OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 429 And he'd snuck out and hightailed it, rejoicing all the way, back to Holly Sugar and the bondage of literary fame. Though none of that initial rosy glow of enthusiasm remained these days, still Sam would sometimes fool his personal physician into giving him an extra shot of one substance or another, and he would get all energetic and would get on that speakerphone's hotline to the Broadmoor and, as he lay on the wine-colored, foot-thick, sculpture-pile carpet and scanned the small-average resort community laid out like a personal possession at his satin-slippered feet, Sam would wax grandiose and flighty into the old man's ear about the purely abstract prospect of getting himself finally between covers (his brain mercifully forgetting precisely what sort of words were going to represent him there to the ages) . And the old man would be obliged to shoot Sam back down to earth again with a few well-chosen statistics. Say, a few defense-budget stats as compared to publishing world stats, to remind Sam's mushrooming ego where the real American Life was being lived these days. "Did you know, son, that -" And something like one of Sister Polycarpana's righteously indignant social-justice utterances would buzz across the phonelines, strangely transformed by the old literary agent's voice into a leer and jeer as of a devil. He said these things with an almost dismissive tone, as though he considered this whole enterprise an unserious lark. It almost made Sam wonder if the old fart really was an agent. And so did the fresh, hot way he spouted his publishing world data and stats, as though he's just looked them up in the cloying introduction of a fairly recent Writer's Market. "Besides, Sammy," the self-styled agent would say, "even if we were to |