Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  Visions of sugar plums danced in my steamy gutter of a mind.

  We went to The Magic Castle, which is a fornigalactic private club with dining room that specializes in showcasing the craft of the magician. We were carrying our drinks around the many fascinating rooms, and wandered into one where they had an Atwater-Kent setup that was playing tapes of old-time radio. Amos‘n’ Andy, Jack Armstrong, Lux Presents Hollywood, Gangbusters. And above the radio was a glass-fronted cabinet in which reposed half a dozen Captain Midnight secret decoder badges. I began enthusing over the nostalgic wonders of the little plastic-and-metal icons, and only paused in my panegyric when I caught the look of total noncomprehension on the face of my Helen of Troy. “Captain Midnight,” I said. “He was on the radio in the Forties, when I was a kid. I used to lie on my stomach and listen to the program. It was sponsored by Ovaltine. I had a map of the Pacific Theatre of Operations on the wall. I used to mark the progress of the war with little maptacks with red heads on them.” Absolute bewilderment on her face. “The war in the Pacific. Bataan, Corregidor, Saipan, Palau, Wake Island?” Nothing. “V-J Day?” More nothing. “World War II? It was in all the papers. 1941 through 1945.”

  She looked at me, perfection in every line and tremble, holding the Remy Martin of lust in the crystal snifters of her eyes, and she said, “World War II? I was born in nineteen—” and she named the year that coincided exactly with the date of the firebombing of my third marriage. I computed rapidly and came up with her age as not quite seventeen. I hastily ran the numbers through my terrified mind a second time and, even allowing for a recent birthday on her part, I was still in deep trouble. I removed the stinger from her paw very gingerly, smiled my brightest, and said, “It’s time to go home now, dear.” Fifteen minutes later she was inside her own home, safe and unsullied. Christ, I could have been arrested just for what I was thinking!

  All of which brings me back to Katie, who was eighteen, and who was the exception to my loathing of young women that proved absolutely nothing. I was bananas over her from the git-go.

  All of which totals up to make the point that we talked to each other. I got answers. Good answers. A marvel, this Katie. I didn’t want to let her get away.

  What do you mean: what impressed me most about you? The size of your tits, what do you think?

  Don’t hit me, I’m a sick man. I was only kidding, for God’s sake!

  All kinds of things impressed me. That look on your face like a depraved munchkin. The dumb imitations of Lily Tomlin you do. The word you made up for the feel of velvet against skin, smoooodgee. And what the hell do you think you’re doing now? You’re not going to put up that damned Christmas tree in here while I’m working? Can’t you keep an eye on me from the living room? Oh, boy. Okay, okay, but if you make a sound I’ll do a Jose Greco on your head.

  I didn’t want to let her get away. I knew I had to solidify the thing. I told her I had a few interesting errands to run, and did she want to come along before I returned her to Price and the parking lot where she’d left her car? She said okay, we finished eating, and left Yellowfingers.

  She accompanied me to the post office to buy stamps for the office; to the hardware store to buy a half-dozen packages of gopher gassers as weaponry in my losing battle against the carnivorous rodents systematically gnawing my lawn and flowers to death; to the record shop to pick up the new sides by The Spinners and Grover Washington, Jr. And then I purposely made a detour through Bullock’s Fashion Square so we could hit the bookstore. And there, right in front, between E.L. Doctorow’s sensational RAGTIME and Deepak Chopra’s SUCK UP THE FUZZY LOVE (or whatever), right on the front table, was a stack of my new book with my name in bright red letters. THOMAS KIRLIN KANE. “Oh, that’s my new book,” I said offhandedly, walking past the table as if it were a matter of absolutely no consequence. I wandered back to the “obscure stuff and incunabula” section, pretending to look for a book on quahogs (an edible clam) while surreptitiously watching her reactions as she picked up the book, read the cover, turned the book over, opened it and read the front flap copy, flipped to the back flap and saw my photograph, a stunner by Jill Krementz, showing me in thoughtful contemplation, pipe in mouth, finger up left nostril. She kept looking from the photo to me and back again, like an immigration official trying to penetrate a passport disguise, trying to see if Robert Vesco is really dumb enough to try sneaking back into the country posing as Leo Gorcey.

  I couldn’t find a book on quahogs. She came walking up beside me. I held my breath. This was the moment. Actually, there is no book on quahogs. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “I didn’t realize you were famous.”

  “You thought I was just another pretty tuchis?”

  “I got to your lecture late. The auditorium was full, so I stood at the back with some friends. None of us knew who you were.”

  “So why’d you come up to talk to me?”

  “I thought you were funny.”

  “Funny? Funny!?! A man stands up there and explains the Ethical Structure of the Universe, the Convoluted Nature of Life in the Cosmos, the Core Dichotomies of Love in a Loveless World…not to mention how to replace washers in leaking spigots…and you think he’s funny?”

  “I thought you had a nice tuchis, too.”

  Okay, so you didn’t say that. You were slack-jawed that I was a world-famous author, come on, admit it. All right, you dumbshit nuisance, don’t admit it, and will you fer chrissakes stop dropping that tinsel all over the typewriter! It’s making the keys stick.

  Then what happened…? Oh. Yeah. We went up to my house in the hills. Nice view, straight across the San Fernando Valley, above the smog line. Clear view to the Ventura Freeway and the pall of yellow-gray death produced by the thousand-wheeled worm. When people ask me if I find it hard living in Los Angeles with the smog, I tell them it doesn’t hang where I am; but I have a dandy picture of the stuff killing all the Birchers out there in the Valley. It isn’t a line that goes over very well in Ohio. But then, what can you expect from a state that lets the Kent State killers off without even rapping their pinkies?

  She wandered around the house with her mouth hanging idly open. It’s a super house. Like a giant toy shop furnished in Early Berserk. “My God,” she murmured, passing me on her way toward the dining room with its posters from the Doug Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad, Errol Flynn Sea Hawk and Gary Cooper Beau Geste on the ceiling, “you really are famous.”

  She didn’t want to break her date that night with her roommate and another girl friend. I took all three of them out. She mentioned she was going to look for work as a restaurant hostess. I left her at three in the morning, went home and masturbated till I went blind. Next morning, early, I called her and suggested she come to work for me, as an assistant to my office assistant. She said she didn’t take charity. I said it wasn’t charity, that I needed someone, that the work load was getting too much for Lynne, what with all the fan mail. She said she didn’t believe me. I called Lynne out in Santa Monica. A guy answered. I said, “Let me talk to Lynne.” After a second a muggy voice came on. “What time is it?” she asked. I told her. She groaned. “Call Katie,” I said, on the verge of hysteria. “Tell her we need her.” She wanted to know who Katie was. I told her the whole story. She continued groaning. I badgered her. She held out. I gave her a six dollar a week raise. She called Katie.

  That day Katie came to work for me. She didn’t go home. That night we fucked. I’d like to say we “made love” or that we “slept together” but the simple, unadorned truth of the matter is that I was blind with Technicolor passion and I went at her the way a troop of backpacking Boy Scouts fresh off the Gobi Desert would go at a six-pack of Hostess Twinkies. There is no firm memory anywhere in my head of what happened or how long it went on, though I keep getting a recurring vision of myself hanging upside-down from the shower curtain rod. That can’t possibly be an accurate recollection.

  She moved in two days later.

  I ingratiated myself with her ex-room
mate, her parents, her friends from Price, her hairdresser, and the mechanic who serviced her Fiat, just to be on the safe side.

  That first month we went to Denver and Boulder on a lecture tour; I took her to New York (it was her first time out of the state) and turned her loose with my credit cards; and when she came back with a superb silver choker for me, and told me she’d bought it with her own money, I was hopelessly, desperately, irretrievably hooked through the gills. I put the ordering of Cokes with duck l’orange out of my mind. This was no kid, this was a woman; the one I’d been waiting for through three scungy marriages and forty-one lonely years. Thus doth Cupid make assholes of us all.

  What’s that? Oh, so I finally said something nice about you. It’s all nice. Except the Coke thing, which I keep harping on because it’s supposed to portend ugliness to come. I know it’s not important. Look out, you’re going to drop that ornament…oh shit, now look at it, all over the floor, and I’m barefoot. Merry Christmas, with me in Mt. Sinai, my foot rotting away from gangrene. No, don’t get the vacuum, it’ll tear it up inside. Get the broom and the dustpan. Nag, nag, nag: it’s my gangrenous foot we’re talking about here!

  Okay, where the hell was I?

  What do you mean, “get to when it started to go sour”? Oh. That’s what you mean.

  Well, it was a dynamite three months from the starting gate. We went everywhere, saw everything, did everything, and I started falling behind in the writing. So I had to spend a lot of time behind this typewriter. Katie started getting antsy. She wanted to go out and go to the beach, go water skiing, take a drive up the Coast to San Francisco. I kept promising, but I was way behind and my publisher was screaming at me long distance from New York every day. Right on the tick of seven A.M., ten o’clock in New York, the phone would ring and it would be Norman, calling me a rancid pyramid of pig shit because he was missing printing deadlines. I would tell him I was working, which was true, but it wasn’t coming fast enough.

  So I was locked into the house. And Katie started hanging out at school longer each day, started going to evening rehearsals of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” took a flying lesson with some guy, spent lots of time in some restaurant with the “theatuh crowd” and I knew something was going on, though she kept volunteering the information that everything was cool and she loved me. She talked an awful lot of good trash at me.

  Now understand something: as a card-carrying loner, I prefer, no I insist on a woman having her own thing. I definitely do not want a Stepford Wife, explaining the merits of Easy-Off Oven Cleaner or the manifest benefits of Preparation-H rectal suppositories while she’s whipping up my favorite dessert with one hand and polishing the slate slabs in the entranceway with the other. I want a fully-realized human being who, unlike my mother who spent twenty-five years after my father died crying and wandering through life alone and stunned, can make it on her own. But. I am not a dip. I like to think I’m passing intelligent. And I don’t mind if someone thinks I’m dumb, just as long as they don’t talk to me as if they thought I was dumb. I knew something was up.

  Yes, nuisance, I knew what was going down all the time. Not the specifics, but I knew there was a Baskerville hound out there on the moors, sniffing around your supple young boogie’ing body.

  It wasn’t till the fourth month that I learned his name was David.

  Would that my name had been Goliath.

  I don’t remember how I found out that she’d been balling him. It doesn’t matter.

  I said it doesn’t matter.

  No, dammit, I don’t want to write that part. Shut up, nuisance…the tree is tipping. Hold it! Okay, now prop it up on the right. On the right…yeah, there. No, I’m not going into that part of it. We talked about it, you let something slip, he called here, I got tired of playing the game of I-know-nothing-and-everything’s cool, whatever it was, I found out, and you laid all that crapola on me about how you were only nineteen and you needed to fly, to discover yourself, that it was the first relationship you’d ever had with someone who had a steady job, an occupation, a fully-established life that needed aerating and fertilizing and watering, and you were too young to handle responsibility for someone else’s love and life, and I understood all that shit, but you want to know what I thought of?

  I thought of that scene out of, I guess it was Monkey Business, where Groucho is carrying-on with Margaret Dumont and he begins dancing the shag, flinging his arms in the air, and he says, “I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to hot cha cha!” Well, I tried talking to you about it, and it didn’t do any good; hell, yes, I knew you loved me, that it was good with us, but you were being torn in two directions at once, and it wasn’t even that asshole David. Sure he was fucking you, but that wasn’t what was important. Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled anyhow. That isn’t where love comes from! I’ve never understood how some poor slob could permit his wife or lady friend to have a deep intellectual relationship with another man, and not think anything about it, but let him get meaty about it and the slob goes out of his pithecanthropoid mind. Love isn’t meat in meat. It’s all in the headwork. So David was only a convenient symptom. If he was good in bed and you enjoyed it, that’s fine with me. I do the best I can. If you need supplements to your diet, well, McDonald’s is on every street corner these days. But it was clear you wanted to cut and run because it was getting too thick, and you saw me as an older dude strapped to a typewriter, and you wanted to find out who Katie is.

  So we had our little talk, Katie and me, and I suggested we ease off and just do our things as best we could, and if one or the other of us felt the need to partake of a greaseburger at some other fast-food counter, that was okay. And you said to me…no! And Katie said to me, “What you’re proposing is a mature, adult way of handling this thing; and since I’m neither mature nor adult, it just won’t work. There’s no way things are going to be copacetic for both of us.” (I always wondered how you knew the word copacetic; that’s a word from my generation, not yours.) “There’s no way to avoid one of us getting wrecked, and I’ve decided it ought to be you, because you can handle it better than I. That’s because you’re a mature adult.”

  And you left. No, dammit…Katie left, and I put it all out of my mind in an hour. Don’t say no one can put it out of his mind in an hour, God damn you, I did! I learned how to do it a long time ago. Just to mortar up that alcove where the hurt is. To brick it over and keep moving, just shuckin’ and jivin’.

  Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too, kiddo.

  I ain’t mad. I curse the lesson and bless the knowledge. It’ll be a long time again between hurts.

  Hold everything. My name is David Feinberg and I did not write what you have just read. There is no Thomas Kirlin Kane. What you have just read was written by a woman. Her name is Patricia Katherine Feinberg. Her maiden name was Patti Brody. She is twenty years old. I am forty-three. We have been married for almost two years. She is the dearest person I have ever known and there is nothing in this life I need more than her love and support and presence in my world. For a while, when we first met, we had problems. Not so much between us, but from the outside, from people who saw us as a mismatch of “young stuff” and “dirty old man.” We got past that after a great many aggravations. And how she remembered it all!

  I have been in trimming the Christmas tree, which would decimate my mother if she were still alive, a good Jew like me; and I’ve heard Patti typing in here for days. But not till now has she suggested I come in and read what she’s been writing. It’s not her usual non-fiction stuff, it’s a story. Her first fiction. I hope you enjoyed it. How she did it so much inside my head, writing it the way a man would write it, I’ll never know. She wrote it a great deal more fairly than I would have, but for the record, I’m the one who orders Coke with canard l’Orange. How did she remember all this, all the detail, all the things I said in idle moments? I’m amazed.

  But it’s the best Christmas present I’ve ever received.

  And have a ha
ppy yourself.

  With love, from us, a terrific object lesson in beating the odds. Or, as Thomas Kirlin Kane would put it, everything’s copacetic.

  —Los Angeles, 1975

  BATTLE WITHOUT BANNERS

  When they first broke out of the machine shop, holding the guards before them, screwdrivers sharp and deadly against white-cloth backs covering streaks of yellow, they made for the South Tower, and took it without death. One of the hostage guards tried to break free, however, in the subsequent scuffle to liberate the machine gun from its gimbals and tracks, and Simon Rubin was forced to use the screwdriver on the man. They threw the body from the Tower as an example to the remaining three hostages, and had no further difficulties. In fact, the object lesson was so successful that it was the guards themselves that carried the cumbersome machine gun, with all its belts of ammunition, back down into the yard. The Tower was an insecure defensive position, interlocked as it was with the other three Towers and the sniping positions on the roofs of the main buildings. They had decided in advance to make it back down into the yard and there, with backs to the wall itself, to take their stand for as long as it took the second group to blow the gate.

  Construction on the new drainage system had been underway for only two days, and the great sheets of corrugated sheet metal, the sandbags, the picks and shovels, all were stacked under guard near the wall. They were forced to gun down the man on duty to get into the shelter of the piles of material, but it didn’t matter either way—if he lived or died—because they were going to take as many with them as they could, breakout or not.

  Nigger Joe and Don Karpinsky set up the big-barreled machine gun and braced its sides as well as fore and aft with sandbags, digging it in so the recoil would not affect its efficiency.