903: I awoke . . .
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 11 begins
Chapter 11
September 20
Photographic Proof
The most realistic person is susceptible to the seduction of legends and believes them loyally; . . . by a phenomenon of inverted perspective, memory has a tendency to see things growing larger as they move further away, to get them out of proportion, to remove their bases, in short . . . nothing is more suspect than evidence.
Jean Cocteau, “On Guillaume Apollinaire,” in The Difficulty of Being
I AWOKE feeling much better, even optimistic. I had slept the night through for the first time in weeks. I had no explanation for the change in my emotions, but I wasn’t going to poke and probe until I was miserable again. I wasn’t in the mood for it. I skipped my coffee and went out for a solitary walk along the shoreline. The morning was bright and crisp, and I felt so renewed, so invigorated, that I broke into a run. I hadn’t run far, though, before I came to an abrupt stop, and stood there, bent over, hands on my knees, breathing hard. In the crisp morning air, the memory of a dream had returned to me, and it had staggered me. In the dream, or at least in the memory of the dream, I was someone else, and now it all came rushing back to me, and I knew who I had been.
I ran to the hotel, ran upstairs, grabbed my microcassette recorder and began dictating:
I’m always hungry on the day of a hit. Hungry and horny. Kill, eat, fuck — that’s the perfect day, and this promises to be a very good day. A very good day.
I’m standing at the window of my hotel room — a really shitty room in a really shitty hotel — conveniently located across the street from a bank. A small crowd has gathered for the grand opening of this bank, because there hasn’t been a bank in this part of town for years. If nobody in the neighborhood’s got any fucking money, and nobody in his right mind would lend any money to anybody in the neighborhood, who needs a fucking bank, right?
Well, now they’ve got a bank, part of the mayor’s “enterprise initiative,” and in a couple of minutes his honor himself and the president of the bank and half a dozen local politicians are going to stand in front of the bank and take credit for it, and as soon as one of them opens his fucking mouth, I am going to press the button on my remote and fill the air with body parts.
Given the placement of the bomb and the way I’ve shaped the charge, the deputy mayor is going to be running the city tomorrow, but somewhere in the heap of pieces there will be whatever is left of Theresa Kendall, the darling of the six o’clock news, a beauty, a woman with a lot of talent and a lot of promise. She’s the one I’m being paid to kill. The others — the mayor, the bank president, the two kids they’ve got standing there to show that this is an investment in the future — are just a way of covering my tracks.
My name is Rockwell Kingman. . . .
I played it back. I had intended to transcribe it immediately, but when I heard it I was ashamed of it. I shut the recorder off and put it in my desk drawer.
Rockwell Kingman was a twisted mutation of Rocky King, the square-jawed sidekick of Larry Peters in the defunct series I’d written for so many years. Now, I supposed, following the cancellation of the series he was out of a job, older, and angry. I could see the cover of the book. There would be a photograph of a window of a second-floor office in a seedy building. A card in the window would read:
Murder While You Wait
Rockwell Kingman
(One Flight Up)
The title would be Murder While You Wait: The Memoirs of a Very Professional Killer. The author would be Rockwell Kingman himself. “Call me Rockwell. Don’t call me Rocky.” He might make us some money.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.