Partners in Wonder Page 14

  •Sans-culottes: he, she, or they, without kneebreeches: non-aristocrats, revolutionaries. Vallembrossa: scene of a well-known WPA project in the poems of Petrarch…or was it Edgar Guest? Mt. Hymettus: big honey-producing district near Athens, Greece, elevation 3369 feet, give or take a couple of hymettii.

  •Zeppo and Gummo were also Marx Bros. Zeppo wasn’t very funny, though. He quit and became an agent. Gummo had quit years earlier to become a raincoat manufacturer, and nobody remembers if he was funny or not. The reference refers to the film Room Service.

  •Grover Whalen was, for many years, NYC’s official greeter.

  •“He was found in the wreck, with his hand on the throttle, “An’ a-scalded to death by steam.”—Wreck of Old 97 (not ’96) All right, already, Davidson, you made your point!

  There was more, much more, but in the original version of this essay, published in a men’s magazine more noted for aureoles than erudition, there was insufficient space available to continue the list, endless as it was. So those additional notes are forever lost to posterity. However, in the mails a few months ago, out—as it were—of the blue—to coin nothing at all—came an article about that very same period, written by dear Avram, the good fairy of Novato, California (where he is now living). And apparently it was written way back when, for some defunct fan magazine or other. With a whimpering tone in his letter, Avram implored me to find a home for this hastily scrawled persiflage, in order that payment might be made him, thereby providing a smidge of gruel for his son, Ethan.

  (Do you notice, even talking about Avram, one falls into that damned baroque style of his!)

  And so, on promise of slipping him a few extra bucks off the top of this anthology, I herewith present as the conclusion of “Scherzo for Schizoids,” Avram Davidson’s—

  INTRODUCTION TO “UP CHRISTOPHER TO MADNESS” BY AVRAM DAVIDSON

  “Okay,” said Knox Burger, of Gold Medal Books. “You do it that way, and I’ll give you a contract.”

  “Crazy!” said Harlan Ellison, Boy Collaborator. I said nothing. I was like dazed. Only the other day I had observed to Ward Moore (Father Image, Mad Genius, and [non-] [Boy] Collaborator), “For almost eight years now I’ve been on the verge of getting a contract for a book—”

  “—and you’re still virgo intacto,” said Ward…But now no longer.

  “We’ll go down and have a couple of drinks on it,” said Knox. We did. I had Irish-on-ice, Knox had Scotch, Harlan had milk. Sometimes between the third and fourth Irish I managed to burn a hole in Knox’s Harris tweed jacket with my cigarette. “That will come out of your royalties,” he said, gloomily.

  “Okay, then,” said Harlan rising. “We’ll get started on the rewrite right away, Knox. Avram!” I snapped to attention. “Watch it!” cried Knox, snatching his jacket away. “Be at my place at seven tomorrow night, and we’ll get right to work,” Harlan ordered.

  “Aywah, Tuan Besar,” I muttered, making my salaam. A tendency of my right leg to twitch as if struck by a rubber hammer, I attributed to impurities in the ice. But at seven the next evening I was there, at Harlan’s apartment.

  “You play skittles, Avram?” he inquired.

  “Promised my mother not to,” I said primly. “What’s the gag, Ellison, or The Non-British Agent?” I asked.

  “No gag,” he said, briskly, and dragging me out to the elevator. “You must have seen the skittles setup outside the Paperbook Gallery.”

  “Oh, is that what it is; I thought it was a gym for waltzing mice.”

  “How microcephalic can you get? you clod,” he demanded, affectionately rhetorical. “Skittles are in, and the Village Voice wants me to do an article for them. Andy Reiss will illustrate.”

  “But the, uh, book, Harlan? The rewrite? For Knox? You said—”

  “Later, later. Right now: skittles.”

  So we went up Seventh Ave. to where the Paperbook Gallery crouched below street level on its corner. In the tiny area in front was the skittles setup, on a table. I hung over the railing, watching, like a spectator at a dog-pit, or a bear-baiting—a simile which, it developed, was not to be too far-out. Along with Harlan was Andy Reiss, Boy-Artist Extraordinary, a young lady, and Kenny Sanders—Harlan’s step-son-to-be, aged twelve—all of whom, I neglected to mention, egocentric observer that I am, had been at Harlan’s when I arrived. Two or three inoffensive young boys from Brooklyn, wearing black sweaters, turned up from somewhere; and so the game got started.

  Like so: You spin these sort of tops, see—and they whirl around like gyroscopes, and you try to influence them telekinetically to spin through doors in the wooden maze and so get to the skittles proper—tiny bowlingpins—and knock them down. My capacity for games and for sports is pitifully limited; I mean, there was this time in Sumatra when I yawned, openly, during the ox races, and almost precipitated an international incident. The tops whirled and caromed and careened and sometimes got through the doors and knocked down the widdle pins. “Oh, well-spon, sir!” I would call from time to time, and slap my handies in a languidly well-bred sort of way.

  Spectators came and went, pointed, giggled, gawked, exclaimed; Andy Reiss made sketches, scratched them out, drew new ones. Cars screeched, buses rattled, trucks roared; “You, ya, shmuck, I don’t like ya face!” I snapped my head up, startled. Who was that? It was a kid, age about 16 and he was leaning over the railings which—at a 45-degree angle—joined the railings I was leaning over; and he was addressing his comments to Harlan, peaceably playing skittles in the pit beneath.

  Harlan looked up, said, “I’ll go home and change it for you,” or something flip of the sort.

  And kept on skittling. By now he had attracted a crowd of would-be skittles aficionados, who were commenting on his skill. The remark infuriated the kid. “I’ll come back with a gun!” he screamed. “Dontcha believe me? I’ll show ya!” And his sidekicks, several in number, joined in.

  “This” (I said to myself) “is crazy. If I were writing this for a story or a TV show or a movie, no editor would buy it. ‘No motivation,’ is what he’d say. ‘You haven’t shown any motivation.’”

  And he’d be correct. In this case, Nature refused to imitate Art. There was no motivation. Nevertheless—

  “Ya sonofabitch!” the kid screamed. “Ya———!” (No use counting dashes; I’ve disguised the invective to protect the innocent.) “Ya————! We’ll mopulize ya! Ya know what I think ya are?”

  “What?” Harlan inquired, smiling, and seeming only mildly puzzled.

  “Yer a—————-!” He screamed, mentioning one of the less lovable offenses of which the late Emperor Nero has, from time to time, been accused. Harlan, still smiling, went on skittling. Andy Reiss continued to sketch. I went on leaning over the railings, trying to look like a hay, feed, and grain dealer in a small way of business, from East Weewaw, Wisconsin; somebody, in short, who had never heard of Harlan Ellison. And waited (such was my lack of confidence in the success of the impersonation) for the moment, inevitable, I was sure, for the kid to turn on me and offer to pluck out my beard, hair by hair, and feed it to me: an offer I intended to decline with all the politeness at my command.

  Suddenly, they were gone. In a westerly direction. No sun-worshipper ever looked so wistfully at the east as did I, then. “Looks like we’re going to be mixed up in a teenage rumble,” Harlan said. “Preposterous!” I told myself. “Absurd…Things don’t happen this way…” After all, I had read about the Crazy Mixed-Up Kids, Turfs (Turves?), Rumbles, Bopping Mobs, etc. We weren’t contesting their territory. We hadn’t made a play for one of their debs. So why?—How come—? And then, like a bolt of Jumbo Number Ten lightning, came a flash which illuminated a scene from earlier criminal literature, videlicet and to whiz, the young punk who wanted to make a rep…I swallowed a foreign object, as it might be a tesseract, or a cactus, which had gotten lodged in my throat.

  “Well, that ends the game, I guess,” Harlan said, after a while. I looked around. No sign of the Ju
nior Assassins, or the Young Torturers, or whatever their sticky name was. I breathed the air once more/O-o-of Freedom/In my own beloved—

  “How’s about we go over to The Caricature, Harlan?” I suggested, casually. The Caricature wasn’t much of a place, but it lay to the east.

  Harlan considered. And then the young lady, in a small voice, said, “My pockabook.” “What’s that, dear?” Harlan asked, paternal, benevolent. “My pockabook. I left it in your apartment.” “Oh. Well, we’ll go and get your pocketbook. And then we’ll go to The Caricature,” said HE. And we started off. Toward the west. “’As yer ’eard about poor old Alfy, Bert?” “No, Len, whuh abaout ’im?” “Took a Jerry bullet at Wipers. Went west.”

  At the corner of Christopher and Bleecker Harlan paused. “The rest of you stay here,” he said. “I’ll go up and get the purse.” By this time I was able to see the whole thing for the absurdity it patently was. Obvious, the gang had just been amusing itself. A mere ritual. Wasn’t there something akin to this in the puberty ceremonies of the Kwakiutl Indians? I chuckled.

  And then there they were.

  There were more of them. They had gotten reinforcements. And, as they gathered across the street, they began calling out threats, cursing. Slowly I melted into the background (not an easy thing to do under the glare of the streetlamps) and oozed down the street. Something sticking part way out of a garbage-can caught my eye, I picked it out as I went, my fingers working with it absently…Inside the candy store I dropped a dime in the booth’s phone, dialed O. “Give me the police,” I said, in a low voice. In an equally low voice the operator asked, “Emergency?” “Yes.” “Where are you calling from?” I told her, and immediately the police were on the phone. I gave them a rapid rundown, they promised to send someone, I went out into the savage street.

  The details seem unaccountably blurred in my mind. I recall the gang slowly starting to cross the street toward us. One of the boys from Brooklyn said, in a resigned tone of voice, “I’ve been beaten up so many times…” Harlan said, “Don’t worry—” He walked into the mob. A drink-blurred voice screamed something ugly. A bottle shattered against the wall over our heads. And then somebody stepped in between the two groups—a fellow of about eighteen. He asked something I didn’t catch. “Well, they wanna fight, so—” one of the Junior Assassins replied, but he seemed suddenly less sure of himself. The newcomer, whoever he was, was clearly Someone of Consequence.

  “No fighting,” the newcomer directed. He turned to us. “You go ahead, wherever you’re going,” he said, calmly. “There won’t be no trouble.” We turned and started walking. The last I saw of them, one of the kids was struggling to get loose, and cursing wildly, but he was held tightly amidships by the Peacemaker.

  Halfway down the block we passed a policeman, hurrying toward the scene we had just left.

  Later that night, after leaving The Caricature, after pausing for Harlan to shatter four empty beer-cans (old, hard-style) and two wooden fruit crates with one blow each; later, back in his apartment, I reached into my pocket for a match, and encountered a strange object. I pulled it out. It was a piece of rope, the piece of rope I had extracted from the trash can en route to the phone. Something, however, had been done to it…

  “What,” said Harlan, staring, “is that?”

  “Oh, er, uh,” I said, lucidly, remembering, vaguely, my fingers working on the rope.

  “That is a thuggee noose,” said Harlan.

  “Uh, wull, yuh, I guess it is,” I said. “They taught us how when I was with the Marines. You slip it over the guy’s head from behind, and you put your knee in the small of his back…” My voice trailed away. Harlan looked at me, strangely. Then he got up and got himself a glass of milk.

  “Now, about the rewrite,” I began.

  Harlan waved his hand. “Not tonight, Avram” he said. “Not tonight.”

  That was some several years ago. Harlan married Kenny’s mother very soon after, and moved to Evanston to edit Regency Books. Later I had a letter from him. His marriage was terminating, he said, and he was leaving his job and the Midwest. Under the circumstances he felt unable to finish the book for Gold Medal with me, and was returning the ms. He was sure, he wrote, that I’d be able to find another collaborator.

  So far I haven’t. I’ll probably do the book by myself. It’s a crime novel, not sf, and I’d like to work on the scene about the rumble-which-didn’t quite. But no editor would pass it. It lacks, you see, it lacks motivation…

  Ellison again. As you can see, by comparing the two renditions, there are small but important discrepancies in the telling. In my version, I am a hero. In Avram’s, not only is he a hero but, as in the Sam Sheppard case, the Mysterious Stranger is the focus of action. I leave it to you to siphon truth from wayward memory. Or check with Dona Sadock Liebowitz, the girl who said “my pockabook.” She has an eidetic memory, and she can tell you the way it was.

  In any case, alla that happened around the time of “Up Christopher to Madness,” and I hope the texture of what you have just read will inform your reading of this non-sf, I think hilarious, story of the good old days what was, in Greenwich Village, when we were all younger and collaborations (aside from the novel, which never got wrote) were simpler.

  Up Christopher to Madness

  Guided tours—those Roman circii on wheels—of Greenwich Village and the Bowery, invariably include visits to (or passing notice of) such taverns as The White Horse, McSorley’s, Julius’s, Leo’s, The Jumble Shop. But only Red Fred’s Village Voyages takes out-of-towners and uptowners to Aunt Annie’s Ale House. Which is, perhaps, the reason so few out-of-towners and uptowners are found weighted down with old typewriters in the East River. The Ale House’s clientele is—in the parlance of the fuzz—unsavory. A mugging-cum-swimfest w/typewriter was, therefore, not uncommon at Aunt Annie’s. (Times, of course, change, and He Who Would Stay Abreast must change with them: In the good bad old days a man who had been weighted down with an Oliver the size of a small threshing machine stayed weighted. Try that with an Olivetti or a Hermes thin as a wafer, and the victim-elect is not only likely to decline the nomination but to emerge, damp and annoyed, and start grinding an ice-pick point—or other uncivil, though not altogether unexpected, behavior.)

  No matter what they may mutter at Charles Street Station House, it was accident, nothing but accident, which brought Red Fred and a bumper crop of sweating hayseeds (Royal Arch Masons from Chitling Switch, Nebraska: retired elocution teachers from East Weewaw, Wis., wearied with the season’s labors, shuddering at the very sight of prunes, prisms, and cheese: and other specimens habitans of The Great American Heartland) on the scene at the exact moment, Greenwich Village Meridian Time, when Angie the Rat, a prominent Six-for-Fiver—having compounded his interest once too often to expect further indulgence of Big Patsy the horse-player—was unceremoniously, but none the less effectively, sent where the bad loansharks go. One bullet in the left larnyx, one bullet in the right larnyx, and one bullet in the precise center of the umbilical quadrant. The reubens, male and female, scattering with shrieks and squeals, the assailants leisurely made their escape in an oyster-grey Edsel (which proved, of course, to be stolen).

  Such amenities, confirming what had heretofore been mere wicked suspicions, instantly brought the yokels back for more. More, MORE; and, for the moment, left the competition nowhere. Fred might even have dispensed with the jumbo beret, the black tinted-lens hornrims, and the chestnut-colored beaver, which served him in lieu of neon signs and barkers; only he was stubborn.

  And to be brutally honest (dealing as we are with clinical detail), Fred had to wear the beret, shades and foliage. He was not called Red Fred for naught. His name still appeared with inglorious regularity on subversive lists circulated by private, alphabetized agencies; and he thought it best to await the Revolution incognito.

  It was, perhaps, because the assassins had hyped-up his almost moribund business that Red Fred thought with mild kindnesses (when he t
hought of them at all) of Big Patsy and his two side-boys, whose names at this stage of narration are unnecessary. One can well imagine Red Fred’s dismay, then, at the appearance, the following Tuesday, of Gook, the blind beggar (whose hobby was serving alternate Thursday nights as a Civil Defense sky-watcher), who informed him that Big Patsy was indeed anxious to see the tour guide posthaste. This, to make clear Red Fred’s attitude was (in the fullest Hitchcockian sense of the cliché), for the birds.

  Gook made it abundantly evident, however, that if Red Fred did not bust his tuchus getting down to the empty loft building, on the corner of Bleecker and Bank streets, it might well fall on him the next time he went by. And that Big Patsy would be most reluctantly compelled to come and get him.

  There was even some mention of sulphuric acid.

  Red Fred, as a consequence, put on a clean shirt (for had not Big Patsy once remarked in Aunt Annie’s that if there was one thing he could not abide, it was a slob?) and made haste to keep his appointment.

  The loft building in point was a massive, brooding structure more reminiscent of a tyrannosaurus coprolite than a hideout for wayward horse-players. Big, black, brooding, it hovered over the corners of Bleecker and Bank as though it was hungry. Red Fred had the distinct impression it was hungry for him.

  Red Fred’s height was five feet six inches, and his hair was not only thinning in front but—as though anxious to do its part all down the line—was also departing steadily from the rear. The shades he wore were corrective lenses ground along the thickness lines of a cathode ray tube. He was, in short, short and balding and near-sighted.

  He was also a coward, a thief, and scared out of his gourd.

  The loading dock door of the old loft building stood ominously ajar, as though someone had been standing behind it, waiting for Red Fred to come in sight through a crack in the splintering jamb. Red Fred whistled a tremulous note or two from “The Peat Bog Soldiers” and opened the door, stepping through quickly.