Harlan Ellison: Spider Kiss

Life is not art. In art, they go into the sunset arm in arm and live happily ever after. Fade to black, and credits. In life they go into the sunset, argue about whether the furniture will be Swedish Modern or French Provincial, whether the baby’s name will be Frederick Alan after her father or Timothy Tyler after his father, and inside two years begin the path to Reno. In art it is all clean, neat, final, tied up in a socko exit line and a clear moral point. In life it is messy; the ex-lovers see each other a few more times, drag it out, do it sloppy.

The guy who rebelled slips back and takes a few more jabs to his ethics, his manhood and his pride. The nice black-and white punch lines get muddy and gray and insubstantial. The Fastest Gun in the West grows old and wets his bed. The Wicked Witch of the East gets psychoanalyzed and turns out to be a latent dyke. The beautiful princess gets a little too heavy and the prince cheats on her with a scullery maid. It happens. That’s life.

And because it’s life, can’t be anything but simple true life, it had been no more than life for Shelly Morgenstern. It might have been nice had the time in the hospital room been the last time he saw Stag Preston. But it wasn’t. Stag’s rise had been fast, his descent even faster, but the ends were not cut off that neatly. There was one more time, two and a half years later.

Stag had disappeared upon release from the hospital. For his own good, and to dodge the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts he had accrued. Shelly had at first tried to get a line on him, follow him by a close reading of the trades, but it was as though the boy had unzipped the Earth, popped in, and zipped it back over his head.

The moral responsibility Shelly had felt drained almost completely. Time heals. Etc.

Then, two and a half years later, on a publicity junket in New Orleans, Sheldon Morgenstern encountered one of the loose ends of his life. On Bourbon Street with a group of press agents, merely walking, going for a pot of jambalaya, a nice crawfish etouffée stew, a big bowl of andouille gumbo, Shelly passed a strip joint. Kandee Barr was peeling in the joint. The name aroused Shelly, for in half a dozen other buff shows down the strip he had seen billboards boasting Candy Barr, Candi Bahr, Kandy Bar and Candy C. Barr. In smiling at this particular Miss Barr’s photo, life-size and voluptuous, his eyes met someone else’s. A dark, intense, lingering look, even in the photo that held his glance.

It was Stag Preston.

He was singing in the strip joint. He was alive, and working, and singing in this strip joint. Shelly excused himself, suggested the fellows go on up to the restaurant, not waste those reservations, have their gumbo, and he’d meet them back at the hotel.

Then he entered the club.

It had no name.

He didn’t want to know the name.

What sights beyond vision in such places; the trysting places of meaning, where men test their souls, and the vista must be conversant, sympathetic with the mood. What places are these, where great tries are tried, great ties are tied, and great treaties formed. What importance they have, and how seldom they fit. Seldom.

It was dingy, soggy, frayed, splayed, smoky, smoked-out, just damned weary in the nameless strip joint. Artificial as a plastic leg. The walls were of an unidentifiable wood, paneled as though to signify something—perhaps at one time intimacy or relaxation—but saying nothing. The smoke eddied and misted and drifted, a heavy low-hanging cumulus that made Shelly’s eyes water. He had been a smoker all his life, and for the first time of which he was aware, cigarette smoke was making him uncomfortable. The veil was partially drawn, and he wanted to see, to see ! All of it.

Just beyond the bare semicircle in which he stood, separated by a worn velvet rope and two tarnished brass posts supporting its flaccid droop, the tables began. Four chairs to a table, all filled with dark shapes hunched in toward the center, or sprawled away from the nucleus, touching female thighs and knees and arms. The men were mostly alone, but some had been hooked, some had been pinged by the unerring sonar of a B-girl slathered with pancake makeup into the hairline. Some of these men had been picked-up, some had been lucked-out, some had been cleaned-out … and some had even brought the wife to this naughty place. But mostly the men were alone. They would, probably, always be alone. Lost in the cumulus.

Just beyond the tables was the raised stage, and on the stage a girl of—why bother to mention them—attributes was peeling. Her flesh was yellow, very yellow, blue, very blue, then red, very very red and back to yellow as the gels spread their diseased light across her empty face, her swollen thighs, her meaningless breasts. She was doing things. They had no interest for Shelly.

“Table, Mister?” The maitre d’ was pear-shaped, out of a comic strip dealing with pugs and hipsters and fat little men in checked suits who spoke from the recesses of their noses. Shelly reached into his side pocket, brought out a bill and waved it through the maitre d’s immediate venue.

“This, when you tell Stag Preston that Shelly Morgenstern is out here and wants to see him.” The pear-shaped man nodded at the bill, puffed a cheek in empty meditation, and turned away. He threaded his way among the tables, into a curtained archway and out of sight. Shelly lit up and waited, seeing the girl because there was nothing else to see. She had split nipples and stretch marks on her belly from a tough pregnancy.

A little bit of time passed and the pear-shaped man returned, hand first. Shelly gave him the bill and the maitre d’ unhooked the velvet cord. He fastened it behind Shelly and led him to a table off to one side, with only two chairs, neither occupied.

Shelly sat and the pear-shaped man inquired about a drink. Shelly shook his head, turning the scene off as easily as a shower.

He waited, and continued waiting until he felt the hand on his shoulder. “Hi, kid,” he said, staring straight ahead.

The body moved around him, a hand reached into his line of vision, pulling out the chair, and then the body in its tuxedo lowered into his sight, first the waist, then the stomach, then the chest, the shoulders, the neck, the chin, the scars, the face, the eyes, and he was there, once more, completely in Shelly Morgenstern’s life.

He was no longer the golden boy of the rock’n’roll world. He was no longer even a boy. If he was a man, he was some kind of man that did not exist in the world of reality, of sight and sound and emotion. He was something else completely. The ravages of his own sins and sour living had caught up with him, beat the hell out of him and left him for gone, but he had fooled them. He had saved the hulk, pieced it together with Scotch Tape and gin and grapnels thrown into the cliff because it was a long drop.

He was on the verge of alcoholism. The abyss lay in his eyes.

The end result of what he was now, living in the Bowery, on the Embarcadero, on every Skid Row from Bangor to Bangkok, was called a “wetbrain.” He wasn’t that yet, and he probably never would be, because the scream was still there, like the abyss, in the eyes, in the cruel mouth … but it was bad, very nasty, very bad indeed.

There was even the faint stink of the junkie about him. There? Yes, there, that faint odor, is that it? High-tech crematoria, autopsy rooms, dumpsters outside slaughterhouses.

It was obvious Stag Preston had gone in search of artificial stimuli to bring back tumescence to the limp dick of his dead dreams. In the high flights of liquor and junk he was still Stag Preston. On Top. Up There. Pow !