Put a lot of fucking in it, Ex -- twon't sell otherwise! (sfw) →[More:]"My roommate thought I was writing a novel. Often I heard him caution the pigs -- suddenly all the boys had become no-good vermin -- who lay about our apartment Saturdays watching baseball, guzzling beer, farting and scratching, to "keep it down," that I was "working." But this only increased their curiosity. Occasionally one of them would stick his head out the window and shout "Put a lot of fucking in it, Ex -- twon't sell otherwise!" Occasionally one would sneak up behind me, read over my should, and exclaim "Jesus, Ex, not another one of those morbidly sensitive fuckers! It won't sell, daddy-O! Ho! Ho! Ho!"

But I paid them no mind and went my way, typing in Chicago's sunshine, knowing that it would "sell." Indeed I wrote so any weekends that some wild charlatan of a tour bus driver, pointing upward, began bringing the attention of his complement of sightseers to me. Unquestionably having been told that I was one of the "struggling artists" said to inhabit the area, these people invariably waved frantically at me from behind the fragile glass dome of their bus, so happy were they to share this fragile moment with one who might one day be hailed a genius, so pleased that they could go back to Omaha and tell Cousin Lucy, "We saw one of them writer fellows -- in his underwear!" I never waved back. I thought it might crumble their notions of the aloofness of the artists. Instead, to please them, I hung on my face a carefully cultivated, soulful, near-visionary look, one with which, by opening my eyes as wide as I could ,in imitation of Bela Lugosi, I looked quite through their greetings. This made them giggle hysterically and pound each other self-consciously on the back, as though they had just interrupted me in an unseemly masturbation. On the bus's shooting out of sight, I always grabbed onto my stomach and roared a fitful, lunatic laughter, once even tipping my chair over and rolling all over the hot-tarred roof."
--Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes