Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  Horror: I m a murderer! Remorse: Oh, Sarah, you fool. Panic: What ll I do? Fear: They use the lethal injection in this state.

  Zero.

  Zeroth .52

  And finally…a nasty little smile comes over his face.

  thru

  57

  SONNY (calmly)

  Well, okay. Of course.

  58 THE SCENE

  as he folds the plastic raincoat around her, leaves her for a moment to exit the office and CAMERA HOLDS ON THE BODY. He comes back quickly from the next room, with a small tarpaulin. He lays it out, rolls her onto it, folds it around her, and tapes it at the ends with industrial strapping tape from a dispenser on the desk. Then he hoists the body and puts her over his shoulder, and leaves through the doorway.

  59 BLACK FRAME—INT. CONSTRUCTION SHED—NIGHT

  As the overhead swinging-bulb light clicks on. HOLD FULL SHOT OF SCENE as Sonny lays the body down, takes off his vest, rolls up his sleeves, drags out a long, galvanized iron cement trough and begins mixing a six-foot-long troughful. Then, after a bit, he drops the tarp-encased shape into the thickening soup. A few bubbles as it settles. He stares down.

  SONNY

  Consider it your Christmas bonus, darlin’.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  60 EXT. LAKE—NIGHT—FULL SHOT

  The black rain slants across frame. The RV is parked at the edge of the lake. Sonny is lowering a large rectangular block of cement onto a small hand-truck.

  [MORE]

  He gets down, tilts it back with some straining of his muscular body, and backs toward the dock. CAMERA MOVES IN to show Sonny easing the block off the dolly, into a skiff tied up at the side.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  61 EXT. LAKE—LONG SHOT—DAWN

  Across the forested area to the body of the lake. It is just coming to light in the sky. We can see a shape out there, and we know it’s the skiff. There is movement in the small craft, something goes over, there is a DIM BUT DISTINCT SPLASH and we

  DISSOLVE TO:

  62 INT. CANOGA HOME—BEDROOM—EARLY MORNING

  CLOSE ON SONNY as he sleeps. Birds chirp, the sun shines across his bed. We HEAR the insistent ringing of a strident doorbell. It rings. Rings again. Rouses him from sleep. He turns over and shouts.

  SONNY (yells)

  Dammit, Darleen, answer the door!

  The ringing continues. No one answers it. Sonny curses and throws the bedclothes off. He sleeps in pajama bottoms, still wearing his discreet gold chain. He snorts, rubs his hair, and goes to the bedroom door.

  CUT TO:

  63 INT. CANOGA HOME—FRONT FOYER—DAY

  As Sonny comes stumbling downstairs toward the front door.

  [MORE]

  The doorbell continues its caterwauling. Barefoot, he reaches the door.

  SONNY

  Hold yer water, I’m comin’!

  He throws open the door. Standing there, very large and ominous, is Trooper Fred Lamont.

  LAMONT

  Mornin’, Mr. Canoga. Got a spare minute?

  Sonny looks confused, but gathers his wits.

  SONNY

  Yeah, sure. Come on in.

  (beat)

  What’s up?

  He closes the door. Lamont steps farther inside and removes his Smokey Bear hat.

  LAMONT (question, as statement)

  I understand your bookkeeper, Miz Bieber, hasn’t been to work for about ten days?

  SONNY (cheerful but careful)

  That’s right. She went to see her sister in, uh, I think it’s Omaha. She’s gonna have a kid, and Sarah went to help.

  LAMONT (firmly, shaking his head)

  No.

  SONNY

  No?

  SONNY

  Definitely no.

  LAMONT

  Well, that’s what she told me.

  LAMONT

  I don’t think so.

  Trooper Lamont holds up the broken letter opener. CAMERA ANGLES to include Trooper and Sonny and the doorway to the kitchen nearby.

  LAMONT

  I found this in the trash barrel behind your office.

  (beat)

  The other half was rammed through Sarah Bieber’s chest, broke off on a rib.

  At that moment, a woman in her mid-thirties, once pretty but now a trifle careworn from living with Sonny, comes out of the kitchen carrying a plastic clothes basket filled with wash and clothes pins. She stares openmouthed as Trooper Lamont unships his handcuffs.

  LAMONT (CONT’D.)

  Let’s go, Sonny.

  Sonny starts to say something, but Lamont gives him a look.

  LAMONT (CONT’D.)

  You really want to make a statement now? Before I read you your rights? I don’t think so.

  Sonny folds. Lamont cuffs him. He opens the door. As they go through the door, Lamont begins:

  LAMONT (CONT’D.)

  Anything you say may be used…

  64 EXT. CANOGA HOME—DRIVEWAY—DAY

  FEATURING STATE PATROL CAR IN F.G. as Sonny in cuffs and the Trooper come to it. Darleen stands in the doorway, just watching. They come to F.G. and as Lamont opens the rear door and bends Sonny, protecting his head to put him in the back seat, their faces are very close in EXTREME CU.

  LAMONT (CONT’D.)

  Damn bone-stupid of you to use your own materials, Sonny.

  (beat)

  She floated to the top this morning. Fish got most of her face, but I recognized it was Miz Bieber, anyways.

  (beat)

  Any fool knows that much sand in the mix won’t hold together.

  Sonny’s face falls apart. The horror of his own stupidity overwhelms him. His face slides down the frame in the backseat as the car door is slammed. He stares out the window. He stares back at the house.

  QUICK CUT TO:

  65 CLOSE ON DARLEEN IN DOORWAY

  The veriest hint of a soft smile appears around her mouth and we

  CUT BACK TO:

  66 STREET SHOT

  As the State Patrol car pulls away, with the face of Sonny Canoga, petrified with fear, still staring out at us. On his way to a lethal injection.

  FADE TO BLACK and FADE OUT

  —Hollywood, 1984

  WHAT I DID ON MY VACATION THIS SUMMER, BY LITTLE BOBBY HIRSCHHORN, AGE 27

  He had begun to smell really rank; and standing there at the side of US Route 1, covered with dust and small bugs, Robert Hirschhorn had begun to suspect There Is No God. All around him the incredible Fairchild Desert sang with mind-frying heat, and the watery horizon devils twittered in the corners of his vision like mad things. Beside him—and on which his good right foot rested—the black sturdyboard suitcase (which he had used to mail home his dirty college laundry) was equally filthy. Yet its binding cords were not as frayed as his nerve ends; and only a close second to his shoelaces, which bulged with knots where they had been rejoined.

  Like three eggs basting in a shallow pan, his brains were being steadily fried; his mouth tasted brown, and funky; he was hungry; he had sweated so much it felt like ants on his flesh; his eye sockets flamed from the hundred-watt bulbs burning behind his retinas; he was sick and unhappy.

  And a jack rabbit bdoinged! across his path.

  It took seventeen leaps and was very much gone.

  “You are very much gone,” Robert said, mostly to the puffs of dust that moved when he spoke. “And I am not far behind you.”

  His ears went up like the rabbit’s, as the Cadillac zoomed out of nowhere on the terribly flat highway, and his thumb went halfway into the air, and the Cadillac whispered away down behind him, toward Reno, toward San Francisco, toward the Pacific Ocean and all that cool muthuh water.

  “Good-bye,” he murmured, and fainted.

  They had stopped the car almost directly over him—or perhaps had rolled it to him—so that as he fluttered awake, he found himself staring directly up at the canvas water bag hanging from the front fender. A great, chill drop of perspiration water hung preca
riously from the underside of the bag, and as he watched, it sucked itself free and plummeted down. It struck him directly under the nose. It was tepid.

  “Hey, Teddy,” a voice came out of the sky, “the yo-yo’s comin’ to.” Robert looked up past the fender. There were three pairs of legs rising directly up out of his vision, continuing, he supposed, to Heaven. “Help him up,” said another voice, presumably Teddy’s.

  Hands reached down, one pair covered by black soft-leather driving gloves, with flex-holes cut in their backs. Robert was drawn unsteadily to his feet, and his eyes focused on the three young men. The one with the Italian driving gloves supported him. “You okay, fellah?” he asked Robert.

  “Szmmll.” Robert mouthed a cheekful of road dust. He had fallen face-forward; they’d turned him over on his back. He extended his dust-coated tongue and swiped at it with his fingertips. They came away muddy.

  “Well? You okay huh?” asked the shortest of the three, and Robert recognized the voice as Teddy’s. He found himself nodding yes, he was all right. But he wanted a drink of water, badly. He motioned to the canvas bag, making feeble finger movements in its direction.

  “Hey, man,” Teddy said to the tallest of the trio, the one with the driving gloves, “dig him out that thermos.” The boy reached into the back seat of the car and rummaged through wads of clothing and luggage, till he came up with a thermos bottle. He unscrewed the top, pulled the cork and poured the red plastic cuptop full of a light yellow fluid. He handed it across to Robert, saying, “Lemonade.”

  Robert took it with both hands, and gulped. The first few swallows were coated with dust and mud, but after that it went down smoothly, and it tasted wonderful.

  “Where uh where you headin’?” asked the third boy, a medium-tall, freckle-spotted item with the free-swinging egocentricity that expressed itself in manner before a word could be spoken. The kind of arrogance of personality best connoted by wealthy young men from good families who are Big Men on Campus.

  “San Francisco,” Robert answered. “I was hitchhiking; I thought it would be a good background experience.” He grimaced, and felt the tip of his nose. It was raw where he had scraped it on the ground.

  “You scraped it,” the one with the driving gloves said. “But it’s not bleeding; it just looks funky.”

  Robert murmured something pointless about how it didn’t matter. The three young men stood around nervously, until Teddy said, “Listen, we’re going to Frisco, too, and if you don’t mind a few stops along the way, you can jump in with us.” Robert could not quite believe he was hearing properly. It was the sweet chariot, come from beyond the pearly gates to rescue him.

  “Robert Hirschhorn,” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “Theodore Breedlow,” said the short boy, returning the gesture. He indicated the tallest boy: “Cole Magnus, and,” turning to the third young man, “George Young. They call me Teddy Bear.” He smiled sheepishly at his own sophomoronism.

  They threw his sturdyboard case into the trunk of the big black Lincoln, and hollowed out a place for Robert among the clothes and packages tossed helter-skelter across the back seat.

  And then they were off down the road.

  They were from an entirely different social stratum than Robert had known. While he had come from genteel and mildly Puritanical Middlewestern conformity, the three young men in the front seat had been spawned by the harsh, black-and-white hustling of Detroit. Where he chose his words for maximum effect and clarity, they bumbled and shotgunned through the language with rimfire “ain’ts” and copper-jacketed “goddams” and frequent double-barreled scattergunned “muthuh-fuckers.” It was not entirely new to Robert, but in such close quarters, and for such a protracted length of time down the road, it became almost a heady experience. They were refugees from an assembly line in Dearborn, ferrying the big black Lincoln to a buyer in San Francisco, and they were GoToHells this week and next. Then, pilot another car back to Detroit, and the lathes and conveyor belts of their waking hours. But this week and next!

  “Man, I pushed more’a them goddam Fords down’a line than I got hairs on my head. Sheet, man, it’s good to be outta that racket and in the fresh air.” And Teddy Bear turned up the air-conditioning in the hermetically sealed Lincoln another notch.

  “If my parents could see me now!” George Young chirruped. “They’d crap!” He bounced in his seat. His laughter began slowly, like a dynamo winding up, and in a moment had become so much a part of the charged air, that all four of them were laughing together. “Th-they…they…think I’m, they think I’m…buh…back in Dearborn sweating on that fuckin’ line an’ an’ an’ here I am out in the m-muh-muh-iddle of Nevaaaaduh…!” and he rocked back and forth like an old Yiddish man dovening over his Talmud, the tears streaming down his freckled face. Cole Magnus was forced to pull over on the shoulder, as they all capered tightly in the Lincoln. It was a madhouse for a moment.

  When they were going again, Cole said suddenly, “Hey, you remember what Roger Sims told us…?”

  Teddy Bear and George Young looked at him questioningly. “You remember: about Winnemucca, Nevada!”

  The lights shone out abruptly from their eyes, and Teddy Bear went, “Whoo-eeeee, sheeeet, man! Yeahhh! Now I remember, yeah! Winnemucca, Nevada!”

  And George Young clapped his hands together like a delighted child. “Hoo hoo hoo, boy, I’m gonna get me a piece a’tail…hoo hoo hoo!”

  Cole, without turning around from the wheel, pulled his right shoulder forward allowing his head to move sidewise, as he spoke to Robert. “We got this buddy back in Detroit”—he pronounced it Dee-troyt—“and he’s almost as big a swordsman as George-O over there, and he took this trip out to Frisco—”

  “The natives hate the name Frisco, I understand,” Robert stuck in without meaning to be rude. “They prefer it to be called San Francisco…”

  “Yeah, well,” Cole went on without hearing him, “Roger came back and said he stopped off in some little burg called Winnemucca, Nevada, just this side of Reno, and he says they got the next best thing to legalized prostitution there.” He pronounced it proz-ti-toosh-un. “Wanna stop off there for a little diddly-doo?”

  “Aw, that was probably one of Roger’s goddam wet dreams,” Teddy Bear denigrated the idea. “You know he lies, man. If he says he got laid the night before, it prob’ly means he said hello to some chick on the street and followed her till she called the laws.”

  “Yeah, well…”

  George Young stuck in, “No, I think he was shooting straight. He had a ball, I could tell from the way he was talking. Hell, it can’t hurt, can it? Just to stop and see. It’s on the way, ain’t it?”

  They pulled out the map and ran fingers down US #1 till they located it. “Right on the way,” Teddy Bear said cheerfully. “I guess it can’t hurt to try. It’ll probably be one of them wet dreams, but what the hell…”

  “What about you?” Cole asked Robert.

  Robert had never been with a whore. In fact, at the age of twenty—perhaps two years older than these three wandering minstrels—he had had only one girl. Sally Gleeson, who had been as virgin as himself, until they had discovered each other the year before. Now Sally had gone off to Radcliffe and was making time with Robert’s ex-friend Dave, who had met Sally on a visit to Robert’s home, from New Jersey where the family had moved. He was not at all sure he wasn’t terrified by the idea. But he could not expose the twitching raw end of that fiber of fear without denying everything he had decided was true of himself:

  Robert Hirschhorn came from a small town outside a larger town in central Ohio. He hated the town. Hated it because it did not know what to do with him. He was the one who read Proust and Edward Gorey and MIDDLEMARCH and Ronald Searle and Hobbes and Ian Fleming, and who ignored Morris West and Leon Uris and Daphne Du Maurier and Harry Golden and Irving Wallace and Time magazine. He was something other than what everyone else was in town; he knew it, and they knew it, and there was something more for him tha
n the softly moldering inside of the cocoon called Starkey, Ohio.

  He had decided he wanted to be a writer. It came to him not entirely unbidden, for he had contributed a seven-part serial to a kiddies’ column in the now-defunct Cleveland News when he was still in grade school. He had won a National Scholastic writing award for a short story about a robot that had taken over the world (which he had cribbed in concept from Capek’s famous R.U.R.). And he had decided that college would be of no use to him if what he needed to know was the world. So Robert Hirschhorn, at the age of twenty, had taken to the road with his black sturdyboard suitcase, and a determination to taste of life in all its sherbet flavors. Which offered, this week, the tantalizing, fraudulent favorite, Cheap Whore. It was a combination of peach, rocky road and lemon. And to turn it away, back to the cooler chest, in return for a triple-dip of the pallidly familiar vanilla on which he had been subsisting for so long, would be to deny all that he had decided about himself.

  “I’m game if you are.” He grinned widely. Perhaps a trifle too widely.

  “Hell, how should I know?” said Teddy Bear. “I suppose you ask a cabbie. Ain’t that the way they do it?”

  George shook his head. “Listen, stupid, you got to be more uh more undercover, more—”

  “Surreptitious?” offered Robert.

  “—whatever.” George refused to accept the word. “But you can’t just go around town asking any dumb hick where the hoo-er-houses are. That’s stupid.”

  “Oh, hell, this isn’t Detroit,” Cole said. He suddenly braked to a stop by a general store, and leaned out to an old man sitting in a straight-back chair propped against the wall. “Hey, Mister!” The old man looked up disinterestedly. He closed one eye to focus better with the other. “Where’s the whorehouses, huh?” Cole asked blatantly.

  “Straight down this street till you come to Main, take a left and keep going till you see the veterans’ trailer camp. There’s a big wood fence behind it. Th’other side is Littletown. That’s it, can’t miss it.” He went back to picking his nose.