Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

Wendell at that time was devoting less time to writing fiction than to his great project of reconciling the Indo-European Exarchate with the Dravidian Rite of the Sanscrit Church (Lapsed Branch) in Exile. Bengali archimandrites in cruciform dhoties and deaconesses in the Proscribed Saffron Sari fluttered round about his doors like exotic butterflies— could chrismation be administered in ghee? — was the bed of nails a legitimate form of penance? — their collective presence a great perturbation to Mary Teresa, who referred to the entire kehilla as Them Gypsies. The only thing which indeed prevented her taking her broom to the lot of them was that a genuine Monsignor of the True Church as recognized by the Police Department had chanced by: whereat the whole ecclesia had knelt as one and collectively kissed his brogans.

“Ah well, nobody is all bad,” was her philosophic comment, as she re-sheathed her besom and, clearing her nasal passages, skillfully swamped a fly in the gutter.

It was to this picturesque scene, as yet unstirred by Beat, Hippy, Freak, Funk, RadLib or LibRad influences (and, indeed, only still faintly tinctured by the froth of the waves which once had beaten ceaselessly upon the Seacoasts of Bohemia) that there came one day clad only in his harness and his sword that strange brave man known, very simply, as John Carter of Mars.

Some few of the readership may have figured out, all by themselves, that Fiduciary Debenture III (who lived downstairs) was not really named Fiduciary Debenture III. His real name was in fact A. Cicero Guggenhimer, Jr. He was not related to the the Guggenhimers. In fact I do not know, even, if there are, or were, any the Guggenhimers. The people who peddled lace, smolt copper, leisurely migrated between the State of Colorado, the US Senate, and the Venetian Litoral, now and then pausing to found an art museum or transport a monastary to a choicer location, are Guggenheims. With ei. Without er. However, A. Cicero’s grandmother was the last surviving granddaughter of old John Jacob You-Know- Who , and she had left A.C. her half of Manhattan Island, plus the bed of the East River, which Yon Yockoob had bought cheap in between grifting furs from the Redskins and whisking from the Knickerbockers (who had guffawed in Hudson Dutch when thinking how they were taking him in) those hay meadows and swamp-lots on which now stands the most valuable real estatery in the world.

Bar none.

Hence the A.

As for the Cicero, he always claimed his grandmother got it out of a dream-book.

It may not be generally known that every, but I spit you not, ev ery commercial vessel which plies or “stands” up and down the East River pays through the hawse-hole for the privilege: because if not, trolls will come up and eat them. Naturally, when you got this kind of money, no matter how tied up in trusts and annuities and danegeld it may be, estates mean nothing, penthouses mean nothing, fancy cars and yachts mean nothing: so naturally you come to live in Greenwich Village, where everything is so, well, Interesting.

People would snort when I told them that Edward and I lived on the seventh story of a seven-story walk-up: but we did. On the ground floor was the Dante Alighieri Association, the door of which in those days opened only wide enough to admit one small man with well-shined shoes at a time: doubtless to discuss Canto II, or whichever. As to its subsequent career as a coffee-house, of this I know nothing, I say nothing, I’ve heard nothing, wild horses would drag nothing out of me, so don’t even ask.

“Seven stories and no ele vator?” people would exclaim rolling eyes and clutching chests. “That’s got to be il le gal!’

“It does got,” I would agree. “But it didn’t used to got.’ Furthermore it was made of cast-iron and not wood, and was not mouldering at all: it was indeed a tenement house, probably one of the last of the Old Law or the first of the New Law tenements, but it was a tenement house in good condition, I should only be in half such good condition at the same age. I was younger in them days and had more than my memories, and thought nothing of charging up or down the full seven story mountain, heigh ho. Maurice with his Biblical beard used to pass by with his arms full of publications from the four or five quarters of the earth, the sales of which, such as they were, sustained him in scraps of food and the rent on the dozens if not scores of public coin lockers in which he stored the paper memorabilia of decades:

Eheu, Maurice, Maurice! Where are you now?

You were ahead of your time, as well as the wrong age and appearance, these were your only faults: had you lived today, had you been younger, were your beard not white nor your locks long, had you the proper academical affiliations an academician of the academicians (they should plotz), or a friend or a protegé of a bevy of academicians and critticks see how fast the Guggenfutzes (they should plotz) would bestow upon you Foundlingship after Foundlingship, weevils should only eat their navels: may you, o contrare, O Rare Maurice, flourish in eternal life.

Amidst the Crash of Matter.

And the Wrack of Worlds.

G. (for Gabriel) Courland…the Moriarity Expert? The same. Whom else? G. Courland was then much exercised (if that is not too vigorous a word) in the matter of his trousers, yea cuffs? nea cuffs? He wanted no cuffs, his tailors want cuffs. “But they trip when you run fast,” he would explain. This cut neither ice nor worsted with Morris, Max, and Rocco. “So don’t run fast,” they said.

All very well for them: staid old cockers with their wild, wild youths behind them. Gabriel G. was at that time running (there! that verb again!) a sort of Consolation Service. For listless wives. And the energy displayed by (now and then, though only now and then) some of them husbands on learning All, would, if devoted on behalf of their wives, have left them (the wives) quite listful. And McCourland ohn a Consolation Service.

In Bleecker Street the Open Air Market how it flourished! Greens galore. Greens (as Butch Gyrene he put it) up the ass. Flowers in bloom, too. Nearbye, the old-established markets, all the names ending in vowels. Wendell Garrett, scarlet vest well-filled, cap of maintenance on his audacious head, would stroll in and out, tweaking the poultry. “Have you any,” this he would ask of the Sons of Sicily and the Abruzzi, you or me they would kill: “Have you any guinea fowl?”

Dandelion greens, fresh-made latticini, lovely reeky old pastafazool, no, had some other name, cheese , hm, mm, ah! Provalon’! * Smekk* Mussels in icy pools with water always a drip-drip-drip-a-drip, pizza — you let the word pass you by without your lips trembling, your nostrils pirouetting and corvetting, your salivary glands drooling and your eyes rolling? You must be dead, dead…

Or else, for your sins and your bad karma, you have known nothing but Protestant pizza, may God help you. Not baked in a stone oven according to the Rules of the Council of Trent. Not with the filling so firmly bonded to the crust — and the crust brown and crisp and bubbly round the rim, Marón! that wild horses could not part filling from crust: No! What do you know of pizza, you with your heritage of Drive-ins, and McDonald’s, and the Methodist Church, pizza, you think that is pizza, that franchised flop, comes frozen, is thawed, is redone in an ordinary metal quick-a-buck oven, with the cheese from Baptist cows, the tomatoes by Mary Worth, the filling rolling back from off the crust limper than a deacon’s dick: this you call pizza?