Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  When she repeated the conversation, I felt my jaw muscles turn to concrete, and I must have scraped a half-dozen layers of enamel off my back teeth. Frankly, I wanted to kill the bastard!

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  I took a drive and stopped off at a phone booth in a gas station; while they were putting in a couple of bucks of hi-test I called Roger Gore.

  “Is Roger there?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Ken Markham.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “You won’t be here for long, Gore, if you don’t start acting like a man.”

  “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”

  “Shape up, Gore. The kid’s in trouble, and you’d damned well better be ready to take the responsibility.”

  “Screw you.” Click.

  I walked back to the car. “You save Blue Chip Stamps?” the gas jockey asked.

  “Yeah. I’m saving up.”

  He grinned pleasantly. Make conversation. Build the clientele. “Oh? For what?”

  “A hydrogen bomb.”

  He was still staring as I tooled out of the lot.

  I was right, of course. He was trying to split. I drove up his drive-way just as he was driving down. He screeched and stalled the Impala, and I slewed the Magnette crosswise across his path. I left the motor running and the emergency brake on, and I was out of the car, dashing toward him, fast as a wad of spit, before he could get coordinated. He was rolling up the windows and locking the doors as I pulled open the rear door on the side away from him. With four doors, four windows, he could only get to so many before I got to him. Logic. Wham!

  I yanked open the door and plunged into the rear seat before he could turn around.

  My arm went around his neck and yanked him half-out of the driver’s seat. I used my free hand to slam the door handle beside him, and flung the front door open. Still holding him, I punched open my door, and reached around. I grabbed the sonofabitch by his jacket and yanked him sidewise. He went sprawl-assing out of the car, and I was on him.

  “Let’s go see your house,” I said tightly.

  I took the car keys, and using a bring-along I’d learned at jolly old Fort Benning while doing my two for Uncle Sam, we dogtrotted back to the house. I unlocked the door and shoved him just enough ahead of me to plant my foot in the middle of his butt. I jacked my foot forward as hard as I could and Beau Brummel went flailing across the room, headfirst into the genuine imitation mahogany portable bar. Glassware went in all directions, his right hand swept an ornate cocktail shaker against the wall, and he knocked the caster-mounted shell on its side. He fell in a very untidy heap, and I slammed the door behind me as I moved toward him. His eyes were like a pair of Rolls Royce foglamps.

  “Four hundred dollars,” I said, very gently, lifting him by his jacket front and his Jay Sebring twelve-dollar razor-cut.

  “No, I, listen—” he started…

  “Curettage,” I recited, from reading I had recently done, “is a French word meaning to scrape out. This is the simplest operation performed upon the uterus and consists of scraping the lining of the cavity.” I let go of his jacket, still holding him up by the hair, and cocked back my fist. “It is performed under a light general anesthesia.” I hit him as hard as I could, just under the left eye. “The normal uterus is a pear-shaped, muscular organ, about three inches long, two inches wide and one inch thick, lying in the midportion of the pelvis.” He sagged sidewise, and the skin burned, blued, went gray and he started to bleed from a small cut. His eyes misted.

  “The uterus,” I continued, slapping him back and forth across the bridge of the nose to revive him, “consists of three layers—a thin, outer, sheathlike coat, a thick muscular layer, and a membranous lining to the cavity which is located in the center of the organ.” He came back from wherever he’d fled, and there was a fear of the Furies gibbering in his blue eyes. His tongue peeked out of his mouth, and I slammed him with the palm of my hand, and he bit the tip, screeching at me something I couldn’t understand. I cuffed him in the right ear, then the left, and his head bobbled like the top scoop of an unsteady ice cream cone.

  “Simply stated, the function of the uterus is to receive the fertilized egg (which travels from the ovary through the fallopian tubes), nourish and contain the egg as it develops through pregnancy and”—I hit him with everything I had, flush in the mouth—

  “expel the fully developed embryo. Four hundred dollars, Roger.” The lower lip tore, teeth bit through the upper, and he went far away again.

  Softly, “Four hundred, Roger baby.” I let him slip back down on his side. He lay there looking frightened.

  I went into the kitchen and drew myself a glass of cold water. He was a lousy housekeeper; I had to rinse my own glass.

  It had not been the most methodical of jobs, but then neither was I a schooled pistolero. It had been informed, however, by a classic frenzy and a degree of hatred/brutality I’d never known I contained. I sat there while he sponged off his face with the wet washcloth, and my knees were shaking. He looked as though someone had mistaken his face for ten pounds of dogmeat, and had tried to fry it. His left eye was swollen shut, with thick, red-blue puffy tissue that gleamed in the light. His mouth was raw and cut through by his teeth. He had smaller cuts and contusions all over, and frankly, it would be some time before the hatcheck girl at PJ’s winked at him again. I handed him the phone. He looked at it, then at me. The eye was starting to drain blue into his cheek.

  He called his father and mouthed some sort of nonsense about needing four hundred dollars to get him out of a very tight spot. I think he knew just how tight that spot was. His old man must have said okay, because I saw Roger Gore visibly brighten at one point midway in the conversation. There was a great deal of “Okay, Dad, this is the last time; I’ll be turning over a new leaf, you’ll see; you won’t be sorry, Dad, thanks a million,” and he racked the receiver. I looked at the kid just as hard as I could, and I said:

  “It’s a shame there’s no law protecting girls like Jenny from their own stupidity. It’s also a shame there’s no law that punishes a guy for not being a gentleman. But anyhow, Roger friend, there are more serious pains than the ones I loaned you. I’m not telling you not to swear out an assault and battery on me. That’d be foolish, though; assault means to threaten battery, and since I didn’t threaten you, I guess the best you could do would be battery, which might net me about five years in the slam, but there are more serious pains, Roger friend, and they are dispensed by much more unpleasant guys than me. I leave you with that thought.

  “We’ll be taking Jenny down to TJ on Thursday. Get the money to her before then.” I stood up and made to leave.

  He snarled at me from the floor. “Your Jenny is a tease and a bitch, man! She wanted it as much as I did, that Jenny of yours! So just who the hell you think you’re helping? Your Jenny’s a dummy and a tramp, and she hasn’t got any honor to protect! So take your Jenny and shove—”

  I planted my foot with carefully calculated force in his groin. Gently I added, “She is neither your Jenny nor mine. She is her own Jenny, and whatever is wrong there, fellah, she is still a human being.

  “Which is a condition I doubt you possess.”

  He was sucking air like a beached bass when I left.

  My engine was still running.

  When I got back, Jenny was alone. Rooney had gone over to see her parents; they had bought a new dog, and Rooney was a flip when it came to babies or tiny dogs. It wasn’t a vagrant thought: Jenny looked like a little of each. The washed-face pinkness and confusion of a baby; the anxiety and need to love or be loved a small dog wears like a second collar.

  “Want to play some gin?” I asked her.

  She nodded mutely and went to the sideboard to get the dog-eared deck. We sat down on the sofa, and she shuffled while I lit a cigarette. For a while we played, and didn’t say anything. Finally, I knocked on four in a spade hand, caught her with about twenty-f
ive points, and said, “I talked to Roger. He’s changed his mind.”

  “You didn’t hurt him!” That was the first thing to cross her mind. Not did I get the money, not was she going to be rescued, but was he all right. I had one of those moments of stomach-muscle-tensing disorientation, as though I had intruded on a personal fight between two people who knew each other better than any interlopers with inclinations of arbitration.

  “He’s okay. We just…talked awhile. I convinced him you were his responsibility. He’ll be getting the money to you before Thursday.”

  She dropped her arms, and I could see her gin hand. It wasn’t so hot. “Thank God,” she breathed. There was a pale milkiness about her then. As though some vital ingredient in her spirit had been hit by a catalytic agent, had vaporized in her system. She seemed just a little dead, at that moment.

  She dropped the cards and lay back against the sofa with her eyes shut. Her hair was a natural blonde, somewhere between hard canary and yellow ocher, and she wore it in a ponytail, usually, a style few girls affect any more. But she wore it well, and there was a pleasantness to her youthfulness. I looked at her, resting there, and something turned over inside me.

  She had said something.

  I hadn’t really heard it, had just imagined I’d heard it, but she had spoken, absently, without realizing what words had been selected to convey her fear and her insecurity, but she had said, “Oh, Kenny…”

  And it was someone else’s voice from another time. I can’t remember even now who it was. Another girl I had known, when I was young enough to be able to remember everyone who had said yes, and count them on one hand. Perhaps it was that second girl I’d slept with. I can’t recall who she was. There isn’t anyone, man or woman, who can’t recall the first. But the second…ah, that’s another matter. And perhaps it was her.

  Whoever it had been, this was now, and Jenny had said, “Oh, Kenny…” and I was holding her slim body very close to mine, and my hands were locked behind her back, still clutching the gin cards. Her face came up, and there were dust motes spinning in her eyes of whatever color those eyes might be.

  I smelled her hair, and it was very clean. It was another reminder of things from before, but they were silly, irrelevant things, like a field of winter wheat I had run through once, on a picnic day, when there had been such things as days right for nothing but picnics. It was a stupid thought, and it passed quickly, but not before I recalled having run and run and finally fallen down on my back, and lain there, completely hidden from all but the sky, staring straight up and feeling sorry as hell for myself. I kissed Jenny, and her mouth was soft, precisely as a woman’s mouth should be. I kissed her the way a gentle lover would kiss someone he revered.

  “Not like that,” she murmured, pulling my face down harshly. “Like this.” She opened her lips and worked at me fiercely, as though it was something worth doing and hence, something worth doing well. It was possibly the grandmother of all Soul Kisses, and when she was done, I knew I’d been kissed. My hand was on her thigh, and she moved slightly, so my hand went over the rise, down where her slacks were tightest. I had a mad thought that someone was going to pop out of the clothes closet and take movies of it all, but that thought passed, too, and in a moment we were wriggling with each other’s clothes, trying to keep our mouths together, and yet get naked.

  Jenny was young, but Jenny was expert. She took me the way Hillary and Tenzing Norgay took Everest: all the way, and chiefly because it was there. Anything worth doing was worth doing well. Midway, she arched up and there was a feral gleam on her face, a drawing back of the lips and an exposure of small teeth that reminded me of a timber wolf I’d shot up near North Bay. Sometimes, though, she was a flower, and sometimes she was a hot shower, and sometimes she was a pitch pipe whistling an elegant tune. She had a small habit of twisting her hips sidewise at special times.

  When we were over the final hill, and the road behind seemed much too rough for anyone to have crossed alone, much less two people as strangely locked as we had been, I went into the bathroom and took a bath. Not a shower. A bath. I have taken showers since I was sixteen and had a bad back. Baths are a pain, and they leave a dirty ring around the tub.

  I felt I needed a bath.

  And I wanted to see that dirty ring around the tub.

  Thursday was two hells and a decapitation away. Every time Rooney looked at me I could swear she knew. And when Jenny leaned over in a movie we three attended, with her hand on my leg, and whispered, “At least I know for sure you couldn’t make me pregnant,” I wanted to open my wrists with a beer can opener. What had I stumbled upon: a key to the depravity of the young? Or the key to my own yin and yang? I didn’t feel guilty, I felt unclean, which was infinitely worse. I, Kenneth Duane Markham, became a case in point for myself. This, I thought angrily, is how we fool ourselves into thinking we’re honorable men. Jenny’s mere existence became a constant reminder of the other side of my nature; an ungovernable side that didn’t even have the consistency, the decency or the stamina to be constant. I was a mealy-mouthed, smiling sinner who took his pleasures and pains as they comfortably fit into the regimented scene of everyday life. Dorian Gray be damned! There isn’t one of us who isn’t in that bag.

  But finally we left. Our little caravan moved out onto the road with all the glee and aplomb of a New Orleans funeral that couldn’t find a Preservation Hall Dixieland band.

  We turned onto the Hollywood Freeway and sped straight down Route 101. Santa Ana Freeway, Pacific Coast Highway, El Camino Real; past Downey and its used car carnivals, past Disneyland and its ludicrous Matterhorn rising out of the surrounding squalor, past Tustin and the art bookstore that faces out on a highway going too fast to give a damn. San Juan Capistrano, and I’ve never seen a swallow yet, going or coming. San Clemente, Del Mar, Pacific Beach, and we were in San Diego. I once asked a resident if they minded the Navy calling it “Dago,” and that worthy responded he didn’t care if they called it dog-whoopee, as long as they kept spending their money. That, I feel, sums up the beauty and glory of San Diego, a helluva way to end a beautiful state. It is not, I hasten to add, a coincidence that Dago appears at what might metaphorically be termed the backside of the state. We pulled in at a one-arm joint on 101, just before National City, the other side of San Diego, and while Jenny went to phone, Rooney and I had cups of coffee; I worked my neck around, trying to unkink it.

  “What’s the matter with you today?” she asked, over the lip of the cup.

  “What do you mean: what’s the matter? Nothing. Why, does something look the matter?” I could feel my nose growing, like Pinocchio’s.

  “You’ve been awfully quiet the last forty miles or so.”

  I shrugged. “Tired. My back aches. That’s all.”

  She didn’t answer, but she knew I was lying.

  “And this isn’t really the pleasure trip of all time,” I added. Keep talking, shmuck, I told myself. Dig it a little deeper.

  “Well, it’ll all be over soon enough,” Rooney said, trying to cover her own awareness of my mood. She knew me too well. I knew we’d be splitting up soon. I couldn’t let anyone get that close to the core of me; as long as it was froth and foam it was safe. But the encystment was too marked in me, at age thirty. I smiled across at her reassuringly.

  Jenny came back. “Have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie,” I told her. She shook her head no. “I’m not supposed to eat before the operation. His girl told me not to eat for about six hours beforehand. I haven’t eaten since last night. I’m starving, but you know you’re not supposed to eat before this kind of thing.”

  I hadn’t known, but I saw no reason for her to make a big who-struck-John of the whole matter. I mumbled something about oh yeah, I knew. And that was that. She sat down next to Rooney, staring at me with open malevolence. Like I was the guy who’d knocked her up. In a philosophical sense, I suppose I was as guilty as Roger Gore, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to eat that particular humble pie. I had
a feeling too many strange Jack Horners had already had their thumbs in it.

  “Well, what did they say?” Rooney asked.

  Jenny pulled her eyes away from me with difficulty. There was actually physical violence in her expression. I chalked it up to her fear and the fact that I was a man the same as Roger Gore, only he wasn’t handy for hating.

  “She said to drive across the border, into downtown Tijuana, and park behind the Woolworth’s at 4:30, there’d be a fellow to meet us. She said his name is Louis—”

  “Luis,” I corrected her.

  “So Loo-ees,” she snapped back. “So what?” Then she went on, addressing herself to Rooney. I couldn’t have cared less. “She said to dress poorly, not like tourists—”

  “Turistas,” I murmured, under my breath.

  “Why don’t you just shut up!” Jenny was screaming. A man at the counter turned to look at us, and the waitress paused on her way through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  I reached across and grabbed her wrist as hard as I could. “Listen, you little asshole, I’ve had about as much horseshit from you as I can take. I’ve had to listen to your miserable bellyaching and whining and complaining for the last week; you may not appreciate the fact that aiding someone in getting an abortion is a prison offense, and that Rooney and I are risking our necks to drag your butt down here, but the least you can do is be civil and keep from being a bigger pain in the ass than you already are.” I shoved her wrist away violently and slumped back in the booth. Rooney was staring at us as though we’d both gone insane. Jenny was rubbing her goddam wrist and looking like a whipped spaniel. I drank coffee and pretended I was in Nome, Alaska.