Harlan Ellison - No Doors, No Windows

I took her out to dinner and we played grabass in the car, and it was that seldom once-in-a-while fine thing, being turned on by a woman who was also a person and had stuff going for herself, and knowing that even if my Wurlitzer rotted and fell off, even if her Charlies sagged and turned to empty Baggies, we’d still be buddies and craft companions and could laugh at all the bats and their bum plays.

Which was what I needed. Because you see, down where I lived, down here in my gut, I was foundering. I was going down for the third time, sucking up all the bile in my nostrils and my mouth, feeling the tide beating black in my head. So Holdie was a life preserver. Hosannah!

Then, less than a month after I’d met her, I was doing some talking with the editor of a men’s magazine I’d written for. He was desperate for high-grade material. I was already boxed-in on assignments, didn’t have the time for him, and he was crying the blues.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ve got just the writer for you. Holdie Karp. Really dynamite writer. You’ve seen her stuff in Cosmo and Esquire , haven’t you?”

He opened up like a flower after the rain.

I couldn’t wait to get over to her house in the hills, to tell her she could make a grand a month just selling reprints of her other magazine pieces. Picked up a couple of barbequed beef sandwiches and milk shakes, and came ripping into her driveway doing fifty. Almost hit her MG.

She was covered with black from changing a typewriter ribbon, hair dangling down onto her big chest, tongue hanging out at the sight of the food. She gave me an enormous, sloppy kiss and rolled her eyes like a panda, trying to figure out if she wanted food first, or bed first.

“No sex,” I said sternly. “No sex. I have the world’s greatest deal for you. Only the world’s most sen-say-sheh-null deal. A star you’ll be by this time tomorrow, buhbie. A star of the first magnitude!”

I came on like an eight-axle diesel. I ran her all the data on what the editor needed, on how she had the subsidiary rights to all her work and could sell it for more than what she’d gotten the first time because this was a national magazine and not a local newspaper or a dinky underground sheet. She reeled back and flopped on the sofa, barely missing crushing her dog, Roger.

“Let me see everything you’ve written in the past year,” I said. “Now! Jump jump jump!”

I knew that in one of the cubbyholes of her neat roll-top desk she had a stack of unpaid bills, and I knew she was too independent a creature to let me pay any of them for her. She was making money, but not a lot. She was on her way, and in another year or two she’d be one of the hottest female writers in the country … but right now she needed some bread. And here was I, God the Savior, ready to dump just globs and gobs of manna in her neat long-nailed hands. Ah, she would adore me!

Then I realized she wasn’t as enthused as I thought she should be. Her eyes were almost cold. Her mouth was tight.

“Come on, Rapunzel, bestir yo’ ass. Lemme see them carbons. Trot out the goodies!”

She got up and went over to the filing cabinet where she kept all the yellow second-sheet copies of her stories and articles. She fished around, not saying a word, and came up with a stack. She handed them to me, and I went over by the fireplace and sat down, started reading.

An hour went by. She lit the fire in the fireplace and fixed me a cup of her good coffee, with a wedge of coffee cake on the saucer. I read and read, and set aside half a dozen articles I thought would work.

Finally, I turned the last page of the last article, and realized I hadn’t heard her pounding her typewriter all the time I’d been reading. I knew she had a deadline on a piece about costume designers for Cosmopolitan due that Friday; and the silence suddenly scared me.

I turned around and she was still sitting in the same place on the sofa, watching me. Her body may have been in the same room with me, but her soul and mind were off someplace in faraway frigid Tibet, understudying the Dalai Tama.

“What’s the matter?”

She didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Nothing.” Which was still not saying anything.

Holdie Karp had turned me off.

“Listen, I think ,” I said, “the piece on airline stewardesses would be perfect for him, if you wrote a new lead paragraph slanting it for men — every guy in America thinks stewardesses put out, right? — and drop in about five sexy paragraphs here and there. And the piece on nude models is perfect the way it is. And the —”

“No.”

I stared at her. “What?”

“I said: no.”

“What no? He’ll lay two-fifty on you for every one of these he uses. I can see three of them right here that can make it; that’s seven hundred and fifty bucks. What’re you, allergic to a life without bill collectors?”

“I don’t know if those nude modeling agencies are still down there on Santa Monica.”

“So what. These, three others, none at all. What’s it matter? This is Americana, baby. It presents a great picture of what it was like when you wrote it, and that was only six months ago. Of course they’re still down there. So change the names, make ’em fictitious. Who cares? The guys in Topeka who read the magazine don’t give a shit.”

“I care.”

I thought maybe I’d lost my way. “What the hell is wrong with you? Look, okay, don’t write a new lead on this one about the stews. I’ll take them down to his office tomorrow just as they are … I’ll lay them on him. He’s anxious to buy your stuff. He wants an original from you. Christ, Holdie, this can mean ten grand a year for you … you’ll have all the time you want to write the stuff you want to write. You’ve been telling me you want to get heavier behind short stories, well, this is your chance.”

“No.”

I was getting mad now. Didn’t this brain damage case know when I was trying to do her a favor?

“Well, fuck it, baby, I’m taking these down tomorrow, and if you have any qualms about the money, you can stuff the checks in your bidet for all I care!”

I turned around and lit a cigarette.

It was dead silent for a long while.

Then she was speaking, behind me. I didn’t turn around, I just listened.

“You know, you come on just like a benevolent dictator. Deus ex machina. You try to steamroller me. My ex was like that, except he insinuated himself, not like you, like a jackhammer. He kept telling me I couldn’t do this or that, or the other thing, until I believed him. He got me so goddamned dependent on him that when we broke up I thought I had lost everything. I was right at the bottom, you know. But I wanted to be a writer. I wanted it more than I even wanted him back. So I worked, and I’m still working, and I’m not going to backslide. I’m not going to make the same mistakes I made with my life before. There was a guy after my ex, a rebound, you know. And I let him do for me, little things, but after a while I was dependent again. And I didn’t even love him! I know my pattern, and I’m not falling into it again.”

I was furious. I jumped up and came down on her like … like a steamroller, like a jackhammer, like a benevolent dictator … “Listen, you stupid, you! I’m ten years ahead of you in the writing thing. I starved and suffered, and I thought that made me holier than shit, because I didn’t deserve any good things happening to me. But that’s a crock of piss, you know, because I had talent, and I deserved whatever I could knock out of the rock for myself. And I’m trying to shortcut a little heartache for you. Do you think there’s some fucking nobility in poverty? Don’t be an asshole! Poor is dirty, and poor is chained, and money means freedom, and it means you can write better and more, and what you want. So what the hell are you trying to do to me here, make me feel guilty for wanting to do you a favor?”