Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [381]
After he hung up, Schiller went to his bedroom and began to study the view from the window. It was snowing. Suddenly Schiller hated snow. He couldn't have said why. Felt like a blanket was slowing his efforts. It seemed dreamlike and this situation was crazy enough that he didn't want to be in a dream.
Now, somewhere around midnight, a big call came in from Murdoch. He was ready to make his top offer. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. But for the execution. A firsthand exclusive account from Lawrence Schiller.
Years ago, Larry had gotten $25,000 for a single photograph of Marilyn Monroe nude. Now he was being offered a hundred and twenty-five grand to describe the shooting of a man. It would be pure gravy. He wouldn't have to give up the book, or the Playboy interviews, not the movie, nothing. Murdoch wouldn't even know if he got the whole execution or not. Schiller could save the best parts for himself. Give Murdoch one-half: he would probably be just as happy.
The publisher was interested in the exclusive-in raising circulation. He could never even print the whole thing. It really was tempting, It really was.
Schiller walked to the window again. The snow was coming down hard by now and he was tired. His hand ached from squeezing the phone. He started crying. He could not explain what it was about, or why he was crying, but it went through him uncontrollably.
He said to himself, "I don't know any longer whether what I'm doing is morally right," and that made him cry even more. He had been saying to himself for weeks that he was not part of the circus, that he had instincts which raised him above, a desire to record history, true history, not journalistic crap, but now he felt as if he was finally part of the circus and might even be the biggest part of it, and in the middle of crying, he went into the bathroom and took the longest fucking shit of his life. It was all diarrhea. His system, after days of running nonstop and nights with crummy sleep, was by now totally screwed up. The horrors were loose. The diarrhea went through him as if to squeeze every last rotten thing out, and still it came. When he thought he might be done, he looked out the window at the snow and made the decision that in no way was he ever going to sell Gary Gilmore's execution. No. No way could anybody convince him. He would not make that fucking mistake for greed or security.
No. He didn't care if he never saw a penny at the end. He had to stay by what his gut told him. He started crying again and said to himself, "I can't even spell decently. I can't write the way I feel and want to express myself." It got real heavy and he heard again the disgust in Stephanie's voice over the phone when she refused to come from New York, and thought of what was going to happen when he told Murdoch and Time and Newsweek and the Enquirer and all the others he had kept on the string that he wasn't going to give them any big private story on the last minute in the life of Gary Gilmore, They would really be after him then. He understood some of the fear at the center of his diarrhea. He was not only turning down easiest money he had ever been offered, but was going to take a beating, and he thought back to the time when he was a kid in Diego, and Chicanos would waste his brother and him coming from