GUMSHOE

Looking through some old correspondence from many years ago, I came across a letter to the poet Clark Coolidge telling him that I was "flirting with the possibility of writing some kind of gumshoe manuscript." I had no memory of it, and doubt that he does either. But the letter excerpted this sample:

I gunned the old VW to Italy. Lago Maggiore because I wanted to find out where the German nouveaux riches spent their vacations. And boy did I find out.

I was also searching for a guy. When I found him he looked at me with the unclean gaze of a male hustler.

"Listen," I said, "I wasn't raised on country cornflakes. I was bread & buttered in NYC, milk-toasted in San Francisco, and swallowed whole in Paris. Are you the buyer?"

"For nothing, you guessed it."

"Uh huh. You sound like you were digested in Rome and spit out in the Athens suburbs."

People don't hit it off sometimes. He was big but not that big, and he sat there in all the sartorial splendor of a plastic clothespin. Wore his floriated shirt buttoned or rather unbuttoned to the navel (sexy, too) and he had on a forget-me-not pinky ring, the kind to brand a nose with. He also had a nervous tick in his eye which was, I suppose, the sweetener -- the point of give in an otherwise lousy complexion.

I knew where my brass was. Before I checked in I'd stashed it in its custom leather holder under my right arm. I'm a lefty. It must've weighed nearly two pounds.

Then the telephone rang. He picked it up. "Hello, pussycat how are you . . ." It went on like that for long enough to have a cigarette, so I did. When he got off I said: "Goodbye. Sorry to make your acquaintance."

It was strictly from the lowest form of show business but you can't live forever in a VW as I found out, clammed up in mine those three months. A case of sciatica was not what the doctor ordered.

Right then I decided to give Higgins a phone call. Maybe no rhumbas with him either. I remember that Indian ashram was good for his spinal column but he sure as hell hadn't come back swinging.

The beep from his livingroom tape recorder came on. "You don't smell natural any more," I said and hung up. And that left me with a bottle of Belgian beer in my hand, checking the times at the Mannheim rail terminal. I already gave off more carbon monoxide than I could breathe. ...

Never did finish it.