Harlan Ellison: Spider Kiss

“Maybe I’d like to hear you play?” Shelly said; he was sure he could handle the kid, wiry and tall though he appeared, even slouched into an “S” on the chair.

“What foah?”

“I’m from New York. I’m with Colonel Jack Freeport, you ever hear of him?”

The boy shook his head slowly. He wasn’t giving an inch. “What’s your trouble, Mistuh? You want somethin’ from me?”

Like a primitive , Shelly thought, taking in the narrowed eyes, the thin mouth, the wary expression, the hostility so near the surface.

“Nothing at all, Luther. I’m just with the Colonel, and he’s judging the big talent show at the Fair; you’ve heard about that , haven’t you?” He stared at the boy openly. Interested in him, without knowing why. There was a quality about Luther that interested Shelly. Vaguely. Disquietingly. Peculiarly.

The boy’s eyes now acquired a brightness, a gleam. “I know all about it. I’m entered.”

“Go ahead and play for me,” Shelly said. He slouched back against the wall, waiting.

Luther stared for another moment, then reached back, took out the guitar and slung the cord around his neck. Then he began to play, and to sing.

It was mostly rock’n’roll garbage, with occasional folk songs and Negro blues numbers included, either shuffle-rhythmed for backbeat, or delivered in a strange-to-Shelly mournful manner. He was impressed. The boy had a talent. It had been there distinctly, distantly, through the door as Shelly played cards, and now Morgenstern realized it had been nagging at him for some time.

He had wanted to hear this boy more closely.

Abruptly, he realized he might have stumbled on something more than amusing. At first it had been idle curiosity, then mild amusement and interest. But now…

“Get your coat,” he told the boy, when Luther paused in his strumming.

The boy stared at him suspiciously, half-confused, half-terrified. “Whut foah?”

“You’re coming over to The Brown to meet the Colonel.” You’re thirty-three years old, Shelly Morgenstern , he thought, and you’ve been losing a long while now. This time, just maybe, just may-damn-be, you’ll win . “C’mon, Luther, let’s get moving!”

Oh, you beautiful twanging Louisville delinquent, you!

The card players were plenty mad to see their dough slamming out of the room, out of the game. And who’d bring ice if that damned bellboy cut out?

Colonel Jack Freeport, when he slept, very much resembled a whale in shoal. Or the Île de France in drydock. Rousing him was very much a salvage job.

He finally burrowed out from under the covers and the oppressively stuffy closeness of the sealed, darkened bedroom, to blink at his wee-small-hours invaders.

“Just what the cursed devil do you think you’re doing, Shelly?” His face grew red as a stop sign, his otherwise pleasant features contorting in annoyance and frustration, verging on an infantile expression.

“Colonel—” Shelly began, shoving Luther forward.

Freeport exploded once more. “Do you have any idea how late I was in that meeting? This is inexcusable, Shelly. I’ve warned you about drinking, and if this is a sample of—”

Shelly stood over the bed, his mouth tightening down into a line of ricocheted annoyance. The Colonel had a right to be angry, but he had no right to stay angry, particularly with what Shelly had brought. “Colonel? If you’ll only listen a minute!”

" Listen to what ?" the Colonel cried, frustrated fury in every syllable.

" To this goddamn kid, that’s to what !" Shelly screamed back.

There was a long silence. An awkward silence, in which Luther made a hesitant step toward the door. “You stay put!” Shelly snapped, without completely turning.

Freeport sat up in the bed, running a hand through his thick, white hair. His eyes narrowed as he stared at the boy. Then he spoke calmly, as though deciding if he paid this man so much money, it might be worth his time to trust him. “All right, Shelly, explain why you want me to hear this boy.”

Shelly quickly gave him a rundown on the poker game, the music he had heard, and his excitement. “I felt you should hear Luther before the talent contest tomorrow. He’s entered in it, but that isn’t what counts. I thought—if you liked what he sounds like—we could…”

He sketched a promotional plan, and at its conclusion, Freeport was sitting on the edge of the bed in a deep purple silk bathrobe, nodding carefully at each point his PR man ticked off.

“It’s good, Shelly. Very good. And the contest, too?”

Morgenstern nodded, a crafty light flickering in his eyes. “The contest, too, as a starter. We can see how he does cold, with no fanfare, no puff at all. If the kid swings on his own, we’ve got us a hot property.”

Luther stood listening. What might have passed for an innocent, confused expression rested on his face. But that was precisely what it did; it rested there, a mask. He was listening. He was hearing everything being said, and applying it.

“Well, let’s hear him sing,” the Colonel said, shifting on the edge of the rumpled bed. “Let me hear what you can do, son.”

Shelly said, “Just take it easy, Luther, don’t press. Just sing for the Col—”

“Knock it off, big man,” Luther snarled. “I’m cooling it, I’m singin’, and you don’t hafta worry whut I’m gonna do.” The hardness of the streets was in his voice, mixed with the pleasant susurration of the Kentucky accent.

He pulled a plush chair to him, planted his foot directly in the middle of it, and began tuning the guitar. He did it hurriedly, expertly, and abruptly launched into a rockabilly version of “Birmingham Train” while the Colonel stared open-mouthed. So sudden had been the explosion of sound that neither Shelly nor his employer could quite grab a breath till the second verse.

By then, Luther had made it.

He was on his way.

He had come up with a product for which there was—at the moment—no demand whatsoever. But he had two of the most silken supply-and-demand men in the country on his side, seeing him not as a tall, willowy Kentucky street-snot with a guitar, but as a seven-figure bank account in the Chase Manhattan.

Luther What’shisname was about to become famous. “Shelly,” the Colonel said reverentially, when the boy had stopped playing, “you have dipped into pig slop and come up with a diamond.”

Luther Whateverhisname smiled. Knowingly. Complacently.

Cool.

Big men, happy men, are often equated with stupid men, slow men … men who substitute camaraderie for the sleek slyness of the professional sharpie. There had been such equations made of Colonel Jack Freeport. They had been made when he was in college, a penniless undergrad with pretensions to Southern nobility. Those who had seen in him a slightly overweight Good Time Jack had been rudely awakened; Freeport had managed to become a power on the campus, had talked any number of the most eligible co-eds into his bed, had promoted several offbeat deals that had made his financial way through higher education infinitely easier, and when he graduated, was labeled by the yearbook

NOT NECESSARILY MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED, BUT A SHOO-IN TO GET ANYTHING WORTH HAVING.

Jack Freeport had started small.

His first promotion was a string of girlie shows made up of local talent recruited from eight of the widest-open towns in the decadent South. Ostensibly song and dance grinds, the girls were emotionally and physically equipped to do double service as prostitutes, and in little over eighteen months,

Freeport was able to sell the operation to three brothers (one quarter Seminole) and invest his capital in the next ventures…