Spider Kiss (4 page)
Ah, jeez, Fritz my old friend, how I miss you. It's been a crummy few years this past decade, insofar as losing old pals is concerned. Fritz is gone, and Avram, and Isaac. Chad Oliver and Terry and Alfie and…
Shit. I'm not going to get into that again. It sweeps over you, and drowns you, and all you can think about is that ominous goddam door. I was there, and I don't want to dwell on it here. It's late, nearing three ayem, and I've been up for twenty-four hours, and my head is growing foggy. I'll go get a cuppa, and come back. Give me a minute.
The "other guy" Fritz remembered swimming out with me that day in Milford, Pennsylvania, was Bob Silverberg; and he likely saved my life. I was being swept downstream, over the rocks. Bob anchored himself on a slippery rock that jutted out into the flow, and as I beat my way back toward him, he reached out and grabbed me. I probably would've been swept under that day if not for Silverberg.
And the strange linkages that bound Fritz and me were even stronger and stranger, by chance, than he ever knew. The story he referred to, "Lie, Still, Snow White," was written for an anthology that
I
created. An anthology that was the prototype for DANGEROUS VISIONS that came six or seven years later. I've never told this one before, so here's a good place for it. You didn't have anything else to do, did you? You can hang out for a while, yeah?
Great. Terrific. So here's how it went:
I got out of the Army, as I said earlier, and I went to work for this guy in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago. And then I went back to New York, as I said; and I wrote SPIDER KISS, as I said; and then this guy I'd worked for in Evanston came back. He searched me out, where I was living in Greenwich Village, and doing rather well, thank you; and he offered me lots more money to come back to Chicago and start these two paperback lines for him.
Well, actually, I'd
already
started one of them, when I was working for him previously. Sort of did it with my left hand while editing
Rogue
magazine with Frank Robinson. It was a line of "erotic" novels—pretty pale and tame by today's standards—called Nightstand Books, and in one year the line made this guy, my boss, over a million bucks. So then I split, and he came and found me, and I was just getting married for the second time, a rebound sort of liaison that didn't last more than a year…but that's another story for another time…and I needed the bread, so I agreed to come back to Evanston, though I had come to dislike the guy (and would grow steadily from dislike to loathing, the deeper in his clutches I got), but I made the deal like this:
I said I'd edit Nightstand, if I could create a line of controversial, mainstream paperbacks. Over which I had total control. He hmmed and haggled, tried to outflank me and tried to intimidate me, but I knew what I needed to stay sane in such a job, not to mention the dangers and risks attendant on his operation (another story, for another time). Finally, he agreed.
I got married and, in company with Billie and her son from a previous marriage, I moved back to Chicago. Where I took up the Nightstand reins. I spent two days a week on the line of what we called "stiffeners," and we were publishing six or eight titles a month by that time, which I edited singlehandedly, proofing, getting covers, writing up the plots for most of them, doing every phase of the production and editorial regimen in a tiny, one-room office, with the name Blake Pharmaceutical on the door. Don't ask.
But five days a week I worked on my passion, Regency Books.
That was the line that published Robert Bloch's FIREBUG, the first collection of B. Traven's short stories ever done in this country, my own MEMOS FROM PURGATORY and GENTLEMAN JUNKIE (both of which will follow in this White Wolf series), Bill Brannon's THE CROOKED COPS, and several dozen other kickass books, all originals. And I had an idea for an anthology of controversial science fiction stories that would deal passionately with taboo subjects of hadn't, till that time, tackled. With further ironic coincidence, that this anecdote appears in this EDGEWORKS volume, I called the book STORIES FROM THE EDGE, and I hired Judith Merril to edit it.
Well, Ms. Merril commissioned Fritz to do a story for the book, he wrote "Lie Still, Snow White," and Ms. Merril didn't deliver the book. She dawdled and dawdled, and by that time I'd had it up to here with the publisher, whom I had come to despise with a ferocity that time has not dulled; and I left the job under crummy circumstances…another story for another time…and wound up here in Hollywood. Another editor tried to get the book out of Merril, but it never happened.
Fritz's story was published in an obscure paperback collection of originals called TABOO, and it wasn't till 1965 that I managed to sell the idea of a big, controversial collection…what came to be known as DANGEROUS VISIONS.
Watch for its reissue here in this White Wolf picnic.
But Fritz would never have written "Snow White," and likely wouldn't have jumped off from that dangerous vision to produce the brilliant "Gonna Roll the Bones"—that won him a Nebula, among other accolades.
Ain't it a strange gitalong.
It's late. I think I've overstayed my welcome this time. The sun's coming up. My neck muscles hurt the way they do when you drive truck cross-country, thirty-six hours on NoDoz and coffee and Clark Bars for the jolt. You looked fragged, too. We've been sitting here talking for hours. You ought to go home and crap out for a couple of hours before you go to work.
I've got a hard day ahead of me. Cardiac rehab tomorrow morning, and before I can snag a few zees I've got to fax this introduction out to Dana Buckelew at White Wolf.
They call this a metafiction. Watching myself watching me as I watch myself write an introduction. Drive carefully. Stay away from bad dope. Avoid Stephen Seagal movies. Thank your mother for the chicken soup.
And as Howard Garis used to say, We'll get together again unless the soup spoon flips itself off the edge of the table and puts out the cat's eye so that it runs amuck in the kitchen and lands in the microwave and fricasees its feline ass, and Uncle Wiggily gets involved with a hooker who takes him for his top hat and spectacles; unless all that happens, I'll be back here in six months or so with Volume Three, containing THE HARLAN ELLISON HORNBOOK and the previously only-limited-edition-published book-length screenplay, HARLAN ELLISON'S MOVIE.
Until that time, kiddo, stay out of the line of fire. And let's pretend
Life is a lot easier than reality tells us.
Harlan Ellison
6 August 1996
Los Angeles
First there was only the empty golden circle of the hot spot, blazing against the silk curtains. That, and in another vein, the animal murmuring of the audience, mostly teen-age girls with tight sweaters and mouths open-crammed by gum. For what seemed the longest time that was the portrait: cut from primordial materials in an expectant arena. There was a tension so intense it could be felt as warmth on the neck, uncontrollable twitches in the lips and eyes, the nervous shifting of small hands
from
nowhere
to
nowhere.
The curtains gave a vagrant rustle and from three parts of the orchestra and four parts of the balcony came piercing, wind-up-a-chimney shrieks of pleasure and torment. Behind the velvet ropes, overflow crowds pressed body on body to get a neck-straining view of the stage. Just those purple and yellow draperies, the golden coin of the spotlight beam. The scene was laid with a simple, but forceful, altogether impressive sense of dramatics.
In the pit, the orchestra began warming its sounds, and the jungle murmur of the anxious crowd rose a decibel. There would be no Master of Ceremonies to start festivities, no prefatory acts — the Tumbling Turellos; Wally French & Sadie, the educated dachshund; Ivor Harrig with mime and merriment; The DeLaney Sisters — there would only be that golden spotlight, a blast of sound, and the curtains would part. This was one man's show, as it had been one man's show for two weeks. This was The Palace, and it had been invaded.
Two weeks before they had made The Palace alter all its precedents. The screaming, feral teen-age girls with their eyes like wine-soaked jewels, their mouths hungry, their adolescent bodies rigged and trussed erotically. They had booed and hissed the other acts from the stage before they could gain a hearing. They had stamped and clamored so outrageously, the booker and stage manager had decided — in the absence of the manager — to cut straight through to the feature attraction, the draw-card that had brought an audience rivaled only by the gates of Garland, Belafonte and in days past, Martin & Lewis.
They had set the other acts aside, hoping this demonstration was only an opening day phenomenon. But it had been two weeks, with SRO at every performance, and the other acts had been paid off, told a profusion of sorrys, and the headliner had lengthened his stint to fill the space. He seemed, in fact, suffused with an inner electricity that allowed him to perform for hours without fatigue. The Palace had regretfully acquiesced … they had been conquered, and knew it.
Now, as the golden moon-face contracted, centering at the overlapping folds of the curtains, the orchestra burst into song. A peculiar song; as though barely adaptable to full brass and strings, it was a repetitive melody, underslung with a constant mechanical piano-drum beat, simple and even nagging. Immature but demanding, infectious.
The audience exploded.
Screams burst from every corner of the theatre, and in the first twenty-seven rows of the orchestra, girls leaped from seats as though spastic, lanceted with emotional fire. A senseless, building fury consumed The Palace and beat at the walls, reverberated out onto Seventh Avenue. The love affair was about to be consummated — again.
The curtains withdrew smoothly, the golden circle of light fell liquidly to the stage, hung in the black mouth of no scenery, no cyclorama, nothing, and the orchestra beat to a crescendoing final riff.
Silence …
The hushed intake of a thousand, three thousand, too many thousand breaths …
The muscle-straining expectancy as bodies pressed upward toward the empty space soon to be filled …
The spotlight snapped off …
Darkness …
Then back to life and he was
there
!
If the insanity that had ruled seventy-six seconds before was great, what was now loosed could only be called Armageddon. Seats clanged up against the backs of chairs, a Perdition's chorus of screams, wails, shrieks, moans and obscenities crashed and thundered like the waves on the Cliff at Entretat. Hands reached fervently, feverishly, beseechingly upward. Girls bit their fists as their eyes started from their heads. Girls spread their hands against their breasts and clutched them with terrible hunger. Girls fell back into their seats, reduced to tears, reduced to jelly, reduced to emotional orgasms of terrifying intensity.
While he stood quietly, almost humbly, watching.
His name was intoned, extolled, cast out, drawn in, repeated, repeated repeated repeated till it became a chant of such erotic power it seemed to draw all light and sound to it. A vortex of emotionalism. With him at its center, both exploding and imploding waves of animal hunger.
He was of them, yet not of them. With them, yet above them.
He stood tall and slim, his legs apart, accentuating the narrowness of his hips, his broad shoulders, the lean desperation of his face, the auburn shock of hair, so meticulously combed with its cavalier forelock drooping onto his forehead.
A guardian of unnamed treasures.
Then he began to play. His hands moved over the frets of the guitar slung across his chest, and a guttural, sensuous syncopation fought with the noise of the crowd … fought … lost momentarily … lost again … crowd swell … then began to mount in insistence … till the crowd went under slowly slowly … till he was singing high and loud and with a mounting joy that caught even the self-drugged adolescents who had not come to listen, merely to worship.
His song was a pointless thing; filled with pastel inanities; don't ever leave me because I've got a sad dog heart that'll follow you where'er you go, no, don't leave me 'cause my sad dog heart cries just for you for you, ju-ust fo-o-o-or you …
But there was a subtext to the song. Something dark and roiling, an oil stain on a wet street, a rainbow of dark colors that moved almost as though alive, verging into colors that had no names, disturbing colors for which there were only psychiatric parallels. Green is the dead baby image …
The running line of what could be sensed but not heard was ominous, threatening, sensuously compelling in ways that spoke to skin and nerve-ends. It was like the moment one receives the biopsy report. It was like the feeble sound an unwatered plant makes in the instant before all reserve moisture dries from the tap root and the green turns to brown. It was like the sigh of anguish from the victim of voodoo at the instant the final pin is jammed into the ju-ju doll half a continent away. It was like the cry of a mother brought to see the tiny, crushed form lying beneath the blanket on a busy intersection. It was like the kiss of a spider.
