Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Read Online Free

in your idea,” is the way Jack put it. “But the feeling is , we’d like to see something on paper.”
                There’s nothing an editor likes more
than reading words he hasn’t had to pay for. They’d all like to see
something on paper. When I was first in New York . . . .
                Ah. When I was first in New York , what a wealth of things I did not know.
Entire encyclopedias of awful truths were unknown to me. What I brought with me
to the big city nineteen years ago was a truly awesome ignorance, a change of
clothing, and the belief that my memory of a pink- walled garage surrounded by
snow in sunlight was the most important thing on Earth.
                That’s not how I would have phrased
it then, of course. I knew I was a writer, I knew that much, and I knew I’d
grown up in a small town in southern Vermont that was absolutely full to the
brim with reality , and I felt I could snare that reality in a net of
words, a great open-mesh net of all the words I’d ever learned in Vermont, that
net I would toss with a masterly flick of the wrist over that pink-w f alled
garage, and pull the cord, and I’d have it!
                I think it worked, actually. I did
office temporary work, and knocked out a few magazine articles to pay the rent
on the studio apartment on West 101st Street , and spent most of my time hunched over the typewriter, putting the
words down while that pink wall stood and gleamed in my imagination.
Pink-walled garage out behind Bill Brewsher’s house, with the white snow around
it in the sunlight. We got really good snow in Vermont , really white and glistening, not like this
trash around here. Every time I thought about Bill, or Candy, or Jack and Jim
Reilly, or Agnes, or any of them, I always saw them as bundled-up fevered
darknesses in front of that shining wall.
                The Pink Garage Gang was
bought for two thousand five hundred dollars by the fifth publisher who saw it.
Print order three thousand, no advertising, no publicity. No paperback sale, no
foreign rights sale. No movie interest. From time to time they sent me royalty
statements; the last one, eleven hundred dollars of the advance was still
unearned.
                By the time The Pink Garage Gang was published I was more or less making my living with my typewriter. No more
novels, though. I actually didn’t have any more novels in my brain, I was too
busy. Then, a few years ago, back in Vermont, a Burlington & Northern
freight locomotive that somebody had forgotten to turn off or something got
loose all by itself one night and trundled at a few miles an hour all the way
up the state to the Canadian border before it stopped. All by
itself. You may have read about it in the paper. It was winter, and
everybody was in bed asleep, and the locomotive rolled slowly by, going north.
It went right through my town. It was a moonlit night, and a few people here
and there in the state looked out their windows, holding a glass of warm milk
in their hand, and they saw the dark bulk of the locomotive go by.
                For a while, I thought about that. I
smiled sometimes, and thought about the locomotive basting a seam up through Vermont . God, that novel was real to me. I could see it, I could see everything in it, I knew everything in
the world about that story. It was all so clear and detailed, I can still
remember so much of it, that every once in a while there’s a split second when
I think I wrote it.
     
                Jan 10
     
                Jack Rosenfarb
Craig, Harry & Bourke 745 3rd Ave.
     
                New York , NY 10017 Dear Jack:
     
                As you recall from our conversation
of last week, and your telephone call to me this
morning, I have it in mind to do a large glossy gift-book anthology on the
subject of Christmas. I would combine already existing literature and artwork
on the subject