“I’ll be charging that twenty dollars to your account,” said Behm as Todd carefully unfolded the paper. There were five or six closely typed pages.

“What is this?” asked Todd.

“Guy told me he found it inside one of the books,” Behm said. “Read it. I’ll get some more whiskey.”

Todd unfolded the first page.

THE CONFESSION OF JAKE TURNER, it said.

“Is it a story?” he asked.

“You’re the writer,” said Behm, returning with the whiskey. “You tell me.”

Todd sat back and began to read.

THE CONFESSION OF JAKE TURNER

I, Jake Turner, writer and bum, do hereby confirm that this here is my true confession. Read it and weep, gentle reader, and excuse the clichés, because I don’t have the time or the money to hire an editor.

I was born where I’ll die, in Michigan, the son of a truck driver and a housewife, and I was educated in the school of hard knocks and the university of life. My ma and pa provided the hard knocks and the world showed me life. By the time I was fifteen, I’d been with a woman, I’d drunk a bottle of whiskey unaided and lived to tell the tale, and I’d punched a man so hard he lost an eye.

You could say I was born to be a writer.

I was born too late to ride the railroads. My uncle did that during the Depression, but all he ever got from it was a drinking problem and a sore butt. And I was born too early for rock’n’roll. It sounds crazy to say it, but man, I would have been the best rock’n’roller. I could play the guitar a little, I was good-looking and mean, and I knew how to keep a crowd in the palm of my hand. I was just a kid in a leather jacket, but I could stop a fight and snare a woman, sometimes in the same moment. So I was too old for Elvis, but I was just the right age for Brando. And Dean. And Jack.

I don’t know when I first came across the Beats, but when I did, it changed my life. Because it was my life. Sitting around listening to jazz and smoking tea—marijuana—and talking. God, I could talk. Sometimes I even talked women out of going to bed with me, I talked so much.

Anyway, I read On the Road and I read Ginsberg and I listened to Lenny Bruce and I was hooked. And one day, I was pushing my motorcycle past a pawnshop and there it was in the window. A Smith Corona typewriter, black as hell. All I had with me was the motorcycle. Yeah, you guessed it.

I pawned the helmet and got the typewriter. (What, you think I pawned the bike? Are you crazy?)