Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  —Detroit, Michigan, 1966

  PUNKY & THE YALE MEN

  “Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled,” he had said, when he had left New York, for the last time. He had said it to the girl he had been sleeping with: a junior fashion and beauty editor with one of the big women’s slicks. He had just found out she was a thirty-six-dollar-a-day cocaine addict, and it hadn’t mattered, really, because he had gift-wrapped his love and given it to her, asking nothing in return except that she let him be near her.

  And yet, when he asked her, that final day, why they had made love only once (with all her stray baby cats mewling in corners and walking over their intertwined bodies), she answered, “I was stoned. It was the only way I could hack it.” And he had been sick. Even in his middle thirties, having been down so many dark roads that ended in nothingness, he had been hurt, had been destroyed, and he had gone away from her, gone away from that place, in that special time, and he had told her, “Love ain’t nothing but sex misspelled.”

  It had been bad grammar for a writer as famous as Sorokin. But he was entitled to indulge. It had been a bad year. So he had left New York, for the last time, once again resuming the search that had no end; he had gone back to the studio in Hollywood, and had forgotten quite completely, knowing he would never return to New York.

  Now, in another time, still seeking the punchline of the bad joke his life had become, he was back in New York.

  Andy Sorokin came out of the elevator squinting, as though he had just stepped into dazzling sunshine.

  Dazzling.

  It was the forty-second-floor reception room of Marquis magazine and the most dazzling thing in it was the shadow-box display of Kodachrome transparencies from the pages of Marquis.

  Dazzling:

  Péche flambée at The Forum of The XII Caesars; tuxedoed and tuck-bow-tied stalwarts at a Joan Sutherland première; decorous girl stuff, no nylon and garter belt crotch shots; deep-sea fishing with marlin and mad-eyed bonita breaking white water; Yousuf Karsh character studies of two post-debs and a Louisiana racist politico; a brace of artily drawn cartoons; a Maserati spinning-out at the Nürburg Ring; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, others whose first work had appeared in the magazine; a soft-nosed Labrador Retriever in high grass, ostensibly retrieving a Labrador; two catamarans running before a gale.

  Andy Sorokin was not dazzled. He squinted like a man suffering on the outside of a needle-thrust of heartburn.

  The unlit cigarette hung from the exact center of his mouth, and he worked with his teeth at the spongy, now moist filter. Behind him, the elevator doors sighed shut, and he was almost alone in the reception room. He stood, still only two steps onto the deep-pile wall-to-wall, a man listening to silent songs in stone, as the nearly pretty receptionist looked up, waiting for him to come to her.

  When he didn’t, she pursed, she nibbled, and then she flashed her receptionist eyes. When he still paid no attention to her, she said firmly, projecting, “Yes, may I help you?”

  Sorokin had not been daydreaming. He had been entirely there, assaulted by the almost pathological density of good taste in the reception room, beguiled by the relentless masculinity of the Marquis image as totemized in the Kodachromes, amused by an impending meeting that was intended to regain for him that innocence of childhood or nature he had somewhen lost, by the preposterous expedient of hurling him back into a scene, a past, he had fled—gladly—seventeen years before.

  “I doubt it,” he replied.

  Steel shutters slammed down in her eyes. It had been a bitch of a day, lousy lunch, out of pills and the Curse right on time, and but no room in a day like today for some sillyass cigarette-nibbling smartass with funnys. It became unaccountably chill in the room.

  Sorokin knew it had been a dumb remark. But it wasn’t worth retracting.

  “Walter Werringer, please,” he said wearily.

  “Your name?” in ice.

  “Sorokin.”

  And she knew she had blown it. Ohmigod Sorokin. All day Werringer and the staff had been on tiptoes, like a basic training barracks waiting for the Inspector General. Sorokin, the giant. Standing here rumpled and nibbling a filter, and she had chopped him. The word was ohmigod. And but no way to recoup. If he so much as dropped a whisper to someone in editorial country, a whisper, the time for moving out of her parents’ apartment on Pelham Parkway was farther off, the Times want ads.

  She tried a smile, and then didn’t bother. His eyes. How drawn and dark they were, like purse strings pulled tight closed. She should have guessed: those eyes: Sorokin.

  “Right this way, Mr. Sorokin,” she said, standing, smoothing her skirt across her thighs. There was a momentary flicker of reprieve: he looked at her body. So she preceded him down the corridor into editorial country, moving it fluidly. “Mr. Werringer and the staff have been expecting you,” she said, turning to speak over her shoulder, letting the ironed-flat blonde discothèque hair sway back from her good left profile.

  “Thank you,” he said, wearily. It was a long quiet corridor.

  “I really admired your book,” she said, still walking. He had had fourteen novels published, she didn’t say which one, which meant she had read none of them.

  “Thank you.”

  She continued talking, saying things as meaningful as throat-clearings. And the terrible thing about it, was that from the moment Andy Sorokin had entered the reception room, and she had thought I blew it, he had known everything that had passed through her mind. He had thought her thoughts, the instant she had thought them. Because she was a people, and that was Andy Sorokin’s line. He was cursed with an empathy that often threatened to drive him up the wall, around the bend, down the tube and out of this world. He knew she had been playing it bitchily cool, then scared when she found out who he was, then trying to ameliorate it with her body and the hair-swirling. He knew it all, and it depressed him: to find out he was correct again. Once again. As always.

  If just once they’d surprise me, he thought, following her mouth and words, her body. Thinking this, in preparation:

  Here I am returning to New York, to the very core of The Apple, after summer solstice in L.A. (where the capris run to tight and the soma run to trembly), and it’s returning to my past, to my childhood. Filthy, drizzly, crowded till I gag and scream for elbow room on the BMT, it’s still where I came from, a glory—notably absent from The Coast. It doesn’t even matter that the collar of my Eagle broadcloth looks as though caterpillars had shit in a sooty trail, after a day on the town; it doesn’t matter that everyone snarls and bites in the streets; it doesn’t matter that the service at the Teheran has been run into the toilet since Vincente went over the hill to The Chateaubriand; it doesn’t matter that Whitey silenced Jimmy Baldwin the only way it could, by absorbing him, recognizing him, deifying him, making him the Voice of His People, driving him insane; it doesn’t even matter that Olaf Burger up at Fawcett has grown stodgy with wealth and position; to hell with all the carping, dammit, it’s New York, the hub of it all, the place where it all started again, and I’ve been so damned long on The Coast, in that Mickey Mouse scene hiya baby pussycat sweetheart lover…and even when I’m systemically inclined to believe sesquipedalian Thomas Wolfe (no, not that Tom Wolfe, the real Tom Wolfe), I keep being amazed to find I can go home again, and again, and again.

  It is always New York, my Manhattan, where I learned to walk, where I learned all I know, and where it waits for me every time I come back, like a childhood sweetheart grown sexy with experience, yet still capable of adolescent charm. How bloody literary!

  Sonofabitch, I love you, N’Yawk.

  She was still gibbering, walking, and all he thought, every spun-out spiderweb sentence of it, only took a moment to whirl through his mind, before they arrived at the door to Walter Werringer’s office, concluding with:

  Even forty-two stories up in an editorial office, going in to see an important editor who wouldn’t have paid me penny-a-word to carve the
Magna Carta on his executive toilet wall before I went to Hollywood and became a Name, who now offers me an arm, a leg and a quivering thigh to go back down to Red Hook, Brooklyn and rewrite my impressions, seventeen years later, of juvenile delinquency, “Kid Gang Revisited,” even this is New York lovely…

  Oh, revenge, thy taste is groovy!

  Thoughts of Andrew Sorokin, best-selling novelist, Hollywood scenarist, page 146 (vols. 5–6) of CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS [Born May 27, 1929, in Buffalo, New York; joined a gang of juvenile delinquents in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and posed as a member of the group for three months during 1948, gathering authentic background material for his first novel, CHILDREN OF THE GUTTERS.], and nominee for an Academy Award, as he stepped past an oiled-hipped receptionist into the outer office of Walter Werringer, editor of Marquis magazine: thoughts of Andrew Sorokin, if not recognized as a prophet in his own land, at least a prodigal returned to accept the huzzahs of the nobility. Time had passed, times had changed, and Andy Sorokin was back.

  The receptionist spoke with purport to the trim and distant secretary in the outer office. “Frances…Mr. Sorokin.” The secretary brightened, and the smile buttered across her lower face. “Oh, just a moment, Mr. Sorokin; Mr. Werringer is expecting you.” She began clicking the intercom.

  The receptionist did a little sensuality thing with her mouth as she touched Andy Sorokin’s sleeve. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Sorokin.”

  He smiled back at her. “I’ll stop to say good-bye on my way out.” She was off the hook. He had done it purposely. One of his occasional gestures of humanity: why let her worry that he was going to cost her a job with a casual remark. It also meant he was going to ask for her number. Now all she had to decide was whether she would play it ingenue and let him ask, or hand him the pre-written note with the name and number on it, when he came back past her in the reception room. It was an infinitely fascinating game of ramifications, and Andy Sorokin knew she would play it with herself till he reappeared. She went, and he turned back as the secretary rose to usher him into the inner presence of Walter Werringer.

  “Right this way, Mr. Sorokin,” she said, standing, smoothing her skirt across her thighs. He looked at her body. She preceded him to the inner office door, moving it fluidly. If just once they’d surprise me, he thought.

  Forty minutes later, they still had not discussed what Sorokin had come to discuss: the assignment. They had talked about Sorokin’s career, from pulp detective and science fiction stories through the novels to Hollywood and the television, the motion picture scripts. The impending Oscar night, and Sorokin’s nomination. They had discussed Sorokin’s two disastrous marriages, his appraisal of Hollywood politics, the elegance of Marquis, the silliness of Sorokin’s never having been in the pages of that elegant slick monthly. (But not the bitter weevil that nibbled Sorokin’s viscera: that Marquis had never thought him worthy of acceptance before he had become famous and a Name.) They had discussed women, JFK, what had become of Mailer, the unreliability of agents, paperback trends, everything but the assignment.

  And a peculiar posturing had sprung up between them.

  Werringer stared at Andy Sorokin across a huge Danish coffee mug, steam fogging his bifocals, gulping with heavenly satisfaction. “Without joe I’d be dead,” he said. He took another gulp, reinforcing his own stated addiction, and plonked the mug down on the desk blotter. “Ten, fifteen cups a day. Gotta have it.” He liked to play the stevedore, rather than the literary lion. He enjoyed the role of the Hemingway more than that of the Maxwell Perkins. It was his posture, and as far as Sorokin was concerned, he was stuck with it. Yet it had an adverse effect on Sorokin, who had been what Werringer worked at seeming to be. (Damn my empathy, he thought. Perversity incarnate!) It had the effect of sending Sorokin into a pseudo-Truman Capote stance. Limp-wristed, campy, biting with bitchy aphorism and innuendo. Werringer was on the verge of mentally labeling Sorokin homosexual, even though the conclusion ran contrary to everything he knew of the writer, and the confusion only served to amuse Sorokin. But not too much.

  “About this idea of yours, for me…” Sorokin finally broached it.

  “Right. Yeah, let’s get to it.” Werringer crinkled his face in a Victor McLaglen roughsmile. He rummaged under a stack of manuscripts and pulled out a copy of Sorokin’s first novel, sixteen years old in its original dust wrapper. CHILDREN OF THE GUTTERS. He fingered it as though it were some rare and moldering edition, a first folio “Macbeth,” rather than a somewhat better than good fictionalized autobiography of three months Andy Sorokin had spent living a double-life, seventeen years before, when he had been young and provincial enough to think “experience” was a substitute for content or style. Three months with a kid gang, living in and running through the stinking streets, getting what he liked to call “the inside.”

  Now, seventeen years later, and Werringer wanted him to go back to those streets. After the army, after Paula and Carrie, after the accident, after Hollywood, after the last seventeen years that had given him so much, and stripped him so clean. Go back, Sorokin. Go back to it. If you can.

  Werringer was doing the hairy-chested bit again. He tapped the book with a fingernail. “This has real guts, Andy. Real balls. I always felt that way about it.”

  “Call me Punky.” Sorokin minced, smiling boyishly. “That’s what they called me in the gang. Punky.”

  Werringer did a frowning thing. If Sorokin was a visceral realist out of the gutsy Robert Ruark school, why was he camping?

  “Uh-huh, Punky, sure.” He tried to get his feet under him, but wobbled a little. Sorokin tried not to snicker. “It has real plunge, real honesty in it, a helluva lot of depth,” Werringer added, lamely.

  Sorokin assumed a moue of displeasure, pure faggot: “Too bad it tiptoed through the bookstores,” he said. “It was written to alter the course of Western Civilization, you know.” Werringer paled. What was happening here? “You do know that, don’t you?”

  Werringer nodded dumbly, and took the remark at face value. He didn’t know why he should feel as though he had just fallen down the rabbit hole, but the impression was overwhelming.

  “Well, uh, what we’d like, what we want, for Marquis, is the same sort of ballz—uh, the same sort of highly emotional writing you put into this.”

  Sorokin felt his stomach tightening, now that the moment was with him. “What you want me to do, is go back down to Red Hook, to the same place I knew, and write about the way it is now.”

  Werringer banged a palm on the desk. “Exactly! The kids, what happened to them, where they are now. Did they wind up in the slammer, did they get married, go into the army, the whole story, seventeen years later. And the social conditions. Have the tenements been cleaned up? What about the low-rent housing projects? Has the Police Athletic League been of any use? What about racial tensions down there now, does it make for a different kind of kid gang, different rumbles, you know, the whole scene.”

  “You want me to go back down there.”

  Werringer stared. “Yeah, right, that’s what we want. ‘Kid Gang Revisited.’ Something in depth.”

  The tension that had been growing in Sorokin now abruptly tightened like a fist. Go back down there. Go back to it, seventeen years later. “I was nineteen years old when I joined that gang,” Andrew Sorokin said, half to himself. Werringer continued to stare. The man in front of him seemed to be in some sort of shock.

  “I’m thirty-six now. I don’t know—”

  Werringer bit the inside of his lip. “We only want you to write it from the outside this time. You’re no kid now, Andy…Mr. Soro—”

  “But you don’t want it to be a surface skimming, do you?”

  “Well, no—”

  “You want it to be guts and balls, right?”

  “Yeah, right, we want—”

  “You want it told the way it is, right? With realism, all the hip talk the kids talk?”

  “Sure, that’s part of—”

  “You want me to
find out what happened to all those kids I ran with, who didn’t know I was studying them like bugs in a bottle. You want me to go down there seventeen years later and say, ‘I’m the guy finked on you, remember me?’ You want that, in essence that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  Werringer had the feeling now (sudden shifts with this man) that Sorokin was furious, was frightened, but furious. What the hell was going on?

  “Well, yes, we want the truth, the inside, the way you did it the first time, but we don’t want you to take any chances. We aren’t…hell, we aren’t Confidential or the Enquirer! We want—”

  “You want me to go back in and let them take a whack at me!”

  Aggression. Werringer reeled.

  “Say, wait a minute we—”

  “You expect a helluva story, and all the risks, and you want it now, right, Mr. Werringer?”

  “What’s the matter with you, Sorok—”

  “Well, how the hell do you expect me to do it unless I go back down there and sink into it again, up to my GUTS, up to my BALLS, up to my EYEBALLS FOR CHRISSAKES! YOU DAMN DUMB DEADLINE-MEETER, YOU!”

  Werringer shoved back from his desk, as though Sorokin might jump across and throttle him. His eyes were wide behind the bifocals, all out of shape and moist.

  “It’ll be my pleasure, Mr. Werringer,” in a tone so soft and warm, relaxed at last.

  “How soon do you need it? And what length?”

  Walter Werringer fumbled for his Danish coffee mug.

  Sorokin had his hand on the door, when it opened inward, and two young men came through. The moment he saw them, prim and clean-scrubbed in their almost-identical dark blue suits, he knew they had come from the right families, had learned to dance at the age of six or seven at Miss Blesham’s, or one of the other good salons, had been allowed that first quarter-snifter of Napoleon with “Dad,” and had most certainly graduated from one of the right schools.

  The one on the left, the taller of the two, with the straw-colored hair and polar twinkling blue eyes, entering the room with thumbs hooked into the decorative pockets of his vest, was an Andover man. Had to be.