Stark: A Novel (20 page)

“Are you nuts? Every cop in California is looking for you. And you want to go into the drug business? Pull over,” she said. “I need to get a taste. I’m really strung out.”

Stark pulled over to the side of the road. He needed to piss. He stepped down into the ditch at the side of the road to be out of sight of passing cars. As he did so, he heard the Caddy pull away. Dorie was driving off. The hustler had been out-hustled.

As the Caddy disappeared up the road, Stark smiled to himself. He hadn’t told Dorie that the Caddy was Mrs. Klein’s. The cops would soon be looking for it. He’d also forgotten to tell her that Klein’s gun was in the glove compartment. Or that he’d kept half of the dough in his pants pocket.

About a quarter mile down the road, the Caddy pulled over. Had she changed her mind? Stark hustled after her. As he came up to the car, the bank bag was thrown to the side of the road. In it looked like half the cash and half the bindles. The dame had a heart.

He didn’t have enough to start a new business, but he had twenty-four hours and dough that would get him to Canada and out of Crowley’s reach. There’s a whole new market for suckers in Canada awaiting a smooth con man like himself. He whistled as he walked along the road, ready for new action and a new scene.

THE END

____________

I was completely taken aback when Nat Sobel, Eddie’s book agent, asked me to write this brief background to Eddie’s last (and first) novel. I protested that he should write it. After all, wasn’t he (like a modern times Maxwell Perkins) the one who resurrected it? Calling me to see what unfinished work remained, locating the manuscript in a publisher’s office outside of London, stitching it together, finding a new publisher? He disagreed. And after thinking about it, I suppose he’s right in that, perhaps, I am the only one that could know the details surrounding
Stark
.

My relationship with Eddie spanned thirty years. Prison, halfway house counselor, wife for twenty years, mother of his son, and always his close friend. It would be safe to say that I heard all of his “stories.” As he wrote in a letter to me in 1996, “My beloved and best friend… if my life is adjudged a plus, it is because I have my private angel to give me a haven and at least enough peace to work.” I write this, then, as the “beloved and best friend” of the not-so distant past; and as the mother of his son. It’s really an honor - to once again assist in whatever way so that his work can be brought to life again.

Imagine someone with a seventh-grade education wanting to be a serious writer? He had no guidance. He had to teach himself everything. The prison psychologist said it was another “manifestation of infantile fantasy.” His gift was an above average I.Q.; and from the age of seven, he was a voracious reader. He discovered that he could see the world through endless different eyes and minds, could experience life in Ancient Egypt, modern India, the Middle Ages. He thought most Americans didn’t value books. He thought that in America, only money mattered; and that although money was necessary for everything, to read widely is to have more of Life itself.

His parents divorced when he was four, and he was made a ward of the court at seven years of age. A child abandoned to the wilderness adopts its ways. Read his third novel,
Little Boy Blue
, for more on that. His childhood was a war with the world, and he burned through reform schools, escaping at every chance. He’d been adopted for a short period by Louise Fazenda Wallis, his benefactress, when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. At seventeen, he was the youngest inmate to ever enter San Quentin. It was 1950 (one year before I was born). For a brief time he had back to back cells with Caryl Chessman (Chessman was on death row; on the opposite side, Eddie was not). They spoke through the ventilator pipes about literature. One day a convict surreptitiously brought him a folded magazine under a hand towel and handed it to him through the bars. He opened it up. It was a copy of
Argosy
magazine. On the cover, the lead piece was “Cell 2455, Death Row by Caryl Chessman.” A light bulb exploded. He couldn’t believe it! Writers went to Harvard or Yale or Princeton. Chessman had also been raised by the State. If Chessman could write a bestseller, then why couldn’t he?

The idea was so sudden and intense that he couldn’t sleep. He wrote his benefactress, and she sent him a typewriter — a secondhand, Royal Aristocrat, and a subscription to the
Sunday New York Times
Book Review. The reviews talked about Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dreiser, Jack London, Dostoevsky, William Styron, and others. He studied
The Elements of Style
, by E.B. White; and culled his memory for all the tales and crime stories he’d seen from his unique perspective. His research was his life as he lived it.

This brings us to
Stark
. By this time, he’s around thirty-three years of age. The year is 1963. He’s a four-time loser. His typewriter had, by then, bit the dust. No matter. He had access to typewriters and paper. He wrote in long hand first, with a pencil. He had two prison jobs. The first was as the head lieutenant’s secretary. He was responsible for writing and typing all reports on “incidents” within the prison, so that they could be sent to Sacramento as required. His other job was in the prison library. It was there that he educated himself about the law. Every convict with a legal question would come to him. It got so he couldn’t go out on the yard, because he’d get “mobbed.” He’d also gotten to know lawyers who could take his pages out, though he had to sell his blood in prison to pay the postage for sending them to publishers. He still had his dreams, but he wondered if they would really ever see the light of day.

He described
Stark
as a story about a con man. Eddie didn’t think much of con men, because, as a rule, they preyed upon people weaker than themselves. But he understood them. He thought it was worth telling a story from such a character’s point of view. He once told our son: “We are what we have been taught to be by many influences. No more, no less. Remember that because it will instill humility instead of arrogant self-righteousness.”

He had a chance to look at the underbelly of life from a unique position. He never tried to impose a preconception, or ignore or twist a fact to make any position more persuasive. He was obsessed with the “Truth,” and with finding it. He always said he was as dedicated to the Truth as a prelate to the Church. It was ironic: he was an athe- ist, but aspired to the Transcendent. “If there is a rule we should follow, it is to seek truth as best we can, via whatever paths we can find.” What he most wanted was a chance to last, a lotus to grow from the mud.

Jennifer Steele