Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

“What’s your story, bitch?”

She stared back at him. She had experienced it all during her peregrinations. This approach was not new. But the boy was. There was money here; more money than Shelly would ever know, because the same things she saw in her mirror each morning, she saw in his face.

“You bore me, Mr. Preston. Please let go of my wrist. Or I’ll have to call Shelly.”

He pulled her further toward him. The bar top cut painfully into her stomach. “You keep chewin’ on me, bitch, I’m gonna climb your frame.”

She sneered. “That seems to be your only interest, Mr. Preston. You’re an animal, you know.”

He reached across with the other hand and wrapped it in her hair. He was standing as tall as he could, pulling her up by wrist and hair, painfully, when Shelly came out of the bedroom, half-dressed, on his way to the bathroom.

Stag did not see him. Carlene saw him out of the corner of her eye. Shelly saw it all.

“Animal, huh? You never saw how much of an animal I can be, bitch. I got an animal’s—”

“You’ve got an animal’s mouth, Stag,” Shelly said coldly, from the doorway. “Get your goddam hands off her before I tear your windpipe out!”

Stag did not loosen his hold, but his head turned, and at first a quip formed on his lips; then he saw the white, corded expression on Shelly’s face. Then he let Carlene drop. She plopped back behind the bar with a gasp.

“Get out of here; go wait in the lobby,” Shelly said, pointing a trembling finger at him.

Stag started to argue, started to mouth inanities about fun & games. “Get out of here, you little bastard, before I crack your skull for you.”

He moved away from the bar, but he wasn’t finished. He was Stag Preston and he didn’t go quietly.

“S’long, bitch,” he said to Carlene, ignoring Shelly. “Don’t forget us animals; we get around to makin’ it sooner than you’d think.”

Shelly moved toward him, threateningly, and Stag paced himself enough to make the door before the shorter man reached him— without actually running.

As Stag opened the door, Carlene said, very gently, “Goodbye, Mr. Preston. Come again.”

He looked at her as the door closed. It was not a look of enmity. The rank, raw glance of the mating beasts smoldered there.

The door closed and Carlene began mixing another drink. Shelly began to feel like Frank Buck.

Three nights later, the Colonel’s talk still painfully reverberating in his memory, Shelly found himself with Stag, two chorus girls out of Carnival ! and a half dozen assorted nameless hanger-on nonentities down front at the Bon Soir. Stag had particularly wanted to make the scene that night.

“A zonky-lookin’ com-eed-ee-an,” Stag had said.

When it came to the patois of the Broadway hipsters that Stag had recently adopted, Shelly was of the express opinion that a little vocabulary was a dangerous thing.

The “zonky com-eed-ee-an” turned out to be a nationally-famous cabaret performer, no longer a spring chicken, who was breaking in a new act. Stag sat through the first show, his ears turned off to the mildly-blue (while attempting to be Sahlishly controversial/contemporary/sociological) material, but his eyes corked open on the woman in her stranglingly tight, blue-sequined gown. With every breath, the décolletage dipped and so did Stag’s eyes. Shelly felt, however, that as long as he kept Stag off the bottle, the boy would behave himself. What did itch at his peculiarity center, however, was that Stag made frequent trips to the men’s room.

The first six times, Shelly (ah, glorious naiveté!) assumed it was the debilitating effects of the ginger ales Stag had been swilling. But when the singer returned from his seventh sojourn, wobbling, as it were, through the ranks and files,

Shelly realized the kid had either been nipping from a flask secreted on his person, or from a cache deposited with the black attendant in the washroom.

Stag slumped heavily into his seat, instantly returning his hand to its former position somewhere beneath the skirt of the tender Carnival ! showgirl. She made not a sound; or as Shelly put it to himself: not a mumblin’ word.

When the second show began, Stag sat up very straight, twisting at his tux’s bow tie, crookeding, rather than straightening it.

When the comedienne made her entrance in an amber spot, this time in a flame-red velvet gown that flared mambo style at her trim calves, Stag literally began to drool. His palms were wet and red from applauding. She smiled down at him with the phony stage affection packaged and sold to performers in gross lots. Stag flipped.

Halfway through her routine (accompanied as it was by sporadic paradiddles by the drummer in time to the performer’s bumps and punctuating grinds), Stag leaped up, took two steps and three obscene phrases toward her, and encountered a solid right to the cheek.

The slap was heard ’round the room.

“Sit down, tot,” she snarled, “I stopped picking green apples like you when I was thirteen.”

The laughter was heard ’round the room.

Stag, infuriated, went for her and managed to wrap a hand in the dress.

The rip was heard ’round the room.

Shelly, ghost-white and furious, tore Stag away from the stage, pushed and hurled him back out of the club, the comedienne cursing foully from her naked vantage point in the amber spot. The next day the columnists took a swinging shot at Stag Preston.

The shot was heard ’round the world.

“I’m telling you, Colonel, it doesn’t mean a thing. They can say anydamnthing they want in the columns, it only makes for good copy on the kid. Okay, so he’s a problem, but I’m telling you it’s only the success that’s going to his head. He’ll get over it.” Shelly was sweating.

“This is it, Sheldon,” the Colonel said, from his chair. He was deep in the chair. Neptune about to open the waters and engulf those audacious enough to defile his realm.

“Look. Colonel. The kid’s strongest source of publicity is the whispering campaign these teenagers have got. As long as the underground loves him, the hell with what the big-mouth columnists say. I’m telling you it’s worked this way before and it’ll work this way again. The kid is solid, and no little incident like that one last night can hurt him. Now I’m assuring you, Colonel, that blah and blah and blah blah blah…”

Long, and hard, and far into the night.

It finally quelled the savage thrust of Freeport’s anger. The waves broke on the rocks and crags of Sheldon Morgenstern’s quick thinking. The Colonel subsided, but it was the uneasy rest of a dyspeptic giant threatening to break slumber and seven-league stomp the principality.

Which was all prelude and prologue to The Affair of the Road Show Romance.

Lyric and refrain by Stag Preston, last of the red-hot papas.

Stag was practicing dropping putts into a simulated fairway cup in the exact center of his bedroom. He was using a specially-made iron with his name in gold on the shank. One more of the many big-time habits the singer had taken up with his sudden success. He kept his head down, knees locked, and followed-through sharply, sending the red dot on the golf ball rolling over and over.

He missed the shot by a good three feet.

Then he looked up at Shelly.

“I don’t dig, Shelly baby. Why we goin’ outta the Big Apple?”

Shelly perched on the arm of a chair, rolling the cigarette between tongue and lip. “Forget the hip patter, Stag. Talk to me in native English.”

Stag made a placating gesture. Awkwardly, still holding the putting iron. He replaced it in the hand-tooled leather caddy bag and moved over to Shelly. “Gimme a cigarette.”