Strange Wine (22 page)

I’d go into the full story of Cordwainer’s most famous awfulness,
The Starlost
, but I’ve told it in explicit and defamatory detail as the introduction to a wonderful, terrific book called
Phoenix Without Ashes
(available from another publisher for a paltry 95¢). This incredibly great book to which I make humble and merely passing reference is a novelization of the original version of the pilot script, the one that won the Writers Guild award as the Most Outstanding Dramatic-Episodic Script of the 1973–74 season. I wrote the introduction about how the morons who produced the show screwed it up, forcing me to put the Bird monicker on it, and the talented young sf writer Edward Bryant did the novel. And if you want to read the original version of that script, the one Ellison wrote, not the one that got aired with Bird’s name on it, you can read it in an anthology called
Faster than Light
, edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski (Harper & Row, 1975). And if you want to read a funny novelization of the shit I went through in Toronto during the period when I worked on the series before walking out on it, try Ben Bova’s comic novel,
The Starcrossed
(Chilton, 1975; Pyramid, 1976). In fact, Ben even dedicated the book to Bird. So that’s as much cross-reference as you’ll need and further than that I don’t want to go into it. Besides, the publisher of
this
book will start charging me for advertising if I go into it any further.

Which brings us to the story you’re about to read.

A couple of years ago, Philip José Farmer, one of the
great
fantasists of our time, wrote me saying he was in the process of doing stories by famous fictional writers who were characters in stories by real writers. Hemingway’s Nick Adams, Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout, Jack London’s Martin Eden, Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, Thomas Mann’s Gustave von Aschenbach, Barry Malzberg’s Jonathan Herovit…that whole crowd. And he said he wanted to do a Cordwainer Bird story.

At approximately the same time, dashing and debonair young Byron Preiss, editor of a lunatic series of paperbacks called
Weird Heroes
, got in touch and wanted me to write a story about a new American pulp hero who was a writer. I suggested Cordwainer. He thought that was super.

The next thing I knew, Phil and Byron had gotten together and were
nuhdzing
me almost weekly to write the story for the book. Phil even integrated Cordwainer into the genealogy of Doc Savage in the revised chart to be found in the paperback edition of
Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life
. Now, let me make one point perfectly, uh, let me say this: I had never
ever
given any thought to who or what Cordwainer Bird might be. It was just a pen name, just a throwaway, a device to let those who knew my work and the standards of craft I try to maintain that I had been jerked around, that the result was for the birds and I wasn’t the one responsible.

But. Here comes that damned Farmer with letters, one after the other, wanting to know this about Bird, wanting to know that, wanting to know how tall he was, and how he wore his hair, and what color his eyes were, and what stories he’d written. Then the phone calls! Between Preiss and Farmer, I was driven bats. The one calling to find out if I’d even started writing the bloody story yet, and the other calling to tell me Bird was a nephew of The Shadow and The Spider and G-8, for God’s sake! And it all started ballooning and mushrooming, and the next thing I knew others had found out that Bird was going to take on The New York Literary Establishment, that inarticulated conspiracy of writers, editors, critics, and publishers who get fat while so many fine writers starve in back rooms and Quonset huts across the country. And they started suggesting why didn’t Bird kill this one in the story, and why didn’t Bird wipe out that one in the story, and why didn’t Bird get all the brain-damaged copyeditors who fuck up literate copy in their hell-bent drive to make it conform to Smith or Bryn Mawr type-style and machine-gun them in the lobby of the Plaza.

And I must confess that while Bird’s activities in this story are a tot bloodier than any I’ve engaged in (though I did once send a dead gopher and a recipe for dead gopher stew to the comptroller of a publishing house that was messing me over), there is just the faintest tot of wish fulfillment in the work.

So as you can see, I
am
Cordwainer Bird and I am
not
Cordwainer Bird. I am, when I’m forced to put a pen name on work that’s been ruined by other hands; but I’m not the guy in the story, because he’s a vigilante and I’d
never
do that sort of thing.

Further, my hair is brown, and Bird’s is black; I’m 5’5” and Bird is exactly four feet tall; Bird has Uncle Kent, The Shadow, for a relative, and the best I’ve got is my Uncle Lew up in Larchmont, who dabbles in stocks…I think. (Come to dwell on it, what
does
Lew do for a living?)

In any case, the story you’re about to read is a fable. A myth. It ain’t true. And if the names of real persons have managed to creep into it, why, it’s just literary tomfoolery. I’ve never even met any of the book-buying staff of Brentano’s, and while something like what Skippy Wingwalker talks about in the story happened to me when I was being published by Avon, I’d
never
throw even a creep like Skippy’s real-life counterpart out a window. So that disclaims it, and we can all settle back in the assurance that Cordwainer Bird is merely a creature of the imagination. Honest he is. Would I lie to you?

“The one important thing I have learnt over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking oneself seriously. The first is imperative and the second disastrous.”

Dame Margot Fonteyn, 1976

“Bird, Bird! That’s all I hear from you creeps! Bird! I don’t give a damn
who
he is, or where he’s hiding! The great City of New York has no room in it for vigilantes; I’ll find this goddam Bird no matter
where
he’s holed up! My men and I, the whole goddam department, in fact, are working on this Bird thing a full twenty-four hours a day! All leaves have been canceled, special ’tac squads have been laid on, we’ve got our people in the streets following up every possible lead! We expect an arrest within twelve hours! Twenty-four at the very latest! Thirty-six at the most extreme outside estimate! You can quote me! And will you, fer chrissakes, learn to spell my name right in your goddam papers! It’s
Pflockian
, not “Fallopian”! Now get the hell out of here and go down to the morgue and take some more pictures of that dead publisher, if that’s your idea of fun and games; and let me get back to work! I’ll have this Cordwainer Bird by the heels within fifty-two hours, you can quote me!”

Excerpt of interview with NYPD Chief of Detectives Irving L. Fallopian;
New York Times;
29 January 1976

“Oh, the poor little thing,” the woman with the silver-blue hair said. “Arthur, give him a dollar.”

The portly gentleman in the belted cashmere overcoat and caracul astrakhan shifted the ziggurat of packages in his arms, managed to free his left hand, and reached into his pants pocket. “Hurry, Arthur,” the woman said, “it’s snowing.” He looked at her. He shook his head with mild annoyance. Of
course
it was snowing. It was coming down in great, wet, skimming flakes and covering Fifth Avenue in a coverlet of downy whiteness that meant–without argument–fourteen hundred pedestrians would slip and bust their asses by morning. Of
course
it was snowing!

And that was one of the reasons the woman with the silver-blue hair had stopped before the wretched creature at the edge of the sidewalk. He looked so pathetic. A little man, wearing only an open imitation leather vest, soaking wash’n’ wear slacks, and sandals. No shirt, no hat, no socks, no topcoat. His glasses were wet with snow, and a tiny mound of melting snow rested on the bridge of his nose. He looked like a beggar. To the woman with the silver-blue hair.

The formidable, portly gentleman continued trying to fumble a dollar from his pocket, juggling packages. Taxis shushed through the slush, making virtually the only sounds on Fifth Avenue. No horns, no sirens, no jackhammers, no police whistles, no conversation; the aluminum sky had closed down over the city and everything was hushed.

In the silence, the poor little thing spoke.

“Madam, why don’t you take your fat-ass husband, your ghastly hairdo, your conspicuous consumption of the Gross National Product, not to mention the certainly ill-gotten dollar he’s trying to pry out around his obesity, and insert them vertically where they’ll do you simply a
world
of good. And then, if you carefully light them, you can provide yourselves with instant jet-assisted takeoff back to New Rochelle. In short, get the hell away from me before I dropkick you through the window of that bookstore.”

The bookstore to which he referred was Brentano’s.

Even though lacking four legs each, in precisely the manner of the langouste, or European rock lobster, the woman with the silver-blue hair and her pet Arthur with its hand still doing p.o.w. time in its pants pocket, scuttled sidewise, away down Fifth Avenue, away from the wretched little man with the naked chest and the fierce glow in his robin’s-egg blue eyes. “Anarchist!” the Arthur murmured, and then he suddenly slipped and busted his ass on the sidewalk.

The little man with the straight black hair and the face of a handsome eagle had dismissed them from his world view immediately he had verbally savaged the woman. His attention was now, once again, electrically fastened on the front window of Brentano’s.

There were eight stacks of books in the window, each stack having been faced with full cover display of the title forming the shaft. The titles were
The Pasha
by Harold Robbins;
Retreat and Regroup
by Allen Drury;
Asimov’s Guide to Senescence
by Isaac Asimov;
Pismire’s Pique
by Morris L. West;
The Unpublished Letters of Judy Garland
edited by Gerold Frank;
Living Forever
by David Reuben, M.D.;
Beyond Redemption
by Jacqueline Susann, posthumously completed by Erich Segal; and
Say Howdy-do to God, Charlie Brown!
by Charles M. Schulz.

He stood staring into the window as an early dusk settled over the disenfranchised city. A Puerto Rican trying to look like a Czech refugee in stocking cap pulled down over ears, and plaid duck-hunter’s jacket pushed a hot-cart of redolent chestnuts and millstone
bialies
past him, behind him, in the gutter. His galoshes made slurping sounds. The little man thought of Campbell’s New England style Clam Chowder.

Then, quite suddenly, at precisely ten minutes to five, the little man left his position. He broke out of the mound of snow that had formed around his legs, stamped his blue feet in their sandals, and walked across the sidewalk, elbowing pedestrians to either side. He entered Brentano’s.

A slim, polite young man wearing a name tag that said “Mr. Ingham” approached the little fellow, now standing in an ever widening pool of water. He looked down at him. The customer was exactly four feet tall. “And may I help you, sir?”

The little man looked around. Everywhere he looked there were tables of books, stacks of books, pyramids of books. All eight of the titles in the window could be seen prominently exhibited on a counter, surmounted by a sign that read CURRENT BEST SELLERS. “Sir? Was there something you wanted particularly?”

The little man raised his eyes to Mr. Ingham. “Do you have
Bad Karma & Other Extravagances?
”

Mr. Ingham’s brow resolved itself into a topographical map of the Indus Valley. “
Backgammon
and
whom?
”

“Not
backgammon
, you thug.
Bad Karma. & Other Extravagances
. It’s a book of stories.”

“And the author?”

“Cordwainer Bird,” the little man said, with just the vaguest echo of sackbut and lyre in his voice.

“Oh,” said Mr. Ingham, a thin smile fluttering to rest on his lips like the faintest touch of dragonfly wings. “That would be downstairs in the rear, in the sci-fi section.”

“The
what?
” The little man’s face tightened, a muscle or possibly a nerve jumping at the hinge of his strong jaw. On the left. “The
what
section?”

“Sci-fi,” Mr. Ingham said again, looking a trifle discomfited. “Just beyond the gothics, the nurse novels, and the we-have-been-visited-by-aliens sections.”

The little man’s tone of voice abruptly altered. Where before it had been commanding and stern, it now became very nearly menacing. “It isn’t a science fiction book,” he said. “And it
certainly
isn’t ‘sci-fi,’ whatever
that
nauseating neologism might signify. Why isn’t it up here with the current best sellers?”

Mr. Ingham began to edge away.

The little man moved toward him. “Where the hell are you going?”

“I have a carton of books to unpack.
The Joy of Cooking
. They have to be handled gingerly or they won’t rise.” Jerkily, he kept moving away. The little man kept after him. In a moment Mr. Ingham was back-pedaling and the little man was closing in on him inexorably. The salesman found himself, finally, wedged into the corner where ART HISTORY and SELF-HELP confluenced. He had no idea how it had happened; the little man hadn’t even raised his voice. It was as though he had been…
driven
…into the corner. By some palpable force.

A wash of terror brought tears to Mr. Ingham’s eyes. He flattened against the wall bookcases, his back pressed so tightly against the barrier he could feel each vertebra through his skin. There was something relentless about the little man, something utterly overwhelming, as if he possessed an arcane gift of inducing fear, a power acquired in the Orient, where, it is said, one can acquire the ability to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see you. But that was ridiculous! He could see the little man clearly; and the terror of the sight rendered Mr. Ingham helpless.