Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (40 page)

So he went up and looked at the door for a while.

He whistled. It was nice.

Punky pressed the door buzzer. There was no answer. He waited an extremely long time, half-asleep, leaning there against the jamb. Then he pressed the buzzer again, and held it down. Inside the apartment he could hear the distant, muffled locust hum of the buzzer. Then a shout. And then footsteps coming toward the door. The door was unlocked, slammed back on the police chain. Olaf's face, blurred by sleep, peering out of wakelessness in fury, glared at him.

"What the hell do you want at this--"

and stopped. The eyes widened at sight of all that blood. The door slammed shut, the chain was slipped, and the door opened again. Olaf stared at him, a little sick.

"Jesus Christ, Andy, what happened to you!"

"I fou--I found what I w-was looking for ..."

They stared at each other, helpless.

Punky smiled once, gently, and murmured, "I'm hurt, Olaf, help me ..." and fell sidewise, in through the doorway.

Was lost, and is found. The prodigal returned. Night and awakening. After a night of such length, opening of eyes, and a new awakening. The weavers, Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Atropos. She is the inflexible, who with her shears cuts off the thread of human life spun by Clotho, measured off by Lachesis.

Spun by Punky and his Yale men. Measured off by a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican whore named Lotte in a four-bed pad in Harlem. Cut off by a Negro homosexual in The Dog House Bar in the Bowery.

Hospital white, hospital bright, and blood, instantblood, now downdropping from a bottle, and before the end, just before the end, Punky woke long enough to say, very distinctly "Escape, please ... escape ..." and went away from there.

The doctor on Punky's right turned to the nurse on his right, and said, "He had enough."

Circle-Insult.

--New York City and Hollywood, 1965

I CURSE THE LESSON AND BLESS THE KNOWLEDGE

Okay, if you'll for chrissakes stop leaning over my shoulder, I'll start it again. How the hell do you expect me to write this with you ... supervising the damned thing? Listen, nuisance, one of the reasons I became a writer was because I swore I'd never work under someone's beady, watchful eyes ever again.

And here you are, telling me I haven't got it right, that it didn't happen that way at all. This is fiction, dammit, not real life. Fiction turns the mirror of reality; slightly, so things are seen in a new way.

That's unfair. I'm not lecturing, I'm merely explaining the way I write so you won't get all bent out of shape if I alter the facts. This isn't supposed to be one-for-one. It's supposed to be a story, and that means things will be changed.

Now I'll start it again, and you just shut up and stop nuhdzing me. And okay, okay, I won't call you Patti. (But I still think that's a super name for the young woman in the story.) Now. For the third time. I begin.

The first thing Katie ever said to me was, "How much is the school paying you to come here to speak today?"

I said, "Eight hundred dollars."

She looked shocked and awe-stricken for a moment and then said, "That's indecent. Nobody should make eight hundred dollars just for amusing a bunch of imbeciles for an hour and a half."

"I usually get fifteen hundred," I said.

"You're kidding. Just for standing up here and reading a couple of stories you wrote?"

"I've been told I read very well."

"So what? Dylan Thomas read better than you and he died broke."

"And an alcoholic to boot," I said. "Thank God I don't drink."

She started to turn away. The rest of the mob of students pressing in for autographs jammed into the space she'd vacated. I watched her as she walked away. "Hey!" I yelled. She stopped and turned around. She knew I meant her.

"Are you going with, engaged to, pregnant by, or hung up on?"

She thought about it for a moment. The mob ping-ponged their eyes between us, history in the making, before their very faces. "No," she said. "Why?"

"How'd you like to have a cup of coffee with me?"

The guy who had strolled up beside her looked as if he were about to get an enema with a thermite bomb. He started to take her arm, but she smiled and said, "Okay," and his hand never finished the grab.

She sat down in the first row of the empty auditorium and had a heated conversation with the guy who hadn't finished the grab. I tried to catch what they were saying, but the fans were babbling in my face and I've never been able to listen to two things at once. I signed their books as fast as I could--I was afraid she'd disappear--and as the last straggler moved away, fangs finally removed from my throat, charisma leaking out of my body with a soft hiss, I stepped off the stage and walked over to her.

Yes, I know I've made you sound cooler and hipper than you were that day. Yes, I know you went fumfuh fumfuh a lot. But this makes it sound better. So what if you've never read Dylan Thomas, what does that matter? Will you just sit back and let me get into this bloody thing!

They both stood up. The grabless guy didn't like me a lot; negative vibes hammered at me like the assault of noise made by one of those superpimp blacks in mile-hi platform wedgies who carry Radio Shack transistors with hundred and eighty decibel speakers, who boogie up and down Hollywood Boulevard blasting Kiwanis schmucks from Kankakee out of their white socks with the gain up full.

"Mr. Kane," Katie said, indicating the source of the negative emanations, "this is Joey. Joey, this is--"

He knew who I was. He'd sat through my lecture and my readings and had applauded. Until I'd hustled his girl, he'd been a faithful reader of my wonderful prose. I lose more fans that way. He didn't wait for the introduction, just thrust his hand forward and said, "Howdyado."

We shook. Solemnly. On such dumbass grounds as this did Menelaus and Paris get into one hell of a lousy relationship.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Everyone waited for the Earth to stop jiggling on its axis. As usual, I was the one to move the action. "Well, listen, uh, Joey, it was nice meeting you." I turned to Katie. "Are you ready to go?" She almost gave Joey a look: the muscles in her neck moved slightly: but then she just nodded and said, "Okay." I smiled at Joey, very friendly, very magnanimous, and we walked away from him. I am very grateful blowguns and poisoned darts have never been marketed in this country by Wham-O.

The nameless nuisance in the background tells me I'm lying, and making Joey look like a jerk. That is true. Even though her affair with Joey was at an end at the time we met, she was still fucking him occasionally, and though I like to believe I'm very sophisticated about such things, I was born in 1934, which makes me forty-one, and I spent the greater part of my life as a sexist, not knowing I was doing anything wrong, and though I've had the error of my ways pointed out to me by a number of voluble women infinitely smarter and better-adjusted than myself, I cannot deny that the oink of the beast can occasionally be heard in the velvet tones I now affect. (Like an ex-drunk proselytizing for Alcoholics Anonymous, or a reformed head who's found Jesus, there are few things in this life as dichotomous, neither fish nor fowl, as an apostate male feminist. I try, but it's Fool's Gold, and I despise myself for the hypocrisy.)

Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that Joey was a very good guy, and he urged her to have the cup of coffee with me. But I still hated him. He'd had his hands on her for two years, and I was jealous, And it's my story, dammit!

So we went to Yellowfingers where I ordered with all the aplomb of Gael Greene and Alexis Bespaloff melded into one unisexual gourmet.

"We'll have the spinach and mushroom salad for two, a sausage, cheese and ratatouille cr·à·pe for the lady, and I'd like the fried baby and a cup of warm hair," I said, dimpling prettily. Katie broke up, the waitress stared at me with a charming mixture of nausea and loathing. "Make that a Croque Hawaiian and an iced tea," I said hurriedly. "And what would you like to drink?"

"A Coke."

At that instant I saw the future, "the evening spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table." Gray and chill and inevitable. This moment during which I sit here writing it, as it hurtles down on me; I saw it then.

In a few minutes I would discover that Katie was eighteen, and I would discover that I was forty, nearly forty-one, she nearly nineteen, and she didn't even have to tell me how it was going to end. Damn you, Nabokov!

"Bring the lady a Coca-Cola," I said, and knocked my silverware into my lap trying to pull loose the napkin.

(It was too like that! Shut up and leave me alone; I feel like shit. Let me write, woman!)

The lunch went well. I snowed her like crazy. I was by turns serious, clever, amusing, controversial, urbane and Huck Finn. Her eyes were mostly green. Sometimes blue. Her hair fell over one side of her forehead in a soft sweep that paralyzed me.

I told her I was putting the make on her. She said, "You are?" She wasn't being coy, she simply didn't know that was what was happening. Lesson one for the old man trying to play grabass with (what the nuisance bitchily calls) "young stuff" (when she's trying to bug me): they don't do it that way these days. They are free--they assure me they're free. They just seem to raise invisible antennae and the libidinous message pulses off them. And in some marvelous, thaumaturgical progression of events without time or measure, like a fast wipe in a Chabrol film, pow! there they are in bed together, free and libidinous, everybody orgasming just the way Alex Comfort would have it, no effort, no hangups, no groping and no seduction. In the sweet and amoral world of the children there is no stalking, no hunting, no hustling; just the act, final and total and contained, as Merwin puts it, "one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence."

I have no idea what I was thinking. It had been just another pain-in-the-ass speaking engagement; Price Junior College, an agro school that got confused and wound up with a bedroom-community commuter day-care babysitting population of twenty-five thousand acne-festooned urchins taking dingbat classes in Science Fiction, Artificial Flowers I, Bowling, Inert Gas Welding and Current Events in the Arts (which, so help me, Amen-Ra, turns out to be a course in how to be a good audience). Because it is essentially a free tuition college for state residents--$6.50 per semester for students carrying 6 units or more, $2.50 for schmucks handling under 6 units--it is a refuge for post-puberty illiterates who would better serve the commonweal if they were out planting Ponderosa Pines in an effort to stem the floodtide of concrete threatening to pave over the entire state.

If, from these utterly objective and well-mannered remarks you get the impression that I have very little use for young girls, I am content in the knowledge that I absorbed Lord Alfred Korzybski's theories of General Semantics. I have but nothing to say to young girls. They're fine to look at, in the way I would look at a case filled with Shang dynasty glazes, but expecting to carry on a conversation with the average teenaged young lady is akin to reading Voltaire to a cage filled with chimpanzees. I'm certain they would feel the same alienation for me. I can live with that knowledge.

For instance ...

Yes, I realize I'm digressing, nuisance! This is what is called background color. It lends depth to a story; it establishes character, motivation. Please! Do you mind?

As I was saying. For instance, one night I had a date with a certifiably mind-blowing, color-coded, lathe-turned, rhodium-plated gorgeous. I picked her up and she was wearing an evening dress that, had Lee Harvey Oswald turned around from his position crouched in front of that window in the Texas Schoolbook Depository, 1940 vintage Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano in his mitt, and seen it, with her in it, would have burned out the clown's eyeballs and we'd be living in a much better country today. What I'm saying here, if you catch my drift, is that this female was a positive paralyzer.

Visions of sugar plums danced in my steamy gutter of a mind.

We went to The Magic Castle, which is a fornigalactic private club with dining room that specializes in showcasing the craft of the magician. We were carrying our drinks around the many fascinating rooms, and wandered into one where they had an Atwater-Kent setup that was playing tapes of old time radio. Amos 'n' Andy, Jack Armstrong, Lux Presents Hollywood, Gangbusters. And above the radio was a glass-fronted cabinet in which reposed half a dozen Captain Midnight secret decoder badges. I began enthusing over the nostalgic wonders of the little plastic-and-metal icons, and only paused in my panegyric when I caught the look of total noncomprehension on the face of my Helen of Troy. "Captain Midnight," I said. "He was on the radio in the Forties, when I was a kid. I used to lie on my stomach and listen to the program. It was sponsored by Ovaltine. I had a map of the Pacific Theatre of Operations on the wall. I used to mark the progress of the war with little maptacks with red heads on them." Absolute bewilderment on her face. "The war in the Pacific. Bataan, Corregidor, Saipan, Palau, Wake Island?" Nothing. "V-J Day?" More nothing. "World War II? It was in all the papers. 1941 through 1945."

She looked at me, perfection in every line and tremble, holding the Remy Martin of lust in the crystal snifters of her eyes, and she said, "World War II? I was born in nineteen--" and she named the year that coincided exactly with the date of the fire-bombing of my third marriage. I computed rapidly and came up with her age as not quite seventeen. I hastily ran the numbers through my terrified mind a second time and, even allowing for a recent birthday on her part, I was still in deep trouble. I removed the stinger from her paw very gingerly, smiled my brightest, and said, "It's time to go home now, dear." Fifteen minutes later she was inside her own home, safe and unsullied. Christ, I could have been arrested just for what I was thinking!

All of which brings me back to Katie, who was eighteen, and who was the exception to my loathing of young women that proved absolutely nothing. I was bananas over her from the git-go.