had been forced to reappraise my whole personality. He said, You’re pretty good at this. Why don’t you show these to Chris? I said no, I wanted it to be a secret, and
Richie said: Why… It ain’t pussy. You ain’t no queer. I mean, it ain’t poetry.
Still, I made him promise not to tell anybody about my stories and of course
he did and it turned out most of them liked to read the stuff I wrote, which was mostly about getting buried alive or some crook coming back from the dead and slaughtering
the jury that had condemned him in Twelve Interesting Ways or a maniac that went
crazy and chopped a lot of people into veal cutlets before the hero, Curt Cannon, ‘cut the subhuman, screeching madman to pieces with round after round from his
smoking .45 automatic.’ In my stories, they were always rounds. Never bullets.
For a change of pace, there were the Le Dio stories. Le Dio was a town in
France, and during 1942, a grim squad of tired American dog-faces were trying to re-
take it from the Nazis (this was two years before I discovered that the Allies didn’t
land in France until 1944). They went on trying to re-take it, fighting their way from street to street, through about forty stories which I wrote between the ages of nine and fourteen. Teddy was absolutely made for the Le Dio stories, and I think I wrote the
last dozen or so just for him -by then I was heartily sick of Le Dio and writing things like Mon Dieu and Cherchez le Bochel and Fermez la portel In Le Dio, French
peasants were always hissing to GI dogfaces to Fermez la portel But Teddy would
hunch over the pages, his eyes big, his brow beaded with sweat, his face twisting.
There were times when I could almost hear air-cooled Brownings and whistling 88s
going off in his skull. The way he clamoured for more Le Dio stories was both
pleasing and frightening.
Nowadays writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little, and
more and more often that guilty, masturbatory pleasure has become associated in my
head with the coldly clinical images of artificial insemination: I come according to the rules and regs laid down in my publishing contract. And although no one is ever going
to call me the Thomas Wolfe of my generation, I rarely feel like a cheat: I get it off as hard as I can every fucking time. Doing less would, in an odd way, be like going
faggot–or what that meant to us back then. What scares me is how often it hurts these days. Back then I was sometimes disgusted by how damned good it felt to write.
These days I sometimes look at this typewriter and wonder when it’s going to run out
of good words. I don’t want that to happen. I guess I can bear the pain as long as I
don’t run out of good words, you know?
‘What’s this story?’ Vern asked uneasily. ‘It ain’t a horror story, is it, Gordie? I
don’t think I want to hear no horror stories. I’m not up for that, man.’
‘No, it ain’t a horror,’ Chris said. ‘It’s really funny. Gross, but funny. Go on,
Gordie. Hammer that fucker to us.’
‘Is it about Le Dio?’ Teddy asked.
‘No, it ain’t about Le Dio, you fuckin’ psycho,’ Chris said, and rabbit-punched
him. ‘It’s about this pie-eatin’ contest.’
‘Hey, I didn’t even write it down yet,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but tell it’
‘You guys want to hear it?’
‘Sure,’ Teddy said. ‘Boss.’
‘Well, it’s about this made-up town, Gretna, I call it. Gretna, Maine.’
‘Gretna?’ Vern said, grinning. ‘What kind of name is that? There ain’t no
Gretna in Maine.’
‘Shut up, fool,’ Chris said. ‘He just toldja it was made-up, didn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but Gretna, that sounds pretty stupid -‘
‘Lots of real towns sound stupid,’ Chris said. ‘I mean, what about Alfred, Maine? Or Saco, Maine? Or Jerusalem’s Lot? Or Castle-fuckin’-Rock? There ain’t no
castle here. Most town names are stupid. You just don’t think so because you’re used