Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

“Hey, Stag-baby.” Porter Hackett pulled the emergency brake forward and clicked off the lights. “We is here. Dis de blace.”

Stag looked up and for a moment it was as if everything swam under a film of fleshy plastic. Like the oily skim on the gefilte fish Shelly had tried to get him to eat one afternoon at the Stage Delicatessen back in New York. Everything had twin shapes, superimposed one on another, and he had to blink to realize he was not deranged, but only momentarily fogged by moisture in his eyes, and by the smoggy night, and by the peculiar blue spots playing across the front of the huge Moorish mansion.

He opened the door on his side and stepped out.

The house was built along the lines of a decaying castle, rotting as it settled, like a bad tooth. It was massive, dark and altogether bizarre, bathed in deep blue by the strategically-placed spot on the great front lawn.

“You’re kidding, of course,” Stag said to Porter.

The shorter man laughed—a bit too violently considering the depth of humor in Stag’s words. Stag gave him a bemused and disgusted sidewise glance. “You know, sometimes you really are a drag, Porter.”

Again, Porter Hackett laughed. It was his bit. His shtick. He couldn’t afford not to laugh. They walked toward the front door of the house. From within, Stag could hear the squeal of female voices, a shatter of crystalline hysterical laughter. A bit of a dream shattering.

He grinned down at Porter Hackett.

“We’re gonna have us a time, Porter-boy!” He threw an arm across the shorter man’s shoulders. “Yes indeed sir, we gonna have us a bawl tonight, sweetie!”

Porter Hackett had an entirely different meaning as he looked up into a cashier’s check for one hundred thousand dollars and grinned. “You can bet on that, baby!”

Glib. That was Porter Hackett.

Somewhere Stag could hear the musical, lulling whirr of a movie camera grinding. But he was too busy to concentrate on it. He was all addled and muddled and befuddled and warm with pleasure. He was stretched out on top of just about the ginchiest chick he’d ever seen. A loose-mouthed doll, with hair all blonde and combed close to the head and pulled down into a braid off one side of her small, exquisite head. The girl had a name—Stag was sure of that—but he didn’t know it. Her eyes were very small and he could see the blue smoke in them, if he peered close.

But they were drawn down and half-closed with passion, and opened only a fraction each time Stag thrust down into her.

He could hear sounds. They were fine sounds. Cool sounds. The girl was making them, over and over, and he liked the sounds, trying to match them. Someone said, “Move the mike in a little, ah, that’s got it; sweet !” But Stag paid no attention. The girl was smooth and warm all over and he had this heavy thing on his back and it was himself, pressing down into the blonde girl. He loved her, he really loved her, she was so warm and all.

A while or so later, or so he thought, a while later, he was with another girl … she had very black hair and it was all loose and he put his hands through it and draped it over his face so he was hidden in a little hut of nice silky black, but someone said, “Get his face outta there, we gotta see it, for Arnie to … that’s got it, now keep him faced around like … ah, yeah … swing!”

So Stag swingadingding and the weight on his back wasn’t himself anymore, it was guess who! The blonde again and all three of them were there having a wonderful time and there were smooth things to touch and little hard things to touch and everybody was swinging warm and swinging wild.

Stag had a wonderful time.

Until he was back outside with a sour stomach and a buzz of Christmas tree lights that bubbled inside his head, getting into Porter’s car once more, and one of the girls who was in the car said, “What’ll we call it, huh, honey?”

So Stag listened because this was ’mport’nt, wasn’t it. And he heard Porter, his sweetie bubbie glib Porter Hackett answer with a twinkle in his voice. “Well, this is his magnum opus, this’s his finest effort to date, and we got a name for it.”

And the girl asked again, annoyed, and a little tipsy herself, “So whaddaya gonna call it … c’mon!”

Porter laughed in the back of Stag’s head, and answered simply:

“We’re going to call it STAG !”

It fit.

Porter Hackett waited only long enough to have half a dozen prints made of the film and an equal number of tape recordings cut off the master, to be synchronized with the film. He did not have long to wait, for in the rumpus room of the huge Moorish-style mansion there was a completely outfitted darkroom. A fully outlined processing set-up. A fully developed facility for producing dozens and dozens of “art films” to be sold and distributed throughout the country.

For smokers. For stag dinners. For office parties. For private collectors. For fraternity rush parties.

For blackmail.

When Porter and his two-hundred-and-twenty pound sidekick tried to get the money from Stag, he laughed them out of the scene. Stag Preston knew almost all there was to know about handling himself on the stage; he even knew a considerable amount in the field of human reactions, taken singly or taken as a gestalt in the shape of an audience. He did not know about the fickle turning of public opinion … that emotional mob rule without reason, such a mixture of love and lust and sin and hate … that admiration so easily turned to vitriol. Hate/love. The cliché held. They weren’t a thin line apart—they were the same.

Shelly knew it.

Freeport knew it.

They saw the film and blanched. There had been smoker movies, and there had been smoker movies, but this … this … it was aptly titled Stag !

Their money-making child star, clean-cut and continental Stag Preston had performed every obscenity in de Sade’s scrapbook with a few melodramatic touches of his own, reminiscent of his earthy, all-too-human style before more legitimate cameras. Someone had to pay the ransom for the films.

Over the barrel and into the woods, without a paddle to break over Stag Preston’s head.

They negotiated. The price went up for dallying. Two hundred thousand dollars. Stag suddenly found he was not as affluent as he had imagined. Advances had been drawn on his records, more than would allow any further; his payments on the Universal contract were tied up with the accountants and the tax people—they had been spaced out over a period of years to allow him the best possible break, though he was in the 91 percent tax bracket; and he was into Freeport for a staggering sum.

“Aw, to hell with it!” Stag said, folding his arms, stubbornly staring out the window. “Let them show the damned thing. Let them run it in every theatre in the world, see if I give a damn!” He was a three-year-old, railing idiotically at the adult world.

Shelly stood over him, trying (he knew not why) to explain the seriousness of it all. “What’s the matter with you? You got holes in your head to let the stupidity run out? Bigger names than you have been ruined by less than this. Are you clowning, or what?”

Stag snarled, “Who? Who ever got ruined? You tell me one: just name me one!”

Shelly threw up his hands. “This isn’t Monroe on a nude calendar. Or Mitchum smoking a little grass. Wasn’t anything wrong with that. This is pornography, smut, filth, screwing, you simpleton! It can get you blackballed by every PTA and American Legion post in the country. The Legion of Decency will be all over you like piranha fish. The NODL will excommunicate anybody who even reads the marquees on your film, you stupe! The record company will dump you. Universal wouldn’t touch you if you were gilded. Kid, you’ll be back in the slums of Louisville so fast you won’t know which way the truck went!”