And sitting there in the Valdosta slam, I complained to the innkeeper that I hadn’t eaten all day and I. d like something plain and downhome. After he stopped laughing he advised me that brunch had long since been served and that I’d have to wait till that night for the sumptuous county-provided meal.
In the next cell was an old man who’d been hauled in for pissing on some woman’s garden. He never told me why he’d taken it upon himself to nourish the flora in that way.
He dug around in his pockets and came up with a half-eaten Power House candy bar. He offered it to me, and I took it. There was no reason why he should have done that, but he did it, and I thanked him. Several times I thanked him.
For a few minutes there in Valdosta, Georgia, that old man was my friend.
Another time, just recently, a man who had been a close friend for eight years, who had assured me that when and if I needed his assistance he would be there, who had always talked a very courageous talk, who came to my home and who shared meals with me, who acted (in all ways that required no demonstration of risk) as if he were my friend… betrayed me in a court of law, while under oath, renouncing what he had said in sworn deposition… and all to the end of trying to cripple a lawsuit it took me four years of my life to get before a judge and jury.
The pain of listening to him dissemble, there in that courtroom, was infinitely greater than the pain inflicted on me by the original injustice, by the days, weeks and months I have lost trying to get justice, by the vast sums of money I have expended trying to counter powerful opponents. During the time he testified I felt the pain of watching a friend die. Despite his perfidy, I won… and won big.
I can only suppose he did it out of self-interest, out of lack of courage, out of fear. Nonetheless, I now realize he could never have been my friend.
So what is friendship?
My answers to that question are no more formidable than my answers to the questions what is love or what is art?
It redefines itself each time the question is confronted. But this I do think is true: there is an element of risk in friendship. It is a quality that defines itself in terms of love and loyalty as the readiness to inconvenience oneself at risk of something valuable. And that seldom means money. It means the skin goes on the line.
I think that’s right.
But maybe not.
In this story a writer delivers his own obituary. Some of that last will and testament is mine. Some is not. The narrator and the protagonist are partially me and partially a close friend of mine, a man I’ve called friend for over twenty-five years. The two of us are purposely intermingled, and large chunks of pure invention have been added to both. This is fiction, not personal memoir. Try not to read too much one-for-one into the bits and pieces of this work.
Writers take tours in other people’s lives, and readers must be canny enough to understand that some writers like to playa mean little game of misdirection when it looks as if they’re inviting entry into the private back rooms of the writer himself.
They buried Jimmy Crowstairs today.
My closest, oldest, best friend: the world-famous fantasist, Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs.
They put him down the rectangular hole this morning, and I was one of the dozen people inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes. Also in there among the select few was an ex-President of the United States, for whom I had not voted; also two actresses, one of whom, though age thirty, keeps being cast as late teens beachbait, despite her excellence as a serious thesp, mostly on the basis of her chubby cheeks and a pair of breasts—if you’ll pardon the pragmatism—only slightly smaller than Bosnia and Herzegovina; the other one I didn’t know, but she made a good impression on me when, as we were walking up the hill to the grave from the limos, she graciously waved off a small knot of ghouls seeking her autograph; Jimmy’s publisher, whose chief claims to fame are his rejection of Jerzy Kosinski’s first novel on the basis that it was morbid and depressing, and his ongoing participation as a panelist on a television game show now into its seventh year of syndication; Jimmy’s sister, eight years his senior, whom he had not spoken to for over twenty years and to whom he referred as SylviaTheCunt, all one word; a great bear of an English novelist, a French film director who wore clothes so elegantly it made everyone else feel like breadline standbys, a plasma physicist from Princeton who’s up for the Nobel this year because of his major breakthrough in magnetic containment fusion; and two married couples Jimmy considered close friends, mostly because they proved to him, as living examples, that it is possible for Man and Woman to cleave together under the same roof, bound by The Paper (as he constantly referred to it), without emotionally disemboweling each other. How many is that? Counting me, that’s thirteen. Well, okay, thirteen, not twelve. Even so, it was a select cadre of mourners.
Set apart by black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes from the vast throng of his fans and idle groupies of the great, the near-great, the celebrated and the hemidemisemicelebrated.
History tells us that when Victor Hugo died on May 22nd, 1885, over two million Parisians followed the pauper’s hearse he had specified from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.
Jimmy’s entourage wasn’t quite that large; but for a contemporary author, in a nation where illiteracy has gone beyond mere totemization, well into deification… it was eminently satisfactory. Maybe two or three thousand. Not bad at all for a guy they steadfastly called a “sci-fi writer.”
You‘ll notice I never use that hideous neologism.
Jimmy spent the last twenty-five years of his life trying to get that ugly categorization off his books and out of the biographies they wrote about him. He wrote fantasy, if specific pigeonholes are needed; but he insisted on being called simply a writer. He didn’t even like being referred to as an “author.” He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer.” An author [he said] is what you put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who gets his name on the spine of leatherbound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life… writing.”
Either way, whatever they called him, he managed by sheer dint of hard work and careful manipulation of his public image to become three things, almost always mutually contradictory: a staggeringly wealthy bestselling novelist, a. genius artist who was seriously regarded by all the “serious” critics, and a legend in his own time. A household name like Salk or Babe Ruth or Hemingway—or Nixon or Jack the Ripper or Hitler.
And this morning they lowered him into darkness, and wonderful words were read over him by Rabbi Ashkenazi, Monsignor McCalla, Dr. Ehlen, Carl Sagan and me. Mine were the best.
Naturally: I knew him best. And as Jimmy so often told interviewers, with that abundance of humble largesse that so endeared him to People magazine, The Paris Review and The National Enquirer, “Larry Bedloe is a good solid writer; he’s got a nice little talent working there.”
That popped up in my thoughts as I stood there watching them crank down the gunmetal-blue anodized aluminum casket. Right across from me, on the other side of the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes, was a chubby little woman in basic black and pearls. Her face was all puffy from crying. She was clutching the Literary Guild boxed set of his Radimore trilogy. Chances of her getting it autographed were very slim.
Kerch, as everyone but his ex-wife Leslie and I called him, was already on his way to stardom when I met him. We were both just turning twenty—I scampered ahead only six months older—which meant that for half of each year he could refer to me as “old man” and I could admonish him to speak with respect to his elders—and we had both been science fiction fans.
Every ingroup coterie had its mystiques, its craziness. Masons have secret handshakes; jazz musicians run a special patois incomprehensible to squares; only in the motion picture industry can you get a laugh when you tell the one about the Polish starlet… w
ho fucked the writer; antiquarian bookdealers share arcane rituals of buy&sell that bind them in terms of verso, recto, foxing, gutters and true firsts.
The deranged traditions of science fiction “fandom” are overwhelmingly attractive, particularly to those few boys and girls who are the outcasts of their high school classes because of wonky thought processes, a flair for the bizarre, and physical appearance that denies them the treasures of sorority membership or a position on the football team. For the pimply, the short, the weird and intelligent… for those to whom sex is frightening and to whom come odd dreams in the middle of study hall, the camaraderie of fandom is a gleaming, beckoning Erewhon; an extended family of other wimps, twinks, flakes and oddballs.
We had never met, though we’d corresponded heavily for several years. The nexus of our incipient friendship was the. maelstrom of fannish publishing—”fanzines.” Mimeographed amateur magazines of comment about the writers and the works in the genre, and a smattering of dreary fan fiction. His fanzine was titled, with becoming modesty, The World’s Greatest SF Famine Including Venus; mine was called Visitations.
But it was at the tenth annual World Science Fiction Convention (neologized as ChiCon 11), in Chicago, 1952, that we actually met.
I was walking through the lobby of the Hotel Morrison. Being short on funds, I had arranged to stay in a two-room suite with half a dozen other fans from different parts of the country; and I was looking for the one in whose name the rooms were registered, so I could get the key and dump my suitcase.
The lobby was jammed with a horde of fans checking in, renewing acquaintances, screaming across through the potted plants for directions, rolling in dollies with cartons of used books for the huckster room, making arrangements for cheeseburger dinners that night. And in the midst of that cyclical flow of sweaty aficionados who had driven or flown of hitchhiked or crawled in from Minneapolis and Kansas City and Cleveland, Jake Repnich tracked me down.
I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt as I tried to elbow through a knot of kids divvying up suitcases for the trek to the elevators (thereby saving the bellboy’s tip), and I reeled backward as the tension was applied. Then someone clubbed me a shot in the kidney.
I pitched forward, but couldn’t fall down because the back of my shirt was still wrapped in a fist. So my feet went out from under me and I dropped to my knees. I tried to look around behind me; I was in such exquisite pain that my head wouldn’t turn on my neck. Everything seemed to be slipping off the edge. But I could tell from the expressions on the faces of the crowd that something awful was about to happen, and that I was on the visitation end of that unnamed awfulness.
A foot was planted between my shoulder blades and the fist let go of my shirt, and I was booted forward onto my suitcase, which slid a few feet, carrying me as on a raft.
I fell off, rolled over, and tried to sit up.
Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death were staring down at me.
The courageous and loving extended family had moved back to clear a circle in which I could be conveniently stomped to pudding. Erewhon had been invaded.
The nastiest-looking of the Four Horsemen—whom I instantly recognized as Death—leaned forward, providing me with a dandy view of his terminal acne, and (in the pulp magazine vernacular of the period) lipped thinly, “I’m Jake Repnich, you little sonofabitch. You wanna tweak my nose?”
It all became hideously clear what was happening. Six months earlier, among the batches of fanzines I traded for Visitations by mail, I’d received an ineptly hektographed crudzine called Uranium-236. It was “edited,” if one takes semiliteracy, quadruple amputee syntax and sophomoric screeds against any writer with aspirations of writing literature above the level of shootouts in space as editing, by one Jake Repnich. It came out of Secaucus, New Jersey. Need more be said?
As the voice of reason, I had cast caution to the Four Horsemen (without knowing it), and had responded to a particularly stupid article in which Repnich had said H. P. Lovecraft was a better writer than Poe, with the published remarks that good old Jake had about as much literary savvy as a storm drain, and that someone ought to tweak his nose. The point being that merely slapping his pinkies wasn’t due and proper for the intellectual crimes of a pimplebrain like good old Jake, a. k. a. Death.
Now Jake and three of his buddies, who no doubt spent their off-hours chewing broken glass and flogging cripples, had come all the way to Chicago from Secaucus, New Jersey, to more than tweak the nose of Larry Bedloe.
The smell of the Jersey swamps was still on them.
And I hadn’t, at that point, lived enough of a life to have it flash before my eyes.
With three stories out to market, without even having had my shot at immortality, with the National Book Award and Martha Foley’s Best of the Year and intimate conversations with Styron and Mailer and Hemingway and Steinbeck just within my grasp, I was about to become a problem for the carpet cleaners of the Hotel Morrison. Quelle ironie!
At which moment Jake Repnich’s nose spouted blood and he went pinwheeling past me to land in a hideous heap against the check-in counter.
A foot and a half behind the spot he had just occupied stood a wild-eyed, babbling apparition, part vampire bat, part slavering derangement, part avenging Fury. The attaché case he had used to break Death’s nose was dangling from one of his little pixie fists. The other fist was balled and seemed to be waiting for a target of opportunity.
Feet planted far apart, this pint-sized Zorro, no less than Destiny’s Tot, stared at the three remaining teddy boys with eyes that could have triggered an A-bomb. “You want trouble, you pustulent slugs? You want a hassle, huh? You want to come in here where law-abiding science fiction fans are trying to share good times, and start a fracas? Huh, that what you want? Well, we’re ready! Right, everybody?”
He directed the challenge at the extended family, cowering in confusion and naked cowardice around the lobby.
From here and there in the crowd came timorous responses of “Yeah, you tell ‘em,” and “We’re with you, all the way!”
In that instant I understood the dangerous power of Willie Stark, Elmer Gantry, Jean Paul Marat and Aimee Semple McPherson.
Gorgo the Small then instructed Conquest, Slaughter and Famine to gather up the weeping, bleeding carcass of their leader and, with the crowd backing him all the way, in some unfathomable power-pull, he moved the guerrilla band through the lobby, down the steps, across the landing, down some other steps, through the revolving doors, and out onto the street. The potential assassins were held there for a few minutes, I suppose to get explicit directions from the Goliath-slayer how to find their way back to the sewers that emptied out onto the Jersey flats—with detailed warnings of what would happen to them should they try to return to the ChiCon—and then the throng returned.
I was still on the floor.
Peter Pan reached down, pulled me to my feet and said, with a wide, infectious grin,. ‘Hi, you’re Larry Bedloe, right? I’m Kerch Crowstairs, we’re sharing the room upstairs. I just sold my first novel, Crowell’s publishing it in the spring, it’s called Death Dance on Sirius 7. You’re going to love it, I promise you.”
Say hello to Kercher O. J. Crowstairs.
It started raining as the funeral party filed away from Jimmy’s grave. I looked up into the slanting gray downpour.
My parents were Wesleyan Methodists; Straight out of the Book of Discipline: no movies, no books except the Bible and the Book of Hymns, no eating in restaurants that hold a liquor license, church four times a week, tithes, and praying out loud in unison till it all melds into a droning chant. Some of the clearest thinking of the early 1700s. God is love and no intermediary is needed to intercede for his children. Not to mention that I confess Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord and pledge my allegiance to His Kingdom.
From this background I fled Pittsburgh and my family with the cynicism that served as Maginot Line against the rape of my sanity, yet unable to shake the inculcated, s
ubcutaneous certainty that God Is Watching. God, the art director; God, the set designer; God, the stage manager.
Who always makes it rain at the most dramatic moments in the burial ceremonies. Just once, I thought, why doesn’t the Holy Director go against form, against type-casting, against cliché. A hail of frogs, perhaps. Or a celestial chorus, and marching band decked out like a New Orleans jazz funeral, with selections ranging from Muskrat Ramble to Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.
I stood there as everyone else filed away, directed by the attendants. Since I was still inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes they let me remain for a moment.
Almost thirty years. I knew you through most of my life, Jimmy. Friends. I don’t even know what that means. I’m sure you must have done things for me on the basis of friendship, but I’ll be damned if I can remember a single one of them. I remember another time of rain, a night in New York, years ago, when we had dinner together and you left me standing in the wet outside the restaurant, I remember that. You hustled down the sidewalk to your car and popped into the Porsche and drove off uptown, never even thinking to offer me a ride back to my hotel. It took me the better part of an hour to get a cab; I remember that.
But friends. Never occurred to me to question that word as the operative definition of our liaison. But what the hell did that ever mean, functionally speaking? You knew almost everything about me, and I knew quite a lot about you, but then so do all your readers, what with the confessional nature of most of what you wrote.
I was one of your readers. Every word published that I could lay hands on.