The Adding Machine Read Free

burning house. You see, he thought I was in there.’
    ‘Kid, I got a pinch of something here make you forget about that old dead dog...’
    That’s how it started. Then he fell into the hands of a sinister hypnotist who plied him with injections of marijuana.
    ‘Kill, kill, kill’. The words turned relentlessly in his brain, and he walked up to a young cop and said ‘If you don’t lock me up I shall kill you,’ The cop sapped him without a word. But a wise old detective in the precinct takes a like to the boy, sets him straight and gets him off the snow. It was a hard fight but he made it. He now works in a hardware store in Ottawa, Illinois ... the porch noise, home from work... ‘And if any kind stranger ever offers me some pills that will drive all my blues away, I will simply call a policeman.’
    A story about four jolly murderers was conceived in the Hotel La Fonda on a rare trip to Santa Fe when I was feeling guilty about masturbating twice in one day. A middle-aged couple, very brash and jolly; the man says, ‘Sure and I’d kill my own grandmother for just a little kale .. .’
    ‘We have regular rates of course,’ the woman observed tartly.
    I formed a romantic attachment for one of the boys at Los Alamos and kept a diary of this affair that was to put me off writing for many years. Even now I blush to remember its contents. During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis, so my things were packed and sent to me from the school and I used to turn cold thinking maybe the boys are reading it aloud to each other.
    When the box finally arrived I pried it open and threw everything out until I found the diary and destroyed it forthwith, without a glance at the appalling pages. This still happens from time to time. I will write something I think is good at the time and looking at it later I say, my God, tear it into very small pieces and put it into somebody else’s garbage can. I wonder how many writers have had similar experiences. An anthology of such writing would be interesting.
    Fact is, I had gotten a real sickener — as Paul Lund, an English gangster I knew in Tangier, would put it...’A young thief thinks he has a license to steal and then he gets a real sickener like five years maybe.’
    This lasted longer. The act of writing had become embarrassing, disgusting, and above all false. It was not the sex in the diary that embarrassed me, it was the terrible falsity of the emotions expressed. I guess Lord Cheshire and Reggie were too much for me — for years after that, the sight of my words written on apage hit me like the sharp smell of carrion when you turn over a dead dog with a stick, and this continued until 1938. I had written myself an eight-year sentence.
    Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1938 ... I was doing graduate work in anthropology at Harvard and at the same time Kells Elvins, an old school friend from John Burroughs, was doing graduate work in Psychology. We shared a small frame house on a quiet tree-lined street beyond the Commodore Hotel He had many talks about writing and started a detective story in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler line. This picture of a ship captain putting on women’s clothes and rushing into the first lifeboat was suddenly there for both of us. We read all the material we could find in Widener’s Library on the Titanic, and a book based on the Morro Castle disaster called The Left-handed Passenger.
    On a screened porch we started work on a story called Twilight’s Last Gleamings which was later used almost verbatim in Nova Express . I was trying to contact Kells to see if he had the original manuscript and to tell him that I was using the story under both our names when his mother wrote me that he had died in 1961.
    I see now that the curse of the diary was broken temporarily by the act of collaboration. We acted out every scene and often got on laughing jags. I hadn’t laughed like that since my first tea-high