Collected Prose

call it quits.”
    “How much would a thing like that cost?” I asked.
    “Twenty, twenty-five thousand dollars. Minimum.”
    “I couldn’t come up with that much,” I said. “Not even if my life depended on it.”
    “Then you can’t do it, can you?”
    “No, I can’t do it. I just want to sell the game to a company. That’s all I’ve ever had in mind—to make some royalties from the copies they sold. I wouldn’t be capable of going into business for myself.”
    “In other words,” the man said, finally realizing what a numskull he was talking to, “you’ve taken a shit, and now you want someone to flush the toilet for you.”
    That wasn’t quite how I would have expressed it myself, but I didn’t argue with him. He clearly knew more than I did, and when he went on to recommend that I find a “game broker” to talk to the companies for me, I didn’t doubt that he was pointing me in the right direction. Until then, I hadn’t even known of the existence of such people. He gave me the name of someone who was supposed to be particularly good, and I called her the next day. That turned out to be my last move, the final chapter of the whole muddled saga. She talked a mile a minute to me, outlining terms, conditions, and percentages, what to do and what not to do, what to expect and what to avoid. It sounded like her standard spiel, a furious condensation of years of hard knocks and cutthroat maneuvers, and for the first several minutes I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Then, finally, she paused to catch her breath, and that was when she asked me about my game.
    “It’s called Action Baseball,” I said.
    “Did you say baseball ?” she said.
    “Yes, baseball. You turn over cards. It’s very realistic, and you can get through a full nine-inning game in about fifteen minutes.”
    “Sorry,” she said. “No sports games.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “They’re losers. They don’t sell, and nobody wants them. I wouldn’t touch your game with a ten-foot pole.”
    That did it for me. With the woman’s blunt pronouncement still ringing in my ears, I hung up the phone, put the cards away, and stopped thinking about them forever.
    *

    Little by little, I was coming to the end of my rope. After the grim, garbled letter from Joliet, I understood that Action Baseball was no more than a long shot. To count on it as a source of money would have been an act of pure self-deception, a ludicrous error. I plugged away at it for several more months, but those final efforts took up only a small fraction of my time. Deep down, I had already accepted defeat—not just of the game, not just of my half-assed foray into the business world, but of all my principles, my lifelong stand toward work, money, and the pursuit of time. Time didn’t count anymore. I had needed it in order to write, but now that I was an ex-writer, a writer who wrote only for the satisfaction of crumpling up paper and throwing it in the garbage, I was ready to abandon the struggle and live like everyone else. Nine years of freelance penury had burned me out. I had tried to rescue myself by inventing the game, but no one had wanted the game, and now I was right back where I had been—only worse, only more burned out than ever. At least the game had represented an idea, a temporary surge of hope, but now I had run out of ideas as well. The truth was that I had dug myself into a deep, dark hole, and the only way to crawl out of it was to find a job.
    I made calls, wrote letters, traveled down to the city for interviews. Teaching jobs, journalism jobs, editorial jobs—it didn’t matter what it was. As long as the job came with a weekly paycheck, I was interested. Two or three things almost panned out, but in the end they didn’t. I won’t go into the depressing details now, but several months went by without any tangible results. I sank further into confusion, my mind almost paralyzed with worry. I had made a total surrender, had capitulated on every point I had defended over the years, and still I was getting nowhere, was losing ground with every step I took. Then, out of the blue, a grant of thirty-five hundred dollars came in from the New York State Council on the Arts, and I was given an unexpected breather. It wouldn’t last long, but it was something—enough to ward off the hour of doom for another minute or two.
    One night not long after that, as I lay in bed battling against insomnia, a new idea occurred to me. Not an idea,