I hear you out there, just who the hell is Casper Vidor, you say. Well, since I love to talk about myself, I’ll tell you who I am. I was born in 1933 at the tail end of the “Pulp” fiction boom. I read everything from Doc Savage to Dashiell Hammett, and started writing my own stories when I was around thirteen. I worked, and I worked hard, saving up to buy myself a typewriter, but I never could seem to get over the hump. My mom and I lived in a one room kettle shed and almost everything I could scrape together went to help around the house.
I went to Korea in 1952, spent too many cold nights there, and stayed long enough to marry a beautiful gal with whom I had a child. Sadly, neither she nor the boy made it out with me. My son died at the ripe old age of three weeks from distemper or some such, and she died from an infecting to her womb.
I made it back to the U.S. in the late 1960’s after touring most of Europe—ask me for my Alfredo recipe—and settled down with a bottle of gin and a pet monkey I had picked up in Spain. I did odd jobs, drank, and bummed around for about a year before that little dotty, fate, stepped in and changed my life.
I went in to a pawnshop in New York with the intent of selling as many of my remaining belongings as they would take, I needed a drink and I needed it bad, but they wouldn’t give me any cash; seems I had worn out my welcome. Later that night, as I was sweating any bottle I could find, it dawned on me; if they wouldn’t give me the money I would just take it.
I sucked down as much courage as I could muster between the leftovers and pouring shoe polish through bread. I trotted down to the pawnshop and spent about an hour casing the joint. It was empty, closed around five, but that didn’t mean anything. I had to make sure that nobody was inside.
When I was sure, I went around to the back fully intending to, smash through a window, grab a fist full of loot and high tail it back to my digs. I turned the corner and, sitting there on top of a garbage can, was a typewriter just like I had wanted when I was a fresh-faced kid; a shiny black Royal Portable.
Seeing that typewriter brought back a flood of childhood memories and those fond memories, those youthful dreams, shoved out all the evil images of war and death that had crowded my addled brain since the war. I took it home, forgetting for the moment the overpowering thirst that had driven me to the edge, and never looked back.
Now, here I am, seventy something years old, a prostate the size of a pomegranate, a liver that looks like some alien afterbirth, or so they tell me, and I am still writing. You’ve never read anything I ever wrote, even though I have been told I am the greatest writer of “Pulp” fiction who ever lived. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.
