Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [0]
Lawrence Block
All characters in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or
dead is purely coincidental.
The earth is flat.
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A New, Epistolary Afterword by the Author
A Biography of Lawrence Block
1
74 Bleecker St.
New York 10012
June 12
Mrs. Lisa Clarke
219 Maple Rd.
Richmond, VA.
Dear Lisa:
I trust you’ve already established that there’s no check in this envelope. No matter how long this letter turns out to be, no matter how many sheets of paper wind up folded together and stuffed into this envelope, the first thing you’ll do is shake everything out looking for a check, and there won’t be one. So you’ve done that by now, and you said, “The dirty rat bastard said he’d send a check and there’s no check here and this better be good.”
I’ll make it as good as I can, Lisa.
But where to start? Why, at the beginning of this beautiful day, dear Lisa, when Laurence Clarke sprang out of bed with a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye and—
Oh, hell.
Rome must have fallen on just this sort of day. A bright sun shining, a ghost of a breeze toying with the garbage in the gutters and plucking the hems of the mini-skirts, even the air pollution in the acceptable range. I actually hummed on the way to the office. Hummed! And some of the people I passed in the streets were smiling. Genuine New Yorkers with discernible smiles on their faces. I know it sounds impossible, but they couldn’t all have been tourists. Some of them must have been natives, and here they were smiling at one another.
Extraordinary.
I picked up a Times in the lobby, let the elevator levitate me to the twelfth floor, helloed and nodded and—yes—smiled my way through the outer office, and was at my own desk with my own door snugly closed by five after nine. I spent half an hour reading the paper. There was nothing particularly ominous in it, for a change. I finished it and chucked it into the wastebasket, opened a desk drawer and got out my current book, a first novel by a young person who had distinguished himself in several student riots before entering the world of letters. The publisher and a variety of critics were spread all over the dust jacket, applauding the author for telling it like it is.
Yecchhh. The book was a 300-page refutation of the Winston commercial—it proved you could sacrifice good grammar without even approaching good taste. The person (the author’s name was sexless, and the dust-jacket photograph sexually ambivalent) threw words about like paving stones, and all he told me was that verbal communication may well be obsolete after all.
(But not for us, Lisa the formerly-mine. By God, woman, I’m enjoying this! Do you know I haven’t written this much in a couple of years? All these words winding up on all these pages, and all with no discernible effort on my part. I just sit here at this typewriter and let it all hang out, as the children say. Are you my Muse, Lisa? And are you amused, Lisa? I know you’d rather have the check—)
Ah, well. I went on slogging my way through muddy prose until ten-thirty, slipped downstairs for coffee and prune Danish, came upstairs again and read some more until lunchtime.
I lunched with a friend who has an expense account. Do you remember Bill Adams? He’s over at Ogilvy now, doing something that sounds boring enough. Got married about two years ago, I think it was, and just last month bought a home on the Island. We went to an Italian place on Second Avenue and ate cannelloni and killed a liter of red while I listened to him talk about how great it was to be out of the city and how his job seemed secure although half the advertising business was on the beach and how much he loved his wife and what a good marriage they had going. He talked and I listened and he paid and I burped and we left, and it was still the same beautiful day outside.