Stalking the Nightmare Part 5

The living room looked invitingly comfortable with all those ma.s.sive sofas and the huge baby grand piano. But I had been denied entrance. I felt like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon standing at the doorway to the antechamber of Tutankhamen's tomb, faunching to enter a s.p.a.ce unvisited for three thousand years, but fearing the terrible wrath of Beware all ye who violate this sacred place...

Now I don't know about you, friends, but if you leave me all alone someplace, with nothing to amuse me, for any extended period of time, I will sure as s.h.i.+t get in trouble.

And so, possessed by some devil-demon from my childhood, I became obsessed by the purity of that G.o.ddam carpet. I stared at its unblemished white expanse, that sea of bleached gra.s.s rippling away to forever. And finally, when it was either do something or go bugf.u.c.k, I stepped to the edge of the plastic runner, crouched, and jumped as far out into the carpet as I could. There was no way of knowing where I had come from. My footprints just magically appeared out there.

I hesitated only a moment, and then, scuffling my feet to produce impressions in the carpet, I began spelling out the cla.s.sic Chaucerian p.h.u.qUE. In letters four feet high. In virginal white carpet.

And I was just putting the. on the ! when I heard a strangled " Aaaaarghhh!" behind me. I turned, and there stood the missing Brenda, looking really pretty terrific, but with this, how shall I put it, uh, green expression on her face. "OhjeezusOhmiG.o.dOhs.h.i.+t! My mother'll kiiiill me!" And she ran off, leaving me standing there rather shamefaced, wondering just which mental gargoyle had taken possession of the cathedral of my mind, knowing that there was no way I was gonna get laid.

Then, in a moment, here she came, schlepping a carpet sweeper, not a vacuum cleaner, just one of your basic hand-pushed carpet sweepers, and she starts sweeping the nap back north by northwest!

And I watched this demented scene for about thirty seconds until it got more than I could handle, and I yelled at her, "This is nuts! How the h.e.l.l can you be a slave to a f.u.c.kin' carpet?" But she was in the grip of more powerful forces than my charisma. She was under the unbreakable spell of toilet training, and if the Apocalypse had come along just then she'd still have finished laying that nap back.

I went crazy.

I grabbed for the sweeper. She pirouetted out of my reach. She never broke stroke. I lunged for her again, and got my hands around the sweeper. We struggled back and forth across the living room, caroming off the furniture, lousing up the carpet worse than before. She fought like one of those lady barbarians out of a Conan adventure, punching and kicking.

Then the sweeper went that way, and we went this way, and we fell over and wrestled over and over across the floor, thumping our heads and legs. Over and over, and I came up on top for a moment and pinned her arms and stared down at her, trying to catch my breath...

And in that instant I perceived a mad light glowing out of her eyes, and she murmured huskily, "Hit me."

Oh s.h.i.+t.

Now you gotta understand: I'm a quiet, well-mannered, Jewish kid from Ohio. Not even years sunk to the hips in the fleshpots of New York, Chicago, London and Billings, Montana have been able to sully the rigidly Puritanical morals that have led me to the pinnacle of success and clear complexion you see before you today. To put it simply, I was terrified. After all that time, at long last, despite my best efforts at avoidance, I had encountered one of those kinda ladies. "Uh... beg pardon," I said weakly.

"Hit me," she said again. The light in her eyes strobed.

"H-h-huh-hit you?"

"Punch me around a little bit. I love it. "

"P-p-puh--?"

"Don't leave marks. Just hurt me some..."

Oh s.h.i.+t.

She was watching me, naked l.u.s.t in her face, her lips wet with unconcealed desire. Nice quiet Jewish kid from Ohio. But what the h.e.l.l, I'm adaptable.

Bogart a.s.serted himself. My voice dropped four octaves. "You like a little smacking around, right, shweetheart?" She nodded, bonking her head on the carpet. "Okay," I said roughly, "get naked."

She looked troubled for a moment. "Naked?"

"Now!" I said, my voice a brutal rasp. I got off her. I stood over her as she stripped out of her clothes. My eyes slitted, my jaw tensed. I watched silently.

When she was naked--and pretty terrific she was, I might add--I said, "Okay, lie on your back." She lay down again. (For a crazed moment I wanted to tell her to "make an angel" the way we used to do it when there was a heavy snow in Ohio. You lie on your back and flap your arms up and down, making angel wings. But I didn't. That would've been really crazy.) The heavy drapes on the living room windows were secured by thick gold cord ropes with ta.s.sels. I unhooked four of them. I wrapped one around her left leg, secured it, and tied it to one leg of the baby grand. Then I did the same to her right leg and attached it to the piano at the other side. Then one arm stretched above her head and fastened to a leg of the ma.s.sive sectional sofa. The other arm to another post of the sofa. She was spread-eagled, right in the middle of the word p.h.u.qUE! (without the.) out flat on her back, her perspiring body trembling with barely-restrained pa.s.sion.

"Can you move?"

She tried, then shook her head.

"Tied down tight? Can't get loose?"

She nodded again, breathing raggedly.

"Terrific," I said, heading for the door. "Say h.e.l.lo to your mama for me, and thank her for the chicken soup."

And I ran for my life.

All I could think of was when her mother got home that night, and found her baby girl staked out like a gazelle at the waterhole, she'd take one look at this monstrous scene and start screaming, "My caaaarpet.. . !"

You ask me if s.e.x is one of the most important things in life? Absolutely. But the lack of it is even likelier to drive you nuts.

2, VIOLENCE.

Not the pale, pallid nonsense Starsky and Hutch indulge in every week. Real violence. Sudden, inexplicable, ghastly.

How seldom we see it. How unhinged we become in the face of it. Because when it really happens, when it manifests itself on its most primitive, amoral level... we understand just how fragile is the tissue of social behavior. In a life singularly filled with violence, only one sticks out without even close compet.i.tion as the most horrendously violent moment I ever witnessed. I'll tell it briefly; even today, years later, my blood runs cold remembering....

New York. Early Seventies, maybe '73 or '74. I was in the city on business. Business taken care of, I got together with a friend, a writer from Texas who loves movies as much and as indiscriminately as I do. The ritual: the movie crawl. Load up on junk food, start at the first movie theater on the downtown side of 42nd Street, and just work our way from Times Square to 8th Avenue, cross the street, and work our way back to Times Square. Days. Endless days. Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight time in the dark. We eat in there, sleep in there, p.i.s.s and daydream in there. Hot dogs, popcorn, slabs of cheese, munchies, French bread, anyd.a.m.nthing. And we see them all: the good flicks, the bad flicks, the kung-fu operas, the p.o.r.n jobs, the superfly stomp the paddy flicks... all of them. One after another, till our eyes turn to poached eggs, staggering from theater to theater like refugees from a Macao opium den.

I don't remember the name of the particular theater, but it was on the uptown side of 42nd Street, close to Broadway. It was something like four in the morning. My buddy and I were almost totally cacked-out. I remember the double-bill, however. The lower half, the B feature, was Fear is the Key, a really dreadful action-adventure turkey based on a crummy Alistair MacLean novel. The main feature was Save the Tiger, a contemporary drama starring Jack Lemmon. He won the Oscar for the role in that film.

And there we slumped, way the h.e.l.l up in the balcony, our knees jammed under our chins, best seats in an almost empty house. Four ayem. Two rows below us--and it was steep up there, what I'm talking here is d.a.m.ned near per-pen-dic-u-lar--some black dude was juiced out asleep, lying across three or four seats, snoring.

My buddy the Texas writer is dead asleep, having polished off a recent meal of three boxes of Good 'n' Plenty and a frozen chocolate covered banana on a stick. And, blessedly, Fear is the Key ends, and Save the Tiger begins.

About ten minutes into this serious, sensitive study of a garment center guy who is killing himself with floating ethics, and from the very first row of the balcony, below and to the right of us, but still very high above thefloor of the theater, I hear a shrieky black voice start mouthing off. Dialogue straight out of ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING.

"Muh-fugguh! Gahd.a.m.n muh-fugn stupid piece'a s.h.i.+t. Dumb sunbish cah-suckin' piece'a s.h.i.+t garbage...

Leroy! Hey, you sumbish nigguh p.r.i.c.k Leroy! Le's get th' fuggouna here, Leeeee-roy!"

Clearly, the critic in the first row of the balcony found this deeply penetrating study of middle cla.s.s morality as seen through the dissolution of Jack Lemmon's knock-off sweat shop less than relevant to his existence as a mid-Twentieth Century denizen of the s.h.i.+ny slum to whence he would wend his way once this stupid kike film about muh-fuggin' honk paddy bastids ended. Which wasn't soon enough for him. "Leeeee-ROY!"

I had the feeling that Leeee-ROY was the terminal case lying over the seats two rows below us. Out of it.

Well, I peer through the gloom and see the dude down there in the front row of the balcony, his feet up on the bra.s.s rail, his partner beside him, silently watching the film but not stopping the noise. And I watch the two of them for a little while, hoping the third member of the group, good ole Leeee-ROY, will bestir his a.s.s and go rejoin them there sepia Athos and Porthos, and maybe just maybe vacate the site quietly so I can watch the G.o.ddam muh-fuggin'

movie.

But no such luck. The critic only gets wonkyer, yelling at the top of his lungs. Leeee-ROY don't twitch a bun.

And just as the critic is reaching a pitch that will cause sonic tremors, squealing sunbish and muh-fugguh at the top of his lungs, from behind me I hear The Voice of Doom: "Shut your face, n.i.g.g.e.r, before I come down there and kill you."

Pause with me for a nanoinstant. This was not one of those angrily shouted shutups one encounters all-too-frequently these days in pillbox-sized Cinema I/II/III/IV closets filled with slopebrowed, prognathous-jawed pimplebrains who jabber endlessly as though they were still in front of the tube in their living room. This was--trust me--the most blood-curdlingly threatening voice I have ever heard. It was the kind of voice one suspected would accompany the body attached to the moving finger writing mene mene tekel in letters of fire. This was an abominable snowman, a tyrannosaurus, a behemoth, a stone righteous muh-fuggin' killer. Deep, resonant, commanding, powerful... and very very black.

I don't want to belabor this but whoever or whatever was sitting back up there behind my Texas buddy and me, it was bad.

Beside me, I felt the hand of my Texican partner on my wrist. Softly, he asked, "What the f.u.c.k was that?"

"Voice of Doom," I said. "Pretend we're black. Better still: pretend we're at another theater."

All this happened in a second. And only an idiot would have talked back to the owner of that voice. Guess whose name was in the envelope in the category of Most Outstanding Performance by an Idiot? You got it: Leeee-ROY's buddy with the scoop shovel mouth.

Is violence important in this life?

The critic started shrieking, "Who said that? Who said that gahd.a.m.n s.h.i.+t t'me? You c'mawn down here, nigguh, I'm gonna cut'chu! I gonna cut on you, nigguh muh-fugguh!"

And he did go on. And on and on. "Oh s.h.i.+t," I murmured, slumping down even deeper in the seat, till my knees were up around my ears like a gra.s.shopper. Beside me, my Texican buddy was praying in High Church Latin, Yiddish and Sufi, all at the same time.

I do believe that the joker down in the first row of that c.o.c.kroach-ridden movie house was the single dumbest sonofab.i.t.c.h I have ever encountered; and what happened next was the swiftest, most deadly moment of violence I have ever seen.

Motormouth was still working over the conjugation of to cut when suddenly and without warning there was a rush of wind past me, down those steep steps, fast, fast, so d.a.m.ned fast I couldn't make out whether it was a human or a yeti or simply some terrifying force of nature, and all I saw was a dark blur as something BIG went smoothly down to the front row, something GIGANTIC moved into that row... and that stupid sonofab.i.t.c.h joker just stood up. still working his wet jaw... as if he could do something against that HUGE dude come to silence him... and that monstrous black fury just grabbed Motormouth by the s.h.i.+rt front and yanked... and pitched him headfirst over the rail.

I heard a terrified scream as the guy fell, and then a sickening crack! like the snapping of a T'ang dynasty chopstick, and then there was silence.

The only sounds were Jack Lemmon talking about what emotional violence he was suffering.

Shut up, Lemmon.

No one in the theater moved. There weren't that many people anyhow. Just my buddy and me and sleeping Leeee-ROY and the buddy of the guy who'd taken the dive... and that humongous shape. In the balcony. And if there was anyone down below, they weren't saying anything.

The diver's buddy didn't move or look around or say a word. He just sat there staring straight ahead, as if he could not possibly have found anything more interesting in the universe to think about than Jack Lemmon's problems.

The dark shape moved back up the aisle... I didn't look left or tight... I saw nothing, Jim, nothing... and it went up past me and was gone.

I watched that entire flick in silence. No one moved to see if the diver was still alive. After a moment's wait the diver's buddy slipped out of the balcony like oil was.h.i.+ng down a gutter, and was gone. From below... nothing.

And when the film was finished, and the lights came up, we rose, and turned slowly. The balcony was empty.

Leeee-ROY was still tabula rasa. Just us, all alone. I looked at my buddy from Texas, and he looked at me, and without saying a word we walked down that precarious stairway and came to the railing and peered over.

The diver lay across the back of a shattered seat. He was bent double. Stomach up. His spine was broken. Hedidn't move. The theater was empty. We walked back up the aisle, through the upper vestibule, down the winding staircase, into the lobby, and out. We didn't look back. No one could help the diver. We wanted to get away.

We never spoke of it to each other.

It was sudden. Not a word. Not a second threat. No false heroics like two stumbleb.u.ms in an alley outside a bar. No feinting, and no swinging. He just threw him; launched him out into eternity. And walked away from it.

Because he was being disturbed in a movie.

Violence, real violence, not the Jack Armstrong nonsense we all play-act at... genuine, mindless violence is very important.

Because there is no knowing when it will strike.

And there is no escape from it.

I warn you, it's terrible.

3. LABOR RELATIONS.

At least half our waking life is spent trying to make ends meet. Slouching after the buck. Keeping the rain off our heads. That means earning a living. Aren't you glad I clarified it for you? And whether you're on the paycheck or self-employed, whether you wait in line for the dole or cat-burgle through windows in the wee hours, relations with Them As Has the Money are vital. Not getting the Employer p.i.s.sed-off, maintaining a posture that makes you indispensible, cannot be too strenuously stressed.

One of the most important lessons one can leam in this tragic life, therefore, is what it takes to stay employed.

And since almost any job will eventually drive you to erratic behavior, thus precipitating getting your tuchis laid off, I offer the following heart-rending anecdote from my virtually cornucopial stock of life-experiences... as a cla.s.sic example of what not to do.

One day about ten years ago, I was sitting in this little treehouse I rented in Beverly Glen, a sort of arboreal Bambi-Land section of Los Angeles just on the Tobacco Road side of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, what I'm talking here is artsy-craftsy but poor as a shulmouse, [A shul is a synagogue. As a Jew I'm not allowed to have churchmice.

That's okay, they're trayf.] really a treehouse, I'm not making this up, see, because half the house sat on a rock ledge up a private little street called Bushrod Lane that was mostly only a kind of paved pathway better suited to fugitives from a James Fenimore Cooper book than this upwardly-struggling young writer trying to bludgeon his way into movies, and the other half--of the treehouse, that is--am I going too fast for you?--was in the crotch of a big eucalyptus tree, and it only cost me $135 a month, which was back then at a time before everything was crazy in terms of what it costs to live decently these days and $135 was not the biggest rent you could pay but I wasn't all that cushy either, and so I was sitting there when the phone rang, and it was Marty. Marty the Agent. And he says to me, he says, "Walt Disney wants you!"

Now I don't know what you think const.i.tutes an ominous remark, but as Walt Disney had gone to collect his reward from that Great Consortium Organizer in the Sky at least two years prior to this phone call from Marty the Agent, immediate thoughts of some Lovecraftian horror beckoning to me from the crypt...

Whooooooo... Walt waaaaants you... !

... went pitterpattering through my tiny brain. But, as it turned out, I was never to find out if there was truth to the much-bandied underground rumor that Walt had been flash-frozen cryonically, with an eye to restoring him in the 25th Century or, at worst, stuffing him and putting him on display like Trigger. What it boiled down to, improbably, was that someone had read one of my science fiction stories somewhere and thought I'd be a terrific li'l fellah to have write a kinda sorta sf film Disney was thinking of making.

My first reaction to "Disney wants you" was horror, and then stark amazement. "There's been a mistake," I said to Marty the Agent. "I'm a crazed, radical, bomb-throwing loon who writes stories about things that come up out of the toilets to bite off babies' a.s.ses... are you sure they don't want Bob Ellison? He writes comedy. Very clean-cut guy. Drives a late model car. Shaves regularly. Never says f.u.c.k in mixed company. You sure they mean me, Marty? I'm Harlan Ellison, remember? The one with the hook for a hand."

No, says Marty the Agent, who has been my theatrical agent (as opposed to my literary agent, who is Bob the Agent) as well as my friend for over fifteen years, no, they have clearly lost their minds and they want you, and I have made a nice little week-to-week deal for you, with a guaranteed six and options... and he named a figure that might not purchase San Simeon in these crazy days of lettuce going for $3. 00 a head but back then ten years ago was more money than anyone had ever offered me for anything, including my body.

"Contracts are coming," Marty said, "but go over to the Disney Studio tomorrow morning. They have an office for you."

I was in heaven. So okay, it wasn't writing The Great American Cinematic Answer to Potemkin, so what?! I was on my way. I was going to work in the Studio! It was the big time. And just to get up in the part of a successful scenarist, I dragged out my complete collection of Uncle Scrooge McDuck Comics and re-read them all, till the night had pa.s.sed away and the morning had come.

I dressed smartly, put on the one tie I owned, looked at myself in the mirror before leaving the treehouse and went back in and took off the tie and put on a s.h.i.+rt first. Okay, so I was excited, shoot me.

I drove out the Ventura Freeway to the Buena Vista exit, drove up to the front gate in the disreputable 1951 Ford I mentioned earlier, which hadn't been washed in so long that strangers wrote cleanliness-is-next-to-G.o.dliness obscenities in the dirt, and gave my name to the spiffy guard at the kiosk. "Oh, yessir, Mr. Ellison," he said, validating my existence, "your office is in the Writers Building." I beamed.

"How do I get there?" I asked.

He smiled exactly the same smile as Doc of Seven Dwarfs fame and said, "Well, you drive in here and take the first left, that's Mickey Mouse Avenue. Then you go down Mickey Mouse Avenue till you get to Thumper Boulevard. Turn right on Thumper to Clarabelle Cow Way and take another left. Go straight down Clarabelle Cow Way till you hit the corner of Horace Horsecollar Drive, and the Writers Building is second building on your right."

I think I nodded dumbly, refusing to believe what I had just been told. But I drove in and, sure as s.h.i.+t, there was Mickey Mouse A venue and Thumper Boulevard and all the rest of them, and I said to myself, Ellison... you has fallen down a rabbit hole, keed.

But right there, in front of the building to which I'd been directed, was a parking slot that said H. ELLISON.

Right there, on the blacktop, between the thick white lines, some industrious Audio-Animatronic robot (possibly cobbled up in the image of Matisse or Lindner) had stencilled my name for Eternity or six weeks with options...

whichever came first.

To those of you out there in the Great American Heartland, that may not be such a significant thing, but in the world of studio sinecures, a parking s.p.a.ce of one's own is dearer to the heart than never being put on "hold" when calling the networks. I know Sammy Glick manques who have given up perks and t.i.tles and even a Bigelow on the floor just for a parking s.p.a.ce with the name thereon. So there I had it: authentication of my elevated status in the universe of the soon-to-be-hot-stuff.

I walked into the building and on the register I found my name and office number. Walked upstairs, followed the numbers till I found my office, and opened the door. It was a two-room suite with bathroom. The room I entered was antechamber, and there, sitting behind her desk, reading a paperback nurse novel, was my secretary. No, change that from. to !!!

You shoulda seen her. This remarkable creature was so clean I could see dust motes taking 90 turns as they fell, just so they wouldn't mar her perfection. A smile that would solve all the energy dilemmas of the TV A. Peter Pan collar on the blouse. Malibu blonde, periwinkle-blue eyes, a goyishe nose that would make Streisand climb a wall, a freshly-minted six-pack of dimples most of which were visible.

"May I help you?" she said.