Edward Lee - Trolley No. 1852

Ah, but then exactly what would he write?

He’d already selected his nom de plume; it would be Winfield (his father’s first name) Greene (his former wife’s maiden name, which seemed splendidly appropriate for the author of pornography. The woman had been insatiable! She would impale herself on his groin in his sleep as though he were some nocturnal vending machine for her pleasure!) His tale’s plot, though, was something else. Forcing conscious thought upon a creative target, he’d long learned, always resulted in an abject uselessness that drained the artist’s confidence. He took to the streets, then, to stroll as he frequently did and hope that Mr. Freud’s sub conscious might offer assistance. Some assistance, too, from Dante’s Ladies of the Heavenly Spring might then soon follow, or so he aspired. No sooner had he turned down Benefit than some inklings began to kindle. There could be no utility whatever of his “Great Old Ones”—to do so would rupture the tale’s pseudonymity!—but he could most appropriately re-apparel what his friend Little Belknap once called his “Cthulhuean Arena” with new garments of occultism. This ploy would not only camouflage the author’s identity—and, hence, leave his personal repute uninjured—but also allow him to flex unused aesthetic muscles. As he usually did, he would create a protagonist who mirrored aspects of himself but then plunge him headlong into a most un usual concupiscent peril.

He chuckled—an annoying, high-pitched chuckle.

What fun the endeavor suddenly seemed!

Ah, but his success would demand more than an energized endeavor. Blast! I need an idea!

The generous bank cheque would take over a week to be honoured, but he did have a dollar or so on his person, and given that this was, of sorts, a celebration, he would so celebrate by rewarding his good fortune with a can of Heinz beans—quite satisfiably cold, he could tell you—and a can of Postum pre-ground coffee. (The other brands tasted like a cacodaemon’s bile! Ugh! ) So into the little Weybosset’s shop he ventured, and made his purchases with pennies to spare from the shrewd-faced proprietor (quite a disestablishmentarian) who was blaming the government for the sudden rise of gasoline to seven cents per gallon and gold to nineteen dollars per ounce.

He smiled in silence with a nod and took his parcels just as a dour but well-attired man on the corpulent side stepped up and passed the rankled proprietor what looked like a pharmaceutical prescription, for there was a small apothecarium.

The proprietor scowled, disappeared into the back, then returned momentarily with what was undeniably a package of barrier prophylactics. He could even read the name-brand: GOODYEAR & HANCOCK - VULCANIZED CONTRACEPTIVE SHEATHS. The buyer seemed embarrassed to make this purchase and appeared doubly unnerved by the writer’s presence as witness.

Though there was endless government talk of repealing the fifty-year-old Comstock Act (which banned the sale of these nefarious devices), he was heedlessly opposed to such a repeal. Violations were deemed a federal offense and carried a punishment—quite rightly, in his estimation—of five years imprisonment and hard labor. After losing so many young men in the Great War, and then a half-million more souls—oddly, mostly men—in the ghoulish Spanish Flu Epidemic, what was more ghastly than encouraging lustful hedonists to perpetrate their carnal traffic without any responsibility whatever? Certainly, America’s strength came through the hard-work and innovation of its people, and circumventing necessary new births in the interest of bed-play seemed a howling affront to not only logic but a central morality. By law, these things, sometimes called “condoms” or, in the vernacular “skins,” were only to be used by couples properly wedded for either the prevention of a pre-existing disease or to allow normal sexual congress between the husband and a wife likely to suffer medical complications in the event of pregnancy.

The embarrassed customer, after paying for his package, hurried his bulk toward the exit, but not before the vociferous proprietor called out, “Don’t you be using those on any of them harlots out there, man! It’s against the law! And them dirty women are full up with poxes that dissolve those things!”

The buyer couldn’t have left in any more haste.

Next, the proprietor turned his scowl to the stooped writer. “You agree with me, don’t’cha, mister?”

“Indubitably,” he replied and left.

This, he was saddened to prehend, is what the “cracker barrels” of the good old days had become—unpleasant and often hostile rants. Confrontations were not his forte. But the proprietor could not be accused of exaggeration on one count: the gradually rising number of “harlots” plying their trade on these once-fine avenues. Back on the street, as the sinking sun commenced to flame across the roof-pocked horizon, he beheld the rancorous man’s meaning. Visible at several corners loitered women of the illest repute, drab-faced and gaudily dressed waifs with hungry eyes. These pestilent and immoral urchins had grown in number to a dejecting degree, it seemed. Victims of President Hoover’s economic failures or simply female loafers looking for easy earnings, he struggled not to judge. One thin bonneted creature with a vulpine grin beckoned him with her finger to cross the road. He did not oblige, of course; then another, brazenly brassiereless and sashaying in the uncomplimentary look of a Flapper, slowed her gait as she passed, and asked if he had a dollar for some of her company.

He assured her he did not.

Where are the constables when you need them!

As he stood in wait at the corner for several motors to putter by, he heard a trolley’s bell clanging several blocks over, and then…

Then…

The moment strangely seized him. He stood immobile; a fugue seemed to drone in his head, much akin to the mad flute-pipings of his messenger-demigod Nyarlathotep; and all his powers of conjecture and mental function stalled in what could only be called utter aposiopesis…

Barrier prophylactics, the words thudded in his head, and then—

The toll of a distant trolley bell. Then—

Prostitutes…

These three images (two visual, one aural) shivered in his mind and gave root to an unmediated joyousness that caused him to actually shiver in place.

Why? you may ask.

They provided the creative lightning bolt so yearned for and so rare in a writer’s life. These individual images lay in his hands the catalyst he’d been so desperately struggling for.

And it was in that irreducible division of a second that Howard Lovecraft had his story for Mr. Frederick Wilcox and the clandestine periodical known as Erotesque.

Within minutes he was back in his chamber, coffee on and pen in hand, writing his new tale…

TROLLEY NO. 1852

by

Winfield Greene

1.

My name is Morgan Phillips, and I am recounting this experience in hopes that by doing so I might unburden my mind—and whatever beneficent memories I have left—of some of the venomous and imponderable images which stalk me ever still…

… for however long the earth shall last.

My relocation to New York (that denizen-abyss of stridence and foul smells) had been by necessity and not—I re-emphasize, not —due to the divestment of my position at Brown, as a professor of mythology and ancient histories, two years ago. The latter had been the work of this bungling and greed-induced calamity they are now calling the “Great Depression,” whose attendant turmoil left no room for teachers of subjectivities. Only academicians skilled in mathematics, industry, and the sciences could be retained in such troubled times of bread lines and twenty-five-percent jobless rates. For the rest of us (history, literature, the arts) the coffers of higher learning were closed.