banked on selling a book of stories to the very man for whom I was working. He took considerable pleasure inwaiting till we were at a business lunch, with several other people, to announce he was not buying the book. (Thedepth of his sadism is obvious when one learns he subsequently did buy and publish the book.)But at that moment, it was as though someone had split the earth under me and left me hanging by theragged edge, by my fingertips. I went back to the tiny, empty office he had set up in a downtown Evanston officebuilding, and I sat at my desk staring at the wall. There was a clock on the wall in front of me. When I sat down afterthat terrible lunch, it was 1:00….

When I looked at the clock a moment later, it was 3:15….

The next time I looked, a moment later, it was 4:45….

Then 5:45…

Then 6:15…

7:00…8:30…

Somehow, I don’t know how, even today, I laid my head on the desk, and when I opened my eyes again Ihad taken the phone off the hook. It was lying beside my mouth. A long time later, and again I don’t remember doingit, I dialed a friend, Frank M. Robinson, a dear writer friend of many years.

I heard Frank’s voice saying, “Hello…hello…is someone there…?”

“Frank…help me…”

And when my head was lifted off the desk, it was an hour later, the phone was whistling with a disconnecttone, and Frank had made it all the way across from Chicago to Evanston to find me. He held me like a child, and Icried.

Soon after, I left Evanston and Chicago and the human monster, and with my wife and her son began thelong trek to the West Coast. We had agreed to divorce, but she had said to me, with a very special wisdom that Inever perceived till much later, when I was whole again, “As long as you’re going to leave me, at least take me towhere it’s warm.”

But we had no money. So We had to go to Los Angeles by way of New York from Chicago. If I could sell abook. I would have the means to go West, young man, go West. (And that was the core of the problem, not money: Iwas a young man. I was twenty-eight, but I had never become an adult.)