found me one day, I was a pile
of human rubble sitting among
the beer cans and Scotch bottles
in this bombed-out court in
east Hollywood.
he seemed a well-scrubbed and
decent fellow, refused either
scotch or beer, asked, "do you
have any poems?"
I finished my can of beer,
flipped it to the rug,
belched, pointed toward the
closed closet door.
he opened that and a
mountain of paper, single
sheets that had been
stacked, stuffed and
thrown in there, they came
falling out.
"you wrote all this? he
asked.
"recently," I
answered.
he smiled and fell into a
fit of
reading.
further back in that
closet, well-hidden, was a
mannequin I had purchased
from a junk
shop.
her name was Sadie and she
was a hot
number....
an hour or so later
my visitor left with a mass of
poesy.
2 weeks later
he phoned, said he wanted to
publish a broadside or two of
my work and
that he was mailing an
advance.
"by the way," he asked, "do
you have anything like a
novel?"
"I'll dash one off for you,"
I told him....
I started that afternoon
and later that night I
took Sadie for a
ride, dumped her behind
an old folk's
home, got back in and
poured a tall Scotch to
my new
life.
Sadie had filled a
gap
but
as a professional
writer I
had little need for
such jejune
activities....
and it wasn't so long
after that before
the real Sadies started
coming around, none
of them
as kind or peaceful as
the original
nor hardly as easy to
dump
or
forget
but much easier, of
course, to write
about, and I
did.
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