Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

Nor did the orange juice taste bitter.

So he told it. He told it all to himself, in a matter of moments as he walked the little redhead through the wings and up the metal stairs to Stag’s dressing room. He thought about Louisville and Asa Kemp, about that first appearance at the Kentucky State Fair, about the look in Stag’s eyes as they had flown away from Louisville. Shelly even remembered what Stag had said.

He had remembered it all, in that moment. Four full years of it. The creating of a talent, the sneak preview in Cleveland where the A&R men had sensed the talent building in the boy once known as Luther. The first gold record, the rush of success, the drinking and girl trouble, the night he had been slapped by the comedienne (what had happened to her? she’d cut one comedy album and then phffft!). Shelly had brought it all back in an instant of vacant thought; the tour, Trudy Quillan and the beating the Colonel had given Stag; the revelation that Stag had lied about his childhood and the gradual realization on Shelly’s part that he had been rotting for many years. The movie deal, the blackmail after Stag had drunkenly made his pornoflick, Stag’s selling off the chunks of his contract, and finally Asa Kemp’s death, the scene with Ruth Kemp, and Carlene’s leaving. It had all seemed so fast.

Too fast.

Was it possible?

Could it have been?

Four years?

Yes, that’s what it had been. Four full years, in which Sheldon Morgenstern had become a cipher. He had had no life of his own. His every moment had been devoted to Stag Preston. His sex had been CarleneSex, which was none at all. That had been a draining process, not a giving process. Now she lived with Stag, in an apartment the singer had rented and furnished (under Jean Friedel’s grudging supervision; Paul McCobb, Knoll and Saarinen did not happen to be Stag’s taste; he ran more to Kresge, Woolworth and Lamston, so he had dragooned Jean into doing it for him.) Lots of luck to them both. The cobra and the tiger lie down together.

It was a torrent of memory, in that walking time between the alley and Stag’s dressing room. It was all the silt of incidents deposited abruptly in the delta of his mind. He had it all, all of it, captured there, each bit of time and space prismed and imprisoned as though on a slide, about to go under the microscope.

Even the taking of this girl, this abundantly-built teen-ager, to Stag’s dressing room. That had been part of the memory, slipping into the past even as it happened. For it seemed to have happened a dozen other times … and, in point of fact, had happened a dozen times since Stag had come to The Palace…

When Stag had come offstage that first time, the day after Ruth Kemp had gone back to Louisville, he had made his initial request. “There’s a girl in the fifth row down there, Shelly. She’s got black hair in a pixie cut. I motioned to her to come around back after the show. Get her up to the dressing room, will you?”

Shelly had carefully removed the cigarette from his lips, his eyes narrowing; it was all he had been able to do to keep his fist from balling and driving straight into the kid’s mouth. Very quietly he answered, “I’m a stockholder, Stag, not your pimp. If you want to get her, go get her yourself.”

Then Stag had made some penetrating comments about how easy it would be to drop a mention to Winchell or Lyons or Killgallen—oh, very delicately—outlining the switch in residence of Carlene. It certainly wouldn’t kill anyone, but what a helluva lot of snickers and glances askance it could cause in Lindy’s or The Stage Delicatessen. That sort of business could rob a guy of his manhood, muy pronto .

It had been that, partially, no mean threat in a world predicated on how many times a night you could make the scene with a chick. But it had been more. It had been the awkward feeling that his presence might keep Stag from even greater evils. An egocentric thought, Shelly knew, but one that continued to intrude. Stag had been his creation, and thus was his responsibility. It would be too easy to check out now, letting the kid run loose. He had to stay close by and absorb some of the driving shock of the kid’s rampages. He had to get in the way of the pneumatic drill.

So, illogically or not, Shelly had become Stag Preston’s procurer. All these thoughts, four years’ worth of them, as the little redhead followed Shelly up the gunmetal-gray stairs to her idol’s dressing room.

Shelly knocked on the door, but he knew Stag could not hear it. Stag was out on the fire escape, doing another number, giving his “papoose” show that rode on the back of the regular performance in the theatre, helping to empty the seats for a new audience in two hours when he went on again.

Shelly opened the door and hustled the redhead before him. She stood transfixed, staring at God within a few feet of her, his back turned, one foot up on the rowel of the fire escape enabling him to brace his guitar. He was playing “Light a Fire” and comping behind it with broad chords and slides:

It was a gutty, almost burley bump-&-grind treatment with every whump ! accented by a thrust and counter-thrust of hips. Down in the alley behind the theatre, the horde went wild, and behind him, in the dressing room, the little redhead did her own private flip.

Just as Stag finished, bowed for the inevitable mad applause from below, and launched into “Warm Baby” (indistinguishable from “Light a Fire” save for the placement of whump!) the phone rang. Shelly ground out the most current cigarette in a coffee cup on the dressing table and put the receiver to his ear. “Yeah?”

“Shelly? Jeanie.”

“Hi. What’s happening?”

“Stag finished the first show?”

Shelly looked out onto the fire escape. “Yeah, I guess you’d call it that. He’s feeding the animals a few scraps off the fire escape now.”

“I’ve got some contracts here from Sid Feller; he wants your signature and Stag’s. It looks like ABC-Paramount’s going to release a two-record Commemorative Set of his gold records, or some ridiculous thing. Will you be there for a while?”

Shelly moved against the wall, shielding his mouth, watching the redhead to make certain she could not hear. “The Marquis de Sade has a new case study going on at the moment,” he said.

“He’s still putting the make on those kids, oh Shelly!”

“Listen, what can I do … ?” He shrugged helplessly.

“Oh, Shelly, can’t you do some thing? Did you get her up there for him again?” He did not answer. She spoke again. “Did you, Shelly?” Still no answer. Shame rode silently along the wire. Finally: “Oh, Shelly !”

He snapped at her. “Lay off me! It’s a living, isn’t it?”

Her answer was brief: “Is it?”

The tone of his answer had not been the New Shelly. It had been an Old Gimme-Gimme Shelly. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “But at least with me around he can’t take ’em on the rug against their will.”

Stag finished “Warm Baby” at that moment, and took his applause.

“Should I bring the contracts over?” Jean Friedel asked.

“Yeah, I suppose. C’mon over, we’ll wait.”

A third voice broke into the conversation: “Who’s coming over? Who’re we waiting for?” Stag had come in off the fire escape, seen the girl, and heard Shelly’s end of the conversation. Now he had again taken control; a few words and he was in charge.