Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [7]
Why didn’t you ever take Lisa to Mexico, you son of a bitch? Christ, I would have paid your plane fare.
Anyway, the point is that I’ve decided not to fight my typewriter. Whatever it wants to do is fine by me. I spent a year and a half deep in writer’s block, and now that I think about it I can’t avoid the suspicion that it happened because I would sit down at the typewriter with certain preconceptions that kept getting in the way. I would decide to write a certain poem, and that poem just wouldn’t happen on the page, and as a result I didn’t write anything for a long time, until I decided to shortcut the whole operation by not sitting down at the fucking typewriter in the first place.
You picked a good day to take yourself and Fran out of my life. I got home early that afternoon because they canned me at Ronald Rabbit’s. They finally figured out that I was a captain without a ship, and instead of finding another ship for me they cut me adrift and let me swim. You’d love the story, but I’ve already written it all to Lisa and I don’t want to go through it again. It wasn’t that much fun to live through, let alone to write about. If you ever have an affair with Lisa (after all, there are only three hundred people in the world, and sooner or later they all sleep with each other), maybe you can get her to show you the letter. Or if you ever meet Clay Finch, he’ll give you his side of it.
I got home from Ronald Rabbit’s with my cottontail between my legs, and found that you had hied yourself south with my wife and my fifteen hundred dollars. I know it’s ungallant as all hell for me to say this, and you may not want to show this part of the letter to Fran, assuming you want to show her any of it, but of the two, I rather miss the fifteen hundred more. I had a use for it, what with a drawer full of bills and alimony to pay and no money coming in. I had a use for Fran, but we must face facts. If one takes a walk down the street, one has a much better chance of picking up a woman than of picking up fifteen hundred dollars.
An even harder thing to pick up this late in life is a best friend. Much as my first impulse was to hate you, I’ve decided it would be silly to throw off a fifteen-year friendship over something like this. At the moment you’re near the top of my shit list. There’s no getting around that. But I know that you have a sense of honor, and sooner or later you’ll send back the fifteen hundred and all will be forgiven. If, on the other hand, you keep the fifteen hundred and return Fran, I swear I’ll hunt you down and cut your fucking throat for you.
Jesus, I hope this letter gets to you. I don’t suppose you were expecting mail, but if I know you, you’ll check with American Express in every town you hit, whether anyone knows you’re going to be there or not. And Fran is just about as compulsive that way. I think I’ll put something on the envelope about forwarding it to Cuernavaca if you don’t call for it in two or three weeks. Fran said (well, wrote, actually) that you wanted to go to Cuernavaca to photograph the ruins.
I didn’t know there were ruins in Cuernavaca. For that matter, I didn’t know you had this big thing for photographing ruins. If you wanted ruins to photograph, old buddy, you didn’t have to go all the way to Cuerna-fucking-vaca to take pictures of them. You could have come over to Bleecker Street and worked your shutter to the bone.
In fact, precisely that notion was going through my mind when I finished the letter to Lisa. I put a lot of stamps on it and mailed it,