BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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Hey buddy!
If you’re reading this, you’ve done as I expected. You showed up, you figured out there must be a hidden room (pretty cool, right?), you spotted Lefty, you found the room and what we called “the fatal manuscript” (awful writing, right?) and now, this note.
If one can smile from the other side, I’m grinning like crazy.
Having just read the stupid manuscript for a last time, it sure wasn’t worth the trouble.
I’ll never get over Gen’s death. What you just read is not even worth a rat’s death.
Maybe her death had nothing to do with it. But how would anybody ever know? Everything related to what you just read was shut down by the government.
I’ve got a — faint as it might be — alternative theory. Poke around enough, you’ll too find it.
I’m guessing you’re sitting in my chair. Look to your right at the fatal window. (I hope it was fatal! Eight floors! Onto cement. Come on! Please don’t tell me that I’m in some damn coma in some damn facility!)
So we’re getting old, buddy. Unlike you, I have no family. Being around is increasingly not making sense.
Like me, my business has about run its life cycle. With all those ebooks and audio books nowadays. not enough readers want my silly format for it to still make financial success. I realized I could no longer afford to pay even my long-standing internship position. Holly has to be the last one. I had such joy mentoring all those young men and women. To no longer do that, would leave me with a crushing emptiness.
I now take medicine for an enlarged prostate. And medicine to help me pee. And more medicine for my high cholesterol. I’ve got both a hip and knee replacement waiting for me in the near future. I get dizzy once in a while. I have no idea why. And I can barely bend over to tie my shoes. I hate that.
And my damn urinary tract infections. They come out of nowhere and hurt like hell. A burning pain that makes me scream. I’m afraid to get on a plane. What if that stuff starts up as I’m sitting on a runway at JFK? So, travel must now be out of my life. And that’s crushing.
My father had dementia. No reason it won’t also visit me. So, if I’m going to be in control of my life, it better be now.
Remember also that my father ended up having that horrific stroke. He spent seven years in a bed with a beating heart, not knowing who he was, where he was, all the while shitting into diapers. Those years burned though every penny he worked a lifetime to save and enjoy. So much for that plan.
Unlike my father, I don’t have a son, or daughter, to watch out for me. And I’m sure you’re not up for seven years of changing my diapers.
So, sitting here, thinking about all that, looking at that window, knowing that there will be nobody down in the courtyard to traumatize when I jump, well, it just makes sense. Clean, efficient.
I’ve always been taken with those who jumped from the Trade Center windows on 9/11. What absolute clarity that had upon that decision. Something that eludes most of us for a lifetime. I don’t want to rot away, unsure, confused, without control. It’s dirty and messy and wrong. I want those few seconds of pure and absolute clarity that those jumpers must have had at that horrifically tragic moment.
I’m going to finish this note, have a last martini (might even skip the vermouth), a final smoke (I’ll be sure that the cigarette is safely out in the ashtray), count my blessings, and call it a lifetime. We’re all just passing through.
And at Bologna this year, add me to the Gen toast.
With fondness and great love,
Randy
Tomorrow: I don’t know