A-muse-ing

The keys of the typewriter clicked and clacked with thunderous speed, pounding their various ink-stained letters against the pure, white paper. A great cackle could be heard as, with a sudden rip, the sheet of paper was snatched from the machine.

Slowly, however, the cackle grew distant and mournful, and the laughter gave way to choked back tears and despair. With an angry cry, the page was crumpled between two cracked and bitter hands. The ball sailed over his shoulder and landed with a whisper behind him, the latest addition to the Mountain of Bad Writing that seemed to have sprung up in the past few weeks, around the little trash can in the corner of the office.

Anger gave way to frustration, and the man shoved the typewriter away from him in disgust. He nearly spat upon it, coughing and hacking, filling his mouth with vile phlegm, but he thought better of it. He slowly swirled the mucus around with his tongue before letting it ooze back down his throat.

He wasn’t an old man, though time and circumstance had taken their toll on him. A mere forty-two years old, he appeared closer to fifty, with thin, stringy hair, more gray than his original brown, clinging to his ever-damp scalp. He wore wire-rim glasses upon a large, crooked nose, peering out from behind them with small, dark eyes.

Wearily, he rose from his desk, giving the typewriter one last, good swat across its side, signaling the end of his work day. He pulled open the top right drawer and grasped a half-empty box of cigarettes. Slowly, almost reverently, he slid one of the cigarettes from the case and stuck it between dry, chapped lips.

A chrome lighter was produced from his pants pocket and with a flick of the wrist, a bright flame danced before his eyes, reflected off his glasses. He lit the cigarette, breathing in its acrid air as if it were life-giving, and set the lighter down next to the typewriter.

He lived in on the second floor of a rundown, two-story building in the middle of downtown. The first floor was occupied by a bar, which was one of the reasons he moved in twenty years ago, and was a major reason why he still lived there to this day. It wasn’t a very popular bar, even when he first moved in, so it was always quiet. He had thought it would make an excellent place to write, and, indeed, he had finished his first play, The Devil I Am, while sitting at one of the beer-stained tables. Over time, however, the thought of becoming the first of a new wave of Beat writers, the next Kerouac or Ginsberg, abated. His next two works, a second play, Paradise Never, and a collection of short stories, Minor Thoughts, were written without the aid of alcohol, upstairs in his office.

He had gone on to write six more plays and four novels, the last of which saw publication over five years ago. The fourth book had done so well, both commercially and critically, that his agent used to call him once or twice a week, to inquire about a follow-up. Gotta strike while the iron’s hot, his agent would say.

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” the writer would say, but nothing ever did. In those first few months, he often feared that the well had finally run dry, that the ideas had finally stopped coming, and panic had so tightly gripped him that he had a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight.

After he recovered, his agent made a few courtesy calls to see how he was feeling, and to ask when he might be getting back to work. When the writer wasn’t very forthcoming, the calls came more and more infrequently, on his birthday, around the holidays, before they stopped completely.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t write, necessarily. Words and phrases still flowed smoothly from his fingertips, but they were awful, trite things that wouldn’t have been acceptable in a child’s grade school primer. “See Spot Run” was ingenious when compared to the drivel he found himself spewing forth.

The writer stood behind his desk, his past successes nothing more than distant memories, almost as if they had happened to someone else, and he stared out the large window before him, the cigarette smoke curling around his head like a dirty halo in the gray light. Rain softly pelted the glass, and he could hear the occasional car sloshing through the street below.