Enid and I used to be close. I used to make her laugh. Gahhh, back then I thought she was the smartest, prettiest girl in the world next to my mother. When Enid and I graduated, we made plans. She went off to college and I took a job to prepare for our future.
Except, I hated that damn store clerking job. I felt myself turn into a more miserable person with each new day that passed. Pushing a broom all day, waiting for the sky to darken so I could go home. I wasn't doing anyone any favors. I was just taking up space, oxygen, time... time I only had one lifetime of... no. Not after watching my mother go through another bout of night sweats, I was having no more of that kind of superfluous waste of human life. If I couldn't be useful to folks - at least I wasn't gonna be miserable for myself. I used what penance I'd saved up, bought myself a typewriter, and quit.
It was slow going at first, and I felt silly. Loading the ribbon was tedious. Loading the paper was cumbersome. I couldn't type very fast... and to make matters worse... all the fellas started calling me "Steno"... which only served to get my dander up. Stenographers were ladies. I was neither lady, nor stenographer, but I had read what those other authors had written and I knew I could do as well... if not twice as well... as they had. To hell with those name-calling bastards. I was determined. Whatever it was going to take, I was going to do it. I was going to be a writer.
You see, prior to my typewriter purchase, I had nothing but handwritten stories that had turned in to piles and piles of notebooks and loose leaf papers. Stories that used to make Enid laugh and ask me to tell another. Early on I'd tried to send some of those off, but I always got notes back from publishers about penmanship and how much it impeded the flow, about how policy wouldn't allow them to take handwritten writings, about how the modern man did it with a typewriter.
Was I a modern man?
Hell yes I was. I might have started out as a average man from a backwoods place -- but I'd be damned if I was going to be shoved out of my opportunities by some gentrified, tea-pushing patsy in his cologne-scented monkey-suit, just because the shit had a machine that I didn't have. Hell, I'd have made one of those suckers if I had to.
Then I'd make money... and Enid would graduate... and we'd get married... and I'd support us with my stories. Bounce ideas off my kids maybe. It was a good plan.
Or I thought it was.
Enid came back and she was different. She'd lost her earthy sense of humor. College changed the girl I had loved into a woman I didn't know. Suddenly, she thought I was ignorant and trashy. My girl... MY girl... had become one of the suits who refused to read my stories just because it was handwritten.
No - I wasn't gonna let that one just sit. We had a deal. We made plans. She wasn't supposed to bail. I had to get smart.
You see, before she came back, I really only used my library card to read the pulps. The stories I used to write for her were all pulps. I never thought there was anything wrong with them. But she'd picked up novels on me while we were apart... so, I had to catch up. I started picking up everything from Seneca to Shakespeare. The difference in verbiage from the pulps was apparent. Even Shakespeare, who wrote a lot of the more risque pieces of his time, was more eloquent than I felt I was.
Well, I was no slouch. I could remedy a shortcoming about as well as any other fella. I got a dictionary and every time I wrote I used that time as an opportunity to learn something new.
The problem with learning something new, is that after a while you realize that thing you learned -- was never really authentically you. The words I had started using were not my own, and in the confines of my stories I began to notice how jarringly distracting they were from the rest of the narratives. Shakespeare may have been brilliant, but Shakespeare didn't live in West Texas. Shakespeare didn't know what I knew. Shakespeare couldn't write what I could. Then I realized -- Shakespeare wouldn't even try... and that was what made him great. Shakespeare would just go on writing what he knew best. There it was, the road opened up in front of me. I set the dictionary back on the shelf and returned to what I knew best... referencing it only when it was absolutely necessary. I already had plenty of words rolling around in my gourd -- if I couldn't pick one from the ones rolling around in there, maybe I'd pull the dictionary down... maybe.
So, I started heavy-writing... pulps of course. Blood, battles, carnage, sex... I knew that world. I lived and pretended that world -- all I had to do was write it out my daydreams. Daydreams that at moments became so vivid, I would swear they were real. I knew better, but in the meantime I got real good at manipulating my perception of my actual reality.
The more I wrote, the further and further from Enid my mind drifted, until I no longer cared what she thought of me. I may have used her as inspiration for a couple of the sex yarns, but it never went beyond that. I was going to be published. Period. Enid could stew in her own hoity-toity juices. I didn't need her anymore. I had a typewriter now.
That machine became my best friend, my worst enemy, my sounding board, my confidante, my damnation, my salvation, and my immortality... one keystroke at a time.
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(Note: the following itty bit may or may not show up later... I've written it out of sequence.)
One day, a little bird came to my window, and that was when I realized why novels were called novels. They needed the time and attention investments. They needed a plan of attack because novels were long-term. And I found I had developed a novel in my head that damn near jumped out of the typewriter at me.
