The Scoreless Thai (aka Two For Tanner)

That summer was my first stay in New York, and what a wonder it was. After a year at Antioch College, I was spending three months in the mailroom at Pines Publications, as part of the school’s work-study program. I shared an apartment on Barrow Street with a couple of other students, and I spent all my time – except for the forty weekly hours my job claimed – hanging out in the Village. Every Sunday afternoon I went to Washington Square, where a couple of hundred people gathered to sing folk songs around the fountain. I spent evenings in coffeehouses, or at somebody’s apartment.

What an astonishing variety of people I met! Back home in Buffalo, people had run the gamut from A to B. (The ones I knew, that is. Buffalo, I found out later, was a pretty rich human landscape, but I didn’t have a clue at the time.)

But in the Village I met socialists and monarchists and Welsh nationalists and Catholic anarchists and, oh, no end of exotics. I met people who worked and people who found other ways of making a living, some of them legal. And I soaked all this up for three months and went back to school, and a year later I started selling stories and dropped out of college to take a job at a literary agency. Then I went back to school and then I dropped out again, and ever since I’ve been writing books, which is to say I’ve found a legal way of making a living without working.

Where’s Ta

Hovering, I suspect, somewhere on the edge of thought. And then in 1962, I was back in Buffalo with a wife and a daughter and another daughter on the way, and two facts, apparently unrelated, came to my attention, one right after the other.

Fact One: It is apparently possible for certain rare individuals to live without sleep.

Fact Two: Two hundred fifty years after the death of Queen A

I picked up the first fact in an article on sleep in Time magazine, the second while browsing the Encyclopaedia Brita

I put the idea on the back burner, and then I must have unplugged the stove, because it was a couple of more years before Ta

If you’ve been picking up these splendid new editions of the Ta

When it was finished, I sent it off to my agent and returned the typewriter to the firm around the corner from whom I’d rented it. I’d landed in Dublin in mid-January, and it was the middle of February when I set out to see the country.

I’d been to Ireland once before, and had felt a strong immediate co

I didn’t have all that much to bundle up, having arrived with a change of socks and underwear and a manuscript. But of course I’d bought some clothing since I’d arrived, so I purchased a knapsack and took a bus south of Dublin to a town called Bray. From there I figured I could hitchhike.

But that turned out to be uncommonly difficult. I eventually learned that just a week or two earlier a hitchhiker had pulled a knife on a man, forcing his benefactor to drive miles out of his way before releasing him unharmed. Now back home, if this got any coverage at all, the leadline would have been something along the lines of “Kindly Hitchhiker Spares Moron’s Life.” But in Ireland, where this sort of thing didn’t happen, it was a nine-days wonder, and people who’d always picked up hitchhikers without a second thought now kept their eyes fixed straight ahead and drove on by.

It took a while, but I managed to hitchhike to Arklow. I think that’s where I bought the bike, but it may have been further along, in Wexford Town. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out to be anything but.

For two reasons, really. One was that I was in very hilly terrain, and that I was always going downhill on a bike that was careening out of control or walking alongside the bike as I pushed it up a hill.

In the rain.

I kept at it, and I got as far as a town called E

In Bantry, in the Anchor Hotel, I bought an Olivetti portable typewriter and began writing The Scoreless Thai. I wrote three or four chapters, and by then it was the middle of March, and something made me decide to return to the life I’d left behind in the States. I hitchhiked to Sha