Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison
It is difficult to describe this type, this person—so many of this person.
A description needs specifics—and all the specifics of this person are nebulosities. Unless you know what to look for, unless you can sense them (as the poet said: sniffing strange), see the aura that surrounds them, you will have no idea of the subjects in question.
The girls are easier to spot than the men. The men generally have casual Peter Gunn haircuts or pomaded pompadoured hair; they usually wear Continental clothes (like the little Italian messenger boys on Madison Avenue) or they wear the one-button rolls. They come in many shapes and shingles, but they aren’t too important here. The girls…the Girl …this girl.
This girl has fine legs that look tight and good in her straight, tight skirt. No matter whether this girl is one hundred percent Italian or two hundred percent Yiddish, her profile is strictly Irish. Clean-cut. Sultry. Desirable. Empty. Surface-seeing. Easy to covet, these girls, this girl is too easy to covet. This girl’s hair is soft, glowing and probably (today) in an artichoke. She taps her hands when she hears the music. She applauds at the wrong place, before the number is finished, when an unimportant, saying-nothing soloist has pyrotechnicked.
She is the girl the conga player eyes from the bandstand.
She is a hipster.
There is a great deal of difference between a truly “hip” person (that indefinable awareness of what is right, what is current, what is lasting; beyond sophistication, beyond class, it is the essence of being “with it”) and a hipster.
A hipster is a pseudo. The good-looking girl from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who feels stifled (for the wrong reasons) in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and emigrates to Chicago. Look for the girl two months later in the bars on Chicago’s Rush Street. Look for her just off Times Square; on L.A.’s Strip. You know her. The sleek, well-fed, looks-to-be-good-in-the-hay chick who crosses her legs too high. The chick who gets her meals bought, who has to worry about paying only for her extensive clothing needs and the rent.
Often, it’s only the clothes.
This is the girl who thinks Don Ho is a jazz singer, who goes to Birdland to hear Herbie Mann’s Afro-Jazz Sextet because he plays the kind of jazz you might (if you were a hipster) cha-cha to. This is the girl who wears charm bracelets that jingle.
This is the empty woman, without her own standards, with a Hollywood conception of reality, the girl who talks during the sax man’s solo.
See then, a cultural phenomenon. A leech personality, singularly devoid of purpose, of substantiality. The shadow-people.
The hipsters. The people Sheldon Morgenstern knew well.
And the people Stag Preston knew well. The ones who infested his life in the great cities where he worked and preyed. But these were not the ones who came to the Stag Preston concerts. Mashed Potato Falls, Kansas, had its share of girls, to be sure, but they were wide-eyed and their mouths hung open, exposing the wads of chewing gum.
Yet they were broads.
Chicks.
Stuff.
And Stag Preston—who longed for the sleek, well-fed gloss of his New York hipsters—was forced to make do with what was on hand and underfoot.
It had taken Shelly a long time to recognize the hipster for what he or she is. It had taken him too long, perhaps, but when he did, he realized that the greater portion of his life, all the things he had valued as “with it” were only dross. That was when he first began thinking about the way out. When he realized, sensed, tagged, identified the phonies who did not act like the phonies. The hipsters. A set to which he belonged, blood and bones. A set he abruptly knew was not so much his any longer. He was growing away.
From them.
The hipsters.
Stag Preston’s friends. Not his worshippers (as the kids at the concerts were his subjects), but his friends.
They never saw these people at the concerts Stag gave. They never saw them, because they were the ones who only went to the “hip” places, and a rock’n’roll show was certainly (Jeezus, are you kidding?) not hip. Instead, Shelly and Stag came into contact with the grass-roots, the vacuous adolescents who were too much in love with an image to recognize the stain that by now showed clearly in Stag’s handsome, arrogantly casual demeanor.
The tour ran a month. In Philadelphia at the Stanley Theatre they had a near-riot in which three girls and a scrawny youth of indeterminate sex were trampled. That was the first stop of the twenty-city tour. From Philly (and a side trip to Chester, Pennsylvania, to put in a brief, uneventful appearance at a charity show for a new school bus) they moved on—the entire company of no/some/& lots of talent acts—to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. It was the biggest smash show since Frankie Avalon had broken it up at the Pier the year before. An old woman from Connecticut hit the water. She was rescued. The newspapers picked it up, anyhow: that was how Shelly made his money. Rub-a-dub-dub!
Then Boston, Buffalo (Stag enjoyed the zoo and rock garden), Indianapolis, Des Moines and Cleveland. In Cleveland Stag staged a triumphal return engagement at the high school where he had had his first important exposure. They also did three shows at the Palace Theatre.
Then in rapid succession came the Fox in Detroit, the Woods Theatre in Chicago (and appearances on Marty Faye’s tv show, Dan Sorkin’s radio show and a spread with Hefner at the Playboy offices), a barn-like hall in Milwaukee whose overlong title blissfully slipped from Shelly’s memory, K.C., St. Louis, Omaha, Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City (where Stag threatened to drive a friend’s sports car across the Bonneville Salt Flats at 150 mph and was restrained only by force) and Reno. When they reached Las Vegas, where Stag was initially booked at the Sands (while the rest of the company, on half-salary, lolled, languished and lost their loot at the faro tables), Freeport was waiting.
He took precisely sixty-eight seconds to commend Stag on the wonderful job he had been doing, patted the boy on the shoulder, took the cigarette away from him, and ushered Shelly into the elevator, leaving the star surrounded by his acolytes, four girls from the Sands chorus line and the baggage.
On the way up, Shelly gently extricated Stag’s ex-smoke from the Colonel’s fingers and finished the butt. “What’s happening?” Shelly asked. “How come you’re here?”
The Colonel delivered a withering glance signifying: Don’t you know better than to talk in the elevator in front of an elevator girl who’s probably getting paid to remember what cursed bigmouths like you haven’t sense enough to keep to yourself till you’re safely behind closed doors?
It was quite the glance, all things considered.
Shelly shut up, staring soulfully at the butt end of the cigarette. When they reached the Colonel’s suite, he unlocked the door and preceded Shelly into the room, up to his ankles in the pile rug. They breast-stroked across the room to the bar and Shelly maneuvered behind the counter. “Want a Julep, Colonel?” Freeport shook his head.
“I’ll take a Pimm’s Cup. This dry, cursed weather.”
To Shelly the cliché of a Southern colonel (albeit an expatriated one with a dream of rebuilding the Yankee-burned ancestral plantation) drinking Mint Juleps was almost too cornball for consideration; but the potency of Freeport’s personality simmered in his very hewing to the stereotypical impression of Suth’rin aristocracy. That way, when he pulled off a snakelike Manhattan maneuver, it was unexpected, and usually successful.
But he was right; in Vegas, dry and warm Vegas, the Julep was about as appealing as sulphur water.
Pimm’s Cup, indeed. He mixed it, strong, cool, tall.
Then he mixed a Rob Roy for himself.
The vermouth was distantly introduced to the Scotch, much as a commoner would be introduced to royalty. They nodded at each other, and each went his way.
Shelly moved from behind the bar and settled on the soap-colored sofa. The Colonel remained perched on the bar stool.
“Shelly,” the Colonel said, scrutinizing the drink in his hand.
“I’m ready,” Shelly said.
Shelly’s Rob Roy paused on its way to his mouth and he let loose a whoop of delight. “That’s great! Contracts?”
Freeport held up a staying hand. “Apparently Milt called him from Hollywood, and Charlie flew out there for a conference. They want us out there as soon as we can make it.”
“Well, we’ve only got three more stops on this tour—San Diego, San Francisco and L.A. Why don’t we cancel out the last three and fly right into L.A. tonight?”
The Colonel was shaking his head.
“I don’t think so, Shelly. I don’t think we should jump. There have been other offers, you know.”
Shelly agreed. “Maybe you’re right.”
The Colonel nodded. “After I got the call, I called one of Universal’s press agents, a girl named Billie Sanders. We talked for a while and finally met for a cup of coffee at The Brasserie.”
“How’s her son?” Shelly asked.
“Does she have a son? I don’t know her that well.”
Shelly nodded. “Yeah, a nice kid. His name’s Kenny. I worked with Billie on a promotion for Operation Petticoat while you were in Europe year before last; she’s a good kid.”
The Colonel dismissed the opinion hurriedly. “Well, in any event, I talked to her for a while and tried to ascertain whether there had been any murmurings in the Universal organization. She hadn’t heard anything definite, but her superior, a Herman Kass, had alerted everyone on their field representative staff to be ready for something big.”
Shelly sipped and asked, “So?”
“So,” Freeport said slowly drawing his conclusion, “I believe they’re anxious for our Stag Preston to join the organization, and by canceling, by leaping at them, we may lose a bargaining position. No, Shelly, I firmly believe we should let the tour end when and where we had planned it, and then strike.”
Shelly thought about it for a long moment, then nodded. “I believe, Colonel, sir, that were they to cast for the life of Machiavelli, you would be a definite shoo-in. I bow.” He did so.
They toasted each other silently.
Meanwhile, back at the Sands…
Stag’s apparent good behavior for the preceding month and three-quarters was not entirely due to Shelly’s watchdog attentions. It was due to the one-night stand nature of the tour. It was hard to screw a moving target. Stag was here and gone in a flash, just like The Flash, except without the winged doughboy helmet. Here, then quickly gone: he couldn’t make the contacts and preliminary makeout advances. Not only that, but with the performances, publicity appearances on radio, tv, in department stores, high schools, luncheons—by the end of the eighteen hour day, the boy was more than glad to drop onto the rack and stack up Zs.
Yet Stag Preston had tasted of the fruit of success, had, in fact, bitten deeply of that passionfruit, and like the hophead, wanted his regular supply. Being unable to get at the hordes of luscious young admirers who leered, lusted and drooled over the footlights, Stag’s attentions—as well as his thoughts—turned inward.
There were now ten other acts with the show. Most of them were one-hit record attractions whose name value was (as Shelly phrased it) from Nilsville, but who beefed up the poster listings.
One of the acts was Trudy Quillan, a pneumatic sixteen-year-old who had cut a disc on “Mood for Sorrow” and sold a quarter of a million copies of same. She had joined the tour in St. Louis and had been fourth on the bill. She was a strikingly attractive girl with an ample bust, good legs, dark black hair and high cheekbones. Her life in Florissant, Missouri, had been devoid of charm or significance until she had begun singing around town with a rock’n’roll trio. Friends had told her, “Amy,” (for her name was not really Trudy Quillan), “why don’t you go on into St. Looie and make one of them demonstration records. You got a wonderful voice, child.”
So Amy/Trudy had gone into St. Louis and she had, indeed, cut a demo. It was heard by a scout for a local waxworks who tentatively pressed it. The song was a currently popular R&B dirge and she sang it badly. But the wife of the man who had tentatively pressed it (singularly lacking in taste, but not in enthusiasm) enjoyed it and demanded—suggested?—enjoined?—that Trudy be given something else to sing.
The scout had found a down-in-the-socks composer of rhythm and blues opera and had commissioned him, with the promise of a bottle of Jack Daniels, to do a song for the young girl. That had been “Mood for Sorrow” and it was the only record on the Firefly label that ever got off the ground…even as high as a firefly.
Trudy had, in a moderate way, arrived. Arrived sufficiently, at any rate, to be booked onto Stag’s tour. And booked onto Stag’s tour inevitably entailed being booked onto Stag’s roving eye.
Trudy was an easy place for any eye to settle. Stag’s had settled on her the day she joined the troupe. Unlike most girls on road tours who invariably travel with a “stage mother,” Trudy was an orphan who had lived with an aunt and uncle in Florissant, and so came to the show unchaperoned.
Which was very much like staking out a young lamb for sacrifice.
Back in Florissant, there had been few idols with whom Trudy could identify. There had been Elizabeth Taylor, and there had been Leslie Caron (because Trudy’s features were out of the same general pixie mold), and on the other side of the sexes there had been Nick Adams and Rock Hudson and Elvis and Fabian and, of course, Stag Preston.
What would be your reaction, coming face to face with:
(If you are a dancer) Eglevsky…
(If you are a writer) Shakespeare…
(If you are a lover) (male) Cleopatra…
(female) Don Juan…
(If you are a philosopher) Solomon…
(If you are a physician) Hippocrates…
(If you are religious) God…?
Then you have a close approximation of how Trudy Quillan felt when Stag Preston made his first tentative gestures in her direction. You have an idea, also, of how Tamerlane took over the civilized world. With a gung and a ho!
At the same moment Colonel Jack Freeport was dripping the sweet honey of future wealth on Shelly Morgenstern, elsewhere in Las Vegas, Stag Preston was making merry.
Or to be more specific, Trudy.
Naked, Trudy Quillan was even more appealing than clothed. At sixteen her young, hard body was as voluptuously developed as that of a nineteen-year-old’s; her dark eyes wide, trusting, capable of being filled to moistness with passion newly-found and, most of all, love.
The object of her love, Stag Preston, was staring down at her naked form with horror, disbelief and anger. “You are what?” he was saying, as the Colonel and Shelly planned his future.
“I’m gonna have a baby,” Trudy said again, not quite understanding how her lover man could fail to understand the meaning of the word pregnant.
It meant swelling all up with a little child and going to the hospital and then Stag and Trudy would be Momma and Poppa and even if she had never had a Momma and a Poppa, as far back as she could remember, at least her baby would have a Momma and a Poppa and wouldn’t that just be marvy!
“Jeezus Chrahst!” Stag howled in pain, falling back suddenly into his Kentucky speech-patterns. “Oh, this is just swell!” He hit the side of his hand and turned away from her, leaving her ready young body waiting, empty.
Stag turned away and stared at the air-conditioner for some time. Trudy lay silently on the bed, watching him. She was confused; his attitude had altered so abruptly from anxiousness and energy as he was about to join her, that she could not understand him now.
Stag cursed foully, softly, effectively.
“Well, you can just forget about it,” he said, spinning on her. “Just forget it altogether!”
Trudy stared up without speaking. He didn’t mean…
“I got a—”
“—career to protect and I ain’t—”
“—please don’t say it, Stag—”
“—goin’ to louse it up marryin’ no damn—”
“—I LOVE YOU! Don’t you say that to me…I didn’t do it …you did it, now you better—”
“—well, just kiss off kid because this is it! Now g’wan, you enjoyed it as much as me, so g’wan, get out of here, and don’t plan to give me no trouble, because I’ve got influence.”
Trudy leaped up and dressed with supple, quick movements. Somehow, the sight of her in full skirt, shirtwaist and flats did not equate with her announcement of imminent motherhood. She closed the door behind her softly, but firmly.
Twenty minutes later, the manager who owned ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of pure Trudy Quillan, an ex-fight manager named Horace Golightly, banged—without announcement—on the door to Freeport’s suite.
Horace Golightly was a misnomer. Horace could no more Golightly than the Budweiser Clydesdales at full tilt.
When Shelly opened the door, Golightly stomped through—a short man inclined toward velvet vests and Tyrolean hats—and brought up short before Freeport. The Colonel was still perched atop the bar stool, sipping at his Pimm’s Cup. His face was a battleground of uncertain emotions. He was undecided whether to be annoyed at Golightly’s appearance, pleased at least superficially by a business acquaintance’s attentions, or overflowing with joy because of private good news.
He fell back on the time-honored demeanor of the Southern gentry:
Open hostility.
“Sir, what are you doing?”
Golightly skimmed the Tyrolean hat with its alpenstock feather onto the marble-topped end table and took up a heroic stance before the Colonel. “I’m here to see justice done, Colonel, that’s what I’m doing here!” His voice seemed to come from the bottom of a sealed barrel, hollow, resounding, but entirely wooden.
Freeport set down the drink with a snap of the wrist. He slid off the stool and approached Golightly. The manager moved back a pace. “What exactly, sir, are you blathering about?”