Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  It was not till much later, when the doctor had shaken his head and marveled at the stamina of this man who had crawled God only knew how far, to return to his own lines. With a broken jaw, with two teeth missing, with staved-in rib cage, with thousands of minor cuts, abrasions, holes in his flesh and loss of blood, with extreme shock shaking him like a high-tension wire in a hurricane, with exposure and loss of control of his hands. This was a remarkable creature, this creature the dog tags called MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US51403352.

  And when the interrogation officer came to him in the field hospital, lying twitching and wide-eyed (as though he wanted to miss nothing of what went on in the light of day), only then did he remember why he had crawled all this way.

  Truck and the patrol.

  He told the G-2 and the man went away, and a while later he came back with another officer and they said things to Arnie Winslow.

  “We don’t have very accurate intelligence on that area.”

  “We’re an advance spear of the front. We’d need at least a regiment out there…”

  “Or a guide who could take us back the way you came.”

  Booming echoes of what they were saying cascaded back and forthin his skull. He could not believe he was hearing them correctly. All the pain and fear had been for nothing.

  “Or at least a guide who knew the way. But we can’t start till tonight. They’d shell our asses to bits if we tried it in daylight.”

  Arnie heard himself saying, “I’ll take you back.”

  Through the darkness again. All the way back. Through the horror of the pit a second time.

  The doctor interrupted. “This man isn’t going anywhere. He’s suffering from shock and three broken ribs and more minor afflictions than I have time to list. He’s staying right here.”

  “I’ll take you back…”

  “Will he be able to travel by tonight, Doc?’”

  “I strongly advise against it.”

  “I’ll take you…I can do it…”

  And they left him there, to sleep through the day, to give his mind and his body what little peace they could gather for the long night ahead.

  Arnie Winslow closed his eyes and slept. He slept and dreamed of blind birds, aimless in a sullen sky. But he was able to help the flight now. It was not necessary to rid himself of fear, if he could merely learn to exist, to function with the fear.

  He was still frightened, but he slept. There would always be the daylight.

  —Hollywood, 1963

  PASSPORT

  His old man was drunk again. He was always that way, and Billy wondered why his Maw kept letting the old souse come back each time. It must be because of the old man’s music; that was something nobody could resist.

  Billy Wald stood in the corner of the room, his ten-year-old fingers lightly touching the peeling stucco of the wall, feeling the steady beat of the New Orleans day around him.

  “An’ when I come aroun’, I wanna find ya here, not out cattin’ round the streets with some other goddam…” The man’s whiskey breath filled Billy’s head with fumes, making the room seem indistinct, wavering. Billy Wald’s father, a prune-faced man with eyes that were flaming rivets, stared balefully at the woman he had never married. The words dried up in his mouth, and as though it were compensation, his fist snaked out.

  It caught the brown-haired woman below the eye, sent her back across the room, toppling the ironing board, sending the old cast-lead iron and its warming pan clattering to the floorboards. “And that…that, by God’ll teach ya.”

  Billy felt the first strike. Felt the pain in his own young body, felt the blood quicken and the hatred boil up like swamp mud in a sinkhole. In a movement he was fastened to the thin man’s leg, his teeth clenched through the filthy material of the pants.

  A bellow of rage escaped the man, and his arm whipped over, and back, and down, like the roller coaster at the Park, and caught Billy across the back of the head.

  Billy’s lank brown hair flew up at the force of the strike, and the boy tumbled backward, brought up short against the wall, his eyes smarting, a throb drumming behind his ears.

  The tall, thin—almost ghostlike—man stood gasping in the center of the room, his brown breath coming jaggedly through cracked lips. His eyes were wild, and his face was dense with the coarse stubble of a week’s beard. He smelled of the New Orleans streets, and his shoes were heelless.

  Why does Maw take him back all the time? The thought pounded round and round the track of the boy’s mind.

  “Stay ’way from me, ya little bastard, or I’ll kick in your goddam bastard teeth!”

  Bastard. Bastard. That was what the kids down in the lot called him. Bastard. That’s what they said: Your old lady ain’t married, and your old man stinks like old dead catfish been rottin’ in the sun, and they toss him out inna gutter inna morning, cause he smells like piss on the floor. You’re a bastard, bastard, bastard, and no real old man, just a wino, wino, wino! That was what they said, and he didn’t know what it meant. Did it mean that his father never slept at home…except once in a while? Did it mean he didn’t have the same last name as his father? His father’s name was Joe Privalorio; but his name was Billy Wald. Was that what it meant? He wanted to know so badly…

  His Maw was standing near the cupboard, her hand oddly steepled beneath her swollen eye. She watched the man who was his father by deed only, and Billy saw the fires of depthless hate swirl and mount and burn in her face. And they were mirrored in his own.

  Then, and he knew it would happen just like this—because it always happened just like this, each time his father came back, came back drunk—the tired-faced, thin man went to the cupboard—shoving the woman away with a jab—and opened it.

  Billy knew every movement, every action. And this was the good part.

  This was the thing that made Maw let the old man keep coming around. This was the thing in his stomach that tickled and pounced and popped like hot soapsuds. This was the music that was coming. Joe Privalorio—some made fun and called him Provolone, some made it up that he was Mormon, from Utah, and they called him Provo—took down the battered, warped-bell cornet, the Three-Star, three-valve cornet, and without pucker or wetting of lips, put it to his mouth.

  And then it started…

  …ohGod then it started…

  …and down in the streets jackhammer operators stopped work…

  …and the pigeons shut up in the eaves…

  …and the drunks sat up smiling in the gutters…

  …and all the mouth organ punkeys stopped dancing and blowing their harmonicas for dimes on the sidewalk…

  …and all the whores in their cribs stopped humping…

  …and all New Orleans that could hear, well, they listened.

  Because that was Slow Daddy Privalorio, old Provolone cheese, doing the only thing that kept him from being kicked to death by an irate saloonkeeper. Doing the only thing that kept him out of jail. Doing the only thing that made the woman he’d knocked up look at him again.

  Doing the only thing that kept his son-in-deed-only from killing him.

  He made some excellent music with a voice that spoke many languages.

  Love and death. They’re the cheapest things to a music man. They come and they go so fast, you’d think they wore roller-skates. (That’s what his sounds said.)

  That’s the real music men. The men with it down low somewhere, just waiting till they take a stick in their hands, or put a horn to their lips…just waiting. Just waiting to bubble up like hot oil and spill out, and cover everything nicely. (That’s what his sounds said.)

  That’s the real music men, the ones who feel it, and don’t you know I feel it, and don’t you hear those winds blowing strong and spicy from the South, across my head, and down to my feet? Don’t you feel the Earth tremble and the ground split, and everybody want to lie down and lock together? (That’s what his sounds said.)

  Billy Wald lay there in the angle of walls, watching, watching,
powerfully watching—knowing this was what kept the world from crushing his old man to the pulp he should have been.

  And before he knew what the word was, or what it could mean, he knew what that talent for musicing was to his old man. If he’d been older, he would have said it like this:

  That’s the only thing keeps him alive. It’s the thing makes him a man and not a gobbet of human shit. It’s the thing that makes him a man to my Maw, and to the people he mooches off. It’s the only thing that gets him in anywhere.

  That music…it’s his passport.

  He couldn’t say it, but he knew it. He knew it right off, and the horn wasn’t horn any more. It wasn’t horn a bit. It was passport. To Billy Wald, horn was a sign of keeping that spicy world outside, off him. Off the music, off him. It was the ticket to being a man.

  I know what it is, he might have said. It’s passport.

  And he watched the gobbet of human shit that was his father blow that horn till late into the night. Billy’s Maw didn’t move much, except to bring him some tomato bisque soup and crackers, and to give Daddy Joe a moist cloth to wipe away the sweat.

  It grew slowly, the realization that the horn was the passport. It grew so slow, so soft, so slinky, that he was blowing it strong and hard before he knew it was going to be his life’s work.

  When he was seventeen, he left home. He couldn’t stand it any more, with his Maw wrinkling, and shrinking, and breaking down slowly like a machine with worn-out parts. With his old man coming in one, two times a week, just for the bedroom. And beating her up, kicking him around. He just couldn’t take it.

  Mostly because he didn’t know why he did take it.

  He was tiny, and thin, and pale, but he was big enough to knock the crap out of Joe Privalorio; but he just couldn’t. He’d make a fist and want to use it…but he couldn’t hit the old man. He took a look, and he took a listen, and all he could hear was that music, far off and getting nearer.

  So he went away; because that was the other side of putting up with it.

  And after a while he found working on construction gangs broke his bones and broke his spirit; working the short-order grill made him sweat like a field hand, without even the pleasure of working in the sun, made him always stink of steam table grease…and he started to go to sloppy fat on his own bad food; and the turns driving a hack were just plain nerve-wracking, because nobody treated a cabdriver like a fellow human. So, he started with the horn.

  He bought a battered-bell Three-Star out of the fly-specked window of a funky hock shop in Metairie. He didn’t realize it, but it was exactly like Slow Daddy Joe’s horn. He picked up three sidemen: one in Kansas City (a pure black guy with bad teeth, worse gums, and bewitched fingers) name of Jack Haddass Smith, who slumped over the piano as though round-shouldered, but whose rotten posture did not slow down his ten thousand hands; one in Van Buren, Indiana…an anti-Semitic Jew named Solly Gearhardt who was little, and dark and clever as hell with a walking bass, but who hated himself worse than any stalag commandant; one in Syracuse, New York…out of a gutter with his snare drum wrapped around his crewcut head, and a restaurant owner standing fists-on-hips above him, saying, “Your music’s good, Carpenter, but I don’t like your sass! And I don’t like you likin’ my wife!” That was Cappy Carpenter, the “capstone” they needed for the combo.

  With those three, Billy tagged on the name “Billy Wald’s Blue Notes” and they started making music.

  That year—1949—the Army had it with Billy. He was 4F; bad eyes. Real bad. From getting slapped around a lot. So fucked-up that some nights he had to lean down to Cappy, in some smoky joint, and nudge the drummer in the neck.

  “Hey, Cap, old trooper, there anything good out there?”

  And Cappy would searchbeam the room, and give him back out of the corner of his mouth, “Man, there’s a sophomore co-ed out there, table three, with a stack as high as Babel, and hair red-hot, like it was poured out of your horn.”

  Billy’s eyes were bad, but his music was good. They worked and they worked steady. There was always a spot for them and they never once had to split the group or work a second job.

  They never made the Astor Roof, but there were a few record sessions, some plush night spots, and a concert or two. The name Billy Wald was getting known.

  “I tell you, Billy, we got a chance to be big. Really big. This A & R guy from Decca was down again last night, and you was here like the rest of us. You heard him!” Cappy Carpenter smacked a big wedge of hand across his blonde crewcut.

  “No,” Billy said, looking down at the horn, not looking at them at all. “No.

  “There ain’t gonna be no progressive stuff in this combo. We ain’t ready yet.” Outside the dressing room, sounds of the early dinner crowd filled the club.

  Cappy slammed around the room, banging his fists into the dresser, the door, the walls, the chair. “Whattaya mean not ready?! For chrissakes, Billy, those last sides we cut were just on the border. We can’t go on playin’ Dixie all our life! There ain’t no future…”

  “No!” Billy shouted, looking up for an instant, then returning his glance to his lap and the horn.

  Jack Haddass Smith sat up on the dirty bunk. He had been leaning against the wall, a cigarette growing shorter between his lips, his left eye closed against the sting of the smoke. “Billy,” he said softly, as though afraid his voice might frighten. “Billy, I hate to admit it, brother, but I think Cap is right.

  “Billy, everybody got to grow. They got to change, and if they don’t…” He looked down, and dropped the cigarette butt down, and stepped on it.

  Billy stood, his back to them, walked to the dirty back window, and scraped the size of a silver dollar clear with his fingernail. He stared out into the alleys, just thinking.

  Solly Gearhardt scratched under his nose, and coughed.

  He had a slight accent, middle-European, and unidentifiable. “Bill. I got to pudt in vit Jack an’ Cappy. I tink we’re long overdue. We could be makin’ bedder money…bedder music…bedder every tingk. I—I’ve been meanin’ to say sometingk to you about it for a long…” He mumbled to a stop, embarrassed.

  Billy Wald stood at the window, staring at nothing, and they could hear his fingers drumming on the sill. “Not now,” he said quietly. “Not now. Later, we’ll talk. Later on when I can think, when I can figure out—”

  Cappy exploded. “Shit, man! You’re always stalling. What the fuck is it with you, Billy? Anything else, you’re quick to jump, quick to take a risk, but this…you back off and piss’n’moan and sound like either a cranky fuckin’ baby or a tired old horse’s ass of an old fart! You…oh shit!”

  He picked his sticks from the dressing table and stormed out of the dressing room, slamming the door. A minute later they heard the tentative practice paradiddles on the traps out front.

  The other two sidemen looked at each other, realized they would get nowhere bracing him further, and vacated the dressing room quietly.

  Billy turned away from the window, walked carelessly around the room, touching this, touching that, aimlessly. He sat down on the bunk, picked up the Three-Star, and stared at it. They had been playing Tony Hadley’s Crescendo Casino for a week now, and the horn had never sounded better. Funny how an old cornet like that still had so much muscle.

  It wasn’t one of the modern three-valve snoot-jobs that blow sweet, and blow mellow, and don’t have any zatz, or one of the screwloose jobs like Diz blows, aimed at the sky, or any of that sort of bizarre Pakistanian pocket trumpet. It was a real old-time Three-Star cornet, whirly and twirly, and battered like Bix’s had been.

  It had a dent in the bell that looked as if a Cro-Magnon had used it to bash in a skull. The valves stuck, no matter how much he greased them. The mouthpiece was black and stained. It looked exactly the way Slow Daddy Joe’s cornet had looked, oh so long, long ago when the world was dim and softly-rounded, the way a child sees it. And full of hurt and loneliness, the way a child sees it.

  Bil
ly jerked to awareness, as though he had been asleep, and found he was running the ball of his thumb over the curve of the bell. He grinned lopsidedly, pushed his heavy horn-rims up the bridge of his nose with the same thumb, and got to his feet. He expelled a long sigh, that somehow ended with the word, “Sheee-zusss.” He went out front.

  It was the early show. Late January, and the crowds all seemed to be pink-cheeked and chilly as they huddled around their tables. The combo had eaten before they went into the first set, and Solly was complaining about a sour stomach as Billy climbed to the bandstand. “Oooh, whadt dee hell day godt in dose meatballs?” he was saying. “All I had was meatballs and spaghett. Day must of made dem with groun’ glass fillin’.”

  Jack Haddass Smith looked up from the piano, a toothpick sticking out between the ugly baked beans of his teeth. He grinned. “Yeah, man, the onlyest trouble is—you had twelve them balls. That’s ’nough to grind anybody.”

  Solly made a half-feint toward him with the stem of the bass and Jack ducked away, grinning. He let his big, square fingers flee across the keys and they all recognized it as the first few measures of “Skylark,” done Billy’s way. With a shape like the way Jackie Paris had done it.

  Billy came up then, and he wasn’t wearing his usual smile. The discussion in the dressing room was eating on him, and they could see it.

  “Take it solo for ten, Jack.”

  Mr. Smith gave him a waggled two-fingers of agreement, and they swung into it. The audience was Christmas-residue unresponsive, but they didn’t mind. They played as much for themselves as for the listeners at the tables.

  Jack Haddass Smith beat off the initial melody, and set up the measures for the other three. Then Billy and Cappy came in together, the drums rat-tat-tatting solidly behind the Dixie wail of the Three-Star. Billy was short, but his torso was long, and when he hunched over the horn, talking to it, it seemed he was almost crippled. “Skylark” was a ballad, but they did it up-tempo.