to him. She had come home from work smiling happily and she had handed him the pile of rubbish with the air of one making an offering to the gods.

He had grinned, accepting the magazines, and they had celebrated his success in advance with a meal at a steak house on Eighth Street complete with a drink before and a brandy after. Now she was downstairs in her own apartment and he was alone with the trials and tribulations of a hundred working-class girls.

He’d already finished two of the magazines. He skipped the articles, the letters-to-the-editor and the novelettes, sticking to the short pieces. He also avoided reading the one male-viewpoint piece in each issue, deciding that it made sense to concentrate on the greatest possible market.

Sighing heavily, he picked up the magazine and forced his eyes back to the story. It was a real lemon, primarily concerned with a young girl’s loss of virginity, ensuing pregnancy and eventual reformation. It was amazing the way the confession mentality and morality worked. A girl could do it once in her life, standing up, at the worst time of the month, and she would still get pregnant. All the girls in confession stories got pregnant—except for the married ones, who wrote touching things entitled WE DO IT AND DO IT AND I STILL CAN’T GET KNOCKED UP, or something along those lines. It was frightening.

He finished the story, hoping against hope that the girl would fall off a cliff and make everybody happy. Then he lit another cigarette and moved on to the next story. He was reading with the twin aims of finding a repeating plot-pattern and absorbing the excruciatingly vile style in which all the stories seemed to be written. The second part seemed easy. All you had to do, he reasoned, was write exactly as the stupid readers would write if they knew how. You avoided letting the English language get in the way of the drivel you were trying to expound, and you kept things moving along simply but steadily.

The plot part was tougher. After he had finished the fourth magazine he sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, trying to think of a plot. The harder he thought, the more he realized the impossibility of what he was trying to do. Either a plot was so trite that it read like a carbon of every story in every magazine, or else it was so off-trail that it didn’t fit the confession formula at all.

Hell, he thought, the idiots who wrote the stories had managed. They couldn’t be such mental giants. If they were that brilliant, they wouldn’t be wasting away at three cents a word. If they could do it, so could he.

With a sigh he abandoned the problem of plotting for the time being. The very next day, he decided, he would get up in the morning, sit down at the typewriter and pound out five thousand words of drivel. For the time being he would read and let everything soak in. After all, he thought, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Or, as the anarchists put it, Rome wasn’t sacked in a day either. He had plenty of time.

She had been reading when she heard the knock at her door. She marked her place, put the book down on a table and walked to the door.

“Tessie Trueheart,” he said. “Girl Confessor. Leading hopeful scribe of the twentieth century.”

She opened the door. He came inside and gave her a quick kiss and she stepped back, studying his face.

“Hard to say,” he said. “I’ve never read such a heap of unadulterated ratcrap in my life.”

“If you think that’s bad,” she said, “you should see the stuff I read and send back.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know how I’m going to work it, Joyce. They’re all the same and they’re all lousy. Every last one of them.”

“I’m going to write one of the damned things,” he said. “If it kills me, I’m going to write one of them. It’ll be lousy and it won’t sell but it’ll be the first one. Then the next one’ll be that much easier. It’s a step.”

He scratched his head. “You know,” he said, “I sure as hell ought to be able to grind this stuff out. Say, do people actually read this stuff?”

“When I was in high school. Not all the time the way some of the girls did, but often enough. I think everybody does. Didn’t you read garbage?”

“That’s ’cause you were a boy,” she said logically, “and I was a girl There’s a difference.”

“No kidding. Listen, when you read this stuff, did you believe it was all true?”

“That makes it easier,” she went on. “When you’re writing it, I mean. It doesn’t have to make sense the way good fiction does. It just has to tell a story. If it’s factual, the reader can’t be as critical as if it’s fiction.”

“So,” she said, “tomorrow you grind out a story. And I put in eight hours at Armageddon. And we see what happens.”

“In the meantime,” he said, beautifully without preamble, “let’s go to bed.”

“After all,” he went on, “I’ve put in a hard day’s work reading rubbish. Now it’s time for a little relaxation.”

“Oh, no,” she said uncomfortably. “I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I’m in the mood, all right. If I were any more in the mood I’d be dangerous.”

“Let me put it this way,” she said. “You are not going to be a father. Not for a while, anyhow.”

“It happens,” she said. “I mean, it happens. It could be worse. It could not happen and then where would we be?”

“Looking for an abortionist,” he said. “Either that or knitting tiny garments. But it’s a hell of a note.”

“The trouble with you,” he added, “is that you’ve been doing the wrong kind of reading. As an adolescent, I mean. You were reading confession magazines.”

“They tell you what not to do,” he said. “You should have been reading something to tell you what to do.”

“Since you’re teaching me how to write confession stories,” he said, “it’s only fair that I also assume certain professorial duties. You teach me things and I teach you things. Right?”

“So,” he said, “I’ve had my lesson for the day, and it’s about time you had your lesson. If you feel in the mood, that is. If not, we can wait for a more appropriate time. There’s no sense forcing knowledge upon an unwilling pupil.”

“If I were any more willing,” she said, “I’d be giving you lessons. Let’s go.”

She was a good pupil and he was an excellent teacher. At one point the excitement was too much for her to bear and she screamed his name at the top of her lungs, screamed so loud she feared the roof would cave in.

In the morning he awoke when she did. She cooked breakfast, then when she went off to work, he went upstairs to his own apartment and locked himself inside. He stacked the confession magazines neatly in a corner, rescued his typewriter from where it had remained so long untouched, took it from the case and put it on the table. He stacked paper on one side, second sheets on another side, and put a piece of carbon paper between a good sheet and a second sheet, rolling the paper sandwich into his typewriter.

His fingers were stiff from so long without typing. He didn’t know what to write or where to begin. He sat for a few moments without doing anything. Then, in the upper left-hand corner of the paper, he typed:

He studied that for a few seconds, decided it looked fine, and typed a title halfway down the page:

He looked at that for awhile also, decided it looked just like every title in every confession magazine, and took a deep breath. Then he began to type:

It started out just like every other day. I got up in the morning, took a shower and brushed my teeth, ate breakfast and went off to work. I thought it would be the same as every other day, but I was wrong. I was all wrong . . .

The story went along like half-a-dozen others he had read. The girl who was supposed to be telling the story was fresh out of high school, working her fingers to the bone as a file clerk in a lawyer’s office. A clown who went to high school with her is making a heavy play for her, but he’s an ugly goof and she doesn’t want to be seen with him. She’s the type who places a great premium on physical attractiveness, and while she sees the clown from time to time, she is sure she can never feel anything for him.

And at the same time, she’s got a big thing for the lawyer she’s working for. He’s a good-looking gent and she makes a hot and heavy play for him. He takes her out a couple of times and before long the two of them are in the rack together. He’s got a wife, of course, and when she starts talking about marriage he tells her it’s been fun but she should kindly get lost.

And, to make a long story short, which he was very careful not to do, she discovers that the ugly guy is a nice guy whereas the good-looking one was a one-eyed sonofabitch. She and Ugly get married, and although he’s homely as sin to the rest of the world, he’s the handsomest man in the world to her because of his inner beauty and because of the love for her that shines night and day in his stupid eyes.

It went slowly, somewhat along the lines of pulling teeth. At times he would sit for minutes searching for the right word, and at other times his fingers chattered on the keyboard, pounding out a page in a matter of minutes. He kept a pot of coffee on the stove, pouring coffee into his stomach and pounding the typewriter until his arms ached.

The closer he got to the end, the tougher it became. It was trash, of course, and it was illogical, of course, and trying to tie the ends together with a pretty pink ribbon was something of a chore. But he kept writing, working furiously, kept prodding himself along with black coffee, and by the time Joyce got home from the office the story was finished and proofread.

“You did it,” she said. She made it sound as though he had just discovered the wheel.

“Well,” he said, “I wrote five thousand ill-chosen words. Let’s leave it at that.”

“We’d better eat now. After you read this you probably won’t feel like eating. It’s pretty horrible.”

“Come on downstairs. I picked up a couple filets at the butcher around the corner. Sound good?”

The steaks were good. After dinner he solemnly handed her the script and did the dishes while she read it.

He finished the dishes about the same time she finished the story. “Well?” he demanded. “Horrible, wasn’t it?”

She took a breath. “If it came to my desk,” she said, “I’d pass it on to the editor.”

“You’re kidding. Even if you didn’t happen to be sleeping with the author?”

She nodded. “I’d still pass it on,” she said, “but I have a hunch he’d reject it.”

“Your plot’s fine,” she said, “but the structure’s a little off. I’m no expert, honey, but—”

“Well, there’s too much narration. You keep telling the story instead of showing it. See what I mean?”

She thumbed through the script. “Here,” she said. “This section, where she has the affair with the boss. It’s almost all straight narration. Now, if you made the strictly narrative parts more of a summary and made one or two big scenes out of the most exciting part of it, it would be better. More of a story and less of a dry sermon.”

“And the opening,” she said. “It starts slow. If you start in the middle of a scene and then fill in with a re-cap later on, you’d do better.”

He looked at her appreciatively. “You ought to write these,” he said. “You’re okay.”

“I can’t write,” she said simply. “I can look at something and get a fairly good idea what’s good about it and what’s wrong with it. You know, I’m getting so I even enjoy working at Armageddon. It’s an enjoyable job once you get the swing of it. These past two days have been fun. But I could never write anything. I don’t have the imagination.”

“I mean when it comes to writing. Not what you’re thinking. I could never come up with a plot, not the way you did.”

“Shakespeare didn’t write confessions. The art form wasn’t around then. He had to write plays.”

She sighed. “You’re impossible,” she said. “Do you want to do the revision? I think it’ll have a good chance if you do.”

“Like hell you will,” she said. “Tomorrow is soon enough. There’s a good movie at the Waverly on Sixth—I noticed it coming home from work. Feel like a movie?”

“What the hell,” he said. “It must be better than I Was Blind To His Love. Let’s go.”

Revision, he discovered the next day, was harder than writing it properly the first time. The rewrite he had to do was a pretty comprehensive one and he had to start from scratch. He was sorry now that he had bothered making a carbon of the first draft, but he had better things to worry about.

At least he knew where he was going. But now every word had to be weighed very carefully, every scene had to be built just right. He took his time, working slowly. Occasionally he would hit a section that could be copied almost verbatim, but those were the exceptions. Most of the copy needed a thorough overhauling.

This time, however, he was getting a good idea of what made a story tick. Now the story was taking a definite form and the form was soaking through to him. Strangely enough, it was beginning to make sense. The story had a beginning, a middle and an ending. It was too pat to be real, of course, and it was trash and bad trash at that, but the scenes formed a continuous chain of events and the people had a little substance to them.

He finished it and proofed it. And, amazingly, he found himself proud of what he had written. It was lousy, but at the same time it was pretty good, pretty damned good. It might sell and it might not but even if it didn’t, he had proved something. He had written a story to fit the needs of a market and he had done a relatively good job of it.

While he waited for Joyce he sat around glowing. After part of the glow had worn off he picked up another confession magazine, one he hadn’t gotten to yet, opened it at random and read a story. He saw that the story was better than his, that the organization was superior and that the plot was woven tighter than his. This disappointed him but at the same time he was glad that he was able to see what made one story better than another. This meant that he was getting a professional outlook, that he was learning the market.

Then he read another story. This one filled him with elation, because he saw that his story was visibly superior to this one, better plotted, better constructed, better written. It made him quite proud of himself.

When Joyce came home he was waiting for her, script in hand. “You can read this one before dinner,” he said. “Tell me what you think of it.”

He sat on the edge of his bed while she read the script. He watched her face as she read, watching every smile and frown and trying to guess why she was frowning or smiling. It seemed to take her forever to finish. Then she looked up from the script and he waited for her to say something.

“I think so. I’ll take it in tomorrow and pass it on to Sheila Robbins. She’s the editor of the two confessions. I’ll tell her it just came in and I think it’s good.”

She shrugged. “It depends on how much work she has. Submissions have been pretty slow lately, as far as I can gather. We’ll probably hear next week at the latest.”

“I hope so. Of course, if she doesn’t, it doesn’t mean the story isn’t any good. It might be just because she just bought another one that’s similar to it. This one will sell somewhere, Pete. I’m sure of it. If she bounces it we’ll submit it somewhere else.”

“Now let’s go downstairs,” she said. “I’m starving. You must be pretty hungry yourself?”

He followed her downstairs, curiously elated. He wondered if she was right, if the story would sell. If it did, that would be a hundred and fifty dollars. He—they—could use the money.