Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  Three girls had come onto the set from a mobile dressing room back in a dark corner of the sound stage. They wore flowered wrappers. The assistant director was herding them toward the windows of a dirty little building facing out on the alley. The girls went around the back of the building—back where it was unpainted pine and brace-rods and Magic Marker annotated as SUBTER’GE 115/144 indicating in which scenes these sets would be used.

  They appeared in three windows of the building. They would be spectators at the stunt-man’s fight with the assailants in the alley…Mitchum’s fight with the assailants in the alley. They were intended to represent three Mexican prostitutes, drawn to their windows by the sounds of combat. They removed their wrappers.

  Their naked, fleshy breasts hung on the window ledges like Daliesque melting casabas, waiting to ripen. Valerie Lone turned and saw the array of deep-brown nipples, and made a strange sound, “Awuhhh!” as if they had been something put on sale at such a startlingly low price she was amazed, confused and repelled out of suspicion.

  Kencannon hurriedly tried to explain the picture was being shot in two versions, one for domestic and eventual television release, the other for foreign marketing. He went into a detailed comparison of the two versions, and when he had finished—with the entire cast of extras listening, for the explication of hypocrisy is always fascinating—Valerie Lone said:

  “Gee, I hope none of my scenes have to be shot without clothes…”

  And one of the extras gave a seal-like bark of amusement. “Fat chance,” he murmured, just a bit too loud.

  Arthur Crewes went around in a fluid movement that was almost choreography, and hit the boy—a beach-bum with long blond hair and fine deltoids—a shot that traveled no more than sixteen inches. It was a professional fighter’s punch, no windup, no bolo, just a short hard piston jab that took the boy directly under the heart. He vomited air and lost his lower legs. He sat down hard.

  If Crewes had thought about it, he would not have done it. The effect on the cast. The inevitable lawsuit. The Screen Extras Guild complaint. The bad form of striking someone who worked for him. The look on Valerie Lone’s face as she caught the action with peripheral vision. The sight of an actor sitting down in pain, like a small child seeking a sandpile.

  But he didn’t think, and he did it, and Valerie Lone turned and ran…

  Questions that were not congruent with a film that has to take into account television rerun, accelerated shooting schedules, bankability of stars, the tenor of the kids who make up the yeoman cast of every film, the passage of time and the improvement of techniques, and the altered thinking of studio magnates, the sophisticated tastes and mores of a new filmgoing audience.

  A generation of youth with no respect for roots and heritage and the past. With no understanding of what has gone before. With no veneration of age. The times had conspired against Valerie Lone. Even as the times had conspired against her twenty years before. The simple and singular truth of it was that Valerie Lone had not been condemned by a lack of talent—though a greater talent might have sustained her—nor by a weakness in character—though a more ruthless nature might have carried her through the storms—nor by fluxes and flows in the Industry, but by all of these things, and by Fate and the times. But mostly the times. She was simply, singularly, not one with her world. It was a Universe that had chosen to care about Valerie Lone. For most of the world, the Universe didn’t give a damn. For rare and singular persons from time to time in all ages, the Universe felt a compassion. It felt a need to succor and warm, to aid and bolster. That disaster befell all of these “wards of the Universe” was only proof unarguable that the Universe was inept, that God was insane.

  It would have been better by far had the Universe left Valerie Lone to her own destiny. But it wouldn’t, it couldn’t; and it combined all the chance random elements of encounter and happenstance to litter her path with roses. For Valerie Lone, in the inept and compassionate Universe, the road was broken glass and dead birds, as far down the trail as she would ever be able to see.

  The Universe had created the tenor of cynicism that hummed silently through all the blond beach-bums of the Hollywood extra set…the Universe had dulled Valerie Lone’s perceptions of the Industry as it was today…the Universe had speeded up the adrenaline flow in Arthur Crewes at the instant the blond beach-bum had made his obnoxious comment…and the Universe had, in its cockeyed, simple-ass manner, thought it was benefiting Valerie Lone.

  Obviously not.

  And it would be this incident, this rank little happening, that would inject the tension into her bloodstream, that would cause her nerves to fray just that infinitesimal amount necessary, that would bring about metal fatigue and erosion and rust. So that when the precise moment came when optimum efficiency was necessary…Valerie Lone would be hauled back to this instant, this remark, this vicious little scene; and it would provide the weakness that would doom her.

  From that moment, Valerie Lone began to be consumed by her shadow. And nothing could prevent it. Not even the wonderful, wonderful Universe that had chosen to care about her.

  A Universe ruled by a mad God, who was himself being consumed by his shadow.

  Valerie Lone turned and ran…

  Through the sound stage, out the door, down the studio street, through Philadelphia in 1910, past the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, around a Martian sand-city, into and out of Budapest during the Uprising (where castrated Red tanks still lay drenched in the ash-drunkenness of Molotov cocktails), and through Shade’s Wells onto a sun-baked plain where the imbecilically gaping mouth of the No. 3 Anaconda Mine received her.

  She dashed into the darkness of the Anaconda, and found herself in the midst of the Springhill Mine Disaster. Within and without, reality was self-contained.

  Arthur Crewes and James Kencannon dashed after her.

  At the empty opening to the cave, Crewes stopped Kencannon. “Let me, Jim.”

  Kencannon nodded, and walked slowly away, pulling his pipe from his belt, and beginning to ream it clean with a tool from his shirt pocket.

  Arthur Crewes let the faintly musty interior of the prop cave swallow him. He stood there silently, listening for murmurings of sorrow, or madness. He heard nothing. The cave only went in for ten or fifteen feet, but it might well have been the entrance to the deepest pit in Dante’s Inferno. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he saw her, slumped down against some prop boulders.

  She tried to scuttle back out of sight, even as he moved toward her.

  “Don’t.” He spoke the one word softly, and she held.

  Then he came to her, and sat down on a boulder low beside her. Now she wasn’t crying.

  It hadn’t been that kind of rotten little scene.

  “He’s an imbecile,” Crewes said.

  “He was right,” she answered. There was a sealed lock-vault on pity. But self-realization could be purchased over the counter.

  “He wasn’t right. He’s an ignorant young pup and I’ve had him canned.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “Sorry doesn’t get it. What he did was inexcusable.” He chuckled softly, ruefully.

  “What I did was inexcusable, as well. I’ll hear from SEG about it.” That chuckle rose. “It was worth it.”

  “Arthur, let me out.”

  “I don’t want to hear that.”

  “I have to say it. Please. Let me out. It won’t work.”

  “It will work. It has to work.”

  She looked at him through darkness. His face was blank, without features, barely formed in any way. But she knew if she could see him clearly that there would be intensity in his expression. “Why is this so important to you?”

  For many minutes he did not speak, while she waited without understanding. Then, finally, he said, “Please let me do this thing for you. I want…very much…for you to have the good things again.”

  “But, why?”

  He tried to explain, but it was not a matter of exp
lanations. It was a matter of pains and joys remembered. Of being lonely and finding pleasure in motion pictures. Of having no directions and finding a future in what had always been a hobby. Of having lusted for success and coming at last to it with the knowledge that movies had given him everything, and she had been part of it. There was no totally rational explanation that Arthur Crewes could codify for her. He had struggled upward and she had given him a hand. It had been a small, a tiny, a quickly forgotten little favor—if he told her now she would not remember it, nor would she think it was at all comparable to what he was trying to do for her. But as the years had hung themselves on Arthur Crewes’s past, the tiny favor had grown out of all proportion in his mind, and now he was trying desperately to pay Valerie Lone back.

  All this, in a moment of silence.

  He had been in the arena too long. He could not speak to her of these nameless wondrous things, and hope to win her from her fears. But even in his silence there was clarity. She reached out to touch his face.

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  And when they were outside on the flat, dry plain across which Kencannon started toward them, she turned to Arthur Crewes and she said, with a rough touch of the wiseacre that had been her trademark eighteen years before, “But I still ain’t playin’ none of your damn scenes in the noood, buster.”

  It was difficult, but Crewes managed a smile.

  HANDY

  Meanwhile, back at my head, things were going from Erich von Stroheim to Alfred Hitchcock. No, make that from Fritz Lang to Val Lewton. Try bad to worse.

  I’d come back from Never-Never Land and the song of the turtle, and had called in to Arthur’s office. I simply could not face a return to the world of show biz so soon after polishing tombstones in Emery Romito’s private cemetery. I needed a long pull on something called quiet, and it was not to be found at the studio.

  My apartment was hot and stuffy. I stripped and took a shower. For a moment I considered flushing my clothes down the toilet: I was sure they were impregnated with the mold of the ages, fresh from Santa Monica.

  Then I chivvied and worried the thought that maybe possibly I ought just to send myself out to Filoy Cleaners, in toto. “Here you go, Phil,” I’d say. “I’d like myself cleaned and burned.” You need sleep, Handy, I thought. Maybe about seven hundred years’ worth.

  Rip Van Winkle, old Ripper-poo, it occurred to me, in a passing flash of genuine lunacy, knew precisely where it was at. I could see it now, a Broadway extravaganza

  RIP!

  starring Fred Handy

  who will sleep like a mother stone log for seven hundred years right before your perspiring eyes, at $2.25 / $4.25 / and $6.25 for Center Aisle Orchestra Seats.

  The shower did little to restore my sanity.

  I decided to call Julie.

  I checked her itinerary—which I’d blackmailed out of her agent—and found that Hello, Dolly! was playing Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I dialed the Olady and told her all kindsa stuff. After a while she got into conversations with various kindly folks in the state of Pennsylvania, who confided in her, strictly entre-nous, that my Lady of the moist thighs, the fair Julie Glynn, née Rowena Glyckmeier, was out onna town somewheres, and O-lady 212 in Hollywood would stay right there tippy-tap up against the phone all night if need be, just to bring us two fine examples of Young American Love together, whenever.

  As I racked the receiver, just as suddenly as I’d gotten into the mood, all good humor and fancy footwork deserted me. I realized I was sadder than I’d been in years. What the hell was happening? Why this feeling of utter depression; why this sense of impending disaster?

  Then the phone rang, and it was Arthur, and he told me what had happened at the Studio. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

  He also told me there was an opening at the Coconut Grove that night, and he thought Valerie might like to attend. He had already called the star—it was Bobby Vinton, or Sergio Franchi, or Wayne Newton, or someone in that league—and there would be an announcement from the stage that Valerie Lone was in the audience, and a spontaneous standing ovation. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

  He suggested I get in touch with Romito and set up a date. Help wash away the stain of that afternoon. Then he told me the name of the extra who had insulted Valerie Lone—he must have been reading it off a piece of paper, he spoke the name with a flatness like the striking trajectory of a cobra—and suggested I compile a brief dossier on the gentleman. I had the distinct impression Arthur Crewes could be as vicious an enemy as he was cuddly a friend. The blond beach-bum would probably find it very hard getting work in films from this point on, though it was no longer the antediluvian era in which a Cohen or a Mayer or a Skouras could kill a career with a couple of phone calls. I couldn’t stop shuddering.

  Then I called Emery Romito and advised him he was to pick up Valerie Lone at six-thirty at the Beverly Hills. Tuxedo. He fumphuh’d and I knew he didn’t have the price of a rental tux. So I called Wardrobe at the Studio and told them to send someone out to Santa Monica…and to dress him au courant, not in the wing-collar style of the Twenties, which is what I continued to shudder at in my mind.

  Then I went back and took another shower. A hot shower. It was getting chilly in my body.

  I heard the phone ringing through the pounding noise of the shower spray, and got to the instrument as my party was hanging up. There was a trail of monster wet footprints all across the living room behind me, vanishing into the bedroom and thence the bath, from whence I had comce.

  “Yeah, who?” I yelled.

  “Fred? Spencer.”

  A pungent footnote on being depressed. When you have just received word from the IRS that an audit of your returns will be necessary for the years 1956–66 in an attempt to pinpoint the necessity for a $13,000 per year entertainment exemption; when the ASPCA rings you up and asks you to come down and identify a body in their cold room, and they’re describing your pet basset hound as he would look had he been through a McCormick reaper; when your wife, from whom you are separated, and whom you screwed last month only by chance when you took over her separation payment, calls and tells you she is with child—yours; when World War Nine breaks out and they are napalming your patio; when you’ve got the worst summer cold of your life, the left-hand corner of your mouth is cracked and chapped, your prostate is acting up again and oozing shiny drops of a hideous green substance; when all of this links into one gigantic chain of horror threatening to send you raving in the direction of Joe Pyne or Lawrence Welk, then, and only then, do agents named Spencer Lichtman call.

  It is not a nice thing.

  New horrors! I moaned silently. New horrors!

  “Hey, you there, Fred?”

  “I died.”

  “Listen, I want to talk on you.”

  “Spencer, please. I want to sleep for seven hundred years.”

  “It’s the middle of a highly productive day.”

  “I’ve produced three asps, a groundhog and a vat of stale eels. Let me sleep, perchance to dream.”

  “I want to talk about Valerie Lone.”

  “Come over to the apartment.” I hung up.

  The wolf pack was starting to move in. I called Crewes. He was in conference. I said break in. Roz said fuckoff. I thanked her politely and retraced my monster wet footprints to the shower. Cold shower. Cold, hot, cold: if my moods continued to fluctuate, it was going to be double pneumonia time. (I might have called it my manic-depressive phase, except my moods kept going from depressive to depressiver. With not a manic in sight.)

  Wearing a thick black plastic weight-reducing belt—compartments filled with sand—guaranteed to take five pounds of unsightly slob off my drooling gut—and a terry cloth wraparound, I built myself an iced tea in the kitchen. There were no ice cubes. I had a bachelor’s icebox: a jar of maraschino cherries, an opened package of Philadelphia cream cheese with fungus growing on it, two tv dinners—Hawaiian shrimp and Salisbury steak—and a tin of condensed milk. If Julie
didn’t start marrying me or mothering me, it was certain I would be found starved dead, lying in a corner, clutching an empty carton of Ritz crackers, some fateful morning when they came to find out why I hadn’t paid the rent in a month or two.

  I went out onto the terrace of the lanai apartments, overlooking the hysterectomy-shaped swimming pool used for the 1928 Lilliputian Olympics. There were two slim-thighed creatures named Janice and Pegeen lounging near the edge. Pegeen had an aluminum reflector up to her chin, making sure no slightest inch of epidermis escaped UV scorching. Janice was on her stomach, oiled like the inside of a reservoir-tip condom. “Hey!” I yelled. “How’re you fixed for ice cubes?” Janice turned over, letting her copy of Kahlil Gibran’s THE PROPHET fall flat, and shaded her eyes toward me.

  “Oh, hi, Fred. Go help yourself.”

  I waved thanks and walked down the line to their apartment. The door was open. I went in through the debris of the previous evening’s amphetamine frolic, doing a dance to avoid the hookah and the pillows on the floor. There were no ice cubes. I filled their trays, reinserted them in the freezer compartment, and went back outside. “Everything groovy?” Janice yelled up at me.

  “Ginchy,” I called back, and went into my apartment.