Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  And their contest of agonies, their cataloguing of misery, their one-up of sorrow was cut short as the loudspeaker blared from across the yard, from the Administration Building.

  “Hey! Hey over there!”

  It was the main loudspeaker, mounted on the Administration Building, where the guards were waiting to come for them, holding out—it was now obvious—until their nerves were raw.

  “Hey, Simon…Lew…all the rest of you…this is David, do you hear me, can you hear me, all of you?”

  Gyp Williams fired off a long flaming burst, and they could hear the tinkle and shatter of window glass when it hit. It was an answer, of sorts.

  “Listen, we can’t blow the gate. We just can’t do it, you guys.”

  Chocolate looked at his companions. “Hey! That’s David, the one who was with the second group, what’s he doin’ in there with them?” Gyp Williams motioned him to silence. They listened.

  “They’ve got the gate staked out, listen you men! They have it fixed so we can’t get at it. Simon! Lew Steiner! All of you, Gyp, Gyp Williams, listen! They said they won’t punish us if we go back to our cells. They said they won’t demand payment, we can go right on like we were before, it’s better this way, it isn’t so bad, we know what we can do, we know what they won’t let us do! Simon, Gyp, come on back, come on back and they won’t make any trouble for us, we can go on the way we were before, don’t rock the boat, you guys, don’t rock the boat!”

  Gyp Williams rose to both knees, somehow manhandling the heavy machine rifle against his chest, and he screamed at the top of his voice, throwing his head back so his very white teeth stood out like a necklace of sparkling gems in his mouth—“Sellout bastards!” and he fired, without taking his finger from the trigger, he fired and the flames and heat and steel and anguish went cascading across the yard, hitting unreceptive stone and gravel and occasionally one of the already dead would leap as a slug tore its cold flesh.

  Finally, when he had made it clear what their answer was to be, hefell exhausted behind the sandbags, where he would die.

  In that instant of minor silence, Simon Rubin said, “I’m going back.” And he got up and walked across the yard, his head down, his hands locked behind his head.

  Don Karpinsky began to cry, then, and Chocolate slid across to him, trying by his nearness to stop the fear and the fury of being too brave to live, too cowardly to die without tears. No one behind the barricade moved to shoot Simon Rubin. There was no point to it, no anger at him, only pity and a deep revulsion. And the guards in their immaculate white did not shoot him. Back in their world he was infinitely more valuable, as a symbol, a broken image, for the others who might try to free themselves another time.

  They would point to him and say, “See Simon Rubin, he tried to rock the boat, and see what he’s like?”

  Behind the barricade Nigger Joe turned to Lew Steiner and the crying kid who had not fled with Simon Rubin.

  “There, that’s how much your people understand.” He condemned them all.

  And Lew Steiner said, “There were half a dozen of your boys in that second group, Joe. My back aches again, you feel like doing that thing?”

  Nigger Joe chuckled lackadaisically, slid over and began thumbing Lew Steiner’s back.

  They were like that, waiting, when the final assault began. The high keening whine of a mortar shell came at them like the Doppler of a train passing on a track, and it landed far down at the end, where Chocolate caught it full, and split up like a ripe, dark pod. He was dead even as it struck, and the other four fell in a heap to protect themselves from screaming shrapnel.

  When the ground had ceased to tremble, and they could see the world again, they tried not to look toward the end of the barricade, where a brown leg and a torn bit of cloth showed from under the heap of rubble, from under the fallen sheets of metal. They tried not to look, and succeeded, but Gyp Williams’s face was now incapable of even that half-bitter, knowing smile he had offered before.

  Another whining shell came across, struck the wall above them and exploded violently, with Lew Steiner’s howl of pain matching it on a lower level.

  The shard of twisted metal had caught him in the neck, ripping through and leaving him with a deep furrow, welling out wetly, black-red down his shirt and over the hand he raised to staunch the flow. Nigger Joe tore his shirt down the front and made a crude bandage. “It ain’t bad, Lew, here, hold this on if you can.”

  The four of them turned back to see the first wave of white-uniformed guards breaking from the cover of the Administration Building and another group from around the end of the Laundry.

  They came on like a wide-angled “V” with a longarm grenade hurler at the point. Gyp Williams turned loose with the machine rifle, and swept the first attackers; they fell, but one of them got off a grenade, and it sailed almost gracefully, a balloon of hard stuff, over and over into the enclosure. The earth split up and deafened them, and great chunks of steel and stone cascaded about them. It was enough to ruin the machine gun, and send Don Karpinsky tumbling over backward, his body saturated with tiny bits of steel and sand. He lay sprawled backward, eyes open at the sky of free darkening blue, over the wall he would never climb.

  They huddled there, the three of them left—Gyp Williams, Nigger Joe, and Lew Steiner, still clutching the bloody rag to his neck.

  The guards in their white uniforms would not let them go back to the cells. They knew the ones who were weak enough to keep from rocking the boat, and they knew the ones who had to be destroyed. These three were the last of the ones who had sought their freedom and their pride. They would be killed where they lay, when the ammunition had run out and all the strength was sapped from them, not only by the fighting, but by the ones who had betrayed them, the ones who had said it was better not to make trouble.

  And as waves of faceless, soulless attackers streamed toward them across the dead-piled yard, no more intent on the particular men behind the barricade than they would have been about any other vermin who threatened them, Gyp Williams said it all for all three of them, and for the few strong ones who had found peace if not pride: “We all of us down in the dark. Some day, maybe…some day.”

  Then he managed somehow to get the machine rifle steadied, and he fired into the midst of them, screaming and running with their immaculate white uniforms the badges of purity and cleanliness.

  But there were just too many of them.

  There were always…

  Just too damned many of them.

  —New York City, 1961

  A PATH THROUGH THE DARKNESS

  In a summer heavy with sunshine and promises, I came to New York. It was the end of the confused times for me—and in many ways the beginning of a deeper bewilderment.

  College had confused me with its confounding regimentation and inability to provide realities, answers; my family had exposed itself for the inelastic failure I had always unconsciously known it to be, love had been merely a high-flown word, an abstract concept whose meaning had changed with every pretty smile; I was, simply enough, a bewildered seeker.

  New York magically held all my answers. On streets of purest gold I would seek my fortune, find it, and mold a life of meaning, achievement and satisfaction.

  I took a room uptown across from Columbia University, in what had once been (thirty years before) a fashionable hotel. I paid ten dollars a week for a room with an unobstructed view of the air shaft, and cooking privileges I shared with two spinster schoolteachers, three college students, two Chinese exchange students and a constantly drunken Puerto Rican day-laborer. It was a quiet place, whose walls retained the odor of Cantonese cooking, Gallo wine and that never-to-be-forgotten smell of disinfectant mixed with urine. I had my radio, my books, my typewriter and a good bed. A single bed.

  If I’d ever known anything that could be called happiness, this was it…languishing in a simplicity of existence that I rolled around in smugly, snugly, like a nesting baby or a happy-go-lucky terrier.
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br />   At first the writing came slowly, amateurishly, but in my fervor to write, and say what I had to say—to hell with the fact that others had said it all before me, far better; I had to write—I stayed behind the machine, working far into the nights, sleeping most of the mornings, then making the editorial rounds in the afternoon.

  Again, it was the good life. Except for the loneliness.

  There were friends, of course: Billy and Stella Soles who had come from California and subsisted on kidney bean soup, the publication of an amateur science fiction journal and endless bed-bouts; Aggie Vinson, a selling writer with a cool manner and a brotherly affection for my stumbling attempts at writing; Pernell Morris and his sister Beth, who ran a newsstand on Broadway and invited me over perhaps twice a week for a kosher meal; others.

  But there was still the feeling I was walking alone, that I had no human goal toward which to work. That I was out there swinging by myself, and if it were to end tomorrow no one could really be troubled. The ripples would roll out and disappear, the water would close over and silence would replace me.

  Perhaps that is the essence of loneliness: to feel that silence will replace you.

  So when my money ran out, and I landed the job selling books and souvenirs in the Times Square bookshop (seven P.M. to three in the morning) I decided to throw a small blast. God knows my room wasn’t large enough for the full Elsa Maxwell treatment, but nonetheless I invited everyone I had even remotely grown to know, and urged them to bring friends. It was the perfectly ordinary sort of thing one does when the loneliness gets too oppressive, too obstinately endless.

  It was an ordinary thing, and when I think back on it I get uncharacteristically choked up, and I am chagrined at my callowness. It barks my shin on those protruding dream fantasies about going back in time five minutes before the event, and just not doing it. How I’ve wished for those precise five minutes to come again. Saved her…would it have saved her? I think not.

  But it might have saved me.

  They started arriving early, and the first ones were the Columbia students who wanted to souse-up their dates, lay them and get them back before Barnard curfew. They came with eighty-nine-cent bottles of Chianti and with routines borrowed from comedians’ LPs. They were pretty much an empty lot, all sound and not a helluva lot of fury, but they made good background noise and as bookends they served the purpose of decoration.

  At about nine o’clock Aggie arrived carrying a brown paper sack with a bottle of Pernod in it, and he flashed both the label and a secret smile as he retreated to a far corner. The label was the come-on and the secret smile said, The dishwater booze is for the tourists, podnuh, but the goodies is for us.

  Billy and Stella blew in noisily, with a bowl of clam dip plastic-covered, and a box of stiff potato chips for dipping. Of all the horrors of the civilized world, I had decided clam, oyster and bleu cheese dips were the worst, and of the worst, Stella Soles’s dips were the dippiest.

  I beamed and thanked them. It smelled like decaying bodies.

  Stella and Billy snuggled down on the sofabed and began pawing each other immediately. It was very much like the hippo and the dik-dik bird. Stella was perhaps six feet, three inches and big…really big, across the chest, across the shoulders, in the hips…a big woman. Billy was a gnat. He was barely five four, and wore his hair in a style reminiscent of Farmer Al Falfa. When he went at her, it was like watching a dwarf storm the Bastille. But they loved each other almost outrageously, and the whining sound of Stella calling, “Bill-ee…Billll-ee!” was a familiar sound in our building.

  The mating call of the great musk ox.

  The party was gasping for air, coming up for the second time only to sink for a third, and blessedly final, when the knock came at the door. I leaped to my feet with all the grace of a poled ox, and picked my way across the littered carpet—it was one of those parties where everyone dropped where they stood, usually in an orderly, out-of-the-way manner—and opened the door.

  She had come with three fags, each dressed entirely in black, and next to their lean, hard-muscled litheness her tiny white-swathed figure was a shock.

  Her face was so clear and direct, the features arranged as they might have been by a simpering cameo-carver who saw perfection in the face of disorder, I was truly startled. I had no idea who she was, but I instantly related to her, instantly desired her, instantly saw her image of me rise up and be greeted with attention. The three homosexuals with her distressed me, for I was very nearly pathological in my abhorrence for those of the gay set—but the girl was so arresting I let them pass.

  She came into my single room, smiling like a street gamine, and found a place for herself and her retinue by the far window. It was too much; my eyes followed her as though I’d lost all volition or personal desire except to be near her, even if it was only by sight.

  I followed them and started making introductions…for the first time in the evening they went badly. Inevitably they were set straight and she said her name was Stephie Cook, her friends were Blank, Blank and Blank Blank. Who the hell listened, who the hell cared what marcelled titles they had given themselves. That she was a queen of the fag set did not seem to offend me. Before, when I had run into a seemingly normal girl surrounded and attended by queers, I had drawn my own conclusions as to the girl’s personality and sex habits. But with Stephie, somehow, it was entirely different. She was straight, I knew it, I could feel it, she was interested in me from the first, and I—by that weird alchemical nature of attraction—was completely in her power.

  As the evening wore down, we gravitated toward one another on imbecile pretext: would you like a glass of Pernod? Do you work? Have you really read all these books? Where do you live?

  The homosexuals seemed not to mind, smiling like indulgent duennas at Stephie as she nuzzled closer to me in a dim corner by the record player.

  Sometime during the decaying last moments of the party, without either of us saying it aloud, we knew she would stay with me that night.

  Aggie seemed to know, too. Perhaps it was that he knew me so well, took such a bemused view of my goings-on, and wished me well or perhaps he knew because he was also a writer who felt he had to know people to write honestly.

  As he left, he raised the empty Pernod bottle in a pseudo-centurion salute, mumbled, “Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc,” and grinned his way out of the room. Billy and Stella left soon after. They had been the last—the coeds and their spatula-handed paramours having checked out hours before, the three gay boys long since departed to their contorted repose—and when the door shut after them, we stared at each other from our seats without moving.

  “Would you like a pair of my pajamas?” I asked. She nodded and gave me a look that was half-affection and half-trust. It was quite unlike anything I’d ever seen in a woman’s face before.

  I found my last laundry return had included only one pair of pajamas, so I offered her the tops. She took them, went down the hall to the bathroom and changed while I did the same in the room, and she returned as I was crawling into bed.

  Wearing my oversized pajama tops, the sleeves rolled well above the wrists, the tails hanging down past her thighs, she was a Dresden doll figurine, come to life. It was an entirely commonplace, entirely believable and trite situation; I knew it had happened to a million other guys with a million other girls, but for me, it was the most astounding, the most hypnotizing experience of my life. In a matter of hours my loneliness had been ended.

  She came to bed and we lay there talking for hours. We did not make love that night; we slept soundly, holding each other.

  She lived in Brooklyn, and I would come running up out of the subway entrance, gathering speed as I raced down the half block to her building and—Doug Fairbanks-style—would bunch my muscles and leap, catching the railing of the little balcony that faced off her room. I would catch it, pull myself up and throw myself onto the balcony. It had all the demented romantic imagery of a Romeo seeking his Juliet. It was our own pe
rsonal route to one another. And then the French doors would open into the broom closet that she rented as a room. It was perhaps five feet across and twelve feet long, a narrow coffin of a room whose only advantage was that little balcony. Her bookshelf was on the wall over the racklike bed, and her bureau was shoved into a niche on the opposite wall. Posters of Eglevsky, Maria Tallchief and the Ballet Russe covered that wall opposite the bed; staring at us all through the short nights of muggy passion and unsatisfied demands.

  In that room I grew to know Stephie more intimately than I had ever known anyone before. Not merely her body, which she gave rarely, unsatisfactorily, painfully. But her mind, and that commodity I had always thought was folly, her soul. But Stephie had a soul, one that at first confused me and invited attention; one that soon exposed itself for what it was—the soul of a demon.

  Her thoughts were dark, strange, troubled.

  She dwelled on facets of life that I had never even known existed. One night she sat smoking, her legs folded under her, and said:

  “I saw a boy run over a cat today, with his bike.”

  I looked up from the book of Jackson Pollock prints we had gone in on together, not really hearing what she had said, but suddenly letting it filter through, and catching meaning from her intention to explain. “Oh?” I said.

  “Yes,” she explained, “he ran over it lengthwise, and the guts came out of its mouth like a pound of raw hamburger; its eyes were bulged and there was a tire track up its back and through the center of the spilled innards. Ants were—”

  “Jeezus, Stephie!” I shouted. “For God’s sake, what the hell is the matter with you?” I had a strong stomach, but this clinical attention to morbid detail gagged me.

  She shrugged, got up and walked out onto the balcony, still smoking. She looked so tiny against the massed darkness of Brooklyn at night.