George R.R. Martin

by The Armageddon Rag

  “I lied,” said Froggy. “It was a trick to see if you were paying attention. Hey, I do it to the kids all the time.”

  Sandy smiled and climbed up from the sand. “They must love you,” he said. “And hate you.”

  “It runs about fifty-fifty,” Froggy said, “but the trend is agin’ me, Sander m’boy.”

  “Really?” Sandy was surprised. “I don’t believe it. You’ve got to be a dynamite lecturer. And you care.”

  “About the wrong things,” Froggy Cohen said. “I care about all the wrong things. Hey, Sandy, just because I can hold forth eloquently about the historical forces that have disillusioned and wounded the chilluns of Aquarius, that don’t mean I’m immune to the process. I’m out of step, too.” He made a rueful face, his broad rubbery features taking on a look of comic dismay. “I ascend unto my podium armed with wit and wisdom and vast stores of secret and arcane knowledge, and I spread my arms and cry out, ‘Listen to me, all ye sons and daughters of Orange County Chevrolet dealers! Listen to me and I shall lead you to truth!’ And half of them stare as though I’m crazy. The other half, God help us, write it down.” He clapped Sandy on the shoulder. “Come on, Sander, let’s go to the pier. I’ll buy you a corn dog or an ice cream, and we can ride the carousel. It’s got apartments built over it, you know. I wanted to rent one once, when I first moved down from Oakland, but number three wouldn’t hear of it. The woman had no poetry in her soul, I tell you. Imagine waking and sleeping to the sound of the calliope, and looking down whenever you wanted to watch the people going around and around on their pretty painted horses. Around and around and around, just like us.”

  “And the seasons, they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down,” Sandy quoted.

  “We’re captive on the carousel of time,” Froggy finished. “Hey, you caught me. But you’ll date yourself, m’boy. Can’t go around quoting Joni Mitchell these days. Besides, you’re revealing your petty bourgeois inclinations, as Lark would say. Quote Yeats. Yeats is timeless and will establish your credentials as a real intellectual.” He gave a snort of evil gremlinesque laughter as he took Sandy by the elbow and led him down the beach. “Let me tell you about this faculty party at the last college I was at. There was this vision, this angel, this luscious moist person of the opposite sex, this fair blond surfer girl, and a T.A. in history to boot, though in her case the initials had a double meaning. Ah, Sandy, you should have been there! My magic twanger grew desperate, but there I was being shut out by a man named Fowler Harrison. It was grossly unfair, you know. He was tall and devilishly handsome, with gray at his temples, and a pipe, and he was a full professor. And named Fowler! And you know what he was doing? He was holding fair Juliet spellbound by reciting Yeats to her! Poem after poem after poem. The human mind cannot hold so much Yeats, unless it is housed in the skull of an English prof named Fowler. And what a gorgeous voice he had! She was staring at him, like a cobra fascinated by a tall gray mongoose, so what could I do?” He looked over and winked. “Well, I joined them and listened respectfully, and when Fowler finally paused, I gushed and asked him how he could possibly remember so much. And Fowler beamed down at me and said that when he heard something beautiful he could never forget it. ‘That’s funny,’ I says to him, ‘when I hear something awful, I can never forget it. For instance, I live every day of my life with the accursed theme song of the Patty Duke Show bouncing around in my brain.’ And I began to sing it, and damned if my vision didn’t break into a wide smile, and laugh, and join in. Fowler turned green, and Sherry and I—no, it was Brandy, I think, or Gin, something like that—well, anyway, we moved on to Dobie Gillis and the Beverly Hillbillies and thence to bed.”

  “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy,” Sandy said.

  “They are all so young, Sandy, and they bulge so against their sweaters, and I keep waiting for my temples to turn gray so they’ll fall in love with me, but instead my hair is falling out.” He put his lips together and made his wet, silly noise again, derisive and dismissing. “Well, that was in my callow youth. No more! I have tattooed the name of number four upon my magic twanger, and forsaken all others.” They passed into the shade of the pier and ascended from sand to boardwalk. Froggy went first.

  At the top they found an open stand and bought two ice cream sandwiches that tasted like chocolate-flavored cardboard. They peeled back the paper halfway and walked down to the end of the pier, over the water. “How do you feel about teaching?” Sandy asked. “Really?”

  Froggy stared at him through the thick lenses. His eyes were shrewd and faintly amused, and he had a white ice cream mustache on his upper lip. “Seriously?” he asked.

  “Seriously,” Sandy said.

  Froggy sighed. “I love teaching,” he said. “It’s my life. I love history, and in a perverse way I even love the whole ivory tower scene. And I certainly love my students.” He winked. “Not often enough, but still, I do love ’em. Yet it’s true, Sandy, what I said down on the beach. I’m not making it. Not really.”

  “How?” asked Sandy. “Why?”

  Froggy balled up the paper from his ice cream sandwich, tossed it into a nearby trash can, and carefully licked his fingers one by one. When he was done, he leaned back against a piling and frowned. “I loved college. The atmosphere, the sense of excitement, of ferment. Those years at Northwestern changed me forever and ever. The demonstrations. The debates. The classes. Bergen Evans lecturing, making me think about just about everything in my life, though he was supposed to be teaching English lit. My history profs. Jesus, I loved it. I wanted to be like those teachers I’d admired. I wanted to shake kids up, to lay truth on them, to make ’em see things in a new way. I wanted to make them angry and shocked. I wanted them to argue with me. I wanted to make them think. Hah!

  “The kids have changed, Sandy. They’re not like we were. And it gets worse every year. They’re docile. They’re practical. They’re polite. They don’t bite. Well, hardly ever. I’ve been at four colleges now, never been higher than an assistant professor, so I get all the big introductory lecture courses. I used to try to do Socratic dialogues, get arguments going, controversies. Disaster. I gave that up. And no matter how outrageous I am in lecture, no one argues back. They write it all down. That business about saying there are four causes of thus-and-such, and giving only three? That’s no joke, Sandy, I’ve really done that in class. It’s about the only sure way I know to make a hand go up out there, to make someone say, ‘Hey, Professor Doctor Cohen, you fucked up.’ Except they say it politely.

  “Once I was teaching a basic intro course in American history, lecture format, seventy-nine students, and I was convinced that every damn one of them had turned to stone or died out there. So I gave an entire lecture on the administration of President Samuel Tilden. His election, his accomplishments, his failures, his reelection. After it was over, exactly three kids came up and said, ‘Uh, excuse me, must be some mistake, the textbook says that Rutherford Hayes became president, not Tilden.’ When I fessed up to them, one of them went to the department chairman. That was my last year at that college.

  “Oh, there are exceptions, of course. The kids who make it worthwhile. But so few. It’s not that the others are dumb. It’s not even apathy. They’re just different. Products of a different time.

  “You remember how we wanted courses that were more relevant? The new breed wants relevance too, but for them relevance means Basic and Accounting and Introduction to Advertising.” He sighed. “Is it any wonder I’m a misfit? And I am, Sandy, truly I am. I’m a good teacher, I’m an exciting lecturer, but I move from one university to another, I’ve never gotten tenure and I never will. I’m a brilliant anachronism. My students give me blank stares or frightened laughs, and the deans think I’m a loon, an anarchist, a threat to the dignity of their ivy-covered halls. My God, Sandy, I tell the kids to put the spaghetti in their hair, and all they ask is how that will help them get a job!”

  “I hadn’t realized it was that bad,” Sandy s
aid.

  Froggy grimaced. “Bad? Bad? I’ll tell you how bad it is… fraternities are coming back!” He groaned theatrically, spun, and stared out over the seas. They were alone on the end of the pier. When Froggy fell silent, Sandy could hear the slap of waves against the pilings. The air was crisp with the salt smell of the ocean, and you could see the mountains curving out to the north, veiled in mist. Froggy shoved his hands deep in his pants pockets. “Fuck,” he said loudly to the wind. He turned around, frowning. “I didn’t mean to go on like this. Look, come over for dinner tonight, OK? I promise I won’t talk so much. We’ll play Nazgûl records and reminisce about Timothy Leary and I’ll tell you precisely what’s wrong with every one of your books. Including the dedications, none of which, by the way, have been to me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed, Sander m’boy. And after all I did for you.” He grinned. “And you can meet Sam.”

  “Sam?”

  “Samantha,” said Froggy. “Otherwise lovingly known as Number Four. You’ll like her. She won’t like you, but nobody ever does, so what the hey? So what do you say?”

  “I’d like to, Froggy,” Sandy said, “but I have to go back to my hotel and check for messages from Edan Morse. I want to try and see him tonight, if possible.”

  “Sam doesn’t really look like Andy Devine,” Froggy said. “She won’t even wear Buster Brown shoes.”

  “Sorry,” Sandy said, smiling. “I’ll see you before I leave town, though. You and Sam both. You’ve got my word.”

  “Give me some advance warning, so I can rent a tux and paint my face green,” Froggy said. “We want you to feel at home.” He snorted with laughter, slapped Sandy on the back, and they walked down the pier together, past the carousel and the ice cream stands, toward the city. Froggy Cohen began to talk about the history of merry-go-rounds. Sandy smiled, and listened.

  TWELVE

  Some are born to sweet delight/

  Some are born to the endless night

  The desk clerk, a plump little homunculus of a man in a gray cardigan and slippers, was engrossed in a porno novel when Sandy returned to his motel late that afternoon. “Any messages?” Sandy asked him, leaning on the desk.

  The man peered at him suspiciously, obviously piqued at being disturbed. “Messages?”

  “Yeah. Messages. You know. Little slips of pink paper with words written on them. From all the folks who called while I was out.”

  The clerk cleared his throat. “No messages,” he said. He went back to his porn, and Sandy went back to his room. It was all the way around back, behind the scummy swimming pool. Sandy walked to it feeling annoyed and restless. Edan Morse should have called. He would have bet his life on it. In fact, maybe he already had. He’d left one detail out of the version he’d told Froggy: the message scrawled with a Flair on the back of the purple Hog card he’d left in Malibu. I taut I taw a puddy tat, Sandy had written. He didn’t understand how Morse could afford to ignore that.

  He hadn’t. When Sandy reached his room, the door was ajar, and they were waiting.

  There were two of them. The woman in the orange Naugahyde chair by the door rose and turned when Sandy stepped into the room. She smiled as he glanced at her, and he found his glance turning into a stare. She was striking. Tall and dark, with café-au-lait skin and ink-black hair that fell in a long jet cascade down to the small of her back. That great mass of hair made her seem smaller than she really was. Her body was taut and trim everywhere. A white halter top, knotted between high round breasts, revealed an absolutely flat and firm stomach. Her faded jeans followed the line of calf and thigh tightly. She wore a red cloth sash as a belt, and a matching red headband. Her eyes were black and deeply set and large. Her cheekbones were high and sharply defined. Her mouth looked like it belonged to someone who smiled a lot. She was altogether the most gorgeous woman Sandy had seen in years, outside of movie theaters and magazines. He could have looked at her for a long, long time, easily. But the other person in the room was enough to distract anyone, even from her.

  He was lying on Sandy’s bed. His legs, in big combat boots with a spit-shine on them, went on about a foot after the bed gave up. He was altogether the biggest man Sandy had ever seen, and never mind the movie theaters and magazines. Never mind the basketball courts, either. This guy had to be at least seven-two or seven-three, but he was wide as well as tall. He had shoulders like a comic book superhero and a huge stomach that bulged against his green muscle shirt and looked to be made of brick. He also had a bad case of sunburn, a shaved head, and one gold ring in his right ear. He looked like some bastard offspring of a mating between King Kong and Mister Clean.

  Sandy stood in the doorway and looked at each of them. “Neither of you looks like a hotel maid,” he said. “What are you doing in my room? How did you get in?”

  “I opened your door with a lock-pick,” the woman said cheerfully. “I’m good at that. We didn’t know how long we’d have to wait, and I figured we might as well be comfortable.” While she was talking, the man sat up on the edge of the bed, and rested hands the size of cinder blocks on thighs as thick as telephone poles.

  Sandy frowned. “Who are you?” He was looking at the giant. The woman was a lot easier on the eyes, but the giant made him nervous, especially when he moved. Something that big shouldn’t be able to move at all without stop-motion animation.

  “That’s Gortney Lyle,” the woman said. “Gort. And I’m Ananda. We work for Edan Morse.”

  “That much I’d figured,” Sandy said, turning to face her. “Pleased to meet you, Amanda.” He held out his hand.

  “Not Amanda,” she said, obviously accustomed to the error. “Ananda.” She took his hand, remolded his fingers into the old Movement handclasp. It had been years since Sandy had shaken hands that way. Ananda’s hand was cool and strong. She had a ridge of callus along the edge of her palm.

  “I’m not going to shake hands with him,” Sandy told her with a glance at Gort. “I type for a living.” He wiggled his fingers.

  Ananda laughed; Gort stood up and grunted. He had high, thick heels on his boots, and his head almost touched the ceiling. “Let’s go,” he said in a voice as deep as the bass on the Coasters, but a lot less musical.

  “You still want to talk to Edan?” Ananda said. She held her head cocked slightly to one side as she asked, appraising him frankly. The tip of her tongue flicked out and slid across her lower lip, and she smiled.

  “Uh, yeah,” Sandy said. All of a sudden, he felt surprisingly unsure of himself. “Might as well. Nothing good on TV tonight.”

  “Nothing good on TV ever,” Ananda said. “Well, get your coat or your notebook or whatever, and we’ll take you to Edan. He’s pretty anxious to see you, Sandy. That note you left rattled his cage a little.”

  Sandy grinned; it had worked after all. “Just a sec,” he said. He went to the coatrack by the bathroom, walking a block or two to get around Gort in the center of the room, and traded his light windbreaker for a heavier jacket. As he shrugged into it, he caught a glimpse of himself in the big mirror over the sink. His beard had come in full and dark, and his black hair was longish and windblown. He looked pretty good, he thought. More important, he looked pretty radical. Radical enough so that Edan Morse might talk to him.

  A nondescript blue van was parked outside, in the space next to Daydream. Ananda stopped to admire the car before she climbed into the van. “Nice,” she said. “Yours?”

  Sandy nodded, feeling vaguely pleased to have impressed her. She was the kind of woman you wanted desperately to impress. Had Froggy been here, he’d have been singing the Patty Duke theme already, no matter what was tattooed on his magic twanger. They stood for a moment in the fading afternoon sun and talked about his Mazda. Ananda asked a number of sharp, intelligent questions, and Sandy fielded them as best he could.

  Sandy rode shotgun during the drive up to Malibu, with Ananda driving and Gort sitting silently in the back. Having Gort behind him made Sandy distinctly uncomfortable at first,
but he soon got wrapped up in conversation with Ananda and managed, somehow, to forget all about the third passenger. It turned out that Ananda had read all of his books, which pleased him inordinately. And she even remembered some of his pieces from the Hog. “I was delighted when Edan told me who we were supposed to fetch,” she told him. “I’ve admired you for a long time. Really. The Hog was so important to us back in the old days. When all the establishment rags were printing lies and distortions, twisting everything around to make us look bad, there was only the Hog and a few undergrounds to tell it like it really was. I’ve liked your books, too. I got so angry when Sarah died in Kasey’s Quest. I cried. You never sold out, like so many of them did. You kept the faith.”

  “And you like that?” Sandy said, astonished. He laughed. “My God, you don’t know what a relief it is to meet someone who doesn’t want to lecture me about my immaturity!”

  Ananda glanced at him with a warm, rueful smile. “They got you on the defensive, right? Don’t worry about it, just hang in there. It’s the same for me. My mother was a big civil rights activist once, and she used to think everything I was doing was great, but about five years back she got grandchildren on the brain. Maturity is all she talks about.” She sighed and pressed her lips together. “They don’t get it. I can’t even think about having a child, the way the world is now. The way I see it, commitment is commitment, whether it’s fashionable or not. If the Movement is dead like they say, then those of us who are left are more necessary than ever, now that all the sunshine soldiers are working for the corporations. The principles are still valid, right? The injustice is still there, people are still oppressed, war is still just as fucking unhealthy for children and other living things, right? So there’s still work to be done. I couldn’t live with myself if I copped out. But it does get lonely at times.” She looked at him and grinned. “Another reason I wanted to meet you. The good guys are getting hard to find nowadays.”