Years ago when I was young and wanted to write the great American novel, I took a security guard job working in a condo in Miami. Actually I started the thing a few years earlier when I was teaching, but because of the time and creative drain I decided I’d do better painting in the meantime so I could write. But until the art could support me, I worked at this condo where I could write and paint in the guard house. Write because I wanted to. Paint because I had to. For me it was perfect.
What I hadn’t expected at the time was that year I worked there, I had enough material to write a best seller. If I wanted to write a best seller. Which I didn’t. No, my goals were loftier. Nothing less than Catcher in the Rye or Portnoy’s Complaint. Instead of an Arthur Hailey novel like Airport or Hotel, it would be the perfect tell all:
CONDO
I can see it now: all the stories I was witness to, would play out every night – where “daydreams about night things” occurred on a nightly basis – from a Tennessee Williams allegorical play to a Woody Allen farce.
At the far end of the condo by the water lived the eternal Homecoming Queen whose mortality was starting to show meanwhile ardently pursued by an insanely jealous undertaker who if he got wind of any attempt at seeing someone else would come charging in in his dark blue station wagon and start pounding on her door repeatedly saying I know you’re in there Carol I know you’re in there meanwhile at other end of the building with her windows open I’d be regaled with the moans of another Homecoming Queen who obviously opened her door (all very Jacqueline Susann to Carol’s Tennessee Williams) while right behind me a Woody Allen farce was being played out by a doctor crawling around on his hands and knees looking for the keys to his car that he customarily left over the visar that one of his two girl friends who also lived at opposite corners of the condo had taken so he couldn’t leave meanwhile the one who stole the keys was faking an attempt at sobering up her friend by walking her around the general area the doctor was crawling in, zeroing in closer and closer while I’m trying to write the great American novel.
So you can see the distraction. Do I go for the Tennessee Williams allegorical or the Woody Allen farce? And what about the Jacqueline Susann love scene taking place in the nearest unit to my guard house? Don’t these people realize their window’s open? Meanwhile the lady who lives directly above her is calling me on the phone telling me she thinks the lady in the unit below her is in serious trouble and she thinks I better check it out.
Meanwhile… no, it only gets worse and yet isn’t THAT what I should have written about all these years instead of something people might actually believe?
Precisely!
Because who WOULD believe this? I was the man who knew too much and they all knew it, because the second part of this story involves all the people who would forever pump me on who was two-timing whom since besides being the perfect material for a Tennessee Williams play, a Woody Allen movie, or a Jacqueline Susann novel, let’s not forget Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place?
And let’s not forget Captain Huttoe from the previous blog who would regale me with all the smut from the outside world who had his share of suitors all vying for his affection on the inside world – right here! – and better yet trying to pump me to give them the lowdown and oh yes then there’s the nympho I had to deal with who was always trolling my guard house that I learned the hard way not to respond to like her emergencies I got suckered into – ONCE! – while I’m standing at her open door being threatened that if I don’t come in she’ll cry rape which took more imagination to get out of than the novel I was SUPPOSED to get into and oh yes this was the pre-Anita Byrant days when it was safer to stay in the closet so I’d have to play stupid when their closeted invitees would come and ask where they could park to see some “girl” invitee (emphasis on the “girl”) visiting some over-the-top Liberace wannabe DEFINITELY not closeted – boy, the lines they’d give me so you can see how all these years I never wrote about this – Never even hinted at it in ALL of my novels – was like blood in the water to a shark. No, but somewhere in my Tennessee Williams, Woody Allen, Jacqueline Susann, Grace Metalious, and now Harold Robbins imagination, I’d think about it late at night.
Oh, and the doctor? She nailed him. And Carol? She finally just accepted her fate. And as for the rest? I was discovered shortly after that where one of the richest men in the world bought all my paintings. And you wanna know how it happened?
Carol.
She convinced her other boyfriend to put on a one man show for me – and that’s when I was discovered. And the boyfriend? It didn’t work out and the last I heard was she was back with whom the ex-boyfriend called “The Digger.”
And what was it that old Holden said about telling anybody anything? “If you do, you start missing everybody.”