Spider Kiss (2 page)

(No, you sorry thing, we choose to do 'em just the way Gutenberg did 'em in his Bible, the way John Peter Zenger did 'em and Emile Zola did 'em and even Mark Twain did 'em. Because, there was a time in this life, and not all that long ago, when a book was designed with some style, some dangerous panache, some chutzpah; even a bit of the old
crème de la crème
. It was called Lookin' Good, and you had to pay extra for it. We give it to you free of charge, just another way in which we say, "We're proud of these packages. You get good value for the money." Think not? Well, consider this:

(The Ecco Press this year published Joyce Carol Oates's short story, FIRST LOVE, as a book, with illustrations by the splendid Barry Moser. The size of the book is 6½" high by 4½" wide. It is a
little
book. It is 88 pages including frontmatter, short bios of Ms. Oates and Mr. Moser, and
very
wide margins. It is a lovely
little
book. It costs $18.00 in the U.S. and an unbelievable $23.99 in Canada. Yes, it is an absolutely terrific story by an author whose every book I own, illustrated with seven of the most striking Moser woodcuts you've ever seen—notably that Christ and the snake on page 57—but gimme a break here, Ecco honey, it's a measly eightyfuckingeight pages! For something close to twenty bucks, including the tax.

(And I don't even want to think what it runs some poor damned Oates aficionado who lives in Ottawa.

(So consider: EDGEWORKS volume one stands 9¼" high by 6½" wide; it contains two complete books and new additional material, such as this introduction, totaling more than two hundred thousand words [200,000].
Way
more than 200,000. It runs to nearly 470 pages [four hundred and seventy] and it has photographs and an exhaustive index. And a great cover.

(White Wolf offered it to you for $21.99 [$29.99 in Canada]. With that gorgeous Jill Bauman cover.

(Now, let's get something straight here. I'm not talking comparison of quality of the work in either book. As a long time and righteous Joyce Carol Oates/Barry Moser fan, I freely admit that Mr. Moser can draw circles—as well as polyhedrons, tesseracts, hexafoil spheroids and skiagrams—around me; and Ms. Oates—whose photo was taken with me on a June night in New York this year, in the banquet hall of the hotel where Cary Grant used to live—produces work, year after year, book after book, that is the envy of any sensible writer and the delight of any percipient reader. I am only nuts about her writing. So step off, with any suggestion that I'm saying I'm better than Oates and Moser…or admitting they're better than I. What I'm pointing out, and shouldn't have had to, and certainly shouldn't have taken this long to do it—but sometimes you do piss me off—what I'm pointing out is that anyone who bought EDGEWORKS volume one got a huge value for the dollar. Now, if you hated what I wrote, that's another matter. If you can't stand a book, it doesn't matter if you got it for free or your bankbook registered zero after you'd paid for it. But just strictly from the "dollar's-worth" perspective, and the amount of sheer physical labor and talent that went into the book, anybody who is piss-ant pawky enough to
kvetch
about the elegance of an unjustified right-hand margin really ought to take his/her business elsewhere, and stop bitching about it on the web, because this White Wolf series is, candidly, too good for you.

(No, not you. I didn't mean
you
. You and me, kiddo, we're pals. I'm talking about the pinhead who complained on my website about the unjustified margin and, well, I just got fragged about it. But I'm okay now. Susan made me lie down with my feet raised, and she put a cool, moist compress on my forehead. I'm all right now, I really am. You can come out of the closet, and please stop trembling like that. I'm fine, I tell you. Fine. Just
fine
.)

So here you are back again, and this time we have two very interesting books to proffer. The first is a novel. A novel about r&b, rock'n'roll, about the world of pop music. It appeared originally as a Gold Medal paperback in 1961 under the title ROCKABILLY, a title given it by the then-executive editor of Gold Medal, the legendary Knox Burger, and by my personal editor on the book, the late Walter Fultz, as sweet and decent and intelligent and talented a man as I've ever been privileged to work with. He died a while back, and he needn't have…at least, not for the reasons he did.

I've written about the circumstances under which this book came to be written, elsewhere, and at length. But for this EDGEWORKS incarnation, I've decided to tell you some frivolously endearing things about the time and place and remembered faces that hover beyond the veil in the past of art and memory.

I am listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan's
Texas Flood
album as I write this. I've got "Love Struck Baby" on replay loop. It is after midnight. Nice.

The incomparably fascinating thing about W.W. Scott was his naked lust for publishing even the most ordinary stories under titles so violent and demented that Kafka or Sacher-Masoch would have given him a standing ovation, just for sensationalism.

I loved Bill Scott. He was the editor of a couple of pocket-sized, determinedly lowbrow, detective story magazines during the mid-Fifties. They were called
Guilty
and
Trapped
, and they invariably sported covers on which a) desperate men were menacing women whose skirts were hiked to their thighs, their blouses ripped to expose milky cleavage, and a look of utter terror at the gun, knife, rope or blowtorch held by the desperate men…

Or…

Covers on which b) exquisite but desperate women with their skirts hiked to their thighs and their blouses ripped to expose milky cleavage, menaced men who looked with utter terror at the gun, knife, rope or blowtorch held by the desperate women.

I was only a year or three into my professional career as a writer. It was a swell time to be living in New York; what I'm told was the last really wonderful period for The City.

It was the last days of the pulp magazines. Most of them had long-since given way to the slicks, the paperback originals, and the pocket-sized magazines. But if you wrote hard, and you wrote fast, you could eke out a decent living at a penny-a-word. That meant writing detective stories this week, science fiction next week, a western for Doc Lowndes at ½¢ a word on publication and an "exposé" for one of the imitations of
Confidential
the week after that. It was always hand-to-mouth, but the subway was 15¢ a token; a big spaghetti dinner at the Ronzoni near Times Square was a buck; paperback books were just testing the waters at 35¢, up from a quarter; you could get a good seat for the matinee performance of
My Fair Lady
or Leonard Bernstein's
Candide
for about five dollars; and every night for the price of a couple of glasses of seltzer water, you could hang out in one of the jazz clubs and listen to Dizzy, Count Basie, the MJQ, or even Bird (who was working with this interesting sideman, Miles Davis).

We didn't realize what a ducky time it was.

Probably because all of us were hustling as fast as we could just to make ends meet. And when you found a new market, you kept it to yourself till you'd become part of the stable that produced the bulk of fiction they needed. And
then
you told your buddies.

That was the situation with Crestwood Publishing, the prototypical
schlock
New York publishing company. There were many little shops like Crestwood during the Fifties. Some of them got the entire contents of their magazines in a package from Scott Meredith's agency, essentially a closed market unless you happened to be represented by Meredith. Others bought "over the transom" and didn't much care about quality. And there were hole-in-the-wall companies like Crestwood, uptown at 1790 Broadway, just before you hit the Park. In the Forties, they'd published comic books.

How I found out they were starting up a string of fiction pocket-sized magazines, I don't remember. But I went down from West 82nd (between Amsterdam & Columbus) one afternoon, and I met W.W. Scott, and overnight I wrote a fast hardboiled story for him, and Scotty liked it…and I was home free.

I contributed three, maybe four or five, stories a month to the mystery magazines. Scotty took 'em all. Ran 'em under a plethora of bylines—Jay Charby, Landon Ellis, Cordwainer Bird, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo—and between Bob Silverberg and myself, we could glut the entire table of contents. (Not to mention the
other
stories I was writing for Crestwood's sf magazine,
Super-Science Fiction
, and the semi-slick rugged men's adventure magazine they published.)

It was a bonanza. Bill Scott paid two cents a word, often three cents; and the check was instant. I could stay up all night writing a 7000 word crime novelette, take it in the next morning, Scotty would read it while I waited, and if it was a go he'd get the bookkeeper to cut me my check for a hundred and forty on the spot. And I'd rush home and pay the rent.

The stories for
Guilty
and
Trapped
were straight out of the
Manhunt
school. (For those born too late to remember
Manhunt
, it was to hardboiled crime fiction of the Fifties what
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
has been to the more literary aspects of suspense fiction since its inception. It was a tough, utterly unsentimental magazine, in pocket-size, and it paid terrific wages for the time.
Everybody
wanted to hit
Manhunt
. Not only because it was a saucy payday, but because they commanded all the headliners—Craig Rice, Mickey Spillane, Evan Hunter, Richard Prather, Hal Ellson. To be found in that company meant you had arrived.) They were usually one-punch stories, gritty and streetwise, very much of the period and loaded with stereotypes. But the Crestwood books were identifiable from all the others, particularly
Manhunt
, by the derangement of W.W. Scott's penchant for blood-drenched titles.

These were the least of Bill Scott's inventions. Silverberg and I would make our trips regularly to the Crestwood offices; and because we lived near each other, we would
schlep
each other's stories in. If I was working, and Bob was going down to see Scott about something, he'd take my latest novelette. If I had a check to pick up, I'd stop by and grab Bob's latest offering, and deliver it. And we'd always pick up copies of the latest issues of
Guilty
and
Trapped
, issues in which appeared the yarns we'd written just six weeks
earlier!
Improbably, they were already in print.

And we would marvel at how Scotty had retitled us.

Since we had written so many stories, and since we didn't know in what order Scott was going to publish them, we would try to figure out which story emblazoned on the cover as "Psycho Killer" was the one we'd titled "Last Dream Before Morning" only six weeks ago.

But "Horror in the Night" and "Blackmail Girl" were pale offerings. When Bill Scott was at full flower he could warp the English language so demonically, we were sunk to our knees in awe.

It got to be a matter of pride with us, to see if we could anticipate his thinking, cobble up a title so redolent of decay and corruption that Scotty wouldn't change it. He would sit there and read one of these monstrous fables, a small pear-shaped man who affected a green celluloid eyeshade like a faro dealer, and when he had finished reading, he would titter briefly, look up sweetly from under the eyeshade, and say, "That's a nice little story." Rape, pillage, murder, arson, corruption, disfigurement, chicanery, loathsomeness…they were "nice little stories" to the amazing Bill Scott. But no matter how good the title was, he would line it out with his red pencil and scribble in something as deranged as a fruit-bat.

I thought I'd finally hit the mother lode of this titling lunacy when I wrote a story I called "Thrill Kill!" Now, tell me: can you think of
any
thing more perfect than that? I was in heaven. Silverberg gave me a high-five. I'd
finally
beaten W.W. Scott at his own caper. I submitted the story, and he bought it on the spot. "Sweet little story," he said.

And he published it as "Homicidal Maniac."

I gave up. There are Masters; and there are those who will always be Salieri.

Elvis Presley's management people once took an option on SPIDER KISS. Either they wanted to style it as a vehicle for him, or they wanted to make sure no one else made the movie. Because, for a long time, a lot of people thought the model for Stag Preston was Elvis. Even Greil Marcus, and Ken Tucker of
The Philadelphia Inquirer
—canny rock critics, both of them—who praised SPIDER KISS inordinately, both of them thought Stag was a
roman à clef
for Elvis. Wrong. I modeled Stag after the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis.

I wrote this story first as a short, for W.W. Scott. I called it "Matinee Idyll" and Scotty ran it in the December 1958 issue of
Trapped
(and featured it on the cover) as "Rock and Roll—And Murder." It was 4700 words, and it was about this sleaze of a rock star who, during the course of a rape attempt of a fan, causes the girl to fall out a window. It was a one-punch story, purely in
Trapped
style à la
Manhunt;
and I wrote it sitting at an oilcloth-covered kitchen table in Morganfield, Kentucky in mid-'58, where I was on detached duty from my job at the U.S. Army Armor Center, Fort Knox.

I was unhappily married to my first wife at that time. Her name was Charlotte. She was still back in New York, on West 82nd Street. The forty-two fifty a month I was making as a PFC didn't go very far, so I was supplementing my support of Charlotte, back in The City, by soldiering all day and writing all night.

The check for $64.50 (after agent's commission) went straight to Charlotte, I never saw it. And I promptly forgot the story. Just another fast fable for a farthing.