![]() Shit, he said to me, if I could always pack them in like this I’d have enough money to take another trip to India! I walked in and they began applauding. Peter, who ran the store and was living with a black girl, had a pile of cash in front of him. When I walked in there was standing room only. It was at a bookstore on Kenmore Ave., The Drawbridge. I think I met Lydia Vance at my first poetry reading. She was Catholic and looked cute when she put on her pink hat and went to church on Sunday morning. She was terribly wrinkled but she couldn’t help that. The old man would pass out and the old lady and I would hold hands and I’d kiss her now and then. I drank beer with them every other night until 4 or 5 AM. The contents varied but mostly the bags contained tomatoes, radishes, oranges, green onions, cans of soup, red onions. ![]() Each morning when I awakened there would be a large brown paper bag on the porch. The owners of the court where I then lived, who lived in the back, thought I was crazy. It took me twenty-one nights to write my first novel. Of course, the work of each night had to be cleaned up or thrown away. Sometimes there were 17, 18, 23, 25 pages. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages were there. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. ![]() I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I was terrified and drank more than ever. It was about 6 years ago and I had just quit a twelve year job as a postal clerk and was trying to be a writer. I’m not sure when I first saw Lydia Vance. She wrote me a long letter each Christmas for 6 years after the divorce. I believe that she too is dead now, although I’m not sure. My wife had been 12 years younger than I. That marriage lasted two and one half years. I had been married years before at the age of 35. She lived with her mother and I paid child support. I had a 6 year old daughter born out of wedlock. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman-even on non-sexual terms-was beyond my imagination. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years.
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