Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

Huck has been my truest friend for a lot of years; going on twenty. The affection I’ve had lavished on me by Huck and his wife Carol and their daughter Tracy has carried me through many thorny times. He is one of the few people ever to call me out because of my bad behavior and do it in such a wise and loving way that I stopped doing what I’d been doing and changed my manner. Tracy has been a constant amazement to me, growing from a clever child into a remarkable young woman, and all the while providing a handy reminder that not all modern kids turn out to be me-generation nitwits or Texas-Tower snipers. Carol, as architect and self-fulfilling prophecy of female determinism in these most parlous times, has filled my home with light and beauty and loyalty.

It helps. God knows it helps. When a writer spends decades taking nasty sojourns through the brutalized lives of the kinds of people that make interesting fiction, being able to balance it off against a happily married, sensibly oriented, constantly growing, decent and honest family unit helps, God knows it helps.

And how do I repay these limitless kindnesses? In ways I do not think Amy Vanderbilt would have approved: first, I blame the faint cavalier tone of adolescent sexism in this story—however innocent and moronically slaphappy it may be—on Huck. It was his fault, Gloria! Second, I used Haskell Barkin’s name for an utterly amoral, vacuous and psychopathic character in another story I wrote a long time ago. It is the perfect name for a big blond beach-bum kinda guy. Go sue me. Art sometimes demands rapacious behavior. (Or as Faulkner once put it: “If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”)

Arlo, great white hunter, at midnight, poked a bored finger (attached to a bored hand attached to a bored arm attached to a bored Arlo) toward Fred Mac Murray and Madeleine Carroll. It could not be said there was viciousness or even vindictiveness in the movement. But as von Clausewitz said in vol. II of Vom Kriege. any positive action, even if ultimately incorrect, is better than indecision, and no action at all. Fred and Madeleine were feigning animosity for one another as Arlo poked the off button.

They faded, it was still midnight, and Arlo was horny. So he decided to go shopping.

As a follow-up decision, he decided—since he was going to be in a supermarket anyway—to check the kitchen cabinets, to see what staples were vanishing.

Then he put on his stretch Levis and a Swiss velour; went out to his dusty eight-year-old Austin-Healey; headed for the statistically luckiest 24-hour supermarket, The Hollywood Ranch Market; went to Vine Street.

Arlo, Great White Hunter, at midnight plus ten.

He trundled the cart with the left rear wheel that did not revolve up and down the aisles for a while (with great difficulty), noting Signs Of The Times and The Advancement Of Man As Seen In His Artifacts:

There was now a boysenberry-flavored yogurt.

Civilization’s greatest achievement—Saran Wrap—now came in a roll-package with knobs on the end so you could wind it back up if you rolled out a tot too much.

One-to-one eggs were selling well.

Sesame seed party crackers had fallen off a point or two, but barbecue snax were on the rise. (Good, good!)

He accumulated a carton of corn flakes with very pukey dehydrated peach slices in the box, a can of pink applesauce that resembled tree moss from fairyland, and a package of kosher hot dogs. But as for the main hunt, there was very little to stir the blood or put color in the cheeks. (Women with machines in their hair—and particularly those wearing snoods with cilia waving—would be restricted to the bathrooms of the world, never even the living room—much less a public supermarket—when Arlo was elected God.)

Just as he turned right at dog food, somewhat abaft of canary seed, he caught sight of a pair of floral-patterned hip-huggers with bell-bottoms, the outline of the lower rolled edge of the underpants barely discernible in relief. A trifle skinny perhaps, this silver blonde with the loose and lacy matching top cut in an octagon far down the spine, but still the pelvic girdle looked highly functional.

Arlo stalked her past detergents, floor waxes and aerosol bombs (staying upwind so the beast would not catch his spoor), trying to decide whether his opening gambit need necessarily be the standard collision of carts, the chancier request for advice about spring vegetables or a go-to-hell inquiry as to whether or not he had seen her on a daytime soap. The latter worked well enough in the Hollywood Ranch at this hour, but it smacked of “the Industry,” and when coming on with actresses, it was always terra incognita.

Before he could reconcile the tactic, she was joined at the juncture of doughnuts and fruit juices by a man in an open-weave T-shirt (brawny, shaved early in the day). They began discussing what to have for tomorrow’s dinner as Arlo scurried past them. A foul oath escaped Arlo’s clenched gonads.

It was neither May, nor fair, at the Mayfair Market on Fountain and La Brea. A vast wasteland of dozing clerks and Muzak. An empty repository for rows and rows of color-coded commodities. A stalking-ground without prey. A shandah. A pure pain in the ass. He wasted half an hour buying a can of Pledge and three tins of sardines in wine sauce. But as ye cruise, so shall ye be cruised: he was accosted briefly and toothily by an aging homosexual with liver spots, who asked him how you tell a fresh cantaloupe.

As a last resort, before bed and a Seconal, Arlo did not turn north up his street, but continued ahead to a usually arid desert, the Ralph’s on Hollywood past Western. And there, as if the big greengrocer in the sky, he who smiles favorably on all such hegiras, had finally come back into the office and noticed Arlo’s button lit on the board, and sent her to him—there she stood, limned by the fluorescents of dalliance, lush in the simplicity of her skintight yellow ochre capris, seen through a glass starkly, wrestling with a grocery cart in the immense front window of Ralph’s. Arlo had almost gone shooting past the supermart—it was possible to clock the entire action in the store with a fast pass-down in the parking lot —but now, keeping one eye on the trembling roundnesses produced by her attempted disentanglement of the cart from its insertion into the long line of insertions (oh, lord, insertions!), he did a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn and plowed to a stop, half on the concrete walk that edged the storefront.

Arlo sprinted into the store,’ twelve seconds tardy. She had wrenched the cart free from its paramour, next in the line, and she was wheeling it down the nearest aisle, a side-to-side hipslung movement that was all sinuousness and the music of silks on silks. Arlo was transported. Oh, thank you thank you, Great Greengrocer In The Sky!

Arlo pursued, a cart before him like Quixote’s lance and shield. A breakneck lurch that slowed and modified into his strolling pace as he neared her behind, as he neared behind her, as behind her…

Fearing she might turn at any moment, Arlo obfuscated: he wrenched camouflage from the shelves and flipped it into the cart, heedless of form or content to the act: a box of Tampax, a tin of litchi nuts, a jar of maraschino cherries, a pack of frozen prawns, dietetic grapefruit slices.

Now he swung alongside her, two vehicles steaming down the freeway aisles of life, destined to cross at a king’s X of inevitability. Arlo perused prices, hefted weights, compared viscosities, his thoughts meanwhile cascading, plunging, avalanching down corridors of cunning. Tactics of encounter. This was no frippery, this statuesque color-coded commodity, fair traded and in highest demand by a legion of slavering consumers. No miniscule ploy for simpoleons—a fresh varient was required. How do I meet thee? Let me count the ways. Know your enemy. Loose hips sink kips. Wait, hark! See her now comparing bottled salad dressings, a bare minimal ten feet from you. What beauty, what form, what a goddam eternal verity, fade to black and ecstasy!