Spider Kiss (3 page)

I'd gotten the idea for the story from a rock singer named Buddy Knox (his big hit was "Hula Love" in 1957) who, like Elvis and me, had been drafted. He was in my barracks for a while, and one night we sat shooting the shit, and he told me about an incident in which a popular singer had tossed a young fan out of an open window, about thirty floors to the sidewalk from a Detroit hotel room. I filed the story away, with a shudder, and dredged it up when I needed a plot for "Matinee Idyll."

But it was not until 1960, when I'd been mustered out and was living in Evanston, Illinois, that I went back to that story. It was a rotten time of life for me; I'd divorced Charlotte; I was working for a publisher I despised; and I was hanging out with a lot of collegiate mooches from Northwestern. And I hadn't written a book in a while.

Frank M. Robinson—a superlative novelist, a great editor, and a lifelong friend—was also working for the guy I hated, and he saw that I was going down the toilet. And one night, in the middle of a party at my home on Dempster Street, filled with freeloaders and adolescents whose names I barely knew, Frank grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into the big walk-in pantry, and he put me against a cabinet and looked into my idiot face, and he said, "You're turning to shit, kiddo. This isn't your way of living. You know even half those creeps out there, breaking up your furniture and puking on your carpet? Get back to the writing. It's the only thing that will save your ass."

And I threw them all out, and I went into my office, and I sat down at my Olympia manual office machine—I still work on Olympia manuals—and for I-don't-know-what-reason I started writing SPIDER KISS, taking off from "Matinee Idyll." I have no idea why I picked that plot for my second novel, but I suppose it was because I'd been listening to a lot of rock'n'roll, and no one had done a book about that milieu at that time, and I was fascinated by Jerry Lee and how he'd married his teen-aged cousin, and I put on one of his albums, and cranked up the gain, and I began to…well, as they say nowadays…I just said let's rock and roll!

It is now just thirty-six years since the lonely night I started writing SPIDER KISS, and the time thereafter when Knox Burger bought it at Gold Medal Books and published it as an original paperback as ROCKABILLY.

It's been optioned twice for feature films, it's been reprinted half a dozen times, it's been named as one of the best rock novels of all time; and Elvis is dead, and they made a movie out of Jerry Lee's life, and rock'n'roll has become something I can't listen to without my teeth ache; and I'm sixty-two years old as I write these words, and Charlotte is long gone from my life, good luck to the both of us, and I'm married to Susan, as you know…and Gold Medal Books are gone, and Walter Fultz is gone, and Knox is an agent; and Frankie Robinson lives in San Francisco for years and just had a new book come out, and he still writes like a firehouse dog chasing a red truck; and I have no idea what happened to old W.W. Scott. Scotty's wife wrote a bestseller back in the '60s, if I recall correctly. But it's not likely he's still peering up from under that green eyeshade. Hell, he'd have to be pushing a hundred if he were still out there, still chugging along. But nothing's impossible. And Silverberg lives upstate in California, and I seldom go back to The City, if I can help it, and here comes SPIDER KISS again, after all these years, like a good song covered by a current group.

I can't believe it. Sixty-two. Jeezus, I've seen a lot of sunrises, and I wish I had a penny-a-word for every night of my life that I've sat up like tonight, way past midnight, flogging another deadline, just writing and writing and writing. But it's better than standing at that open door I mentioned earlier, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat.

The second book in this volume is a collection of short stories and essays, STALKING THE NIGHTMARE. I wrote a whole batch of stuff about those stories in that book, once upon a time; and then, for reasons that seemed fulgent to me, twice upon that time, I shitcanned all the commentary, and substituted the introduction called "Quiet Lies the Locust Tells." It suited the book better, I thought.

Well, now here it is a while later; and STALKING THE NIGHTMARE is back before us; and once again I have the opportunity to add auctorial insights. And I think I'll opt out. Give it a pass. Shine it. Because the book already has a nice foreword by Stephen King, and it's got "Quiet Lies…" and I think the pieces in that book can definitely stand on their own, they need no Ellison in the background rambling on about what this means, and what that means.

But.

Instead, if you will indulge me, I'd like to give you a gift.

A number of years ago, the great American fantasist Fritz Leiber (some of whose magnificent books White Wolf also publishes, thereby proving the publisher has impeccable taste
despite
his unfortunate habit of publishing Ellison), my dear old friend Fritz, one of the most significant writers this country has
ever
produced—and that means right up there with Shirley Jackson and Hemingway and Steinbeck and Vonnegut and Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce and Jack Kerouac and Donald Westlake and Robert Cormier—my idol and shining model of High Art, goodhearted Fritz wrote a short essay about me.

I don't remember for what purpose he wrote it, but he sent me the manuscript, and he said he hoped I approved.

Just to be
noticed
by Fritz Leiber…

But it was never published. At least, as far as I know. I've never seen it published anywhere, and it appears nowhere in Fritz's bibliography.

It turned up in my files tonight, when I was looking for a bit of minutiae I needed for this introduction. It was there, shoved down back behind a file folder, how it got back there I do not know, and for how many years it's been there I do not know. Fritz died in 1992. It seems, somehow, as I sit here working late, that finding this little encomium by a departed friend, right now when I'm doing the wee-hours job that Fritz performed so brilliantly, for many years over a distinguished lifetime, that maybe I ought not to straighten out the wrinkled pages and shove the manuscript back into the file. Maybe I should offer you a small gift, an unpublished Leiber. There's a real aroma of self-aggrandizement here.

Pretend he's writing about you. Leave me out of it. And here's my gift…Fritz speaks one more time.

I first heard about Harlan Ellison in September, 1956, from science-fiction writer, anthologizer, and activist Judith Merril. He was, Judy told me, a young writer resident in New York City who'd startled and impressed (and maybe frightened) them all by selling some fifty or so sf stories to minor markets, and some crime shorts, too, about New York's juvenile gangs, and on the strength of this she and Damon Knight had invited him to their first Milford SF Writers' Conference, which they'd scheduled immediately after the World Science Fiction Convention, Labor Day weekend, to take advantage of the temporary presence in the city of sf writers from elsewhere. Judy and Damon wanted to have every possible sort of significant sf writer represented at the Conference, and I got the impression Harlan qualified as a sort of streetwise
enfant terrible.

I was invited, too, although my writing had fallen off to nothing during the previous two years due to a big alcohol problem with which I was in process of grappling on a desperate day-to-day basis. A native Chicagoan, I'd quit my 12-year job with
Science Digest
and after eight months of unsuccessful attempts finally quit drinking about the end of July by means of Alcoholics Anonymous, though I was still dependent on barbiturate sleeping pills to tranquilize me daytimes and zonk me nights for a couple of hours. I was in financial straits, but I justified my attendance at the convention by combining it with a job interview in Philadelphia, which Sprague de Camp had kindly procured for me. To avoid hotel expenses in New York, I slept on the living-room couch in the fifth-floor walkup Greenwich Village apartment of Dave Mason and Judy's friend Katherine MacLean, sf writers both. This piece of kindness, begun on a day-to-day basis, was continued for almost three months, by which time I was off barbiturates as well as alcohol, had sold a 1- and a 7-page story, got a tiny advance from Gnome Press on the first Fafhrd and Mouser collection
, Two Sought Adventure,
taken a lot of lonely walks up and down Manhattan, missed out on a couple of other jobs, and was ready to return to Chicago and begin writing The Big Time
.

But first the Milford Conference. (I'd missed out on the Philadelphia job as I'd expected I would.) It was a momentous and exciting affair. As Damon says in his book
, The Futurians, "
There was a kind of intoxication in the air." So, five weeks off alcohol and trying to quit pills, and suffering from writer's block besides, I inevitably figured as the specter at the feast. I just walked through it, trying to say appropriate things when I had to. If Harlan got any impression of me then, it must have been as a pretty somber figure
.

I remember Harlan as a pallid and taut young man looking for challenges, though maybe that last was more what people said about him. I don't recall that he and I exchanged any conversation. I remember that he was supposed to be writing a story during the Conference, something involving a "Silver Horde," or maybe two stories, and perhaps even then there was something about writing a story on a dare, cold in one burst, sitting down at the typewriter in front of people.

One afternoon some of us went swimming in the edge of the Delaware, and I recall how bathing trunks made Harlan's city pallor all the more evident. But then while I sunned in the shallows, Harlan and another guy against general advice started to swim across. There was some excitement when the current pulled them under near the far middle, but they emerged triumphant on the other side. I thought about George Washington pitching the silver dollar and standing up in the boat (according to the painting).

After that I was sober and pill-less for eight years with a lot of continuing steady help from A.A.
During that period Harlan and I moved separately to the West Coast, I to the Santa Monica area, he to the hills behind Beverly and Hollywood, but we didn't run into each other at first, though I heard about him writing for the films and TV, especially a fine
Star Trek show, "
The City on the Edge of Forever," that put pacifism and the need to stop the Hitlers of this world in poignant juxtaposition. Also, while going down cautiously to Watts a couple of times in conjunction with Operation Bootstrap, an early essay in Black Education for Blacks, I heard about Harlan writing for the Free Press, which strengthened my general impression of him as a fighting writer, a Jack London sort of character
.

What finally put us in touch was Harlan's project to edit and produce an anthology of original revolutionary stories most editors and publishers would have considered too hot to handle. During the past few years I'd actually deliberately written a couple such stories—"Lie Still, Snow White" and "The Winter Flies"—for a similar anthology Judy Merill had been assembling, but that book never did find a publisher, and my two stories eventually saw light elsewhere. So I told Harlan I'd work on it, since there seemed to be lots of time available. I had in mind a story about free love and complex marriage, something along the lines of my "The Nice Girl with 7 Husbands," and I filed that idea away in my subconscious, hoping it would grow.

But meanwhile after eight sober years I'd begun to fool around with alcohol again. A year of that (during which I wrote
Tarzan and the Valley of Gold),
and I was back struggling in A.A. and spending little spells in drying-out hospitals too. After one of these sojourns I conceived a story, based on a nightmare, in which a guy has running through his mind the ditty:

      "I'm gonna roll the bones,
      I'm gonna roll the bones
      I'm gonna roll the bones with Death!"

I wrote eight pages of it, but it wouldn't jell, so I finished it up just anyhow in four or five pages, so I'd have something of what I was planning down on paper, and set the abortion aside.

Then some time in 1966 Harlan wrote me he was near deadline on
Dangerous Visions,
and where was my contribution?

So I got out the dozen pages or so of my misfire, saw that if I had my hero humming that ditty I'd be giving away the whole point of my story to the reader prematurely, also saw that it might work better if I kept the time of the story hovering between river steamboat days and a spaceship future, and I whacked out "Gonna Roll the Bones" in four days about, more than doubling the length of the tale in the process.

I was relieved and pleased when Harlan took it, that I'd kept my promise to him, moreso by the success of
Dangerous Visions.

My next contact with Harlan was when we both were writer-teachers during the summers of 1968, 1969, and 1970 at the original Clarion Workshop for Science Fiction Writers, a college course closely modeled by Robin Scott Wilson on the original Milford Writers' Conference.

It was still an indirect contact. Harlan and I worked different weeks, so we didn't see each other, but we had the same students (some of them familiar names now; the first three Clarion summers were remarkably productive of successful writers), and from my continuing contacts with those students, many of them still ongoing friendships today, I heard about Harlan's teaching methods, the grueling pace he set them, his insistence on getting down to the nitty-gritty, and on feeling the universe around us with passion and reacting to it with power. I also learned of the encouragement he gave to students who merited it, acting as mentor and providing them with other assistance, sometimes putting them up at his place in Los Angeles, and always behaving toward them as a professional writer should toward his pupils and apprentices.

And as the years continued to go by I learned more about Harlan's writing. I reviewed the remarkable
Deathbird Stories,
a truly virtuoso performance, and enjoyed other outstanding individual tales, such as

"Shatterday" and the ones he wrote for the special Harlan Ellison issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
I saw the strong movie made from his story, "A Boy and His Dog." I learned that Harlan had early been inspired to write science fantasy by reading Clark Ashton Smith's wonderful tale, "The City of the Singing Flame," and that made another good link between us. And I became aware of his championing of me to the publishers and the public when he learned I was living in a not too spacious apartment in downtown San Francisco
.

It's pretty close to impossible to have any but the warmest feelings toward a man who thunderingly demands "Why isn't there a Fritz Leiber Viking portable?"

Well, since then I've moved from a one- to a four-room apartment on Geary Street. One way or another, Harlan's strident query got me moving.

But those three Clarion years hadn't been the least troubled of my life—they saw me through the death of my wife, my move to San Francisco, and the beginning of a final—so far!—coming to terms with alcohol. So somehow all my periods of association with Harlan have been marked by strife, the shadows and glooms of monstrous cities, and a lot of grappling with the nitty-gritty of life. Which, considering both Harlan and myself, is probably as good a way as any to have it.