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Show Acting Alone 2 Page 428 old man had said from behind this very imposing, yet chic desk. "It's an art form. But be warned. Once editors and agents, not to mention the great reading public at large, have pigeonholed you as a serious psychosexual biographer, you will find it extremely difficult to break out of that mold. You might want to make the crossover to other art forms, like sci-fi (that is to say, E.T. literature), or exorcism literature, or perhaps predator literature, dated as that has become; but you'll never, however, as a crossover talent, demand the bigger advances." "I don't care," Sam had said, feeling all light and flighty in his bones, the broken as well as the intact. "I really don't care about all that. You've got yourself a whore for the night." And he'd gotten permission (already having to ask permission hadn't seemed particularly ominous to his greedy soul at the time) to go straight back to the Army trailer to collect some extra underpants and his guitar and some back issues of Enema Digest, and he'd stood a moment over the sleeping, now-hairless Shanny, and he'd whispered a long, sad goodbye poem to the child, poured it into her sleeping ear as though she were Hamlet, Sr. lying there, pouting, drooling, sheetsucking in her sleep, a pale reflection of her big sister. A regular set piece he'd mumbled into the hole in the side of Shanny's empty head, a poem, a summation and justification of their entire relationship. But, with all the brain-eating methamphetamine sloshing so hot through his system nowadays Sam had forgotten what-all he might have said, exactly. It started with, "Goodnight little Shanny / powder-brown runt of the plains region / lately turned a dusty green and hung with stamped bits of contentious iron," or sentimental words to that effect. |