The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  “All this... is really my fault,” Arlene blurted out. “I think... I think I really hurt him.”

  “Baby, you didn’t hurt me, you hurt yourself.”

  “How about letting us in on all this,” Ida said.

  “All righty. Got your dildo ready, Ida-baby? Arlene and I enjoyed carnal knowledge of each other Wednesday, we created friction in each other’s private parts, we polluted our vital bodily fluids; that is, we fucked.”

  “Do you have to be like that about it?” Arlene said angrily, eyes blazing, hands balled into fists. I had finally gotten to her! “Do you have to make it sound so animalistic?”

  “Was I the one who was animalistic about it?” I said.

  Silence. Her lower lip trembled. The peanut gallery shut up; they were beginning to groove behind the show.

  “Dig what an animal I am,” I said. “I made love to that girl, dig, made love; not screwed, not fucked—made love. All you dirty voyeurs have been listening to her bitch about her sex hang-ups for months. Well, it’s all bullshit. I said it was bullshit last week, but then I thought I was lying to protect my lady’s honor, if the concept isn’t totally beyond you. But this time I found out I wasn’t lying, isn’t that right, Arlene?”

  Arlene studied her shoes.

  “Go on, tell ‘em,” I said. “You wanted this, remember?”

  Arlene nodded without looking up. “It... it was beautiful...” she whispered. “I... I really felt like a woman for the first time...”

  “What do you want us to do, pin the Congressional Medal of Honor on your fly?” Linda Kahn sneered.

  “Just making a point. Which is, that with a Secret I Learned in the Orient, I was able to get her to make love just like a woman. No applause, please. Because it was really a big nothing. Arlene never had a sexual problem. But she does have an emotional problem; something’s made it impossible for her to have a decent relationship with a man. Somethings that’s right here in this room....”

  “That’s very interesting,” Harvey said, “whether it’s true or not. And just what do you believe the supposed cause of this supposed non-sexual problem to be?” Ah, snideness! Microscopic cracks were starting to appear in the facade of Harvey’s cool.

  “Looked in the mirror lately, Harv?” I asked him.

  He actually flinched.

  “What is this crap?” Charley said.

  “Attacking the therapist is a clear—”

  “Shaddap!” I roared. “I’m paying for this damned therapy, and I’m gonna get my money’s worth.”

  “Let him talk,” Harvey said quietly. “This may be a valuable breakthrough for Tom.”

  “Thanks pal,” I told him. “Harvey, how would you react if I called you a castrator, a voyeur, a pervert, a liar, a monster, a cocksucker, a pederast, a Commie, and a faggot?”

  Harvey peered at me from behind his glasses as if trying to decide whether a padded cell was in order. “How would you expect me to react?” he said mildly.

  “That’s how I’d expect you to react, Harvey,” I said, mousetrapping him in his own cool. “Are you a human being, man?”

  Harvey frowned. What could he say to that?

  “Groovy,” I said. “I’m taking your silence to mean you don’t object to being called human. Because if you weren’t human, none of this would make much sense.”

  “You call this making sense?” Rich said.

  “Back to your kennel, Fang,” I told him out of the side of my mouth. “Let’s run it all back to the beginning. I meet Arlene. We ball once—pretty mediocre. But the second time around, it’s really groovy—real human contact, dig? Kind of thing that should really start something going, right? Right, Arlene?”

  “I don’t know...” Arlene muttered, twisting her hands together, looking at the floor. Poor kid. Yeah, I felt like something of a shit putting her through this, but goddamn, she had asked for it. If she was right about the Foundation, I was only doing my duty; if I was right, I was purging the muck out of her head. Either way, it was for her own good.

  “The little lady doesn’t know. Why doesn’t the little lady know what the beginning of a real thing between a man and a woman should feel like? Has the little lady ever had a meaningful relationship with a man?”

  Arlene’s body drooped forward, head practically buried in her breasts. Real touching. But I had worked up so mush nasty momentum that there was an IBM machine where my heart was supposed to be, and it was Arlene who had gotten me into this situation and put it there, and the voice of the computer told me that anything that happened to her in this room was her own fucking fault and I would be doing her no favor by holding back now.

  “Dig, so she’s never had a real relationship with a man, is why she can’t be expected to know what it’s supposed to feel like,” I said. “So last Wednesday, I, who have at least had some kind of real relationships with chicks, did feel that something had started between us. So to show her how I felt, I offered her a key to my apartment. Now you’d think a girl who had never gotten that far before might be a little touched, moved, excited, happy. But not the little lady—”

  “That’s not true!” Arlene shouted, bolting upright in her chair, hands balled into fists. She hesitated, as if looking at herself overreacting; then seemed to deflate like a leaky balloon, and in a little whisper said: “I really was moved, Tom... really I was... I still....”

  “But you couldn’t so much as accept a lousy key, could you?”

  “No....”

  “Why wouldn’t you take the key? Go on, tell ‘em.”

  “Because... because I was afraid... it was too big a step for me to take without... without—”

  “Without hacking it out in this group?”

  “Yes.”

  Oh yes, I had them in the palm of my hand, I did. They were all hunched forward sucking it up and wondering what came next. And old Harv was leaning back with a little smile, the Great Guru watching his people do his thing.

  “Okay,” I said, “you can all take your hands out of your pants folks, because you’ve heard the whole lurid truth about Arlene’s torrid affair with Attila the Hun. So what’s the point of all this except my taking my cock out? One more question for the little lady: would you say that one of the reasons you’re a Foundation member is because you’re trying to do something about your inability to make it with a man?”

  Arlene shot me a look of pure hostility. “All right, all right!” she said. “Yes! Yes! You have all the answers, don’t you?”

  Harvey leaned forward, took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, replaced them and said: “Just what are you trying to say? You haven’t gotten very far with all this.” Ah, Harvey was getting a bit pissed-off at my playing shrink. Well you ain’t seen nothing yet, Harvey-baby!

  “What I’m trying to say is that maybe you can’t tell the cure from the disease without a scorecard. The chick can’t make it with a man till she clears it with her group; she’s going to group because she can’t make it with a man. Isn’t there something vaguely circular in all this?”

  “You’re saying that therapy is keeping me from having a healthy relationship with a man?” Arlene said. The hostility was gone; it was an honest question.

  “I’m saying that therapy is your relationship with a man,” I said. “Instead of taking your troubles to your lover, you take them to group; instead of opening up your soul in bed, you puke it up here.”

  “Are you suggesting that a healthy relationship between a man and a woman must be based upon her... puking her troubles on you, as you put it?” Harvey said primly.

  “I’m suggesting that no real man can put up for very long with a woman who gives her cunt to him and her soul to someone else. I’m suggesting that no real man wants some other cat making it a threesome when he’s in bed with his chick.”

  “And who is this other man you seem so paranoid about?” Harvey said.

  “You are, Harvey,” I told him.

  Pow! Harvey’s face froze into a featurel
ess mask. Arlene looked straight at Harvey instead of at me. Rich, Charley, Linda and Ida rolled their eyes and groaned silently in various degrees of exasperation. But Doris—Doris stared into space as if I had triggered some cosmic flash in her head. What could that—?

  O wow! Yeah—Ted gibbering about homosexual fantasies; not making it with her; no more chicks on the side either. Doris was seeing a strange new lover between herself and Ted—but this “other woman” was Harvey Brustein. Did she think it was a psychic fag thing? It wasn’t—what Ted and Arlene and the rest of them were getting off Harvey was deeper and dirtier than sex, was what I had gotten off smack when I was with Anne. Yeah, Harvey was the Other Man and the Other Woman to all of them—the way smack had been the lover that slept between Anne and me.

  “You don’t think you might be projecting your own insecurities onto—”

  “Can it Harvey!” I told him. “Look around this room. Arlene can’t have a healthy relationship with me; you’re the other man there. Ted can’t get it up for Doris because you’re—”

  “Are you suggesting that I have sexual relations with my patients?” Harvey fairly shrieked. His gray pudding-face had a hint of redness in it; his eyes flickered heat for a second.

  “That fag thing got you going, didn’t it?” I said. Harvey’s hands actually balled into loose fists. “Well cool it man, I’m not talking about anything as healthy as a little harmless nooky for the shrink. Dig: you and Rich and pot are the same twisted triangle. Likewise you and Charley and booze. You’re an emotional vampire, sucking it all in and putting out nothing but void. What I’d like to know, man, is the breed of monkey you’re feeding with all this shit.”

  The color left Harvey’s face and his hands relaxed. “An interesting delusionary system,” he said. “Quite consistent with your history of heroin addiction.”

  A middling-good try, but it wasn’t working. I could sense the group fissioning into factions: Doris and Rich and maybe Charley were eating up what I was putting out; it hit a chord in their own guts; Ida and Linda looked like they were ready to claw me to pieces in defense of their therapist-Man; Arlene seemed to be hanging high and dry on the fence.

  “Come on, Harvey,” I said, “let your hair down. You’re a human being. A human being has needs. No one does anything without personal reasons. You’re got a personal reason for this Foundation scene; it’s your scene, you put it together. What’s your brand of junk, Harv?”

  “The therapist must stand outside the group and maintain an objective viewpoint,” Harvey said woodenly. “Of course I have personal motivations like anyone else, but I leave them outside the Foundation. If I were to enter personally into the emotional dynamics of a group, my usefulness as a therapist—”

  “Cut the shit!” I snapped. “You spend your whole life listening to people baring their souls in front of you. You’ve got scores of twitches so hooked on you they won’t take a piss without group discussion. Don’t tell me you’re not getting anything off it! That shit’s for the birds and we both know it.”

  “I will not discuss my personal life in a group or with any of my patients,” said the Great Stone Face.

  “Okay Harv. Just answer a simple question: are you married?”

  “I see no point in—”

  “Aw come on, Harvey,” Doris said in her best both-feet-on-the-ground Earth Mother voice, “that won’t kill you. Tell us.”

  “Yeah,” said Rich, “why the hell can’t you tell us that?”

  I had the wolf-pack baying: Arlene looked puzzled at Harvey making such a big deal over nothing; Linda, true to her paranoia, looked suspicious; Charley looked more cynical than usual; even Ida seemed to be waiting for a straight answer.

  Harvey paused for a moment, seemed to be studying the situations; he probably realized that if he carried the Great Silent Buddha Act much further, what their imaginations would read into it (maybe a Bluebeard number) would be uglier than any truth could be.

  “I am legally married,” he said evenly. Then, more slowly, haltingly in fact: “However... my wife and I are... separated... we have a boy and a girl....” But strangely, instead of relaxing now that the Deep Dark Secret was out, he seemed to get tenser, began rolling the fingers of his right hand around an imaginary cigarette. He was afraid of something else coming out. I could smell it. What...? A sudden flash: he had been awfully uptight about admitting he was a San Franciscan.

  “You were married in San Francisco, right?” I said.

  Uptight! Uptight! His eyes looked like the eyes of a trapped animal. “I... I believe I told you that I’ve lived most of my life in San Francisco...”

  “And the wife and kiddies are still there, aren’t they?”

  “I... I... that’s really none of your business,” Harvey said. He glanced with far-too-plastic nonchalance at his watch. “Well, er... I see our time is about up,” he said. “I’ve got a session with Rhoda Steiner next hour, so we’ll have to cut it short. It has been a... er... most interesting group....”

  And that was that. I deserved two ears, at least. You could argue about the tail.

  Arlene and I, as if by some, unspoken arrangement, had let the others leave the room while we sat there exchanging strange stares. Now that we were alone, we both got up and faced each other down in the middle of the room.

  “Well what do you think of the little brass Buddha now?” I said.

  “You were cruel to him,” she said, without much conviction. “Yeah, but what if it was the truth?”

  “I don’t know if it was the truth,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “I know you think it was the truth, so I can’t be mad at you for saying it—that’s the way a group should work. But—”

  “But if that’s the truth, you’ll take vanilla?”

  “I... I don’t want to think about it now. Look, I don’t want this to sound like a put-down, but please don’t ask me to go home with you tonight.”

  I smelled it coming, but I was still kind of disappointed. I had socked it to Harvey according to the script, but I had hoped that the conquering hero would ride off into the sunset with the fair maiden. That’s the way they’d shoot it in Hollywood.

  “Who said I was planning to?” I lied, deciding to leave her off-balance.

  “You’re not—?”

  “No, I’m not mad,” I said blandly. “I just got other fish to fry tonight. Later.”

  And I left her standing there and wondering.

  Ole!

  12 - “...and Trust Your Fate to the Hand of God—”

  Ordinarily, I can do without TV dinners. Plastic peas, library-paste mashed potatoes and a few slabs of well-rotted shoeleather drenched in diluted motor-oil are not exactly my idea of food for the inner man. However, making it back to my pad from the Foundation and determined to blow the accumulated muck out of my mind in the far East Village coffee-house scene, I was in no mood for restaurants and even in less of a mood to cook real food.

  So I threw a turkey TV dinner into the oven and by the time it was as ready to eat as it would ever be, I had convinced myself that I wasn’t really hungry anyway. The TV dinner itself did nothing to change my mind.

  Well, anyway, the TV dinner had taken care of my hunger, one way or another, and after I threw the aluminum foil tray into the garbage, I was ready to see what the night would hold. Except...

  Except it was really November outside: temperature barely goosing 30 and a wet wind blowing. What I really needed after that Foundation scene was a nice June night when everyone and everything pours into the streets and you don’t have to think about going anywhere in particular. I had a yen for the street, but I knew that once I stepped out of the steam heat and into the cold sullen November street, I’d quickly end up making for Stanley’s or the Blue Goo or the Id or some other downer dive and the kind of crowd that had started to get pretty boring in the last few months. Cold weather in New York does that to you—kills the urge to wander.

  But I had no intention of brooding around my pad, so I ch
anged to Levis and a heavy flannel shirt, put on my warm black toggle-coat, pulled up the hood to protect my ears and ventured out into the dingy hallway. As I reached the stairwell, I heard a girl’s footsteps on the tin stairs about a flight below me.

  I started down the stairs, but on the first landing down, I met Robin puffing her way up from below. Her ears and nose were bright pink from the cold—which made going outside seem a crummier idea than ever.

  She frowned when she saw me. “Oh shit, man,” she said, “you’re going somewhere?”

  “Nowhere important.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She smiled, reached into her peacoat pocket, pulled out a little brass opium pipe and a tinfoil-wrapped cube about half an inch on a side, said: “Groovy. Let’s go up to your place and blow some of this hash.”

  “Best offer I’ve had all day.”

  My eyes were popping from the effort not to cough and my throat felt like a furnace flue. The civilized way to smoke hash, for my money, is ground up with pot in a joint. But it wasn’t my money or my hash, so we were smoking little brown chips of it in the opium pipe and it was pure murder on my throat and lungs.

  A mule kicked me in the Adam’s apple and I coughed out a typhoon of blue-gray smoke. I coughed again and again—top of my head seemed to explode in a shower of sparks with each spasm. But when I stopped coughing, I felt a delicious hollowness inside, feeling of containing the universe, conscious of the sweet cool air pouring into my lungs like the kiss of the sea. That’s hash: if you’re not a heavy cigarette-head, it can go down like honking Ajax, but man, you do come up high!

  Leaning back on the couch next to me, Robin blew a thin stream of smoke high into the air like a spouting whale, no coughing, just as cool as you please. My throat still felt like it had been napalmed, but after four tokes of hash, who gave a shit?

  “Very nice...” I drawled.

  Robin giggled. Ripples of giggle shimmered the blue smoke in the air.