Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (3 page)

Which led me to think about it and I responded, "Then why don't I?"

"Because you love me," she said.

"Right," I said.

Then she grinned and made the perfect point. "You're handicapped."

Right!

Willingly, gladly, joyously handicapped. A mercurial sprinter happily tying a bag of cement to his left leg so he can race with fairness to the competition, because he loves the race, not the winning.

Love can do that. It can make you dull those savage aspects of your nature so you become more nakedly ready to accept goodness from your love-partner. It is even more pro-survival, if one accepts the theory that life is a string of boredoms, getting-alongs, sadnesses and just plain nothing-happening times, broken up by gleaming pearls of happiness that get us through the crummy stretches on that string.

Weakness becomes strength.

After you've had the Ultimate Love Affair that has broken you, leaves you certain love has been poisoned in your system, then, and only then, can you be saved and uplifted by the Post-Ultimate Love Affair.

Because that's when you're most uncertain, most self-doubting, most locked into a tunnel vision of love and life. And that's when new experiences come out of nowhere to wham you.

I guess this ties in with what I was saying about pain in the introduction to PAINGOD and about how we cannot savor the full wonder of joy unless we've gone through some exhausting, debilitating times of anguish. No one likes pain (and please be advised I'm not advocating S-M or any of the torture-games some people need to get them off; I'm talking about life-situation pain; enemas and shtupping amputees and whips 'n' chains may be superfine for Penthouse and other sources of communication for those who're into such things, but I'm not, and so when I talk about pain I mean getting your brain busted, not your body shackled; okay?) but it seems to me that we spend so much time avoiding pain of even the mildest sort, that we turn ourselves into mollusks. To love, I think, one must be prepared to get clipped on the jaw occasionally.

Otherwise, one would always settle for the safest, least demanding, least challenging relationship. Wouldn't we?

I think that makes sense.

And so, having been destroyed by an affair, knowing one has had the Ultimate Love, one wanders lost and broken in a new place. And then, from out of nowhere--and I've seen it happen time and again--comes this whirlwind that sweeps you up and carries you along, and three, four, five months later you realize it isn't a rebound affair, it's the Post-Ultimate Affair, and you're whole again, and stronger than ever.

So go find the greatest love of your life, the one that burns and sizzles and chars everything around it, and fling yourself into it like a child in a playground. Drain all you can from it, and then get your back broken. Suffer and stumble around and weep and piss and moan. And then look out! Because here comes The Lone Ranger or Wonder Woman, ready to make it all good again ... and this time probably for keeps.

Here are a few more things about love I think work.

Friendship is better than passion.

As Richard Shorr says, if you can say to your partner, even when you hate him or her the most, I wish you well, then you've got a chance to make it. Lust works wonders, it puts apples in your cheeks (and sometimes crabs in your bed), but it ebbs and flows. Friendship sustains and enriches and stays constant.

Hate and love have the same intensity of emotion.

Hate ain't nothing but love misspelled.

But you know that one already .

You can't go home again.

If you were sweethearts after college, and had a thing going, and one or the other of you took off and did your number and it went sour--the marriage dissolved, the career didn't materialize, discovering yourself turned out to be a drag filled with Tantric Yoga and Kahlil Gibran platitudes--and you fantasize what it would've been like if you'd stuck with that Great Love of Your Youth ... forget it. He's changed, she's changed, you've changed, and the best you can have is a quick fuck and a lot of recycled memories. It just doesn't play.

Next to telling your lover what turns you on precisely, the best thing to bring to bed is a sense of humor.

Nothing is more tiresome and capable of creating tension in bed than heavy breathing el serioso. God save us from the men and women who need to hear all the artificial "I love you" jingoism, even when they know it's bullshit, said at the moment and having substance no longer than it takes to use a Kleenex and dash to the shower. But laughter, taking the hangups and inconveniences and wonky awkwardnesses as sources of mirth ... wow, how bright that can make it.

Please yourself and be selfish about it.

In love and sex, it's every man and woman in a one-person life raft. If you don't go'n'get it, no one'll stake you to a free ride. Concern for each other goes without saying, and attention to detail; but when it comes right down to it, you've got to satisfy yourself. If the guy ain't doing it right, lady, bite his nose and tell him how to do it. And if you've got a premature problem, fella, let her know about it before the fact so arrangements can be made. And don't clutter up your pleasure by swallowing that outdated nonsense about, "Oh, it seems too clinical that way; it takes all the romance out of it." Romance is one of those ephemerals they whip on you so you won't know that sex is supposed to be sweaty!

And finally: love ain't nothing but sex misspelled.

Which is an ironic title. It means people confuse one for the other. They think passion alone makes love. And so the relationship flares while they explore each other's bodies, and when it's gone, so is their affection for one another.

Love is being utterly honest, even when it's ground glass painful. Tell the truth all the time! All the truth! Not just that part that you can get away with. Go the limit. And the answer to Hemingway's riddle is that the leopard lost his way. He took the wrong path. And that's what so many of us do in love.

Keep aware, keep wide open, and remember everything that's ever happened to you, everything that's ever been said, every motion and change of tone and subtle hint. We'll read a long, essentially dull book on how to get through probate with our skin intact, or take a correspondence course in electrical wiring just so we don't have to pay an electrician to do our house, or go to college for four years to acquire the obscure knowledge that will permit us to make a living in one or another proscribed field of endeavor. But about the most mysterious subject of all, love, we bumble and careen and hope for the best; without proper education, without proper tools, without even a goal that can be named. And more often than not it poisons our lives. The wrong men and the wrong women get together and proceed to kill each other piece by piece.

This is all I know of love: like the leopard we must pick the right path, and we must never confuse what the body needs with what the soul demands. Beyond these idle thoughts, I know no more than you.

As a troll, as an alien creature, I know that having an affair with me is not the same as having an affair with an orthodontist or a salesman of mobile homes or a guy going for his degree in P.E. That's my arrogance.

I hope to God you have yours.

Final words about this book.

In the original edition of LOVE AIN'T NOTHING BUT SEX MISSPELLED, published in hardcover in 1968, there were 22 stories. For this edition, I've dropped nine of those stories. They are good stories, some of them I consider among my best. But they are available elsewhere, in other books of mine currently in print. I have grown highly sensitive to the odd remarks about duplications of stories in my collections, and so I have taken extra-special pains to make sure there are no duplications, or if there are any, they're at a minimum and they've been included to maintain the theme of the book.

So I've added three new, uncollected pieces to the 13 from the original version of this book. Usually, a short story collection bulks out at about 60,000 words. LOVE, first time around, came to 165,300 words, almost the equivalent of three books. I've deleted 51,900 words of stories and added 16,400 to the remaining 115,400 words' worth of material from the hardcover. That makes a total of 131,800 words of stories, plus this introduction of approximately 8000 words, for your money's worth of 139,800. Something well over two ordinary collections' size. And no room for complaints from those who've bought my other books.

For those curious as to which stories were dropped, the following list with the titles of the other Ellison books shows where they can be found.

"Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes

I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM

"The Night of Delicate Terrors

"Final Shtick"

"O Ye of Little Faith

"Delusion for a Dragon-Slayer

I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM

"Lonelyache

I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM

"The Face of Helene Bournouw

"Ernest and the Machine God

"All the Sounds of Fear

As for the stories I've included, some may seem to you less thematic than others. "Blind Bird, Blind Bird, Go Away from Me!" is a war story, and I suppose might easily have gone into another sort of collection. But I intended this book to cover a wide spectrum on the subject of love; and friendship, a sense of duty, love of those who depend on you ... that's love, too. As is the love-turned-to hate demonstrated in "Daniel White for the Greater Good" and "The Universe of Robert Blake" (not the actor, though we're friends and I probably used the name unconsciously years before we met) and "A Prayer for No One's Enemy." These are all stories peripherally concerned with love, and they are included here because this hook was, and remains, one of my personal favorites. And each tale to be told reflects another part of my fumbling attempts to understand the mystery of love.

These stories have helped change my opinion of myself where human knowledge is concerned. They total up to almost 140,000 words of groping in the dark to find the answer.

For a troll, groping in the dark is second nature.

Here's hoping they shed a little light.

Los Angeles

12 September 75

The Introduction to the first edition was dumb, and I've dropped it. You wouldn't have liked it, anyway. Trust me.

My first inclination, upon learning Jenny was knocked up, was to go find Roger Gore and auger him into the sidewalk. That was my first inclination; when she called, I lit a cigarette and asked her if my girl Rooney, her roommate, knew about it, and she said yes, Rooney knew and had suggested the call to me. I told her to take a copy of McCall's and go to the bathroom, that I had to think about it, and would call her back in twenty minutes. She wasn't crying when she hung up, which was something to be thankful for.

There is a crime in our land more heinous than any other I can think of, right offhand, and yet it goes unpunished. It is the crime of gullibility. People who actually believe the lowballing of used car dealers; people who accept the penciled "2 Drink Minimum" card on their table as law; girls who swallow the line of horse crud a swinger uses to get them in the rack. Like that, yeah. Jenny was a product of that crime wave. She was a typical know-nothing, a little patsy who had been seduced by four-color lithography and dream-images from a million mass media, and she believed the stork brought babies.

In about ninety days her tummy was going to tell her she'd been lied to. And been had.

When I'd started dating Rooney, and had learned that the roommates were two eighteen-year-olds fresh out of nowhere and firmly under Rooney's wing, it had been a toss-up whether I'd try to make them on the sly, or become Big Brother to the brood. As it turned out, Rooney was enough action for me, and I took the latter route.

We started taking Jenny and Kitten (née Margaret Alice Kirgen, the second roommate) with us when we went out. Parties, movies, schlepping-around sessions in which we put miles on the car and layers on our ennui. Kitten wasn't bad; she was a reasonably hip kid who was actually six months younger than Jenny, but much more aware of what was going on around her. Jenny was impossible. There was a naïve quality about her that might have been ingenuous, if she hadn't been so gawdawful stupid along with it. They are two different facets, naïveté and stupidity, and combined they make for a saccharine-sweet dumb that paralyzes as it horrifies.

Why did we allow them to come along with us, to adopt us someway; or rather, let us adopt them? Put it down to my past, which was filled with incomplete memories of deeds I did not care to think about. I can't remember ever having been young, not really. On my own as far back as I can recall, there was never that innocence of childhood or nature that I longed to see in others. So Jenny and Kitten became my social projects. Not in any elaborate sense, but it pleasured me to see them enjoy the bounties of the young ... oh hell, Norman Rockwell and Edgar A. Guest and let's all pose for a Pepsi ad.

Kenneth Duane Markham, thirty years old and a humanitarian. Let's send this child to camp (if we can't roll her in the hay, hey hey!). Call it noble intentions, for all the wrong reasons.

At one of the parties we took Jenny to, I ran across Roger Gore. He was (is) (will be, till I catch his face in my right hand) a good-looking jackpotter with a flair for wearing clothes that would look slovenly on other guys, and a laudable record of having avoided honest labor. His father owned a chain of something or others, and Roger indulged himself by taking jobs as switchman on the railroad, soap salesman door to door, night watchman. He never did any of them for very long; his rationale for taking on such onerous tasks was the same as that of the aspiring novelist. He wanted to be able to say he had done these things. It was all very Robert Ruark and hairy-chested and proletarian. He was a fraud. But a good-looking, smooth fraud with a flair for wearing clothes that would look--but I said that already.

It was one of those parties where some college kid had met a hipster in a downtown black-and-tan club, and had invited him over the following night for "a little get-together." As a consequence, the room was jammed, half with inept, callow UCLA students, half with sinuous spades wrapped up in color. It was one of those scenes where the gray cats felt a sense of adventure and titillation just being in the same time-zone with Negroes, and the blacks were infra-digging, wasting the white boys' Watusi with their own extra-lovely dancing, and mooching as much free juice as possible.

Everybody hated everybody, 'way down deep.

We walked in and I saw Roger first crack out of the bag. He was trying to make the scene with a couple of black dudes I knew from downtown, and they were being indulgent. But they "felt a draft" and Old Rog was about to get frozen out. When they put him down (which could be noted by the way his sappy expression went sour) and he walked away, I took the two girls over and introduced them. To the black guys. Roger would make his own introductions, I had no worries on that score. But the two downtown operators were bad, meaning they were good. One of them was a shipping clerk for a record distributor, and the other was a gopher in an exclusive men's hair salon. (Gopher: "Go for the coffee, Jerry." "Go for Mr. Bentley's shoes, Jerry." "Go for--")

"Hey, baby, what's shakin'?"

"Howya doin', man, it's been time I seen yoah ass."

"Busy."

"Yeah, sheee-it, man, you always busy one thing'n 'nother."

"Gotta keep the bread on the table ..."

"Got to keep that bread in yoah pocket!"

"True."

Jenny was standing there, her face open, and as far as she was concerned, where was she? Rooney was digging, as usual, and loving me with her eyes, which was a groove. I pointed each one out to the guys and named:

"Hey, Jerry, Willis, want you to meet Rooney and Jenny." Kitten had had a date. A CPA from Santa Monica. Wow!

"Very pleased't meetcha." Jerry grinned. That cat had the most beautiful mouthful of teeth known to Western Man, he knew it. and he flashed them like the marquee at Grauman's Chinese. "Very pleased't meetcha," Willis said, and I knew he was shucking me, just to make me feel good; he was coming on with Rooney because he knew it would make me feel tall. I gave them each a soft punch on the bicep and we moved off into the crowd. We said our hellos to the host, who was an authentic schlepp, and took the coats into the bedroom. A pair of UCLAmnesiacs were making it among the coats, so we laid ours over the windowseat. It promised to be a bad, dull party. The roar of rhythm&blues was coming out of the living room, meeting the bubble gum music from the dining room head-on, and canceling each other out in the hallways connecting.

We stepped out into one of these eye-of-the-hurricane areas, and started looking for the bar. I saw Roger Gore heading for the kitchen, and I knew immediately where the juice was being dispensed. I turned to Jenny. "See that guy in the gray hound's tooth, the one going into the kitchen?"

She nodded.

"Stay away from him. There are ten thousand guys at this party who aren't trouble. That one is. He's clever and pretty fair-looking, but he's a lox, and I tell you three times, one two three, stay out of his reach. That's my only advice for the evening. Now scoot." I gave her a shove on the rump and she moved out.

Rooney grinned at me. "Guardian of the morals of the young."

"Poof you," I answered.

"Not here, surely, sir." There were times I wanted to chomp on her ears. And that damned grin of hers. Heidi. Rapunzel. Snow White. Mata Hari.

We went our way, and nodded to Roger Gore in the kitchen, where he was doing something noxious with martinis and sweet gherkins. What a lox!

About an hour later Rooney was bopping with Willis (that sweet muthuh!) and I was in the corner digging a T-Bone Walker 78 somebody had slipped into the stack. Jenny came up to me; "I'm going out for a drink with Roger. I'll be back in about half an hour."

I didn't even think it was worth getting angry about. I'd known it was going to happen. Don't go up in the top shelf of the cabinet and take a bean out of the jar and shove it up your nose, you tell the infant, and when you get back home, there he is, stretched out blue on the linoleum, a bean up his nose. It's the way children are.

She mulched out of there on Roger Gore's arm, and when Rooney was done sweating with Willis, he brought her back and I told her about Jenny's exeunt simpering.

"Why didn't you stop her?" she demanded.

"Who do I look like: Torquemada?" I got hot. "I've got enough trouble governing the habits of you and me without taking on the world at large. Besides, he won't hurt her, for Chrissakes. They'll be back."

We waited six hours. The party was over, we were really drug with the scene, and finally went back to my place to sack out. About five A.M. the phone rang, I groped for it, somehow got it up to my nose and blew into it. After a minute something fell into place and I knew I had it wrong. I tried my eye and my mouth, and by process of elimination got around to my ear. It was Jenny.

"Can you come and get me?"

"Whuhtimezit?"

"I don't know, it's late. Can you come get me?"

"Whereyooat?"

"I'm in a phone booth on Sunset, near Highland. Can you come and get me?" And she started crying. I woke up fast.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine, can you come and get me?"

"Sure. Of course, but what happened to you? We waited till everyone else vanished. What the hell happened to you? Rooney was worried sick."

"I'll tell you later. Can you come get me now?"

"Give me fifteen minutes."

She hung up, I slid out without waking Rooney, threw on a pair of chinos and a jacket, and flew the coop. She was standing under a streetlight where she had said she'd be, and I bundled her into the car, where she immediately broke down. I got her back to my house, and bedded her out on the sofabed in the living room, and went back to sleep myself.

Next morning Rooney cooed over her like Little Orphan Annie. We eventually got the story, and it wasn't that spectacular. He'd taken her to a little bar nearby, tried to get her lushed (which he didn't have to bother doing; Jenny was--putting it politely--not smart enough to avoid being a pushover) and finally told her he had to get the car, which was allegedly his roommate's, back to his house. When he got her there, he proceeded to try The Game, and Jenny swore he hadn't succeeded. In childish retaliation, Roger had fallen asleep. She'd waited around for three hours, but he snoozed on, and finally she'd tried to waken him. Either he couldn't or wouldn't rouse himself, because she finally took to her heels, and an hour and a half later had managed to get to the phone booth.

"Why didn't you call from his house?"

"I was afraid he'd wake up."

"But you wanted him up, didn't you?"

"Well, yes."

"So why didn't you call from there?"

"I was afraid. I wanted to get out of there."

"Afraid? Of what? Of him?"

"Well ..."

"Jenny, tell me now, tell me true, did he get to you?"

"No. I swear it. He got very angry when I gave him a hard time. He called me ... he called me ..."

"I know what he called you. Forget it."

"I can't."

"So remember it. But don't lie to me, did he get in?"

She turned her face away. At the time I thought it was because of my choice of words. "No, he didn't," she said. So I couldn't really bring myself to feel possessively angry at Roger Gore. He'd done what any guy would try to do. He'd tried to make her, failed, and gotten disgusted. His chief sin was in not being a gentleman. In falling asleep and letting her fend for herself; but then, I'd known Gore was anything but a gentleman, anyhow, so there really wasn't provocation enough to go find and pound him. We let the matter drop. I forgot about it, and fortunately, didn't run into Roger Gore again for some time.

Now, eight weeks later, I sat smoking a cigarette, while Jenny languished in the bathroom of her apartment, reading McCall's, and the seed grew in her. I felt responsible. The phone rang. I picked it up reluctantly, and it was Rooney. "She told you?" I mumbled something affirmative. "Have you got a solution?"

"Three of them," I answered. "She can have the baby, she can get it aborted, or she can get Roger Gore to marry her. I'd say the first and third are out, the second one the most feasible, and a quick fourth reason altogether possible."

"What's the fourth one?" Rooney asked.

"She can blow her fucking stupid brains out."

All you have to do is get friendly with a couple of jazz musicians, have met a hooker at a party, be on civil terms with a grocer who takes the neighborhood numbers action, occasionally make an after-hours set in the Negro section, and suddenly you are a figure of mystery, a man with "connections" in the underworld; people come to you for unspeakable foulnesses you have never been within spitting distance of. It is a reflex cliché of people who really haven't the faintest bloody idea of what the Real World is like. Since they themselves never slip over the line, anyone who lives beyond the constrained limits of their socially acceptable scene, has got to be a figure of mystery, a man with--oh well...

Rooney asked me how soon I could locate an abortionist.

"A whaaat?"

She repeated herself, all honey-voiced forthrightness. It was a foregone conclusion. "Spider" Markham, denizen of the murky underworld, familiar of hoods, gunsels and two-bit whores was the man to ask when you needed a butcher.

"What the hell makes you think I know an abortionist?"

"Well, don't you?"

"No. Of course not. I take precautions. I'm not an imbecile like Roger Gore. I've never knocked anyone up, so ergo I don't know any abortionists." I looked at her with unconcealed annoyance, and she stared back blandly. She wasn't convinced. I was, of course, hiding my connections, for obvious reasons.

"Say, you don't believe me, do you?" I was getting highly hacked by this scene. And Jenny just sat there with her face hanging out, and her stomach growing.

"Well, you can call someone, one of your strange friends, can't you?"

I blew higher than the Van Allen radiation belt. "You've got to be putting me on, Rooney! Call who? What 'strange friends'?" My face was so hot I could feel it in my mouth.

She stared at me accusingly.