Wake Up and Dream Read Online Free Page A

problem. He’d always written under pressure. But now he had time, opportunity, freedom. We’d bought Erewhon and had a pine lodge up above Sierra Madre. We were doing well and there were some real successes— Sometime Never, Prospector, Friday Means Tonight … but each new idea was harder than the last. By about 1938, Dan hadn’t produced a script in a whole year.”
    “He’d stopped writing?”
    A new cigarette. A fresh plume of smoke. “You disappoint me, Mr Gable. If I didn’t know you’d lived in this city all these years, I’d wonder where you’d been. You’re like me—you came here to find riches and fame. Almost got there as well, didn’t you? Toured as an actor, got a contract with one of the old talkie studios. You were well on the way to somewhere, even if that somewhere ended up as where you now are.”
    “Well—thanks.”
    “So you of all people should know enough to understand that writers never stop writing, or at least trying to write. He tried everything. Doing without sleep or not getting out of bed for days. Holing up in our pine lodge. Then he started going off on these jags. I found him once out by the Third Street tunnel under Bunker Hill. He was huddled up and howling like a baby.”
    She shook her head. “It slowly tore him apart. I mean, he was always shy and nervy—he always left dealing with the outside world to me. But now it was something else. He just froze. Wouldn’t speak, would barely move, for hours, days. Lying in bed or the same chair. Sometimes, he’d just stand in one place like time had stopped inside him. It was scary. Or he went manic. It was like this terrible fear. Something at the back of everything that was always haunting him. But I guess part of me had always known that this side of Dan was there. Even when we were first staying in the top floor of a cheap rowhouse, I sometimes had to… Well…” She flicked ash. “I had to nurse him. Calm him down, or get him up and back to coping with things. Of course, I knew where to get the necessary stuff. But now, Dan was boozing as well. I’ve used private clinics to dry him out, had witch-doctor psychiatrists try to work out what the problem is. All to no avail. And then he bought that wraith, that fucking ghost in the hallway that he said—can you believe this?—was a birthday present for me. Got some twobit studio to mix the auras of all his favorite performers into this one recording, and then put it on a loop. Cost us a fortune which by then we couldn’t afford. And he’d just stand there gazing at that thing as if it really was his muse, even though we both knew it was taunting him. God knows why I turned it on today. Maybe I’m taunting myself as well. But with Dan it was still all about writing. And I still did everything I could to help him. Believe me. I did everything . I wanted him back. I wanted my Dan, my Daniel. And I knew that the only way to get him was to have him writing feelie scripts again. “This spring, though, things started to improve. He was off the booze and I’d cut down on the tablets and he was watching lots of feelies in our viewing room and talking about writing something in a way I hadn’t heard in ages. Not like it was some demon that was haunting him, but just a simple task that needed doing again. But he said Erewhon gave him the jeebies and he needed to get back to what he called the best of times, by which he meant when we didn’t have a dime to rub together.
    “So he got this rental, a cheap place Downtown. Called it reconnecting. He went there, and he took his typewriter with him. That, and a few reams of paper and some old clothes. And I let him go, Mr Gable. I let him go not because I’d given up on hope, or had given up loving him. I let him go because I hoped. Because I loved…” She gave a soft, sad smile, and he was way beyond telling whether to be moved or impressed. “I wasn’t abandoning him. We’d meet up sometimes at the same diner where we’d