Harlan Ellison - Shatterday

He had no secrets when he wrote. He talked about his feelings when his mother had lingered in her endless midnight coma and he signed the order to kick out the plug on her life-support system; he revealed the most intimate secrets of his love life, with Leslie and others; he told stories on himself that men with more humility and a greater sense of shame would have buried in the vaults of their family secrets. Probably because of that open conversation that went on between Jimmy and his millions of readers, his popularity grew and grew. It was possible to trust a man who told everything, a man who could not be morally or literarily blackmailed. It made it seem reasonable that he would go to the burning core of whatever he wrote, because he was not afraid of sunlight striking the tomb of the vampire.

And once he took me with him.

I was living in Chicago at the time, doing editorial work on a men’s magazine. He called and asked if I was free that night, and if I was free would I like to accompany him on a “dangerous mission of research.”

Evenings spent in Jimmy’s company were many things, but they were seldom dull or uneventful. I said I was stoked for an adventure.

He picked me up in a Hertz rental at the office, and all he would say was that we were going deep into the South Side of the city, the section commonly known as Back of the Yards. Oh yes, he said one more thing: he was going to see a woman who had given him a case of the crabs.

I think I responded with the remark, “Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.”

But when we got there —there being a rundown tenement in a scuzzy section—I found an apartment half-filled with card-carrying criminals. They had the appearance of righteous gypsies, some kind of hyperthyroid Romany rejects. Eleven of them, looking like road company understudies for “The Wolf Man,” starring Madame Maria Ouspenskaya.

Four flights up, in what would have been called a railroad flat, had we been in New York and not Chicago, they sat around the kitchen staring at Jimmy and me with dark, hooded eyes. I felt like a cobra at a mongoose rally.

An extremely attractive young woman had opened the apartment door after Jimmy had knocked in a special cadence: two shorts close together, pause, then three more shorts.

“’Open, Sesame’ isn’t required, eh? How convenient,” I said. He gave me one of his looks.

And the door was opened by this extremely attractive young woman, who threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth. I stared beyond them, into the kitchen, and was greeted by the massed nastiness contained in ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes.

He held her away from him and murmured something too quietly for the gypsies to hear. What he said, Jimmy always the romantic, was: “What’re you pushing this time… cancer?”

She grinned and gave him a playful punch in the stomach—playful enough to straighten him out with a whooze of pain. Then she led him into the apartment. I followed, not happily.

Let me cut through all the subsequent hours of weird happenings. The background was this:

Jimmy had been out on the lecture circuit the year before. In Kansas City the usual gaggle of esurient sycophants who cannot differentiate between the Artist and the Art rushed the podium for autographs and cheap thrills such as the pressing of flesh. In the crowd had been an extremely attractive young woman who, when her turn came to thrust a book and a pen under Jimmy’s nose, had thrust neither. She had moved in quickly and thrust herself. Reaching for him, she had put her mouth to his ear and whispered, “Why don’t we go back up to your hotel room and see if you can make me groan.”

Needless to say…

About a week later, Jimmy back home, a phone call on his private line. It was the extremely attractive young woman whom Jimmy had made groan. Her name, she told him, was not Mia, as she had told him. She was not, strictly speaking, a bank teller, as she had told him. She was, in fact, a member of a rather large family that specialized in robbing banks. When they were between jobs, she worked as a bank teller. “Who better?” Jimmy had replied to that one. She was on the dodge, spent most of her time underground with different aliases and different pseudo-lives, and she had had a wonderful time with Jimmy whose books, during those long hours underground, had brought her endless pleasure.

When Jimmy inquired why she was revealing all this to him, she shamefacedly admitted—though he couldn’t see her face—that she had probably given him a cataclysmic dose of the crabs.

Without even bothering to check, Jimmy perceived that he had, at last, an understanding of why he had been scratching furiously for the preceding week. As it was his first exposure to Phthirus pubis, he dropped instantly into panic. “I would rather, “ he said later, “have ten thousand years of tertiary syphilis than ten seconds of the crabs.” He had an urgent Candygram from his autonomic nervous system, directing him in the most stridently hysterical tones, to rush off and set fire to his crotch.

She had gone on—unaware that Jimmy was no longer within ratiocination range—to say she hadn’t known about it herself, that she was sorry as hell, and that she thought it was a crummy thing to do to someone who had given her so many hours of pleasure, both in print and in bed. And that, she told him, was why she was calling him to tell him… and spilling the beans about herself. (Which wasn’t that big a deal, apparently, because she wasn’t in Kansas City any more; and he couldn’t very well find her, or the family, if the FBI, the Federal Reserve System, the Organized Crime Task force, Brink’s and the Pinkertons couldn’t find them.)

Ever the polite chap, Jimmy had thanked her decently for taking the time to call on such a piddling matter when she obviously had bigger problems to worry about. Then he hung up the phone, hyperventilated, and sent Missy to the pharmacy to buy copious quantities of A-200 pyrinate Liquid, Cuprex, Kwell cream and Kwelll otion—and a thermite bomb just to be prepared in the event a scorched-earth policy proved necessary.

Now a year later, the Mia-manque had summoned Jimmy from California to Chicago to act as intermediary in the family’s surrender to the Laws (as she called them, reminiscent of the colorful patois of Bonnie & Clyde).

And this once he had taken me with him.

Pseudo-Mia took him by the hand and started to lead him down the hallway toward the rear of the apartment. “Hey!” I said. The sound made by a ferret caught in a clampjaw trap.

Jimmy turned, still being led by the hand, walked backward and said, “Make yourself at home. Strike up new acquaintances. Establish meaningful relationships. I’ll be back.”

And Not-Mia opened a door to what I presumed was a bedroom off the hall—thereby illuminating her family’s liberal, one might even say cavalier, attitude toward her sexual egalitarianism—and she disappeared inside; followed by Jimmy’s disappearing hand, arm, body, and face, leaving behind only the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

I turned to stare at ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes that were staring at me.

A man in his thirties got up, stood aside, and indicated the empty chair at the kitchen table. I sat down, not happily.

At almost the instant I realized there was a wonderful, dark brown smell of something baking in the apartment, the old woman—an old old woman, shapeless and infinitely corrugated with wrinkles—sitting directly across from me reached behind her, wearing a potholder mitt, opened the door of the oven, pulled out a metal bread pan, and slapped it down on the table between us.

“Langos,” she said. She pronounced it lahng- osh .