Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  The queue that had lined up to see the film stretched from the ticket booth across the front of the building, past a candy store with a window full of popcorn balls in half a dozen different flavors, past a laundromat, around a corner and three-quarters of the way down the block.

  It was a quiet crowd. People in lines are always a quiet crowd. Arch and Frank were quiet. They waited, with Arch listening to the transistor, and Frank, Frank Amato, smoking and shuffling.

  Neither paid much attention to the sound of engines roaring until the three Volkswagens screamed to a halt directly in front of the theater. Then they looked up, as the doors slammed open and out poured a horde of young boys. They were wearing black. Black turtle-neck T-shirts, black slacks, black Beatle boots. The only splash of color on them came from the yellow-and-black armbands, and the form of the swastika on the armbands.

  Under the staccato directions of a slim Nordic-looking boy with very bright, wet gray eyes, they began to picket the theater, assembling in drill-formations, carrying signs neatly printed on a hand-press, very sturdy. The signs said:

  THIS MOVIE IS COMMUNIST-PRODUCED! BOYCOTT IT!

  GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM! STOP RAPING AMERICA!

  TRUE AMERICANS SEE THROUGH YOUR LIES!

  THIS FILM WILL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN! BOYCOTT IT!

  and chanting, over and over: “Dirty little Christ-killers, dirty little Christ-killers, dirty little Christ-killers…”

  In the queue was a sixty-year-old woman; her name was Lilian Goldbosch.

  She had lost her husband Martin, her older son Shimon and her younger son Avram in the furnaces of Belsen. She had come to America with eight hundred other refugees on a converted cattle boat, from Liverpool, after five years of hopeless wandering across the desolate face of Europe. She had become a naturalized citizen and had found some stature as a buyer for a piece-goods house, but her reaction to the sight of the always-remembered swastika was that of the hunted Jewess who had escaped death—only to find loneliness in a new world. Lilian Goldbosch stared wide-eyed at them, overflowing the sidewalk, inundating her eyes and her thoughts and her sudden thismoment reality; arrogant in their militant fanaticism; and as one they came back to her—for they had never left her—terror, hatred, rage. Her mind (like a broken clock, whirling, spinning backward in time) sparklike leaped the gap of years, and her tired eyes blazed yellow.

  She gave a wretched little scream and hurled herself at the tall blond boy, the leader with the gray eyes.

  It was a signal.

  The crowd broke. A low animal roar. Men flung themselves forward. Women were jostled, and then joined without reason or pausing to consider it. The muffled sound of souls torn by the sight of stalking (almost goose-stepping) picketers. Before they could stop themselves, the riot was underway.

  A burly man in a brown topcoat reached them first. He grabbed the sign from one of the picketers, and with teeth grating behind skinned-back lips, for an instant an animal, hurled it into the gutter. Another man ripped into the center of the group and snapped a fist into the mouth of one of the boys chanting the slogan. The boy flailed backward, arms windmilling, and he went down on one knee. A foot on the end of gray sharkskin trousers—seemingly disembodied—lashed out of the melee. The toe of the shoe took the boy in the groin and thigh. He fell on his back, clutching himself, and they began to stomp him. His body curled inward as they danced their quaint tribal dance on him. If he screamed, it was lost in the roar of the mob.

  Also in the queue were two high school boys.

  They had been alone there, among all those people waiting. But now they were part of a social unit, something was happening. Arch and Frank had fallen back for an instant as others rushed forward; others whose synapses were more quickly triggered by what they saw; but now they found their reactions to the violence around them swift and unthinking. Though they had been brushed aside by men on either side, cursing foully, who had left the line to get at the picketers, now they moved toward the mass of struggling bodies, still unaware of what was really taking place. It was a bop, and they felt the sting of participation. But in a moment they had collided with the frantic figure of Lilian Goldbosch, whose nails were raking deep furrows down the cheek of the tall, blond boy.

  He was braced, legs apart, but did not move as she attacked him.

  There was a contained, almost Messianic tranquility about him.

  “Nazi! Nazi! Murd’rer!” she was mouthing, almost incomprehensibly. She slipped into Polish and the sounds became garbled with spittle. Her body writhed back and forth as she lashed out again and again at the boy.

  Her arms were syncopated machines of hard work, destructive, coming up and down in a rhythm all their own, a rhythm of which she was unaware. His face was badly ripped, yet he did not move against her.

  At that moment the two high school boys, faceless, came at the woman, one from either side; they took her by the biceps, holding her, protecting not the blond boy, but the older woman. Her movements went to spastic as she struggled against them frenziedly. “Let me, let go, let—” she struggled against them, flashing them a glance of such madness and hatred that for an instant they felt she must think them part of the picketing group, and then—abruptly—her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted into Frank Amato’s grasp.

  “Thank you…whoever you are,” the blond boy said. He started to move away, back through the rioting mob. It was as though he had wanted to take the woman’s abuse; as though his purpose had been to martyr himself, to absorb all the hate and frenzy into his body, like a lightning rod sucking up the power of the heavens. Now he moved.

  Arch grabbed him by the sleeve.

  “Hold it a minute…hero! Not s’fast!”

  The blond boy’s mouth began to turn up in an insolent remark, but he caught himself, and instead, with a flowing, completely assured overhand movement, struck the younger boy’s hand from his arm.

  “My work’s done here.”

  He turned, then, and cupped his hands to his mouth. A piercing whistle leaped above the crowd noises, and as the signal penetrated down through the mob, the swastika-wearers began to disengage themselves with more ferocity. One picketer kicked out, caught an older man in the shin with the tip of a tightly laced barracks boot, and shoved the man back into the crowd. Another boy jabbed a thumb into his opponent’s diaphragm and sent the suddenly wheezing attacker sprawling, cutting himself off from further assault.

  It went that way all through the crowd as the once-again-chanting picketers moved slowly but methodically toward their cars. It was a handsomely executed tactical maneuver, a strategic withdrawal of class and composure.

  Once at the open car doors, they piled back against the black metal bugs, raising arms in an unmistakable Heil! and screamed, almost as one: “America always! To hell with the poisoners! Kill the Jews!”

  Pop! Pop! With timing vaguely reminiscent of a Keystone Kops imbroglio, they heaved themselves into the vehicles, and were roaring down the street, around the corner, before the approaching growlers of the police prowl cars (summoned on a major 415) were more than a faint whine approaching from the distance.

  On the sidewalk in front of the theater, people—for no other release was left to them—burst into tears and cursing.

  Some kind of battle had been fought here—and lost.

  On the sidewalk, someone had clandestinely chalked the symbol. No one moved to scuff it out. None of the picketers could have mooched the free time to do it; the obvious was obvious: someone in the queue had done it.

  The subtlest, most effective poison.

  Her apartment was an attempt to reassure her crippled spirit that possessions meant security, security meant permanence, and permanence meant the exclusion of sorrow and fear and darkness. She had thrust into every corner of the small one-bedroom apartment every convenience of modern technology, every possible knickknack and gimcrack of oddity, every utensil and luxury of the New World the rooms would hold. Here a 23” television set, its r
abbit-ears askew against the wall…there a dehumidifier, busily purring at the silence…over there a set of Royal Doulton mugs, Pickwick figures smiling cherubically at their own ingenuousness…and a paint-by-the-numbers portrait of Washington astride a white stallion…a lemon glass vase overflowing with swizzle sticks from exotic restaurants…a stack of Life, Time, Look and Holiday magazines…a reclining lounge chair that vibrated…a stereo set with accompanying racks of albums, mostly Offenbach and Richard Strauss…a hide-a-bed sofa with orange and brown throw pillows…a novelty bird whose long beak, when moistened, dipped the creature forward on its wire rack, submerging its face in a glass of water, then pulled it erect, to repeat the performance endlessly…

  The jerky movement of the novelty bird in the room, a bad cartoon playing over and over, was intended as reassurance of life still going on; yet it was a cheap, shadowy substitute, and instead of charming the two high school boys who had brought Lilian Goldbosch home, it unsettled them. It made them aware of the faint scent of decay and immolation here; a world within a world, a sort of superimposed precontinuum in which emotions had palpable massiveness, greater clarity.

  The boys helped the still-shaken woman to the sofa, and sat her down heavily. Her face was not old, the lines were adornment rather than devastation, but there was a superimposition of pain on the tidy, even features. Cobwebs on marble. Her hair—so carefully tended and set every week by a professional, tipped, ratted, back-combed, pampered—was disheveled, limp, as though soaked with sweat. Moist stringlets hung down over one cheek. Her eyes, a light blue, altogether perceptive and lucid, were filmed by a milkiness that might have been tears, and might have been gelatinous anguish. Her mouth seemed moist, as though barely containing a wash of tormented sounds.

  The years rolled back for Lilian Goldbosch. Once more she knew the sound of the enclosed van whose exhaust pipes led back into the prisoners’ compartment, the awful keee-gl keee-gl keee-gl of the klaxon, rising above the frozen streets; frozen with fear of movement (if I stay quiet, they’ll miss me, pass me by). The Doppler-impending approach of the van, its giant presence directly below the window, right at the curb, next to the face and the ears, and then its hissing passage as it swept away, a moving vacuum cleaner of living things, swallowing whole families. With eyes white eggshells in pale faces. And into the rear of that van, the exhaust whispering its sibilant tune of gas and monoxided forever. All this came back to Lilian Goldbosch as she shamefully spaded-over her memories of the past half hour. Those boys. Their armbands. Her fear. The crowd attacking. The way she had leaped at them. The madness. The fear.

  The fear.

  Again, the fear.

  Burning, blazing through all of it: the fear!

  That boy with his imperious blond good looks, the Aryan Superman: could he really know? Could he somehow, this American child born between clean sheets, with the greatest terror a failing mark in school, could he somehow know what that hated black swastika meant to her, to whole generations, to races of individuals who had worn yellow Stars of David and the word Juden, to shattered spirits and captured hearts who stood on alien roads as Stukas dived, or walked in desolate resignation to already filling mass graves, or labored across no-man’s-lands with shellbursts lighting the way? Could he know, or was this something else…a new thing, that merely looked like the old sickness, the fear?

  For the first time in more years than she cared to remember—had it been only twenty years since all of it?—Lilian Goldbosch had a surge of desire. Not the gilded wastes she had substituted for caring: not the pathological attention to hair in the latest frosted style, not the temporal acquisition of goods to fill empty rooms, not the television with its gray images, surrogates of life. A want. A need to know. A desire to find out.

  Born of an old fear.

  Was it the same…or something new?

  She had to know. She was engulfed by desperation.

  And with the desperation, a shocking realization that she could do something. What, she was not certain. But she had the sensation burning in her that if she could know this blond Gentile youth, could talk to him, this goy, could communicate with him, this stranger, she could find out the answers, know if the evil was coming again, or if it was just another lonely person, trapped within his skin.

  “Will you boys do me a favor?” Lilian Goldbosch asked the two who had escorted her home. “Will you help me?”

  At first they were confused, but as she talked, as she explained why she had to know, why it was important, they were drawn into a prospect of their times, and finally they nodded, a little hesitantly, the taller of the two saying, “I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but we’ll try and find him for you.”

  Then they left. Down the stairs. While she went to wash the tears and streaked mascara from her young-old face.

  Frank Amato was of Italian descent. He was a typical child of his times; transistorized, Sanforized, boss gear bomped groovy tuned-in on the music of the spheres, in a Continental belt-back slim-line hopsacking crease-resistant 14” tapered ineluctable reality that placed him in and of the teenage sub-culture.

  Vietnam? Huh?

  Voter registration in Alabama? Huh?

  The ethical structure of the universe?

  Huh?

  Arch Lennon was a WASP. He had heard the term, but had never applied it to himself. He was a carbon-copy of Frank Amato. He lived day to day, Big Boy to Big Boy, track meet to track meet, and if there were sounds that went boomp in the night they were probably the old man getting up to haul another pop-top out of the Kelvinator.

  Military junta? Huh?

  Limited nuclear retaliation? Huh?

  The infinitesimal dispensation of Homo sapiens in the disinterested cosmos?

  Huh?

  Standing down on the sidewalk outside Lilian Goldbosch’s apartment, staring at each other.

  “That was a smart move.”

  “Well, what the hell was I supposed to say? For chrissakes, she had aholda my arm I thought she was gonna bust it. That old lady’s nuts.”

  “So why’d you promise her? Where the hell we gonna find that guy?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I gave my word.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Maybe not to you, but I gave it just the same.”

  “So we try and find that kid, right?”

  “Uh…”

  “What I thought. I gotta do all the brain work again. Jeezus, man, you are such a nit.”

  “D’jou get the license number of any of those cars?”

  “Don’t be a clown. No, I din’t get the number. And even if I did, what’d we do with it?”

  “DMV, wouldn’t they tell us who it was registered to?”

  “Sure. We’re gonna walk into the Motor Vehicle Department just like James Bond, a couple of guys our age, and we’re gonna say hey who owns this VW. Sure, I can picture it real good. You’re a nit.”

  “So that’s that.”

  “I wish.”

  “You got something else?”

  “Maybe. One of those VWs had a sticker on the windshield. It was an emblem. Pulaski Vocational High School.”

  “So one of those guys goes to Pulaski. You know how many inmates they got over there? Maybe a million.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “You’re serious about this.”

  “Yeah, I’m serious about it.”

  “How come?”

  “I dunno, she asked, an’ I gave her my word. She’s an old lady, it won’t hurt anything to look a while.”

  “Hey, Frank?”

  “What?”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “I dunno, but those bastards were lousy, an’ I gave my word.”

  “Okay, I’ll help. But I gotta get home now, my folks oughta be back by now, and we can’t do anything till tomorrow anyhow.”

  “Stay loose. See ya.”

  “See ya. Don’t get in any trouble, double-oh-seven.”

  “Stick
it.”

  They didn’t know which one they would find, or even if they would recognize him when they did find him. But one of the wearers of the swastika attended Pulaski Vocational, and Pulaski Vocational went all year round. Summer, winter, night and day, it turned out students who knew more about carburetors, chassis dynamometers, metal lathes and printed circuitry than they did about THE CANTERBURY TALES, scoria and pumice, the theory of vectors and the fact that Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was the first American to fall in the Revolutionary War. It was a great gray stone Coventry of a school, where young boys went in unmarked, and emerged some years later all punched and coded to fit into the System, with fringe benefits and an approximate date of death IBM’d by the group insurance company.

  Chances were good the boy—whichever boy it turned out to be—was still attending classes, even though it was summer, and Arch and Frank were free. So they waited, and they watched. And finally, they found one of them.

  An acne-speckled, pudgy-hipped specimen in a baggy orange velour pullover.

  He came out of the school, and Arch recognized him.

  “There, the pear-shaped one, in the orange.”

  They followed him into the parking lot. The car he unlocked was a Monza, a late model. If they had been on the alert for a VW, they would have missed him.

  “Hey!” Frank came up behind him. The pudgy turned.

  He had beady little eyes, like a marmoset. The face was fleshy, with many small inflamed areas where he had shaved and the skin had broken out. There was a wasted look about him, as though he had been used up, and cast away. Even to Arch and Frank, the look of intense intelligence was missing from the pudgy’s expression.