Carlotta's vinyl skin

My friend David, a successful lawyer who helped me with my immigration papers for this country, is unhappy in a niggled, half-tortured sort of way because of the unimpressive salary I earn as an English professor. Once a month regularly he will phone me to beg me to write a lurid romantic novel that might get on the best-seller list and enable me to buy the house and car he thinks I owe it to myself to own. I have told him over and over again that I cannot write such a novel — I would become immobilized with ennui and self-disgust at my very typewriter. I would waste my time trying, and simply be inserting my hands and head into a stocklike writer's block.