Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  The other, slightly shorter, perhaps only six feet, with shoes impeccably dullshined to avoid the vulgar ostentation of gloss, with flat brown hair parted straight back on the left side and brushed toward the rear of the skull in the European manner, whose eyes were of the lizard, he was Choate, surely, definitely, of course.

  “Walter,” Andover said, as he burst into the office, “we’re breaking a little early today. Going over to The Algonquin for a few. Care to come along?”

  Then he saw Sorokin, and stumbled to silence, in awe.

  Werringer introduced them, with names Sorokin let slip out of his mind the instant they were spoken. He knew their names.

  “Where did you go to school?” he asked them.

  “Yale,” said Andover.

  “Yale,” said Choate.

  “Call me Punky,” said Andrew Sorokin.

  So they all went to The Algonquin for a few.

  Choate scrabbled around in the bottom of the bowl. All the salted peanuts and little Cheerios and pretzels were gone. He gripped the bowl by its edge and banged it on the table. At The Algonquin, that was poor form.

  “Succulents!” Choate howled.

  The waiter came and took the bowl away from him like a nanny with an obstreperous infant. “Succulents, dammt,” he slurred the word, only faintly.

  “Andrew P. for Punky Sorokin, by God what a thrill and a half for overtime,” said Andover, staring at Andy for the one billionth time since they had sat down. “A giant, you’re a bloody giant, a flaming institoootion! Y’know that? And here we are sitting right with you!”

  Werringer had left two hours before. Evening was coming on. The two Yale men named Andover and Choate were just high enough to be playful. Andy was sober. He had tried, God knew he had tried, but he was still sober.

  “Reality, that’s what you deal in,” said one of them. It didn’t matter which was which. They both spoke from the same cultural mouth.

  “Truth. Life. You know all there is to know about Life. An’ I don’t mean that Lucely, heh heh heeheehee…” he broke himself up completely, rolled around in the booth. Choate (or Andover, depending which had punned) shoved him away, roughly.

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, Rob. Thass the one thing he doesn’t know about. Life! The core of it, the heartmeat of it! We, who come from such austere backgrounds, even we know it better more truly than Andrew P. for Punky Sorokin sitting right there.”

  The other Yale man sat up, angry. “You shut up! This man is a giant. A flaming giant, and he knows, I tell you. He knows about the seamy side of Life.”

  “He never even touched it.”

  “He knows! He knows it all!”

  “Fraud! Poseur!”

  “Step owsside you bastard, I never knew you were such a bigoted crypto-Fascist bastard!”

  Sorokin listened to them, and the fear he had known earlier that afternoon, when Werringer had sentenced him to going back down to Red Hook, returned. He had condemned himself to it, really, by what series of compulsions he did not want to examine, but here it was again. How did Choate know he was a fraud? How had Choate discovered the secret nubbin of fear in Andrew Sorokin’s heart and soul?

  “What, uh, what makes you say I’m a fraud?” he asked Choate. Choate’s face had grown blotchy with drink, but he aimed a meaty finger at Sorokin and said, “I get spirit messages from the other world.”

  Andover took it as an affront. He shoved Choate roughly. “Owsside, bastard! Owsside, crypto-pinko!”

  Sorokin wanted to get to the sober heart of it, though. “No, really, what makes you think I don’t know reality?”

  Choate took on the look of a pedant, and intoned sepulchrally. “Your first book’a short stories, you had a quote from Hemingway, remember it? You said it was your credo. Bushwah! ‘There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.’ I memorized it. It seemed to be valid. Bushwah!”

  “Socialist, right-wing Birch muther-fugger!”

  “Yes? So what makes you think I don’t know what I’m talking about? That certainly doesn’t prove your point.”

  “Ah!” Choate lifted a finger alongside his nose, like Santa Claus about to zoom up the chimney. Conspiratorial. “Ah! But your fifth book’a short stories, after you’d been out there”—he waved toward California—“you used another quote. You know what it was? Hah, you remember?”

  Sorokin paused an instant to get it right, then recited. “‘To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experience is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul.’ Oscar Wilde. What has that to do with proving your point?”

  Choate was triumphant. “Fear. Cop-out. Your subconscious was squealing like a butchered pig. It knew you were a liar from the first, and were lying all the more in Hollywood. It knew! And so you had to say it to the world, so they could never accuse you of it. You don’t know what Life is, what reality is, what truth is, what anydamnthing is!”

  “I’m gonna push your rotten cruddy Tory face in!”

  They wrestled around the other side of the booth, each too hammered to do the other any harm, as Sorokin thought about what Choate had said. Was it possible? Had he been trying to plead silently guilty to an unspoken charge?

  When he had been a small child, he had been a petty thief. He had stolen things from the dime store. Not because he could not have bought them, because his family was too poor, but because he wanted them without having to pay for them, a sense of accomplishment, in a child’s own strange philosophy. But he had always felt compelled to play with the new, stolen item, directly in front of his parents, that same night. So they could ask him where he got it, and he could risk their finding out he had stolen. If they did not press it, the stolen plaything was truly his; if they pressed it and he blurted he had stolen it, then he had to suffer a punishment he knew he deserved.

  Was the inclusion of the Wilde quotation, as Choate suggested, another playing with a stolen toy in front of mommy and daddy, the world, his public?

  Was it a manifestation of the fear he now felt? The fear that he had lost it, had always been in the process of losing it, could never regain it?

  “Okay, dammit, I’m gonna show you the seamy side of Life! Now what about it, Mr. Punky? You wanna see the seamy side of Life?”

  “He knows it, I tell ya!”

  “Well, do you? Huh?”

  “I’ll have to make a phone call first. Cancel a dinner appointment.” He sat, not moving, and they stared at one another like walruses contemplating the permanence of the sea.

  “Well, do you, huh? If you do, put up or shut up.” Choate was on the pinnacle of proving his point.

  “Just shuddup, Terry, just shuddup; this man is not going to be chivvied and bullied and chockablocked by the likes of a McCarthy neo-Fascist demagogue such as yourself!” Andover was a tot drunker than Choate.

  Sorokin was trembling inside. If anyone knew the seamy side of Life, it was Andrew Sorokin. He had run away at age fifteen, had been driving a dynamite truck in North Carolina by sixteen, working on a cat-cracker in West Texas age seventeen, at nineteen the gang, and his first book published at twenty. He had been in every scene imaginable from the sybaritic high life of the international jet set to uncontrolled LSD experimentation with Big Sur hippies. He had always wanted to believe he was with it, contemporary, of the times, in touch with the realities, all the myriad multicolored realities, no matter how strained or weird or demeaning.

  And the question now before him: has all this living degenerated into a search for kicks, is it a complex cop-out? He slid out of the booth, and went to call Olaf Burger.

  When he had gotten through the switchboard and all the interference, Burger’s bushwhacker voice came across the line. “Yeah?”

  “Didn’t I tell you a milli
on times that’s no way to answer a phone? You should say, ‘Massah Buhgah’s awfiss, c’n ah helps yuh, bwana.’”

  “Explain to me why I have to have a busy workday interrupted periodically by bigots, rednecks and kook writer sellouts from Smog Junction.”

  “’Cause you got such dear little Shirley Temple dimples, and you is a big paperback editor, and I burn for your body with a bright blue flame.”

  “What’s on your alleged mind, nitwit?”

  “Gotta call off the dinner.”

  “Janine’ll parboil me. She made patlijan moussaka because you were coming. And dicing and braising lamb all day will not put her in a receptive frame of mind. At least give me an excuse.”

  “Two hotrock Ivy types from Marquis want to show me ‘the seamy side of Life.’”

  “That’s not an excuse, that’s a seizure of petit mal. You’ve got to be kidding.”

  There was a moment of serious silence from Sorokin. Then, in a different, slower voice he said, “I’ve got to do it, Olaf. It’s important.”

  A corresponding moment of reorientation, the dual statement of a musical threnody. “You sound upset, Andy. Something happen? It’s been three months since I’ve seen you, something biting on you again?”

  Sorokin clicked his tongue against his teeth, seeking the words, finally deciding in an instant to put it baldly. “I’m trying to find out if I’ve got balls. Again.”

  “For the thousandth time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “When do you stop? When you get killed?”

  “Give my love to Janine. I’ll call you tomorrow. My treat at The Four Seasons, that ought to make up for it.”

  A pause. “Andy…”

  Another beat of timelessness. “Uh-huh?”

  “You’re too expensive for the paperback line I edit, but there are a lot of others with a stock in you. Don’t screw yourself up.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Burger clicked off, and Andy Sorokin stood staring at the red plush of the phone booth for a long moment. Then he turned, exhaling breath in finality, and went back to a scene from Hogarth.

  Andover was tapping the table over and over and over with his index finger, saying over and over and over, “You’ll see, you’ll see, you’ll see…”

  While Choate, who had rubbed carbon black from half a dozen spent matches on his cheeks, was flapping his arms tidily, and croaking over and over and over, “Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore…”

  They took him to every paradise he had already known. All the places he had been when he was younger, all the predictable places. The Lower East Side. The Village. Spanish Harlem. Bedford-Stuyvesant.

  And they grew more and more furious. They had sobered; the chill night air, the snow of winter’s November, too many stop-offs where the liquor wasn’t free; they were sobered. It had become a vendetta with both of the Yale men, not just Choate. Now Andover was with him, and they wanted to show the giant, Sorokin, something he had not seen before.

  There were bars, and more bars, and dingy down-the-hole places where people sat murmuring into one another’s libidos. And then a party…

  Noise cascaded about him, a Niagara of watery impressions, indistinct conversational images. Snatches of flotsam carried down thunderingly past his ears” “…I went over to Ted Bates to ask them about those Viceroy residuals, and Marvy told me what the hell I’d gotten a trip to the Virgin Islands out of it and why didn’t I stop bitching, and I told him, say, after that damned fruitcake director and his fayguluh crew got done letting me ‘save’ them from the gay life, I was so raw and miserable double residuals wouldn’t of been enough to make up for all that weirdscene swinging, and besides, if they’d taken along some hooker they’d of had to pay her, too, so I should be getting extra consider—”

  …beep, bip, boop, blah, bdip, chee chee chee…

  “…a gass! A real gass! The joint is laid out like an Arabian Nights kind of thing, with the waitresses in these transparent pants, and all the waiters in pasha turbans, and you lay on your side to eat, and I’ve got to admit it’s hard as hell eating laying on your side, which is almost as bad as laying eating on your side heh heh, I swear I don’t see how the hell they did it in those days, but the food is ab-solutely a gass, man. They’ve got this lemon drop soup, they call it kufte abour and it’s a g—”

  …bdoing, bupp, bupp, beep, bip, chee chee chee…

  “…this compendium of aborted hours and dead-end relationships is of minor concern, for at this moment, this very instant in weightless timeless time, this moment that I am about to describe minutely, all of what I have been through before this will outline itself. If not in particular, then in essence, hindsighted as it were, and what went before will be seen as merely a vapor trail of incidents one like another, building to this moment and…oh for CHRIST’S sake, Ginny, take your finger out of your nose…”

  …bang bang bang, bding dong, clank, crunch, chee chee chee…

  Technically, it might have been a party. Superficially it resembled a party, with too many people clogged into too small a space, a dingy loft off Jane Street in the Village. But there was more going on than just that.

  The ritual dances of the friendly natives were being staged, both physically—as Simone and her husband’s agent did a slow, extremely inept, psychosexual Skate—and emotionally—as Wagner Cole scathingly sliced up the peroxided poetess whose aspirations of literary immediacy were transparently Saturday Review—as well as ethnically—minor chittering of who-balled-who in the far corner by the rubber plant. The whole crowd was there, because it was Florence Mahrgren’s birthday (wheeee!) and not just a dreamed-up reason for getting together.

  Andy Sorokin stood against the fireplace wall, his margarita in his two cupped hands, talking to the whey-faced virgin Andover had found and brought to him. She was talking at him, about a bad movie made from one of his lesser novels.

  “I never really thought Karin was completely bad,” the virgin was saying. “And when they made the movie, I just did not like the way Lana Turner played the part.”

  Sorokin stared down at her benignly. She was very short, and large-bosomed. She wore a Rudi Gernreich and it had her pushed all up tight in front; she smiled with her lips but not her teeth. “That’s very kind of you to say; there wasn’t a great deal in the motion picture version to like, though I thought Frankenheimer’s direction was nice.”

  She answered something totally irrelevant. He bore these conversations neatly or badly, depending on the final objective. In this case, it was getting the short, buxom virgin into the master bedroom; he gave it what charm he could spare.

  Around them, like mist encircling a cleared space, the eye of a storm, the party pitched itself a noticeable degree higher in hysteria. Florence Mahrgren was hoisted on the shoulders of Bernbach & Barker (producers of three current Broadway hits) and carried around the room, as Ray Charles sang in the background, her skirt crumpled about her thighs, Bernbach & Barker improvising obscene happy birthday lyrics to the tune of their current success’s theme song. Sorokin felt his gut tightening on him again. It never seemed to change, no matter how many times the people changed. They said the same stupid things, did the same senseless things, postured and played with themselves insipidly. He wanted either to screw the virgin or to get out of the party.

  From another corner of the living room someone yelled, “Hey! How about Circle-Insult?” and before Andy could make for the door, the virgin had been snapped up by Andover, and she in turn had clutched his sleeve, and daisy-chain, they careened into the center of the maelstrom.

  Circle-Insult. They were already forming the circle, everyone hunkering down cross-legged on the floor. The idle talented and the idle rich and the idle poor and the idle bored playing their games; affectation of innocence, the return to honesty in form—if not in content. Circle-Insult. The women sitting in the preordained postures, careless, nonchalant unawareness of lingerie and pale inner flesh flashed and gone and flashing again, beacons for the w
anderers who would home there that night, keeping the coastline firmly in sight, keeping the final berth open to the lost and the needy. Charitable bawds.

  They began playing Circle-Insult, the world’s easiest game.

  Tony Morrow turned to Iris Paine on his right. Tony to Iris: “You’re the worst lay I’ve ever had. You don’t move. You just lay there and let a guy, any guy, stick it in, and you whimper. Jeezus, you’re a lousy lay.”

  Iris Paine turned to Gus Diamond on her right. Iris to Gus: “You smell bad. You have really vile bad breath. And you always stand too close when you talk to someone. You stink completely.”

  Gus Diamond turned to Bill Gardner on his right. Gus to Bill: “I hate niggers, and you are the most obnoxious nigger I ever met. You got no natural rhythm, and when we played tennis last weekend I saw you were hung smaller than me so stop trying to horse around with Betty, nigger, or you’ll find your throat cut!”

  Bill Gardner turned to Kathy Dineen on his right. Bill to Kathy: “You always steal outta these parties. One night you stole thirty-five bucks from Bernice’s purse, and then split, and they called the cops but they never found out it was you. You’re a thief.”

  Around and around and around. Circle-Insult.

  Andy Sorokin stood as much of it as he could, then he rose and left, Andover and Choate trailing all quiet and sadly sober behind him. “You didn’t like it,” Choate said, following him down the stairs.

  “I didn’t like it.”

  “It wasn’t the core of reality.”

  Sorokin smiled. “It wasn’t even particularly seamy.”

  Choate shrugged. “I tried.”

  “How about The Ninth Circle?” Andover asked.

  Sorokin stopped on the stairs, half-turned. “What’s that?”

  Choate grinned conspiratorially. “It’s a joint, you know, a pub, a place.” Sorokin nodded silently, bobbed his head and they followed him.

  They took him to The Ninth Circle, which was a Village hangout, the way Chumley’s had been a hangout when Andy had walked the weary streets. The way Rienzi’s had been the spot to go and read The Manchester Guardian on a wooden hangup pole, and sleep on Davey Rienzi’s sandwich-cutting board when the rent was too much to make. The way there was always an in-hole for the colder children who couldn’t bear to stand on street corners naked to the night.