hashish smoked in motels always seemed mean. I remember the feeling of something in the middle of my head trying to expand, to work itself outward, causing fearsome pressure. We were in motels between flights or performances, or between a flight and a performance, or the other way around. The motel was never quite the same but motel time was identical everywhere we stayed. There were no edges to the tensions of our waiting; it was one blank plane of unsegmented time. We were usually located somewhere on the outskirts of a vast population center (not necessarily a city) and we sat on the bed or floor, never in chairs, sucking up bad hash, waiting for the ever-rumored limousine to come slipping in out of the plastic glades, a comically elegant hearse into which seven or eight bodies might eventually drop, musicians, road managers, long blond girls with perfect legs, most of us in soiled old clothes, mendicant's denim and mauled boots, all rank with weed, trying to encompass the range of inconsistencies and finding this an unworthwhile endeavor.

But it's the rooms we waited in that I recall. Their plainness had a center to it, a remote secret, something one might seek to reach only through the unbent energies of certain drugs. It was a strange thing about hashish used in this environment; it seemed a puppet drug of technology, made and marketed under government supervision, a contingency weapon devised by some hobbyist of the nastier industrial echelons. Nothing was safe and there was no sure way to the center. I became both frightened and totally immobile, distrustful of everyone in the room, growing heavier by the second. A grim organic motor pulsed against the walls of my head. Often I tried to reason my way out of this conjuncture of fear and stone-weight. But there were too many areas of concentrated pressure, there was too much gravity in the universe, and although I never reconciled myself to whatever horror was ultimate I could not resist the systematic truth that I was being subsumed into an even more immobile category, that of chair, bed, room or motel itself. (It was after one of these half-hours of pensive insanity that I came up with the name Trans-paranoia for our spreading inkblot of holding companies, trusts, acquisitions and cabals.) In the plainest of rooms nothing was comprehensible. We waited to be taken to a sports arena, convention center, theater or stadium, there to plug ourselves in, to run the lucky hum through our blood, to give them evil meat to eat, the blind maidens naked on Styrofoam pedestals, the sellers of ancient medicines, the masters of trance, the black stoics exhibiting their puncture marks, the knifemen and poisoners, every head melting in the warp of our sound, its deflected electric howl, ladies screaming from wheelchairs, children in drag, feeble-minded bankers, wine merchants and baby rapers, mystics in heat, translucent boys fondling the tits of missionaries' wives. They pressed against each other, chained to their invisible history, the youngest among them knowing of all needs that one is uppermost, the need to be illiterate in the land of the self-erasing word. I

For the first time in weeks Fenig was sitting at the top of the landing. I paused at my door, feeling certain there was something he wanted to say.

"Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism."

I went inside, not bothering to lock the door. In a little while he came in. It was a dark afternoon and I lit a candle. Fenig sat at the edge of a straight-backed chair, leaning well forward, easily able to put his fingers to the tips of his tennis sneakers.

"Many thanks," he said.

"What for?"

"For listening."

"I had to stop anyway to get the door opened. So it wasn't that much of an ordeal. Haven't seen you, Eddie. Pounding away at the old machine. Is that what you've been doing?"

"You called me Eddie. That's a gracious gesture and I appreciate it. Coming from you, Bucky, tops in your trade, it's not the kind of thing I'm ever likely to forget. Is there some coffee you can give me?"

"I haven't been able to find the coffee."

"I'd be happy to consume the dregs from an old cup that's just lying around unwashed."

Sorry.

"I'm in the middle of a dark period, practically black. It's one of those times in a writer's life when he or she just wants to fall into bed and pull the covers over his or her head. I'm dropping all my genres and going into a new one completely. The kiddie filth didn't pan out. I can't sell a thing. I can't make anything happen. It's all going sour and I'm just beginning to suspect the reason. Maybe I'll have more on that next time we get together. But for now suffice it to say I'm in deep trouble."

"How deep?"

"How deep is deep, Bucky? The very depths. The place where no sunlight reaches. The pressure hole of the great ocean trench. I'm surrounded by blind fish swimming all around me. It's colder than mountains."

"The pacing hasn't helped. Is that right?'

"There was a point there and I shouldn't admit this even to you, Bucky, but there was a point there when I actually did some running and jumping. I told myself it was exercise, exercise. But I knew deep down it was an extreme form of pacing, an attempt to reinvigorate the format. Now I'm back to conventional pacing again so maybe all is not total blackness just yet. I've written in many styles and in great quantity. I used to turn out material by the yard and they used to pay me by the yard. I don't know what's happened. I know I haven't priced myself out of the market. I know I haven't lost my willingness to work. But the fact remains I can't sell a thing lately. Rejections every which way. It must be an inner failing. Pornography caused the original trouble. That much I know. I got lost in P-ville and I couldn't get out with my professionalism intact. I'm just now beginning to understand the factors and motivations behind my lack of inspiration, for lack of a better word, but that's another story for another season. If there's anything I am, it's professional. Take that away and I turn into an amorphous mass of undifferentiated matter. There's a cruel kind of poetry to the market. The big wheel spins and gyrates and makes firecracker noises, going faster and faster and throwing off anybody who can't hold on. The market is rejecting me but I'm not blind to the cruel poetry in it. The market is phenomenal, bright as a hundred cities, turning and turning, and there are little figures everywhere trying to hold on with one hand but they're getting thrown off into the surrounding night, the silence, the emptiness, the darkness, the basin, the crater, the pit. But the son of a bitch won't get rid of me that easy. I'm a tenacious brute for my size. I'm an in-fighter who can hold his own, pound for pound. I know the ups and downs of this business like few men in my time. But I appreciate your calling me Eddie. This is a big thing to an emotional person like me, which is basically what I am, and I want you to know I'll remember. Everybody else forgets but I remember."

"I can't offer advice for your comeback."

"I'll tell you what you can do," he said. "You can find the coffee pot you used last time you made coffee and maybe there's some grounds left over in the ground holder and you can give me a paper napkin and I can saturate the napkin with soggy coffee grounds and just hold it under my nose and sniff it for a little while."

&............